When he fluffed a penalty against Manchester United in the Charity Shield that summer, I saw fit to offer him some constructive criticism the next day. At the top of my voice. From across the road. (In my defence, I was 18.) He complained furiously to the site foreman, and I could easily have been fired. Fortunately, my boss was a West Ham supporter. I kept the job. In Tuesday’s semi-final the shoe was on the other foot. It was Di Matteo whose employment prospects hung in the balance during an enthralling contest at Camp Nou.

On TV3 Mark Lawrenson dismissed Chelsea’s hopes of progressing as “loaves and fishes stuff” at one point. He had scarcely uttered the words when an exquisite away goal, against the run of play, by the baby-faced Brazilian midfielder Ramires provided the Londoners with the miracle they sorely needed.

The cash-strapped station never admitted it on air, but as the game progressed it seemed increasingly clear that TV3’s commentary team of Lawro and Trevor Welch weren’t actually at Camp Nou. Certainly, neither of them spotted the linesman’s raised flag, off camera, when Dani Alves’s strike was disallowed in the 83rd minute. In the end, Fernando Torres of Chelsea settled the tie with an absurdly unlikely last-minute goal.

“Torres was never going to miss that,” said Welch, who clearly hasn’t been monitoring the Spaniard’s form very closely lately. Over on Sky, Gary Neville greeted Torres’s strike with an ecstatic vocal eruption referred to later elsewhere as a goalgasm. It is a description this writer cannot improve on. In a family newspaper, at any rate.

Torres’s goal was the only topic of conversation in my local corner shop after the game. No doubt the same could be said for every pub, coffee house, kebab shop, trattoria and hookah bar across Europe, the Middle East and north Africa. That’s the magic of the Champions League. At its best, football surpasses even music in its ability to cross political, cultural and religious borders. Hell, it even got me cheering for a man who tried to get me fired in 1997.

DAVID McSAVAGE’S The Savage Eye (RTE2, Monday), by contrast, is a show that appears quite happy to cross no boundaries whatsoever, save those of good taste. It is the umpteenth Irish television programme attempting to unravel what it means to be Irish. When it comes to light entertainment, RTÉ clearly believes the only thing Irish audiences like more than being talked about is being talked about on television.

In the past decade Des Bishop has already carved out a niche essentially telling us about ourselves, ad infinitum. McSavage comes at the subject from a darker place, but the gist is basically the same. McSavage is a man whose comedy often appears driven by bile. That is not a bad thing necessarily. Lewis Black and Charlie Brooker have succeeded with this approach elsewhere through the inventiveness of their language and the clarity and originality of their thought.

McSavage’s sketches hit the mark occasionally. His vision of how Henry Ford’s career as a motoring pioneer would have panned out if he’d been raised in Ireland rather than the US is not only funny but also right on the money. Elsewhere, though, he leans too regularly on the most obvious targets and the limpest cliches, not to mention on wigs, frocks, ludicrous accents and expletives, where there should be punchlines.

Worse, the show is frequently guilty of many of the faults it castigates the country for. McSavage derides Irish society for being prejudiced, yet he appears at every turn to see the world purely in terms of outdated stereotypes. He mocks us for being an inward-looking people, yet the show is too parochial to appreciate that faults such as laziness, ignorance, greed and incompetence are failings not unique to the Irish character.

He portrays us as suffering from a national inferiority complex, yet he is so preoccupied by what the neighbours must think about this “intriguing little place” that it provides the premise for the entire show.

“IRELAND’S ECONOMY,” McSavage’s demented economist character observes at one point, “was like a woman who felt she could only attract investors by constantly increasing her breast size.” Which quotation is clearly the segue gods’ way of hurrying us along to Lolo Ferrari: The Death of an Icon (TV3, Tuesday), a trashy documentary about the late French singer and porn star best known for having the largest bust in the world.

The programme made the not-too-shocking case that those who oversaw Ferrari’s surgically enhanced transition to a 54J cup may not have had the woman’s best interests at heart. It also examined whether her death, ruled a suicide, may have been murder. It was a sad story of an obviously troubled woman.

