Solving housing and health issues will show what Republic is about

Based on traffic volumes, the number of colleagues at their desks and the pick-up in political headlines across the media I think this week represents the official end of summer. 

That means we have just 16 weeks before the end of 2017 and there is plenty of work to be done on Ireland Inc.

The headline economic data is encouraging at a number of levels but most particularly, the unemployment numbers have continued to shift downwards and are now creeping closer to 6% than the level of over 15% that applied during the recent economic crisis.