THE Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin yesterday proposed that local authorities should carry out a “full audit” of apartments and other buildings built during our Celtic Tiger excitements.

LAST week America was numbed — and again divided — by the latest in a long line of school massacres when psychopath Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people, before police shot him, at a community school in Oregon.

TODAY’S report that a primary school firetrap was passed as fit for purpose by Department of Education officials in 2008 is shocking but unsurprising.

THE flood that hit Cork City in late November 2009 had a devastating impact.

THE announcement that Bord na Móna will no longer harvest energy peat and that the company will move to a sustainable business within 15 years is very welcome and recognises that we need to do far more to reduce our dependence on imported energy — we still import around 90% of our fuel needs. It is disappointing, however, that a more ambitious timeframe was not announced.

DISENCHANTMENT with traditional politics is being expressed right around the world in sometimes bizarre but always energising ways.

ORDINATIONS to the Catholic priesthood are at such an historic low that it seems a struggle to keep a priest in every parish. Some parishes share a priest, while others are served by men who might have retired decades ago had the opportunity presented itself.

THE tributes, from everyone from the Glenties Drama Group to Meryl Streep, paid to playwright Brian Friel since his death on Friday were as deserved as they were heartfelt.

THE writer Brian Friel, who died aged 86 yesterday, did as much as anyone, and far, far more than most, to try to help us untangle our ideas of ourselves and how we are inescapably the children of our past.