I’m back in Clonakilty for a few days, working out of the remote hub, performing the ritual that comes around every few months where I pretend I still live in West Cork.

Part of that ritual is the lunchtime saunter uptown like I’m still in Clonakilty Community College, where I used to stand with my friends for the whole of lunchtime reading the guitar magazines in Paddy Meade’s.

Seeing the place closed now brings a little lump to the throat.

On Friday I went for a late lunch, around 2.30pm, to a lovely café in the centre of town and secured what I thought was prime real estate at the window upstairs overlooking Asna Square. The room was nearly empty, most punters having long since eaten and moved on. As a kid I’d wander the square jumping from stone seat to stone seat around the Tadhg an Asna statue, and the plan was simply to look out, eat a falafel wrap as is the tradition, and do some mind wandering in the town I love so well.

Then I noticed them. Out of the corner of my eye, two heads. There’s an aura that comes off people who are at work, a low-grade hum of stress, and it had suddenly filled the upstairs of the café like a second-hand vape. They were a couple from across the water, Manchester I learned later, who were using the café as a temporary office for the day while they did some travelling.

With my sandwich ordered, it suddenly became apparent that I would be spending my lunch break working with them. And so for the next 40 minutes I had to sit through around four video calls with clients and staff about KPIs and targets and measurables. I was really hoping to switch out of work mode and here I was, like a temp in Dunder Mifflin, counting down the hours until the work day was over.

Lads, I’m all for flexible hours and remote working, but there’s got to be some rules about forcing everyone else to take part. I’m happy to report that the falafel wrap was excellent.

Vegas on steroids

The inaugural Enhanced Games took place in Las Vegas on Sunday, the first sporting event where the athletes were actively encouraged to take performance enhancing drugs. Backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr, because of course it is, with $250,000 for event winners and a million-dollar bonus for any new world record.

Sebastian Coe called participation ‘moronic’ and the International Olympic Committee declared the whole thing ‘a betrayal of everything we stand for’. The results were the kind of comedy you couldn’t script. A Greek swimmer named Kristian Gkolomeev, who competed in four Olympics across twelve years and never managed a medal, hopped into the pool drugged to the gills and wearing a high-tech swimsuit that’s been banned since 2010, and beat the official 50m freestyle record by 0.07 of a second.

Meanwhile James Magnussen, the Aussie who’d publicly pledged to be on whatever they could find for him, finished last in the 100m freestyle. I’ll be sticking to watching the Cork footballers and hurlers this summer, thank you very much.

A West Cork Taoiseach?

They say bye-elections don’t really mean anything but in the same breath they are often described as a great bellwether for the current mood of the nation. If so, it was a good weekend for centrist politics. Daniel Ennis took Dublin Central for the Social Democrats, a huge victory for Holly Cairns and her party. We are suddenly a great deal closer to a West Cork Taoiseach, if you ask me.

In Galway West, Fine Gael’s Seán Kyne held on through eleven counts to become the first government candidate to win a by-election in Ireland since 2014. In front of the media, a gleaming Simon Harris tried and failed to receive the mandate with humility.

It was a terrible weekend for Sinn Féin, and for the larger left alliance, given how poorly Sinn Féin’s candidate did on transfers from the left. Indeed, they seemed to pick up as many from Gerry Hutch as from the left, which begs the question - who are they? Fianna Fáil won’t be writing home about their results either, and the question for them is: without Micheál Martin, who are they?

Crossing the Rubicon

If you’re scanning the planet for adult leadership this week, you’d do well to skip several governments and land in Rome.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope and a Chicago man, published his first encyclical on Monday, eighty pages on artificial intelligence and the dignity of the human person, calling on governments to disarm AI and regulate the firms behind it. In a surprising twist he presented the document alongside a co-founder of Anthropic, not the sort of collaboration I was expecting this year. Closer to home, our own Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan attended the National Famine Commemoration in Portumna in a pair of sky-blue Rice Krispies socks, sitting cross-legged on stage while the Taoiseach described half a million people disappearing from Connacht in a decade.

He later called the day ‘one of the most fitting and important tributes’ to our ancestors. There are worries that AI will flood the world with deep fakes and upend politics, but with this sock incident supposedly happening in reality with a real politician, you’d sometimes wonder if we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.