THE ending of milk quotas early last year was supposed to herald an age of prosperity in rural Ireland. 

EARLIER this year Taoiseach Enda Kenney promised that if his intervention were needed to secure transatlantic flights for Cork Airport then he would not be found wanting. 

THERE are fewer more experienced campaigners in the Dáil than Finance Minister Michael Noonan, so his reticence on the Project Eagle deal, where US company Cerberus paid just under €1.6bn for Nama’s North of Ireland portfolio, is pretty hard to understand.

YESTERDAY, as a disheartening number of newly elected and re-elected Dáil deputies indulged in parlour games, something like a cross between blind man’s bluff and a high-jinks round of charades, the real world trundled along showing that we still struggle to learn from history or find the courage to confront the fundamental issues shaping this society in the most destructive way.