Osama bin Laden’s “demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace with human dignity,” President Obama stressed on Sunday night.
WHILE attending university in Texas in 1964 I was about to play golf one day when somebody asked if he could join me. I was going to agree, until I saw the man was black.
OUR system of justice seems to be turned on its head these days. The High Court has ruled that Ian Bailey should be deported to France to face charges for a crime committed in this country. If our system is so flawed that we cannot dispense justice, surely the system should be changed.
EMIGRATION is again one of the biggest problems facing this country.
IT was nice to see a degree of personal warmth in the Dáil between Micheál Martin and Enda Kenny. We have been witnessing probably the greatest changes in the Dáil since 1932.
THE Irish people did not so much speak at the ballot box last week as scream their disapproval of the current government, and this was especially apparent around the capital.
FIANNA Fáil and Fine Gael could be standing together outside the GPO for the centenary of the Easter Rebellion in little over five years time, according to Leo Varadkar.
THERE is considerable interest around the personalities in Kerry in the forthcoming election. Will John O’Donoghue get re-elected, will Michael Healy-Rae succeed his father, and will another Spring swap places with a McEllistrim?
THERE is considerable interest around the personalities in Kerry in the forthcoming election. Will John O’Donoghue get re-elected, will Michael Healy-Rae succeed his father, and will another Spring swap places with a McEllistrim?
THIS could be the most significant general election since 1932, which was a watershed.
A FAIRLY routine medical procedure went wrong and I had to go to the Accident and Emergency at Tralee General Hospital last week. I immediately realised the agony that one would have to endure if there were no local hospital.
FIANNA Fáil has essentially ousted its last five party leaders while serving Taoisigh. Recently, Vincent Browne was asking on TV3 whether this is indicative of something radically wrong within Fianna Fáil.
IN politics, as in life, one does not make friends by insulting people.
NOBODY seems to have asked what Brian Cowen was doing in Vietnam around St Patrick’s Day 2008.
THE Senate was abolished before and it was a great pity that it was brought back, because the present Seanad has only been a drain on resources. It could have been reformed to provide a useful purpose any time in the last 70 years, but now it is too late.
NORMALLY anyone using the National Archives is looking for specific information, but when the State Papers are released to journalists each year, it is a different matter. Most do not know what they are looking for; they just plough through the files looking for anything of likely interest.
THE idea that the opposition could have negotiated a better interest rate from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the recent bailout is “laughable,” according to Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.
LAST week David McWilliams had his one-man show, Outsiders, in Tralee. I have never been much of a theatre-goer and the idea of spending an hour and a half listening to one person was not particularly appealing, especially when I tend to become decidedly restless, if the priest goes on even for 10 minutes with a Sunday sermon.
IN going into government Green Party Leader John Gormley suggested that he and his colleagues could aptly be compared to voluntarily putting themselves in straitjackets. “Because when you are entering government,” he said, “you are entering an asylum.”
SINCE I began writing a regular column I can only remember being called by the editor to justify two of them.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen told a press conference on Thursday: “I don’t believe there is reason for people to feel ashamed or humiliated at all.” He was referring to the current financial crisis.
THE Scannal programme on the 1970 Arms Crisis on RTÉ television this week began with me proclaiming that the whole thing was the most serious crisis since the civil war. It has never been properly investigated but then no one should be surprised because the civil war was largely ignored, too.
IT is hard to believe that anyone with any intelligence was surprised by the High Court ruling this week that the Donegal South-West by-election should be held without further delay. The existing delay, since the election of Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher to the European Parliament in June 2009, has been the longest in the history of the state.
BBC viewers voted Winston Churchill as ‘Britain’s Greatest’. He is remembered as the man who saved them during the Second World War, but he was undoubtedly one of Ireland’s greatest scourges. As Minister for War in 1920 he was the politician most responsible for the Black and Tans.
SINCE Dáil Éireann was established in 1919 there have been 125 by-elections. All but 11 of those were held within six months of the vacancy occurring. But the current Dáil has three vacancies, two of which are already more than six months old and the third well over a year and heading for a record delay.
