Having watched family and friends emigrate and faced with headlines laden with cutbacks and crises, Ronan Moore decided to list some of the reasons why Ireland wasn't all that bad. Fuelled by memories of what he'd missed when he lived overseas, one reason to love Ireland became 10, 10 became 100 and it kept increasing as Ronan posted a blog entry for each and every morning of the year on 365reasonstoloveireland.blogspot.ie. Almost 100,000 hits later, his blog became his first book, Irishology.

Ronan is a secondary-school English teacher whose writing is thankfully a lot better than his spelling. When not trying to get students to stand on their desks to look at the world in a different light, he is trying to get them off the tables to take down their homework. He lives in Trim with 'the one', Frances, who he married recently on a gloriously overcast Irish summer's day.

Follow Ronan on Twitter @ronanmoore