HYSTERICAL conservatives increasingly blame the rise of so-called aggressive secularism for a plethora of societal ills while ignoring a far more pervasive problem — aggressive stupidity.

GROTESQUE, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented seems like an apt description of the callous treatment meted out by the Irish criminal justice system to an alleged gang rape victim.

DISPROVING the truism that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, one of Ireland’s leading bankers, in an effort to rehabilitate the banks’ public image, decided to impart some of his sage advice this week.

JUSTICE Minister Alan Shatter has rightly decried the “inconvenient truth” that the State’s doors “were kept firmly closed to German Jewish families trying to flee from persecution and death” during the Holocaust.

THE constant refrain of those cheerleading the continued implementation of crippling austerity measures, when faced with a chorus of protests, is an exasperated, “we have to live in the real world”.

FACED with a barrage of criticism when it chose a panda as one of it’s 12 female “faces of the year 2011”, a haughty BBC spokesperson wondered what all the fuss was about.

CONTRARY to popular belief, the right to die has been enshrined in Irish case law — but only for those who are physically incapable of voicing their desire to end their own lives.

THE Government is engaged in a campaign of vilification against those claiming social protection benefits despite an Oireachtas report revealing the proportion of fraudulent overpayments actually decreased by more than half between 2007 and 2010.

IN CASE you missed it while gorging on turkey at the weekend, the latest zany instruction from Government is to “embrace a policy of realistic optimism” — as opposed to the unrealistic optimism we all evidently suffered from in advance of the election.

ONLY in Ireland could a situation arise in which gardaí face unprecedented public opprobrium for doing their jobs.