FORMER US President Harry Truman once explained: “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. To tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference. I, for one, believe the piano player job to be much more honourable than current politicians.”
SOME people seem to develop exotic addictions. At one time addicts were limited to alcohol and hard drugs, but then soft drugs like tobacco and cannabis were added. Now sex is included, since Tiger Woods was treated in a clinic.
ALTHOUGH it has become somewhat trendy to denigrate the leadership of Éamon de Valera, he led by magnificent example both at home and on the world stage in the 1930s.
WITH the rumblings of Garglegate in Galway still continuing, we had the story of PJ Sheehan threatening the young garda outside Leinster House when she prevented him from driving his car because he had too much to drink.
BRIAN Cowen’s interview on Tuesday’s Morning Ireland lasted little over nine minutes, but it had enormous reverberations, even though he essentially said nothing. He just fobbed off all the hard questions.
IVOR CALLELY may have had a valid point when he questioned the way the Seanad deplored his claims for more than €81,000 in expenses, largely for travelling from his holiday home in west Cork to Dublin on Oireachtas business. He contended he was entitled to claim the travelling expenses from his holiday home.
ALTHOUGH we should learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others, we persist in following the failed tactics of the US in relation to drugs. Our drug problems, which began in Dublin, have gradually spread throughout the country.
DURING the Rose of Tralee selection last Tuesday night, Dáithí O Sé mentioned “dry counties” to the Texas Rose. It was the first time I had heard the term being used for a long time, but I do remember the first time I heard of a “dry county”.
DURING the week RTÉ televised a fascinating documentary on of the discovery in Dublin of the priceless Caravaggio painting, The Betrayal of Christ. Its whereabouts had been a mystery for more than 200 years before it was found hanging in the dining room of the Jesuits’ house on Leeson Street, where it had been for some 60 years.
OVER the years the media and politicians exhibited an unhealthy deference towards the Catholic clergy and hierarchy in this country.
IVOR Callely is being investigated by committee of Fianna Fáil for “conduct unbecoming a member” of the party.
WITH all the talk about a possible visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland and the 3 Irish Open being played at Killarney this weekend, it is worth remembering that the queen’s great, great grandmother, Queen Victoria, was largely responsible for putting Killarney on the tourist map with her visit to the area in 1861.
WHAT word best describes Michael McDowell during his political career – arrogant, intolerant, self-serving, brilliant, courageous, or exciting? They all applied to him at different times. Whether one liked him or loathed him, he left his mark on Irish politics.
LAST Saturday I watched the senior football play-off game between Tipperary and Dublin. It was not a particularly great game, but it was much more interesting and exciting than any of the World Cup soccer matches. The Cork and Waterford Munster hurling final on Sunday also left the soccer in the shade.
THE French have a saying that the more things change the more they stay the same. This weekend thousands of young people will flock to the Oxegen music festival at Punchestown, but unlike some such gatherings elsewhere, it does not seem to have any real focus of protest.
AS the media were reporting here on the finding of the Saville Inquiry into the events in Derry on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, I was in the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, where 5,075 American soldiers and one American nurse were buried. All were victims of the Second World War.
PEOPLE have become so disillusioned with politics in this country that there are calls for scrapping the Seanad and a significant reduction in the number of Dáil deputies. It would not be the first time for the Seanad to be abolished.
THE present state of disillusionment with politics is the worst I have witnessed. In this week’s public opinion poll, the Government satisfaction rating was a mere 12%, which is the lowest I can remember in any democracy.
WITH the World Cup about to start, people will inevitably regret that Ireland are not there. “France are going to the World Cup,” as Roy Keane rather infamously said, “get over it!”
ALBERT Einstein’s defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It is a fitting description of our drug strategy in this country.
THERE are currently three vacancies in the Dáil brought about by resignations. Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher stood down in 2009 after his election to the European Parliament. Earlier this year George Lee of Fine Gael resigned his South Dublin seat in a tizzy and Martin Cullen stepped down from his Waterford seat due to health reasons.
