If you’re one of the thousands of people now struggling to find a General Practitioner, then these figures won’t surprise you in the least: Right now, there is just one GP for every 1,100 people in the country. And, during a cold snap in November, it can feel like every one of them is looking for an appointment at the same time.

Meanwhile if you live in Co Monaghan, which has the lowest number of GPs per head of population, you’ll be one of 2,000 people competing for the services of one single doctor.  Dr Illona Duffy, for example, said the demand for appointments in her area of Co. Monaghan has been so high that her practice had been unable to take on new patients since before the pandemic.

It’s tempting to paraphrase Woody Allen’s wry observation about the difficulties of finding a plumber in Manhattan at weekends – not only is there no God, but try getting a GP appointment on a Friday evening in Carrickmacross.

Last year, almost 6,000 people contacted the HSE in desperation because they couldn’t find a GP. And those who could often had to wait weeks for an appointment, almost certainly increasing the pressure on A&E departments if they needed urgent attention.

Urgency, meanwhile, seems to be the attitude that’s sorely lacking in the Department of Health’s response to this particular emergency. Up to 2025, we were training just 350 GPs a year but the 2026 intake has been increased to 400. But by the time that additional 50 doctors qualify as GPs, in four years’ time, it’s a safe bet that population growth will have swallowed up that increase so that we’ll still have demand well outstripping supply.

The Minister for Health got herself some very gushing coverage, earlier this year, when she took on a handful of consultant obstetricians in the Rotunda Hospital, but surely the chronic shortage of GPs, given the knock-on effects across the healthcare system, ought to be a far greater priority?

Because it’s not that there’s a shortage of young doctors who want to qualify as GPs in this country. Last year around 1,800 applied for those 350 places, and the 2026 figures were in the same ballpark. I know this because my own daughter, who was working in a hospital in Australia at the time, applied for the scheme. Much as she loved the Aussies, and the amazing lifestyle in sunny Adelaide, she was keen to come home, she said, and put her training to the benefit of Irish people.

But for all the bleating about wanting to lure Irish medical professionals home from Oz, Canada, the UK and New Zealand, they don’t make it easy for a young doctor wanting to repatriate. She’s a fully qualified doctor, with several years’ experience both here and abroad, yet she had to sit two online exams, achieve high scores, provide mandatory references and then undergo an online interview, in order to qualify for four further years of training.

She made it and got onto the scheme she wanted, after an anxious wait when it looked like she might be staying in Oz after all, but 1,500 qualified doctors did not.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have high standards for GPs, but because numbers are so tight there’s bound to have been hundreds of potentially excellent doctors who missed out by a couple of points – many of whom may have been planning to come home from abroad.

Yet even if we doubled the number of places, we’d still fall short: Why is it so difficult to provide much-needed training and employment in the community for Irish medics who want to work here?

Whenever the shortage of doctors, or teachers, arises, you’ll hear perfectly reasonable proposals to compel them to put in five years’ service in the Irish health and education systems before they take their taxpayer-funded expertise off to Australia or Dubai.

Whatever about teachers earning vast sums in the Emirates, though, it’s really not the money that lures young doctors halfway around the world for work. They get experience and qualifications that they couldn’t achieve here, in health services that are far better managed and run, in better climates and tax regimes, in systems that make them feel appreciated and valued.

And that’s just not the case in this country – it seems to me that young doctors get the message that they should be grateful if their own health service deigns to accept them into a specialisation or a training scheme, in an overcrowded, over-middle-managed, underfunded system, and couldn’t care less if they opt for Perth or Montreal instead.

For over a decade now, we’ve been spending billions building a state-of-the-art children’s hospital that’s yet to take a single patient, and yet we can’t afford to expand the GP training scheme that might, at grassroots level, prevent many children needing the services of a state-of-the-art hospital in the first place. But that’d be joined-up thinking and that’s an even more remote prospect than getting a GP appointment in Carrickmacross this evening.

