It was one of those miserable post-Christmas weeks in Kerry a few years back when a local correspondent in The Kerryman summed up the news succinctly as: “No news this week”. A grey January in Sneem, where the biggest event might be the odd sheep wandering into the village, doesn’t lend itself to breaking headlines. But as I sit here in sunny Los Angeles, in the middle of a sprawling city brimming with election fever, I’m struggling to come up with real news myself.