I’ll be straight with ye. I have developed a new habit that my family finds somewhere between baffling and mildly concerning.

Before getting out of bed in the morning, before the news, before checking whether America is still a democracy, I check the inverter app on my phone to see how many kilowatt hours the solar panels have generated.

On a bright morning it’s very satisfying.

On a December Tuesday in Dublin, it’s less so.

This week I was in Dingle for the Animation Festival, sitting in roaring March sunshine watching some genuinely brilliant films, and I’ll confess I was checking the app with some regularity. Back home in Dublin, the panels were having the time of their lives.

Every time the sun came out over our nearly 100-year-old terraced house on the Northside, the little graph ticked upward.

The house was built at a time when the only concern about energy efficiency was whether the coal would last the winter. It has two fireplaces in the bedrooms and a small front room, which is now a bathroom, but which was originally designed as a cold room before refrigeration was normal. It has come a long way.

I’ve been going through the utility bills and the before-and-after is startling. Summer 2024, before the panels: €150 for two months. Summer 2025, same house, same car: €17.16.

Fachtna’s paid more for a Guinness in Dublin city centre. Even in winter, when the panels are producing roughly the output of a birthday candle, the bills have dropped from around €395 to €250 for the same two-month period.

It’s not as dramatic but it doesn’t hurt in these very uncertain times.

There were a lot of reports in the media these past weeks suggesting deep retrofits take 48 years to break even and that the grants are not all they’re cracked up to be. I tend to agree.

But solar on a suitable roof with a battery, done right, is a very different story and will pay for itself within seven years in a lot of cases.

In an age where we all need to be getting off the grid in any way we can, it comes highly recommended.

Survey needs health check

Ireland has been ranked sixth in the world for healthcare, having jumped 74 places in four years in one of the leading international indices, published in CEOWorld magazine. Back in 2021 we were 80th.

The likes of Taiwan, South Korea and Australia are still above us but I was fairly shocked to read how high we are currently placed.

The ranking is driven largely by investment, with the health budget nearly doubling over the past decade to €27.4 billion, but output went up just 3.8% for all that spending.

Meanwhile Ireland is bottom of the EU class for electronic health records, with an eHealth maturity score of 25%, against an EU average of 83%. I honestly think my car has a more detailed health history than me, based on the ancient Commodore 64-style setup I see in my doctor’s surgery.Given anecdotes from my own family about recent experiences at the coalface of the health system, I wouldn’t be holding my breath about some magical transformation in the HSE. But here’s hoping (and praying) that all these billions will start to show up in our real-life experiences soon and surveys like this have some hint of truth.

Lyster death a huge loss

Being in Kerry this week, in that particular Dingle sunshine that makes you feel like everything is going to be fine and Fungie is maybe just on holiday, I was brought back to summers from childhood. The drive down from Cork, through mountain passes and sheep-lined roads, the Munster finals in Killarney, the evening in whatever pub would have us watching the Sunday Game and the post-match analysis…

Michael Lyster died on Sunday at the age of 71, and those pub evenings are what I keep thinking about. Many, many summers of Brolly and Spillane and O’Rourke going at each other like cats in a bag, with Lyster in the middle of it, completely unflappable, a slight smirk, waiting for the right moment. His whole skill was making it look like he wasn’t doing anything, which is the hardest thing in television. Every pundit who ever sat across from him said the same thing this week: he had no ego, he let them be the stars, and without him the show wouldn’t have been half of what it was. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.