BY any criteria, exchequer figures released yesterday, showing that the State collected €45.6bn in tax last year, up €4.32bn on 2014 and €3.3bn more than the forecast at the start of 2015, represent an astounding change in fortunes for this small, open economy, especially as the carnage wreaked by the recession less than a decade ago is still so fresh in our memories. 

YESTERDAY’S staging of a district court sitting in a Clare pub is a pretty accurate reflection of how seriously we take our legal and justice systems.

THE weeks leading up to Christmas might be described as the Anything-in-Wonderland period. 

SO, it finally comes down to a toss-up of a coin as to whether Ireland’s decision to allow filming of an episode of Star Wars on Skellig Michael, the remote Christian hermitage off the Kerry coast, was naive or visionary.

IT is heartening to learn that not one town out of 40 surveyed up and down the country was deemed a ‘litter blackspot’ in 2015, according to the annual report of Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL). 

NOT surprisingly, as the Government meets in Cabinet session today to draw up a flood emergency strategy, the despairing prayer on the lips of those struggling to keep flood waters at bay is that their terrifying ordeal will never happen again.

ONE road death is one too many, but it must come as some comfort that last year there were 21 fewer fatal collisions, and 28 fewer deaths, in Ireland, compared with 2014.

TRANSPORT Minister Paschal Donohoe has scrapped plans to build a motorway between Cork and Limerick.