THE controversy over the European Commission’s efforts to compel the 16 euro states to submit their draft budgets to Brussels before presenting them to their respective parliaments made somewhat confused reading this week. Surely this would be an incursion into Irish sovereignty.
FOLLOWING the publication of my book, Haughey’s Forty Years of Controversy, I was invited on the late Gerry Ryan’s radio programme. I assumed the interview would be for about 12 minutes. I had done a couple of other interviews with him previously about Éamon de Valera, but we were in separate studios for each of those and had never actually met before.
THE do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do style of leadership received a hammering this week. For the past couple of years the Government has been according politicians special privileges while calling on the public to demonstrate patriotism by accepting cuts.
IF Michael O’Leary of Ryanair could make money selling toilet paper on his planes, he would do it, and he has been quite candid about it.
WATCHING Vincent Browne’s news programme on Wednesday night I found myself thinking that young people should seriously consider emigrating because the prospects here seem so bleak. This is the third major recession I can remember and there are reasons for suspecting it could be the worst, notwithstanding the ERSI’s recent prediction that things will pick up in 2011.
LISTENING to some of the teachers and the union representatives moaning during the week one could be tempted to suggest that what we need is to bring back corporal punishment and flog those teachers.
THIS week’s controversy about whether Pope Benedict XVI should be compelled to testify about the Vatican’s role in relation to clerical sexual abuse of minors was an absurd publicity stunt. One might have expected it 50 years ago, but not in the 21st century. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the election of John F Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic President of the United States.
TAOISEACH Brian Cowen and his party certainly did not distinguish themselves with the cabinet reshuffle during the week, but the contortions of Leo Varadkar helped to take some of the spotlight off the Government.
WHY would the future Cardinal Seán Brady ask an eight-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy to swear on oath that they would not divulge that Fr Brendan Smyth had sexually abused them? The main aim was certainly not to protect other boys from that predator. Fr Brady was apparently more interested in protecting the Catholic Church as an institution from criticism.
WE are really in the midst of a revolution of sorts. All of the old certainties are being washed away. People are now questioning all the previously authoritative figures in society.
DURING the week Allied Irish Banks announced losses of more than €2.65 billion for 2009. In explaining the situation, Colm Doherty, managing director of AIB Group, described the current state of retail banking in Ireland as “quite dysfunctional”.
DOMINIC McGowan told Trevor Sargent that after seeing children tampering with a neighbourhood sign, he complained to the father of one of them, but he was head-butted and required hospitalisation as a result.
DEFENDING Willie O’Dea on Monday, Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said: “I suppose Fine Gael are returning to type. They’ve always tried to get the dirt on people. I think it is despicable, to be honest.” Of course, he undoubtedly meant it is despicable to make false accusations.
THE Winter Olympic Games opened in Vancouver, Canada, early this morning (Irish time). The controversy over the Irish bobsleigh team prompted memories of earlier controversies about Irish participation in the Olympics.
A CONCISE version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was about to be finalised when somebody noticed a howler. The encyclopaedia wrongly suggested that our civil war of 1922-23 was fought between the Catholics of the south and the Protestants of the North.
THE global warming crisis is now being rebranded as a climate change crisis because it seems that instead of getting warmer, we may actually be getting colder.
WITH Northern Ireland now being jolted by a couple of sex scandals, maybe we should ask why our politics have remained strangely free of such scandals? The whole thing undoubtedly has a lot to do with hypocrisy.
LATELY the media has been the object of considerable criticism, founded and unfounded, whether in relation to Brian Lenihan’s illness, Noel Dempsey’s holiday or the Government’s appalling lack of leadership.
THERE was an amazing interview during the week on RTÉ in relation to the final decommissioning of weapons by the UDA. It seemed strange to hear Frankie Gallagher of the Ulster Political Research Group speak in such complimentary terms about the help received in Dublin.
THE visit of Pope John Paul II was undoubtedly the most popular event that ever took place in this country. It was witnessed in person by more people than the visit of President John F Kennedy in 1963 or President Bill Clinton in 1995. Yet strangely, the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy treated Taoiseach Jack Lynch and his government with a degree of disdain.
