Sally's blog

It’s the audacity of Manorhamilton’s W8 Centre that takes your breath away.

At a time when rural decline is fast becoming a major problem throughout Europe and the wider world – there are parts of rural Spain which are more underpopulated than Siberia, and some Italian towns will sell you a house for €1, if you would only move there to live – it would be easy to give up on little Manorhamilton.

Like so many Irish provincial towns, Manorhamilton was battered by the bank crash of 2008, leaving a debris of empty shops and ghost estates.

In the middle of the night, as you lie in your bed in your Bubble Dome at Finn Lough estate, you feel that you need only stretch your arm up, and you could take charge of The Plough, and cut a swathe through the Milky Way. The agriculture of the stars is, suddenly, your dominion.

That’s the feeling you get on a clear, starry night, as you exult in the comfort and the extraordinary concentrated viewscape of the out-of-this-world bubble domes, in west County Fermanagh.

On his farm at Castlefin, County Donegal, Thomas Hughes rears the Angus cattle that his butcher makes into the signature Lisnamulligan beef burgers.

He rears the pigs that become the Lisnamulligan pork and apple burger. The smoky bacon on the Smoky burger comes from those happy animals. And the potatoes he uses for his excellent skin-on fries? Yep, he grows the Roosters himself on the farm.

And, he’s not finished yet.

“My nigiri tells a story”, says Yoshimi Hayakawa, the chef-proprietor of Wa Sushi, in Galway’s Docklands.

In fact, Ms Hayakawa’s sushi tells many stories, not least the tale of how her restaurant has crafted something unique in the creation of Galway-Mae sushi, which means that Wa Sushi only uses fish and shellfish from Galway Bay.

We visited Brownes in Tuam for their Friday market lunch, an informal mid-day menu  that gives some hints of the kitchen's magic.

It sounds simple: ham hock and truffled Hegarty’s cheddar cheese toastie on sourdough bread. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing you can buy today in every good coffee shop and lunchtime destination. Chances are you might have a flat white with it, or a glass of kombucha.

It’s always a great day when a grand institution passes to a new generation, with the new incumbents building respectfully on the work of their predecessor, and in the process creating a new dynamic of their own.

Dermot Madigan has always been one of the great Irish hotel managers. He has always had all the skills – the ability to do 10 things at the same time, whilst making it look easy, and being able to sort out whatever issue you have right now, with a smile.
But the story of the Mulranny Park over the last decade is not just the excellence of Mr Madigan and his team. If you have had the luck to stay here, then you know that already. No, the story of the MP is the fact that the hotel gets better and better, and keeps getting better and better.

When it comes to drinking, Claire Davey is an alien.
Ms Davey doesn’t think drink the way we humans think drink. Where we think and drink conventionally, Ms Davey is unconventional, and illogical. Her perspective is oblique, tuned to a different pitch, and America Village Apothecary Tasting Room is Galway city made carnate: out west, out there, out of this world.

“I hear you bought a horse,” says John Edward Joyce to the jodhpur-clad man from Belgium who had just walked through the front door of The Mustard Seed.
That’s the thing about John Edward: if you’ve been out and about in County Limerick, buying a show jumper, he will know all about it.
It’s not just his instinct that gifts him with this skill: it’s a form of wise telepathy, a wisdom that let’s him know exactly where to pitch the conversational tent, every time.