UNEMPLOYMENT in Ireland fell to 7.9% last month, down from 8.2% in August. It is now running at its lowest rate since 2008, having hit a peak of more than 15% in 2012.

It is hard to imagine that morale in the Garda Siochána could sink any lower.

THE work-to-rule by nurses at Cork University Hospital is not about money but patient safety. Nonetheless, they remain the most overworked and underpaid among frontline HSE staff and often work long, punishing hours for relatively little pay.

EVEN in budget week, when many of the claims reaching Government are at best speculative optimism, the news that the HSE could face a bill of up to €700m to compensate hospital consultants over missed pay rises, and that the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors is to demand pay restoration of 16.5%, suggests we have learnt nothing from the hard lessons of the economic collapse.

THE New York Times revelation that the billionaire Donald Trump, by recording a loss of $916m — $1.4bn (€1.256bn) in today’s terms — in his 1995 tax returns, put himself in a position to legally avoid federal or state taxes for up to 18 years has inflamed opinion.

THOUGH it’s more than 42 years since Richard Nixon was forced to resign as American president — August 9, 1974 — that denouement remains the high-water mark of investigative journalism. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, through The Washington Post and with the help of a mole — identified 30 years later as FBI executive William Mark Felt — defeated the most powerful office in the world.

AS the celebrations marking the centenary of one of the seminal events in the foundation of this evolving Republic begin to wind down, we must consider how we might mark the Civil War that followed without renewing the deep divisions that made that great tragedy inevitable. 

THE relief felt that Hungarian prime minster Viktor Orban’s campaign to reject a European Union refugees’ quota system has failed must be tempered by the fact that, of those who voted, 98% rejected the EU policy and supported the anti- immigrant Orban. 

AN Garda Síochana has been undermined by scandal after scandal, by report after report over recent decades yet it is difficult to see how any of these indices of institutionalised dysfunction have been used to change the culture that facilitated various abuses — other than the relentless warnings that morale among gardaí is at an all-time low.

IT IS, of course, easy to make confident, if not over-confident statements around end-of-life issues if you imagine that the prospect of your own mortality lurks below some distant horizon, but none of us can avoid these issues forever.