LAST week was the 30th anniversary of Charlie Haughey’s election as Taoiseach for the first time, but the occasion seemed to pass without notice in the media. Maybe it is a measure of how low he has descended in the eyes of the public. Although he had always been acutely conscious of carving out a place in history for himself, it seems his reputation is now in tatters.
WHILE at university in Texas during the mid-1960s and early 1970s there was very little news about Ireland either on television or in the newspapers.
ELSEWHERE in today’s paper (News Analysis, page 17) I have reviewed Michael Clemenger’s book Holy Terrors, dealing with life in the industrial school in Tralee in the late1950s and early 1960s. It evoked many memories for me, having grown up within a mile of the school.
FREE Education for Everyone, with the inapt acronym FEE, organised up to 1,000 student signatures in protest against the appointment of former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern as a visiting professor at NUI Maynooth (NUIM). They called on the college authorities to suspend the appointment, at least until after the publication of the Mahon tribunal report.
DURING the recession of the 1980s sport helped to lift the public gloom, but unfortunately what happened in Paris on Wednesday night has only added to it now.
IN the last recession during the 1980s the cream of a generation were forced to emigrate. It was an eminently forgettable period, except in the area of sport.
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?
THE author of England’s Greatest Spy: Eamon de Valera was interviewed by John Green on Radio Kerry during the week. The 470-page book, by John J Turi, will not be published until the last day of November so it is not possible to comment on it.
Some may argue that Irish people are more broadminded these days. They probably always were, but not enough people stood up to the clerical bullies to find out. For decades a few loudmouths were allowed to set the trends because people were afraid to buck them. Some bishops were among the worst offenders.
TODAY a memorial will be unveiled in Ventry to an incident that made international headlines 70 years ago. A German submarine, the U35, dropped off 28 Greek seamen at Ventry on October 4, 1939.
A LETTER writer to the Irish Examiner during the week asked if the manner in which John O’Donoghue was essentially forced to step down as Ceann Comhairle was “trial by media and mob justice.” There can be little doubt that there was an element of this in what happened. People are becoming dangerously exasperated.
THE coming few weeks could be very interesting politically. John Gormley has said that the Green Party will withdraw from government if the party’s rank and file do not approve a new programme for government by a two-thirds majority. That could prove particularly problematical, but then maybe he can secure some astonishing concessions from Fianna Fáil in the current circumstances.
EARLIER this month I was asked to discuss Irish neutrality during the Second World War on Tom McGurk’s programme on 4FM.
IT is amazing how exercised some people are about John O’Donoghue’s expenses when he was Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism. He provided an abject apology during the week to those who were paying the bills — the taxpayer.
THE publication of Albert Reynolds’s autobiography revives memories of an interesting and exciting period.
WATCHING this week’s RTÉ programme on the beginning of the Troubles in 1969, I was struck by the similarity of what happened then and what has been happening in the past year.
TED KENNEDY was both the most loved and one of most hated and divisive politicians in the United States. Republicans frequently depicted him as the embodiment of evil and amorality, as well as a relic of the self-indulgent liberalism of the 1960s.
In some respects we have aped the worst of America.
RECENTLY in this column, I wrote about the stupidity and futility of spending millions on a drug strategy that has failed so miserably elsewhere, not just over years, but over decades.
SURELY the worst kind of stupidity is the failure to learn from mistakes. Yet we persist in making the same ones. Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
IRELAND has agreed to take two of the prisoners from the American concentration camp at Guantanamo, Cuba because they cannot go back to their home country, Uzbekistan. The Americans would like us to think they have jailed only crazed Muslim terrorists in Guantanamo, but people should ask who were held there.
PHARMACIES have proliferated in recent years and there are many stories about exorbitant prices being paid for medication. It has all been part of Rip-off Ireland.
LIES, damn lies and statistics have long been regarded as the great falsities, but one might also add bureaucrats distorting the national interest in their own personal interest. There was some surprise this week that the Government published the report of An Bord Snip Nua.
LAST Friday three clean-cut young American backpackers arrived at Dublin airport from Texas. They were setting out on the first international leg of a yearlong trip around Europe.
