Sunday, November 8, 2009 Previous editions

THERE has been talk about cutting the size of the Dáil and abolishing the Seanad, but nobody seems to have suggested abolishing the Presidency, which is the single most expensive office. How much could be save by abolishing it?
IT WAS one of those panels studded with the famous, lucid and loquacious.
HE wasn’t in good humour.
THERE’S a sort of poetic justice to it: having written back in April about the danger to mental health arising from swine flu hysteria, I have now come down with the bug myself. Perhaps 100,000 people in the State have likewise been struck.
POLITICAL and other spin doctors know how to manage a crisis. The critical factor is to hang on. They believe virtually all news media cycles are “nine-day wonders”.
ONE THOUSAND construction jobs for north Tipperary for three years, followed by 2,000 more jobs in the finished development sounds like a good deal that no government could object to, especially when no government financial assistance is being sought.
RYAN Tubridy’s selection as next host of the Late Late Show did not come as a great surprise. He was always on the shortlist.
ANY thoughts that having the Democrats in control in the US would favour Europe in the Doha WTO negotiations have been quickly shattered.
I WAS travelling in my boat on the Grand Canal recently, enjoying the wonderful autumn colours of the trees and shrubs growing along the bank.
DURING the summer, the discovery of what some people believed was a sacred tree, in a church grounds in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, led to sensational headlines that set off a religious frenzy.
IN 1773, James Boswell declared that ‘man is the cooking animal’; no other creature, he observed, treats food the way we do.
AWARDS are two a penny these times, so much so that they often come and go with minimum publicity.
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