But what is arguably as disturbing as the circumstances of her death is the fact that a woman who mutilated her body in a quest for attention succeeded so emphatically that her celebrity still burns brightly a dozen years after her death.

UNLIKE THE US late-night talkshows it superficially resembles, Craig Doyle Live (RTE2, Tuesday) isn’t prerecorded. I know this because the host referred to the result of the Chelsea-Barcelona game at the start of Tuesday’s show. It was as things progressed, and he introduced a roster of guests that pushed the boundaries of tedium, that I began to wonder about the studio audience.

What were these people doing in a television studio at 11pm on a weeknight watching Simon Cowell’s brother being cross-examined about his famous sibling’s favourite brand of toilet paper? And what possessed its makers to green-light such a mind-numblingly boring slate of guests? You’d probably have to ask Craig Doyle. Or, failing that, his brother.

Bernice Harrison is on leave

Get stuck into…

The Hunt for Bin Laden (Tuesday, ITV 9pm) is a two-hour special that marks the first anniversary of the raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader.

FRIDAY
There is a pigeon flapping in the rafters at Heuston Station. Below him, an endless procession of students tramp through the airy terminus, slinging their dirty laundry west for the weekend. My sister is seated at a tiny stainless steel table at the edge of the bustling concourse.

On her knee, my two-year-old niece, Lola, is slobbering over a bagel. Read the rest of this article here.

FRIDAY
There is a pigeon flapping in the rafters at Heuston Station. Below him, an endless procession of students tramp through the airy terminus, slinging their dirty laundry west for the weekend. My sister is seated at a tiny stainless steel table at the edge of the bustling concourse.

On her knee, my two-year-old niece, Lola, is slobbering over a bagel.In a few minutes, my sister will be boarding the 5.05pm train for Tralee. But first she has some last-minute instructions for me. “If she throws a tantrum,” my sister says. “Be firm with her, but listen to what she says.” I nod. “If you take her to the playground, bring the portable potty.” That’s a bit of a curveball. (Aren’t all potties portable?) But I nod, knowingly, all the same.

“There is a can of beer for you in the fridge if you want it,” my sister continues. “But don’t drink any more than that. You might have to drive to the hospital in an emergency.” I smile at my little niece. We’ll have to postpone that cocktail party so, I tell her. “Don’t joke,” my sister snaps. “This is serious.” She hugs the child, begs her to be good for her uncle, and then vanishes into the evening rush hour.

My sister and Lola’s father separated before my niece was born. He is an adoring parent, but he lives in Seattle. So, for the most part, my sister is raising their daughter alone. I live around the corner and babysit a couple of times a week. But although I don’t fully appreciate it yet, I really haven’t the faintest idea what the job of a single mother entails.

In her apartment, my sister has stuck a list of useful phone numbers to the fridge door: GP (surgery), GP (home), hospital, VHI, caretaker, property management, aunt, neighbour, candlestick maker . . . and so on.

Lola only eats healthy food and I don’t really know how to make those sorts of things. So I give her a banana and a glass of water for dinner. She seems happy with that. Then we colour with her markers and play hide-and-seek.

Eventually, it’s time for bed. Lola’s books all seem to feature woodland animals briefly separated from, but quickly reunited with, their mothers. Since Lola’s mammy will be whooping it up at a gay wedding in Killarney until Sunday, I sing The Beatles’ Good Night to her instead.

Then I turn out the light.

It’s only 9.30pm, but I am absolutely exhausted. On the television, Ryan Tubridy and Bob Geldof are discussing the world food crisis. Sorry lads, not tonight. ITV4 is showing Notting Hill, a turgid romantic comedy that was predictable the first time I saw it. I watch it right through to the end.

SATURDAY
“Bagels!” screams the voice. “I want bagels!” I wake up with a shudder. It’s 6.25am. “Baageels!” Lola screams. I peel myself out of the bed. I butter a slice of toast and plonk her down in front of the cartoons.

That gets me about half an hour respite. Then it starts again. Good God, what is this child’s obsession with bagels? I didn’t even know what they were until I was about 28. She seems to consider them one of her basic human rights.

