Former Vita Cortex workers are currently in extra-time in a fight for redundancy payments — the ‘point nine’, as they call it — on top of their statutory entitlements

I used to buy a lot of my clobber from former Cork City players Joe Gamble and Neale Fenn when they had a nice little shop called Indigo on Leeside’s Washington Street.

Instead of sitting in front of a warm TV and a cold drink to watch the rugby game against Italy from Dublin last Saturday afternoon, myself and 20-odd others facing similar prospects in the medium- to short-term sat in plastic chairs in a counselling centre.

I often think our online lives and personas are like that infamous experiment from the 1970s where one sociologist set-up an elaborate ruse to test how cruel people could actually be.

I’m writing this as my old friend Bill O’Herlihy reads a laundry list of names to Eamon, John and, yes even, Ronnie Whelan.

THERE’S a well-known, probably apocryphal story, about one of the first All-Ireland finals played after the wireless became a feature of life in rural Ireland.

The cliché is a vital component of any sporting occasion. You could even argue that it’s not actually an occasion at all until at least a few of these have been trotted out.

How, you ask, did one of The White Stripes’ singles first become an Italian football chant — and then be omnipresent in games across the globe?

THE first thing people ask Simon Hutchinson is if he’s mad.

MANY of us this week may have at last broken a self-imposed winter training ban of our own after an extended Christmas period.