When the students arrive on the first morning for the beginning of the 12-week course at Ballymaloe, I introduce them to my "food heroes" – the gardeners and my farm manager. We walk through the gardens and farm and down to the greenhouses. I run my hands through the rich, fertile soil and remind them that all good food comes from the earth – if you don't have rich, fertile soil, you won't have good food or clean water.
This weekend's Fine Gael ard-fheis at the Citywest in Dublin is a crucial one for the main Opposition party as it presents its outline approach to the next election, now only a year away, against a backdrop of mixed and fluctuating opinion poll ratings.
The European Commission has initiated legal action against the Government for failing to correctly copy a directive on race discrimination into Irish law.
Ceefax Page 338 has a great morning service where each of the various lies invented to fill the ever-expanding football pages is set side by side and each paper credited with the various inventions. So it came to pass, on the Sunday morning after "Metatarsal 5: Rooney Redux" the following headlines appeared in order: "Stephen Gerrard says England can't win the World Cup without Rooney" (Express) and "Sven Goran Eriksson says England can win the World Cup without Rooney" (Times).
Twenty-five years after the IRA hunger strikes, Colum McCann remembers the hot summer the ten men died and questions the prevailing silence about the anniversary
Mary Harney, the Minister for Health, will not address the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) on Friday 5 May due to her prior commitment to lecture US health industry professions, business leaders and journalists on "Fostering Innovation: A Government Perspective". That day nurses are expected to vote for a motion of no confidence in her management of the current accident and emergency crisis.
Eamon Dunphy launched Newstalk's new premium rate text service on air on Tuesday 2 May by emphasising that it was cheaper to telephone or email the programme and telling listeners that "unfortunately" texts would now cost 30 cents.
Campaigners object to ads for European Union's 'Europe Direct' information service. By Colin Murphy
Edward O'Hare speaks to writer DBC Pierre at the Cúirt Literature Festival in Galway.
The Tubridy Show was almost tolerable on Friday (28 April). It featured the wonderful Derek Mooney plugging his Mooney Goes Wild programme of the following day and the arrival of blue tits in a nest in his back garden. Derek talked sensibly and interestingly about the blue tits, about jackdaws they had filmed last year, about plastic bags, money-back-bottles and lots else. No blather, no twittering (from him anyway). Substance. Then there was Diarmuid Ferriter, the historian, talking about his new book What If, based on his radio series of the same title. Again, substance.