“You know, if we weren’t related,” I tell her, “we probably wouldn’t be friends.”

When you’re young, free and single, Dublin is a city of open doors. With a temperamental toddler, and a buggy the size of a tractor trailer in tow, things aren’t nearly as simple. I need a breakfast venue that is child friendly, with ample parking, that sells newspapers, strong coffee and – yes – bagels and is open before 8am. There’s only one thing for it. We’re going back to Heuston.

I don’t know a lot about children, but one thing I have learned is that you can sell them on just about any idea, provided you hype it up sufficiently in advance. (“What say we go to Uncle Eoin’s house after breakfast! To collect his mobile-phone charger! Yes!’) That’s why, the whole morning long, I keep talking up a storm about my friends Cormac and Mia.

They live in Clontarf! They have a child about Lola’s age! We drive up to meet them and spend several hours swinging and sliding and running around nearby St Anne’s Park. In the car on the way home, Lola is cranky. My plan seems to be working. The child is worn out.

Within a couple of hours, she’ll be asleep and my babysitting marathon will be as good as over. It’s not until we get home that my little bubble of self-satisfaction is burst. The boot is empty. I’ve just left Lola’s buggy, changing bag and portable potty (yes, it exists) on the footpath in the car park at St Anne’s.

Oh God. I turn the car around and race back to retrieve it. Thankfully, everything is still present and correct. I pack everything into the boot and set off for home again. But soon, another crisis is looming. Lola needs to go to the toilet. We’re inching our way through heavy traffic in Drumcondra, when she makes the announcement. Hold on a grá, I implore.

We’re almost home. It isn’t just the child whose energy levels are seriously waning. I suddenly realise that my own are too. I pull up in the underground car park for a second time, and lift the child out of her car seat. But it’s too late. She’s already wet through.

I carry her up to the bathroom, remove her wet tights and shoes and place her on the baby toilet seat. Then I rush back into the kitchen to see if my sister left any notes about how to handle a situation like this. “I’m finished,” Lola yells from the bathroom. “Just a second,” I reply. Can I fix this with wet wipes, I wonder? Or does she need a bath.

“I’m finished,” Lola yells again. “In a second pet,” I repeat. Just then I hear the sliding of plastic and a frightened gasp. I race back into the bathroom. The baby seat has become dislodged and Lola has fallen into the toilet. I scoop the child up into my arms and clasp her to my chest, rocking her from side to side. This might just be the rottenest feeling in the world. A little girl is crying and it’s all my fault.

That night, before I turn in, I intend to read a couple of chapters of Greg Baxter’s The Apartment. Instead, I watch an old episode of Friends.

Joey only has enough money to buy one encyclopaedia and, subsequently, keeps trying to start conversations with the others about topics beginning with the letter V. My entire perspective on entertainment is changing.

SUNDAY
There are eight heavy fire doors between my sister’s apartment and the front door of her building. I notice this because Lola insists on being carried through them, despite the fact that I’m already pushing her buggy with my other hand.

It’s 9am. We’ve been up about three hours now.

This morning, she woke me up by climbing on to my bed and singing the Barney theme song to me. (“I love you, you love me . . .”) It was a nice moment. Not as nice as, say, an extra 15 minutes asleep might have been. But nice nonetheless. Anyway, Lola has decided that a trip to the zoo is in order this morning, and I’m punch-drunk enough to go along with that. My sister is back in Dublin at 3pm. So for me, today is all about taking the ball out to the corner flag and running down the clock.

Unfortunately, the zoo is considerably bigger than I remember it being.

And as Lola is still small, I have to lift her up constantly to see all of the animals. She’s asking a lot of questions and I lack the presence of mind even to make up the answers. In the South American House, Lola and some children next to her gasp at the antics of a monkey who comes right up to the window to say hello.

The father of the other children and I exchange bemused smiles. It’s only a second later that I realise he’s Nicky Byrne from Westlife. The man has two children with him here and he looks as fresh as a daisy. I may not be a fan of his music, but he has gone up in my estimation this day. Give me another day babysitting and I’ll probably be downloading his greatest hits.