CRIMINAL activities, whether committed by common criminals or political ones, should be investigated by the gardaí.
The Lemass style of leadership was to encourage his ministers to be proactive. Unlike de Valera, he never managed to lead Fianna Fáil to an overall majority but, unlike some of his successors, he refused to bargain with any independents to support his nomination for Taoiseach
WHILE Eamon de Valera was dreaming of comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, young boys were being flogged and buggered by a sordid assortment of perverted clergy and depraved Christian Brothers.
MERCIFULLY the election campaign is over. Some will say it was the essence of democracy, but the whole thing was particularly tedious.
Kenny, in effect, was trying to hurt Fianna Fáil by helping Mary Lou McDonald when he criticised Garret FitzGerald for suggesting Fine Gael should transfer votes to Eoin Ryan. At the same time he was trying to have us believe that he would not deal with Sinn Féin. He can’t have it both ways
MANY people felt a deep sense of betrayal over the disclosure that Bishop Eamon Casey had fathered a son, but in the last analysis what was betrayed was their own sense of innocence.
THE Government is dizzy from all the U-turns. On Wednesday night Minister for Children Barry Andrews declined to appear on Vincent Browne’s news programme to discuss the report of the Commission on Child Abuse. Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe declined a similar invitation from Morning Ireland.
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.
IN a review of Brian Cowen’s first year as Taoiseach, RTÉ News mentioned he had to face an unprecedented series of crises and that none of his predecessors “ever had to deal with problems of such severity”.
On October 6 the city reported a record 289 deaths in a single day, but it soon got more than twice as bad. The following week one of the victims was my grandmother – who was in Pennsylvania on holidays at the time.
DISHONEST, disloyal, destructive, disgraceful are just some of the words that can be used to describe this Government, which is unquestionably the worst that this country has had to endure since independence.
ON Monday the attention of the nation was focused on two funerals — that of Garda Robert McCallion, who was mown down in Donegal, and Roy Collins, the businessman shot in Limerick.
THE Government did not do as much as it should have in providing proper leadership. It cut pensions to sitting ministers and deputies, but it did nothing about the untouched expenses. Yet they did more than I expected. That was not a compliment; if that is a compliment, it was simply that they are not as obtuse as I feared. They have learned something from their recent mistakes.
THERE was a frightening photograph on the front page of the Irish Examiner on Thursday of a seemingly endless line of people queuing for food at 8.30 in the morning at the Capuchin Day Centre in Bow Street, Dublin.
THE authorities absurdly suggested during the week that Conor Casby, the artist who painted the controversial portraits of Brian Cowen, was guilty of indecency, incitement to violence and criminal damage.
WHEN President Barack Obama met the press on Tuesday morning to discuss his budget proposals, he was sporting a green tie to mark St Patrick’s Day. “Green tie, not bad, huh?” he began.
TODAY the Whyte’s history and literature auction of memorabilia is being held in Dublin. Ian Whyte, the managing director of the auctioneering firm, mentioned that the material had been forgotten after the Civil War.
FOR years the maxim of American business was: “As General Motors goes, so goes the nation.” Today there are fears General Motors is going bankrupt and this could have further enormous implications for the global economy. The whole thing emphasises the need for new political thinking in relation to the economy.
ON RTÉ’s Morning Ireland during the week, Dr Garret FitzGerald said “the crisis is a very serious one, much more serious than we ever faced”.
THE gyrations at Anglo Irish Bank continue to reverberate with fresh revelations coming out regularly. Yesterday, Dermot Ahern was on RTÉ arguing about the damage that disclosure of the names of the Anglo 10 would do to Irish banks.
IN the midst of all the negativity, it is nice to read something positive for a change.
SHORTLY before he died, according to his son Seán, Charlie Haughey said: “I never broke my word in politics.”
BY describing the kerfuffle on the prospect of a property tax as “speculation” Taoiseach Brian Cowen, speaking in Davros, is either firmly focussed on the long game or, as his detractors suggest, is once again dodging the hard question; once again freezing in the headlights.
