Ciara Kelly: For a while this summer, there won’t be any kids at home. How did this creep up on me?

It’s J-1 season. I put yet another of my children on a plane last week to head off to bartend, wait tables and the-divil-knows-what in the Rhode Island sunshine, along with thousands of other Irish students. It’s such a rite of passage that when we went to collect her American work visa (from a Greenhills industrial estate, bizarrely) we weren’t the only J-1ers there and it turns out that the place in which she’s got a job is where her dad’s cousins worked on their J-1s over 30 years ago.