The forecasted snow doesn’t materialise this morning, and instead, there’s a light rain throughout the day. Surprisingly, I haven’t used an umbrella the whole time I’ve been here. A good rain jacket with a hood suffices for most days, especially given how the rain comes and goes. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen my friend J. He comes over in the afternoon...

The EU did an about-face on its threat to invoke article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol, which allows for special safeguard measures to be taken by either the UK or EU in exceptional circumstances. The EU had wanted to prevent a “backdoor” across the open Ireland / Northern Ireland for shipments of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to the UK.The European commission was supposed to publish...

I’ve been meaning to research the background on Ireland’s regions / provinces, not to be confused with the 32 counties (including the 6 in Northern Ireland). Most of the following content has come from various public domain sources such as Wikipedia and Irish websites, boiled down to the essentials. Ireland has historically been divided into four provinces: Connacht, Leinster, Munster...