UNIVERSITY leaders have warned for many years that the current funding model for third level institutions is unsustainable and that we need to radically rethink how we support them and what sort of services we expect them to deliver.

THOUGH Enda Kenny’s statements on the possibility of a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment — should he be returned to power of course — falls some way short of a commitment, his suggestion that he anticipates a vote on the divisive issue will take place over the next “couple of years” is pretty close.

INFORMATION technology has changed what it means to be human. 

DURING our financial collapse one of the stock-in-trade assertions was that, in our unequal relationship with too-big-to-fail banks, we socialised losses but privatised profits. The phrase captured the inequity and dysfunction of the crisis.

THAT our enthusiasm for basking in the reflected glory of a neighbour’s child’s achievements is as much part of the Irish character as the part of us that happily shares, in hushed tones of course, the grimmest details of that neighbour’s child’s day in court for some college rag-day excess, just points to the complexity driving the Irish imagination.