"With the Atlantic ironed flat by high pressure, and a shoreline snow-covered to a slow curl of wavelets, my mountainy landscape in Mayo this winter has known some quite surreal silence for weeks on end. But even without the icy roads, the pulse of local life was already on pause, like that of Ireland in general. In an island littered with empty housing estates and redundant bungalows, the young are emigrating again, and the part-time small farmers of the west, with nothing more to build, are left with all the time in the world."