We get home around lunchtime. My sister’s apartment is a mess. It occurs to me that I haven’t cleaned a dish, or washed a sheet, let alone replied to an email or text message, read a newspaper or magazine, met anyone socially, or done any of the things my sister does to maintain a normal life.

Before I leave that afternoon, I notice a couple of recent Christmas presents I bought her in pristine condition on her bookshelf. Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, 441 pages. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, 600 pages. This year, I think I’ll get her something a little more practical. Like a weekend break and a babysitting IOU.

At 17, I applied for my first provisional driver’s licence. To put that event in an historic context, on one of my earliest (official) jaunts, my friends and I were questioned by gardaí hunting for the IRA killers of Jerry McCabe. We’d just been swimming in Errit Lake, near Gorthaganny. The lads were wearing wet Bermuda shorts. I was driving in my bare feet. Read the rest of this article here.

At 17, I applied for my first provisional driver’s licence. To put that event in an historic context, on one of my earliest (official) jaunts, my friends and I were questioned by gardaí hunting for the IRA killers of Jerry McCabe. We’d just been swimming in Errit Lake, near Gorthaganny. The lads were wearing wet Bermuda shorts. I was driving in my bare feet. I’m not sure what the IRA’s modus operandi was in those days, but I imagine this would have represented a significant departure.

My first car was a 1983 Opel Corsa. It had a manual choke and, on a straight road, could do 0-60mph in about 45 minutes.Once, someone daubed the words “Eoin’s shaggin’ wagon” in enormous letters in dust on the passenger side. I was mortified when I found out. But, in retrospect, that graffiti flattered me in a lot of ways. It wasn’t even my car. It was my mother’s. I was only allowed it on weekends.

I took the driving test for the first time in Roscommon in 1998.They failed me for taking the wrong lane into a roundabout. Not to make excuses or anything, but there were no roundabouts in east Mayo in 1998.

Roscommon had about a million of them. Look at a map if you don’t believe me. It’s like a deranged town planner stole a price-gun loaded with roundabout symbols and went on a shooting spree.

That summer, I got a job working as an air-conditioning repairman in Ocean City, Maryland. On my first day, I was required to present a driver’s licence. I handed them a provisional driver’s licence. They didn’t ask. I didn’t tell. It was amazing. I had my own pick-up truck. I listened to country music radio. I had a walkie-talkie and said things like “10-four”, “What’s your 20?” and “Yee-haw!”.

I knew zilch about air conditioning, of course. But this was a tourist town. People mostly just needed their air filters changed. For anything more complicated, I had the walkie-talkie. My co-workers were amazed to learn that I could “drive stick”, but needed instructions to use an automatic. To them, that was like a Michelin-starred chef having trouble making beans on toast.

I gained a lot of valuable life experience that summer. Unfortunately, none of it was roundabout-related. In September, I failed the test in Roscommon for a second time. By now, my mother was grumbling about the cost of insuring me in her car. When my second provisional licence expired in 2000, I let it lapse.

Five years later, I was in Dublin working for a magazine called Mongrel. Even at the height of the economic boom, free magazines that specialised in interviews with bands no one had heard of tended not to make a lot of money. So, as part of my job, I agreed to hand-deliver 30,000 copies of Mongrel around the country every month. The publisher bought me a 2001 Renault Megane and I was back on the road. Yee-haw!

Driving around the country was a blast. I loved everything about it. On sunny days, I would speed past office blocks, factories and building sites – anywhere people were cooped up doing proper jobs – and feel exhilarated, like a child playing truant from school.

It was the capital I wasn’t so crazy about. Over half of the magazine’s print run was distributed in Dublin. It was a city I thought I knew. But from behind the wheel of a creaking minivan, Dublin swiftly became a baffling maze of one-way streets, terrifying multi-lane junctions and extremely high strung motorists. The latter rankled the most. In Mayo, you’d practically have to ram a school bus off a bridge to get honked at. In Dublin, I got beeped at once for hiccupping. The strange thing was, I was parked at the time.

