Melvine

Beautiful Bangor provided the backdrop for one of the first club championship games at the weekend but the boys from Westport didn't make the long trek north to admire the scenery.
Westport are back playing senior championship football and by the looks of things they will be here to stay, having won the intermediate title last year.

Standuns Station

As I listened to reports of the Labour Party's most recent Conference in Galway, my mind wandered back to a 1970's conference of theirs in Salthill's Leisureland, outside of which I was the lone picketer.
There was a while of an evening in which Charlie Bird and myself manned the entrance, he as a journalist, me as a maverick priest.
Inside Dr. Noel Browne waxed lyrical about the evils of coalition government as far as the party was concerned.
One of his more damning phrases referred to ministers being "shoehorned into the back of ministerial mercedes cars."
Some years earlier it had been proclaimed that: "the '70s will be socialist" while cynics said it would not happen until "the socialists were 70."

Padraig Burns

This column could never be home to a rugby love-in but it was hard to ignore the sport at the weekend with Connacht, Munster and Leinster all in action against French opposition in their European competitions.
Connacht, the team with the smallest bandwagon of supporters, did as well as either of their more illustrious colleagues, both of whom were comprehensively outplayed in France. The final that every (Irish) rugby fan wanted in the Heineken Cup didn't pan out while one of the most romantic sporting stories of the year ended in Galway on Friday night.