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• 'Something almost horrific happened': English media reacts to Leinster's win over Northampton

  Much of the reaction to what happened in Croke Park zeroed in on James Lowe's hat-trick and also the scare Leinster delivered to their fans, when Northampton steamed back into contention in the second half of the European Champions Cup semi-final in Croke Park.

• Tell us about your experience of divorce in Ireland

  Our Legal Affairs Correspondent Mary Carolan spent a day inside Ireland's divorce courts this week. She says the atmosphere was sad and sombre as divorce decrees were granted in marriages ranging from less than six months to more than 30 years.

• Sinn Féin says abolishing the Help-to-Buy scheme will be good for first time buyers – is it right?

  The wheels on the Irish property market are spinning. This week we saw three important pieces of new information, none of them encouraging for those trying to get into the market.

• New poetry: Rapture's Road; And Then the Hare; Landscape of the Body; All the Good Things You Deserve

  " ... each night/I play both sinner and priest –/assigning prayers, the dog-collar,/the dove, the blister of thorns. Yes,/I have been here before." A Ministry opens Seán Hewitt's Rapture's Road (Cape, £12.99). Readers have been here before in Hewitt's night-forest but this is Dublin and the stakes are even higher as present-day raptures are haunted by a murder from the past.

• Tried-and-trusted techniques to help plants to grow back more strongly than ever

  There are certain nuggets of good garden advice, so counterintuitive that they seem to make absolutely no sense at all. Why on earth, for example, should we pinch out the growing tip of a perfectly healthy seedling or plant stem as a way of encouraging it to fatten up? "Leggy", after all, is usually a term of admiration rather than opprobrium. Likewise, why would pruning back perfectly healthy shrubs — essentially cutting away their lovely strong shoots and branches- possibly make them bushier and more floriferous when surely it should result in the exact opposite? In the same vein, why is it a good idea to shear back lavender plants that are only just beginning to fluff up again after a long, dark and dismal winter? And what, oh what, is the Chelsea chop, which sounds to the uninitiated like some form of plant abuse?

• Liverpool and Harvey Elliott turn on style to deal hammer blow to Spurs' top-four hopes

  Premier League: Liverpool 4 Tottenham Hotspur 2

• My partner has embraced conspiracy theories and extreme political views

  Dear Roe,

• Deirdre O'Kane: 'I've reached a point where I'm not afraid to make people uncomfortable'

  Deirdre O'Kane has a saying: God bless the work. The Drogheda-born comic is on tour with her new stand-up show, O'Kaning It, the schedule for which stretches into 2025, and includes 43 performances. Alongside her thriving comedy career, she juggles work as an actor, podcaster, TV host and voiceover artist. But nothing is taken for granted with O'Kane. At the end of our lunch, she'll put the remainder of her San Pellegrino in her KeepCup – it's too expensive to waste.

• Young Offenders star Alex Murphy: 'For Roy Keane to be eager to be on the show was just mad'

  It was the best summer of Alex Murphy's life. He was 17 and had been cast in a microbudget independent movie about two scamps from the northside of Cork city who cycle all the way to Mizen Head in the hope of recovering a €7 million cocaine stash that had washed ashore. Murphy had never acted professionally and had no idea that the film he was making, an irreverent comedy called The Young Offenders, would change everything for him.

• National Lottery plans to move its HQ to new location

  The National Lottery has been based in the same building on Abbey Street in Dublin since the 1980s, with thousands of winners passing through its glass doors to collect their cheques. Now its number could be up. Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI) is considering swapping its city centre HQ in the Irish Life Centre for a new base. After spinning the wheel, it came up with plans for a new HQ, although it was keeping its cards close to its chest last week when asked where it is moving.