Reading the fascinating inside story of the Beckham family feud, in Alison Boshoff’s new book serialised in the Mail recently, it’s hard to have sympathy for either party in the spat. David and Victoria emerge as greedy people determined to wring every penny from every available opportunity – imagine trademarking your children’s names? – as if their combined fortune of almost €1.5billion isn’t going to be enough to see them out. But Brooklyn is also a deeply unlikeable character, a totally talentless lump whose gazillionaire heiress wife wouldn’t have looked twice at him if not for his famous name, and who seems pathologically incapable of appreciating his good fortune. And because his only claim to fame is the Beckham name, like Prince Harry his only relevance – having no career or achievements of his own – is his row with them. And he has to keep stirring it to stay in the public eye, hence the World Cup ad, where he teased about watching the tournament at home, and that ceremony, this week, to celebrate the anniversary of his second wedding, rather than the one attended by his parents in 2022. What’ll he do when, like Harry, he discovers the public’s interest in his tantrums has worn thin?

On Sunday, singer Ariana Grande said she was ‘taking a step back from visibility’ following intense scrutiny and comment about her dramatic weight loss. Her most recent video, in which the bones of her chest, ribs and shoulders protruded alarmingly through her skin, prompted actress Jameela Jamil to say that she was ‘possibly dying right in front of us’. She, in turn, drew a huge backlash for ‘body shaming’ but she’s got a point – fashion magazines are slammed for featuring super-skinny models, yet here’s an icon for young women apparently starving herself to dangerous emaciation and everyone’s too terrified of causing offence to comment. I remember how images of a skeletal Karen Carpenter went largely unremarked, but that was because there was little knowledge at the time of the anorexia that would kill her at 32. Whatever the cause, Ariana’s shape is not normal or healthy, and young women should be told it’s not a look to be admired or copied.

Will we soon have driverless taxis on the streets of Dublin? It’s a definite possibility since, across the water, London is to see the launch of ‘autonomous mini cabs’ over the next few weeks. The technology, according to the developer Wayve, is expected to control the vehicle although they’ll all have a ‘human safety driver’ initially, ‘to intervene if necessary’. Driverless cabs with a driver? That sounds more like an Irish solution to a problem that isn’t really a problem at all, but it might appease the ‘black cab’ driver who grumbled about the plans on BBC radio yesterday. When they go entirely driverless, he wondered, who’s going to return passengers’ lost phones, who’s going to help with luggage, and who’s going to discuss the latest crime outrage and tell the passenger, ‘Hangin’s too good for ‘em, mate’? I guess that we could always programme our cabs to tell tourists, when they collect them at Dublin Airport, that ‘the country is banjaxed’.

 It's been a sombre week for the country. The funeral of Glen Hansard, on Tuesday, turned into a joyous celebration of a life well lived, although cut short, and yet when the last strains of the tributes have faded, his heart-broken widow Maire and their little boy Christie will surely find the silence in a house that once rung with his music and his presence so hard to bear. Brenda Fricker, buried on Wednesday, was another towering figure of international status, a charismatic and intriguing woman who also leaves an aching gap. Both Glen and Brenda, though, were adults who had lived to enjoy success in their fields, and so the week’s saddest loss was surely that of 16-year-old Aoibheann Clarke, the Gaelic footballer who collapsed on a pitch in Wexford, on Tuesday, where her dad was a linesman. A beautiful child with her life ahead of her - like most parents, I don’t even want to imagine the void she leaves behind.

Fatty and Spotty are now Freddie and Scotty, but I was amazed to see that the rest of the Bash Street Kids from the Beano comic have survived these touchy times almost unscathed. Poor old Plug still hasn’t been to the dentist to fix his buck teeth, Smiffy is still intellectually challenged and studious Cuthbert Cringeworthy is still gently mocked for being a swot. And Dennis is still a Menace, leading the Beano crew to Dublin, this week, where they visit the Botanic Gardens and, inspired by the city’s buzzing music scene, start their own band. It’s great to see their innocent antics haven’t changed in the decades since I last read Beano, but even better to learn that, in these screen-obsessed times, 40,000 children still buy it every week.