Anyone who happens to log on to the website of An Garda Siochána may feel a certain reassurance on reading that its mission is “Working with Communities to Protect and Serve.” 

Watching your football team play a nailbiting game may tend to raise the blood pressure, but joining in and playing has more benefits than many people might realise.

During US president Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address he told the American people that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.

In a powerful speech in the city of Perth, Australia, President Michael D Higgins has put into historical perspective the current refugee crisis, comparing the plight of those fleeing war with the millions of people who left Ireland during the Famine.

Fifty years after his execution, the legendary Che Guevara is still arousing controversy. An Irish stamp marking the anniversary of his death has angered Cuban-Americans who see him as a mass murderer and not the romanticised rebel figure that he is so often portrayed to be.

“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” — Lord Acton, 1834 — 1902

AS the American Senate tries to establish to what extent Russia influenced the election of President Donald Trump and as YouTube has to climb down over false conspiracy theories on the Las Vegas shooting, the what-can-we-believe questions scream ever louder. 

THE decision to award the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is an entirely appropriate rebuke to President Donald Trump, who seems unable to understand that his nuclear high-wire act with North Korea and Iran is a form of lunacy far beyond any issue immediately in play.

It happens in the best of homes; stuff — invoices, receipts, notes, cards and letters put by because one day they might be needed — gets lost, inadvertently destroyed or just misplaced. It’s part of the rich and familiar tapestry of domestic life. It should not happen in public organisations and authorities that spend large sums of taxpayers’ money on filing and recording systems and on the people who are supposed to run them. 

No man or woman — and especially no Irish politician — who takes on the mucky business of leading a political party and a government can expect to sail through his or her career without critics and, from time to time, enemies.