MR JUSTICE Paul Carney’s annoyance at the Court of Criminal Appeal is understandable. In January 2007 he sentenced Gerard Kelly to life in prison for rape, but the sentence was for more than that crime.
BARACK OBAMA’S first test as president came as he was being sworn in. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, got the presidential oath wrong.
THE pub culture has been changing in this country in recent years. The drift from the bars is matched only by the drop in vocations and the attendances at Sunday mass, which can probably be attributed largely to the culpable arrogance of prominent church people.
IT SEEMS like the Celtic Tiger has fled and we are floundering in tiger crap. Things are obviously going to get much worse in coming months, especially as the Government appears to have completely lost the plot in so many matters.
IN preparing a timeline for the publication of 1978 State papers, I looked at the front page of the daily newspaper for every day of the year.
NINE years ago, on December 22, 1999, I said here that the “economy is booming and this country will be enjoying unprecedented prosperity at the start of the new century.
CONOR Cruise O’Brien would probably have been proud to think that his passing this week would mark the end of an era.
NEXT week marks 90 years since the election of the first Irish woman to parliament — Countess Constance Markievicz.
ROY KEANE has quit Sunderland and there was a torrent of abuse that he had walked out again, as he had walked out on Mick McCarthy.
While Mary Harney’s hairdo is attracting the spotlight, the more serious question about the gift of the glass barometer to Mary Hanafin is being largely ignored...
THERE was a time when it was trendy for parents to wish for a son to be a priest. But now it seems ambitious parents want their son to become a doctor, which is seen as both a prestigious and a lucrative position.
THE momentous events in the United States and the outrage in Limerick have been major distractions from our economic plight, but we are going to have to face it, and the sooner the better. A number of political commentators have called for a new Tallaght Strategy.
LAST Tuesday I just happened to put on a recording of Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome,” and suddenly I thought of the poignancy of the day.
PUBLIC opinion polls in the United States seem to suggest it is all over bar the shouting. If Barack Obama does not win on Tuesday, it will be the biggest surprise since Harry Truman retained the Presidency exactly 60 years tomorrow.
DURING the week Bertie Ahern fell down a stairs and broke his leg. But the media was so preoccupied it hardly warranted a mention. The country has been reeling since the budget. Is that what happened to Bertie?
It was Samuel Johnson who famously proclaimed in 1775 that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”.
Is it naive to think that there were only problems in Donegal?
AN Irish Press reporter was watching a police water cannon vehicle moving into position. He had never seen one in action before.
SHOULD anyone care if people were stupid enough to pay inflated prices for property in recent years? Sure, this provided employment in the construction industry and that provided extra tax revenue.
THE Progressive Democrats were suggesting this week that they are going to fold up their tent and fade away.
Charlie McCreevy had the courage to move a ‘no confidence’ motion in Charlie Haughey’s leadership in October 1982, but the great majority in the parliamentary party did not have the vision, the guts or the integrity to support his motion, so Haughey survived.
SOME have predicted that Barack Obama could turn out to be another George McGovern.
WITH the growing international tension over Georgia some have been bemoaning the lack of strong statesmen. George W Bush professes to be an ardent admirer of Winston Churchill who was man of the century for a great many people.
FROM some of the early reports from Beijing it was beginning to look like we were going to have to be content that nobody drowned in the pool or got lost on the running track, but then the boxers came to the rescue. Sure we’re famous the world over for fighting.
The gracious way in which Harrington won has further added to his international stature.
IT is probably inevitable that we will be told that the Chinese are exploiting the Olympic Games for their own political purposes, as if the Americans, the Germans, the Russians, the British, or all the others had not done so already.
THE Olympic Games have lost much of their glamour over the drug cheats.
WE ARE approaching the silly season when zany stories get big play because the politicians who are supposedly running the country are off on holidays.
WINNING the Democratic nomination for president is now just a formality for Barrack Obama, and the smear tactics are already in full swing.
RTE’s environment correspondent announced on Monday that the natterjack toad is “unique to Castlemaine” and more than 40 farmers have signed up to save the toad.
THE essence of leadership is good example. The Government is suggesting that people should hold the line and forget about wage increases.
