It may be difficult as the tail-end of a minor January storm passes over the country to remember how very lovely this country can be for most of the year and how lucky we are to have so many wonderful facilities that allow us to enjoy the great Irish outdoors.

At a moment when faith in politics, especially international politics, to champion liberal, uplifting, human-rights values is at a low ebb, it is reassuring that Angela Merkel seems close to securing a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor.

Oprah Winfrey’s man-the-barricades speech at this week’s dressed-in-black Golden Globe awards catapulted her into America’s consciousness as a possible White House contender.

Litecoin, Ripple, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Dash. They sound like a virtual reality version of Santa’s reindeer. 

In 1935 Joseph Stalin is said to have asked contemptuously: “how many divisions has the pope?” The question was answered emphatically by John Paul II long after the Soviet dictator’s death when the Berlin Wall came crashing down and Eastern Europe emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.

If the Taoiseach is to lead successful negotiations with the UK as well as our EU partners over Brexit he will need to show greater political maturity than he exhibited during the debacle over former tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald.

Apart from averting an election for a while, it is hard to see any up side in the decision by Frances Fitzgerald to resign over the McCabe affair — an entirely avoidable, grubby

The relentless advance of artificial intelligence will change the engineering, the choreography of life in ways we cannot yet imagine.

Earlier this week the housing charity Threshold reported that in 2016 it received more than 71,000 calls, many from people facing destitution. 

In our least attractive national game — kicking the can down the road — there are strategies to buy time so hard decisions might be long-fingered.