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THE NEW novel by Pádraig Standún, I gCóngar i gCéin, will be launched at an event in Connemara tomorrow evening.

A High Court libel action brought by Galway priest Fr Kevin Reynolds against RTÉ has been adjourned as there was no judge available to hear the case.

On Tuesday December 13, world famous singer and composer Liam Lawton will be performing live in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Castlecomer. Special guests on the night will be the Castlecomer Male Voice Choir and the concert is in aid of the church renovation.

On Halloween night this week, Young Irish Film Makers held the premier of their latest summer production, First Confession, in Kilkenny’s Set Theatre.

When the Kilkenny essayist Herbert Butler came to write about the burning of Bridget Cleary in 1960 he acknowledged that Slievenaman was always known for its mysterious past. Looking across the Tipperary border from his fields, he described it as ‘a pale blue hump with the soft, rounded contours of ancient hills whose roughness have been smoothed away by time. Finn MacCool lived there as did Oisin and Oscar, and 50 beautiful maidens, who gave it its name The Mountain of Women.’ In Bridget Cleary’s time, it was also the home of Denis Ganey, the local herbal doctor, and a man respected and feared for his knowledge of fairylore. It was to this house that Michael Cleary ran to on the afternoon of Thursday March 14 1895. He pleaded for a cure for his wife whom he believed had been taken by the fairies, and replaced by a woman that was not the Bridget Boland he had married.

On Monday March 4 1895, Bridget Cleary, walked up a hill to Kylenagranagh, the home of her father’s cousin Jack Dunne, who lived with his wife Kate, to sell eggs. The Dunne’s house, less than two miles from her slate-roofed labourer’s cottage at Ballyvadlea, Co Tipperary, was near an ancient circular mound of earth, or a ring fort, still known in rural Ireland as a ‘fairy fort’. Maybe it was because of the location of his house, or because of his skill as a story teller, a ‘Shanachie’, and that he had a limp, that Dunne had the reputation for being ‘an old man who is fairy-ridden’. People believed the local legend that he was once ‘chased up to his home by a man in black, and a woman in white’. He had knowledge of incantations, charms, and spells, and was sometimes consulted for a cure for animal or female sicknesses.

She was a vivacious, witty young woman, intelligent, interested in everything, passionate about her country, and determined to make her own way in a man’s world. He was an elderly, brilliant, and very eccentric scientist. Yet these two became friends, and she has left us a vivid and very funny account of their late-blooming friendship.

Thank God the Government has taken away the fear of the ban of the drink driving. Imagine what the country would be like if Paddy wasn’t allowed to drive home with a few pints on him, run the gauntlet of the local garda in the Fiesta squad car, making it in the door of his isolated cottage just in time for Oireachtas Report, his nightly joust with the law successful again. So he will be thrilled with the new “Just Above” category of drink drivers who have learned this week that they will not face a ban but some penalty points instead, and sure with insurance costs going through the roof anyway, what harm are the penalty points, but a badge of honour to show the lads down the pub. Remember, it is but a short year ago that this country was driven while drunk by our former leader.

A retired priest who lives in Craughwell is one of the first people in the country to be implanted with an MRI compatible pacemaker.

This Mass will take place on August 3 at 7.30pm in Swinford Parish Church.