What Mr Kelly described in his email seemed more like torture than treatment.
THE rest of the country may have been preoccupied with the Lisbon Treaty, but in Kerry the topic of conversation this week was the brainstorm that seized Paul Galvin when he threw a tantrum and slapped the notebook out of the hand of referee Paddy Russell.
JUDGE Pat McCartan of Dublin Circuit Criminal Court fined Bus Éireann €2 million for breaches of the Health and Safety Act in relation to the accident in which five schoolgirls were killed in a bus accident in Navan in May 2005.
THE tribunal was back as the most popular show in Dublin this week. But this time it was not as a drama but as pure farce.
THINKING of the behaviour of the Cork train drivers this week brought Rudyard Kipling to mind. It was he who first coined the term “power without responsibility”.
The Irish were so despised that the American Party was founded against them in 1852.
FOR more than 50 years the Irish public had no right to see official documents. The civil servants were effectively our masters — not public servants.
WHEN Eric the Red landed in Greenland in the late 900s he established a farming settlement, with sheep and cattle feeding on grass.
THE Taoiseach was afforded a magnificent stage to wind up his political career with an address to a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. He became only the 102nd foreigner to address the two houses together.
THE US primaries are supposed to help parties select the best candidate for the Presidential election, but the Democrats could be on a hiding to nothing because they are deluding themselves.
There is the salary of the president and her staff, the cost of the upkeep of the Áras and its staff, providing the president with a car, a driver, and a police escort car, as well as extravagant pensions for former presidents, and ultimately the cost of their state funerals.
IN A sense, Irish politics has gone into suspended animation. Bertie Ahern has been replaced as leader of Fianna Fáil but he remains as Taoiseach for over three weeks. This kind of hiatus effectively happens just about every decade after an election in which the people decide to change government.
The Taoiseach will be making a terrible blunder if he tries to exploit the innate decency and compassion that people feel for him by abusing those who did their job in exposing his wrongdoing.
THERE is a story doing the rounds about Alexander Tyler, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s who assessed the collapse of the Athenian Republic.
ON THE first St Patrick’s Day while at university in Texas in 1964, I was interviewed by the local daily newspaper as I was the only person from Ireland among more than 15,000 students.
CIVIL servants are often called the permanent government. They are the faceless men and women who implement policy and frequently formulate it, but political decorum requires that they keep a low profile rather than outshine their nominal masters.
MANY people have been comparing Barack Obama with John F Kennedy, and they are also comparing his wife, Michelle, with Jackie Kennedy.
We have long moved on from the position of unfounded allegations and speculation.
IAN PAISLEY Jnr had to resign this week as a junior minister in the Northern Executive headed by his father.
PAUL GOLDIN, the hypnotist who died this week, was greatly mourned by many people. I saw him perform in the early 1960s when I was still in secondary school. It was probably the funniest live show I ever attended.
I WENT to university in the USA in September 1963. It was a tremendous culture shock going from Tralee to Davenport, Iowa.
Ahern left himself wide open to the suspicion that he was under obligation by appointing several people to State boards after they gave him money.
THERE was much about the new EU measures to combat climate change during the week. One of the big changes for this country will be the introduction of smart electricity meters to help people measure how they consume electricity, but it would be a lot more effective if we came up with a way of measuring the competence of our public servants.
WAYNE O’DONOGHUE has paid his debt to society and should be allowed the privacy to get on with the rest of his life without publicly having to relive his tragic mistakes.
As we were once told that something had to be done because the British decided it, now we are being told it’s because the EU has decided it.
John F Kennedy had to prove that a Roman Catholic could win in 1960, but the Catholic factor has not been an issue ever since.
WHILE at the National Archives previewing the State papers, which were officially released yesterday, I happened to be sitting beside Prof Ronan Fanning when I came across a letter written to him by the Irish ambassador to the US in 1977.
LITTLE over a week before the current Dáil met for the first time a senior counsel who has worked on the staff of at least one tribunal was asked who was going to be the next Taoiseach.
