On a recent trip to Antwerp my intrepid partner and I found ourselves in hardhats traversing the city’s historic canals. But for flash lights we were in darkness, walking in a line along a canal bed, for the waterways, known as ‘ruien,’ had been vaulted over, enclosed, for many hundreds […]
Like a swallowtail butterfly, David Geraghty has been slowly and steadily unfolding his wings as a solo artist. His first album, ‘Kill Your Darlings’ saw the light of day almost 20 years ago. Until then, since the mid-1990s, he had been in bands, “with a collective song-writing ethos”. No-one was […]
This month, branch Chair, Jez Simms, describes how some Egret species began to visit Ireland regularly, one species even breeding here now. It was not until the latter half of the last century that birders in Ireland began to regularly encounter a beautiful pure white heron known throughout Europe and […]
The illegal wildlife trade is the second biggest international crime after drug smuggling, but one hears about it less often. Personally, I think that wildlife smugglers should be punished far more harshly than drug dealers – after all, if someone wants to inject himself with heroin or addle his brain […]
If you’ve spent any time looking into retrofitting an older home in West Cork, particularly fitting a heat pump, you’ve likely come across the advice to insulate first. The general accepted hierarchy for retrofitting your home, and the advice I give my clients, is to first insulate, then look at […]