The Dublin run was difficult. There were hundreds of outlets to hit. I was working alone and under severe time pressure. Bending the rules was just part of the job. To this end, I shamelessly exploited my rural roots at every opportunity. The Mayo colours hung proudly from my rear view mirror and, in close quarters with the law, I invariably ratcheted my accent up from a two to an eight or nine.

Once, I was caught taking an illegal left turn at the bottom of Dawson Street. The officer couldn’t have been nicer. He told me that, strictly speaking, what I’d done was illegal. He said that, if someone had seen me, I’d probably have gotten in trouble. He was from Galway himself. Was I going to the game Sunday, he asked? Two weeks later, one of my Dublin friends, caught performing the same manoeuvre, was asked if he’d ever been to prison. He got away with a fine and a penalty point.

In 2007, my provisional was due to expire again. I heard that Tyrellstown in Co Dublin had the highest pass rates of any test centre in Ireland. So I made the appointment. When I arrived, the tester asked to see my licence. I’d left it out in the car. She exhaled impatiently.

Already I suspected this one was going south.

“It’s out of date,” she huffed, when I returned. She turned the licence around on the table top for me to see. I couldn’t believe it. My provisional licence was literally one day out of date. I sat there beaming frantically, while my brain formulated a response. Finally, I leaned forward: “Is there any way,” I asked, sotto voce, “that this could be overlooked?” There wasn’t.

Next, I tried my luck in Churchtown. My presentation was tighter this time. I was clean shaven, wore a suit and took my sister’s car. (It had a baby seat in the back.) I looked every inch the company man, I thought. Hell, I’d have given myself the licence at this stage.

Unfortunately, I’d neglected to put L-plates on my sister’s car. Once again, I was kicked to the kerb without leaving the car-park.

My most recent exchange of views with the Road Safety Authority occurred at Raheny test centre on February 10th. My licence was kosher and I breezed through the Rules of the Road pop quiz. When we lifted the bonnet, I admitted I didn’t know where the brake fluid went. But as I told the examiner, if there’s a problem with the brakes, I doubt I’ll be taking matters into my own hands. Recession or no recession.

Things were going okay until the guy decided he wanted to see my tail-lights. I was sitting in the car with the engine on. This was already my personal best for this century. I looked in the rear-view mirror. The examiner was shaking his head. Darkness descended. Exit music came up.

Today I’m sitting the driving test for the sixth time. More in hope than expectation. If I fail then, when my current provisional licence expires, there will be qualified drivers on the road who weren’t born when I got my first. If I pass, then I’ll probably jump in a lake or something. Either way, as my family are fond of telling me, it’s the taking part that counts.

Here’s me talking to Ryan Tubridy on air shortly before the test…

And updating him on how it went the next day.

P.S. I got it!!!

At the stroke of midnight, South Sudan becomes the world’s 192nd independent nation. In the new capital, joy is unconfined. In the mud huts that stretch for miles in every direction, residents can be heard singing and ululating well into the night.

By 7am, the BBC World Service reports a crowd of a hundred thousand already gathered at the Dr. John Garang Mausoleum. The speeches here will last late into the afternoon. But despite a complete lack of respite from the sun, the people never once cease to sing, sway and chant… Read the rest of this article here.

#3 The anatomy of a Twitter gaffe (June 11th)
I went with this headline about a millisecond before every second article you read started being called ‘The Anatomy of…’ something or other. I’d actually just seen an exhibition of illustrations from The Anatomy of Melancholy. Perhaps all the other headline writers had seen it too. We may never know.

#2 The funniest thing I’ve ever seen (January 30th)
I’m still a (relatively) young man. But if I watch this one more time, there is a real possibility I will keel over and die laughing.

#1 The Lonesome Boatman (August 20th)
Very early one summer morning, myself, a photographer and an affable fisherman named Shane Murphy went on a gallivant off the coast of Kinsale. We didn’t catch much. We didn’t see much. We didn’t reach any profound conclusions. But it’s still my most clicked story of 2011.