THE Government was forced into a U-turn over the pay raises this week. Bertie Ahern was right to say they would get no credit for the gesture. They deserved none.
Most people probably do not realise that tea and coffee are drugs, or that nicotine or alcohol are in themselves even more dangerous drugs.
Indeed, should Cowen be worried? After all, Bertie anointed Albert Reynolds for the presidency in 1997.
The way conspiracy theories grow demonstrates the need for investigations to be seen to be thorough and impartial.
WE have never had it so good and we have a Taoiseach who has been in power for 10 years, gaining enormous experience, and we expect him to live like the poor relation of those leaders with whom he has to mix.
ONE of this week’s news spectaculars was Ian Paisley launching Dana Rosemary Scallon’s autobiography, All Kinds of Everything. Anywhere else, that would have been just another photo-op but in Northern Ireland it was an event of real significance.
Dev’s papers have been transferred to UCD, which plans to digitalise them and make them available on the internet.
NEWS coverage of the departure of Steve Staunton as manager of Ireland’s soccer team was quite a spectacle. RTÉ was scathing about the supposedly “shambolic” way in which things were handled at the end.
THE face-off between Eamon de Valera and Winston Churchill in this week’s Hidden History TV programme on RTÉ 1 was a case of hiding history and promoting distortion.
McCreevy explained he was objecting to Haughey’s leadership because there had been a lowering of political standards, mishandling of the economy, as well as the party’s failure to secure a majority in two successive general elections.
WHILE researching High Society, her book on drug use, Justine Delaney Wilson interviewed a Government minister at Buswell’s Hotel, which is just across the street from Leinster House.
EAMON GILMORE gave a fascinating interview on Tuesday’s Morning Ireland. It was the finest I have heard from the new leader of any party. He was forceful, yet compassionate and fair.
THE parents of the late Brian Murphy, the teenage student who was kicked to death in a fight outside Club Anabel in Dublin in August 2000 — gave a poignant interview this week following the inquest into the death of their son. They are left with a life sentence of the pain of their loss.
THE LATE Bill Shankly famously said that “some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
THE late Fr Michael Cleary has been pilloried all week in the media since the riveting RTÉ documentary on Monday night.
Who will be so gullible as to believe those whitewash reports now?
KERRY’S dominance in Gaelic football over the past century is a testament to the county’s passion for the sport — a passion that was forged by the bitterness of the Civil War.
TOURISM, an important source of employment, has been in the headlines lately, especially over the Shannon controversy. This weekend the Rose of Tralee festival is being held.
Michael McDowell refused to release the Justice Department file in line with the 30-year rule ... If McDowell had been in opposition, he would probably have said we were behaving a like banana republic!
AFTER Ireland’s defeat to Italy in the quarter-final of the 1990 World Cup, Charlie Haughey went down on the field to salute the Irish crowd, but he was roundly booed.
LAST Sunday, as the media had wall-to-wall coverage of Joe O’Reilly’s conviction for the murder of his wife, the 25th anniversary of one of the most notorious murders in Irish history went unnoticed.
THE only Irishman ever to win the British Open Golf Championship was Fred Daly from Portrush in 1947. That was 60 years ago, so it certainly is time for another Irish winner.
We should insist the EU demands Vanunu’s return to Italy.
The Americans tried to ban alcohol in the 1920s, but it gave rise to the golden era of the gangsters.
LISTENING to some of the attacks on Mr Justice Alan Mahon over his handling of Tom Gilmartin reminds me of the story of Friedrich Riesfeldt, 46, of Paderborn, Germany, a highly conscientious zookeeper who cared passionately about his animals.
Con Brosnan, a Free State officer, managed to get safe passage guarantees for republican players like John Joe Sheehy and Joe Barrett to play games, and they used football to overcome some of the bitterness.
Of course, the events of either of those earlier decades have little to do with the present, but it worth remembering that the only other head of government to enter 10 years of continuous service is Bertie Ahern. By contrast, his 10 years as Taoiseach have been spectacularly staid.
© Examiner Publications (Cork) Limited, City Quarter, Lapps Quay, Cork. Registered in Ireland: 73385.