IN World War II terms, what is happening in Calais and along the coast of Normandy with refugees trying to enter Britain represents the Western Front.

HAD Fianna Fáil’s finance spokesman Michael McGrath suggested a decade or two ago, even during an emotional, off-guard moment at one of his party’s lively sleepovers, that the party might have to contemplate being a junior coalition partner he would have been taken aside by a fatherly figure, PJ Mara maybe, and told firmly to keep his dangerous, defeatist ideas to himself. Mr McGrath would have felt the steel in the velvet glove on his collar.

THE last thing the divided community of riot-torn Ferguson, Missouri, and the almost intractable problem of race relations in the US, needed was an exclusively white group of middle-aged, self-appointed vigilantes, each better armed than most European soliders, “patrolling” the streets.

EVEN in a world that seems ever more callous, ever more brutal and indifferent to the sensibilities we all hope might protect us from the worst excesses of humanity, especially humanity informed by evil, the Glasgow murder of Karen Buckley, a 24-year-old nurse from Mourneabbey, Co Cork, stands out.

THE 11-person group set up by former education minister Quinn to consider options for funding third-level education is expected to report to Government before the end of the year.

THE long-proposed but unrealised National Children’s Hospital symbolises so many of the unattractive characteristics that cast this society in a less-than-flattering light.

ONE of the many disheartening consequences of our economic collapse was the all but complete collapse in apprenticeship schemes.

AS the evenings shorten and the back-to-school advertisements fill premium viewing slots on television we all, metaphorically at least, reach for the warm fleece to stave off the first chills of autumn.

THE impact suicide can have, especially on the parents and extended family of a young person who commits suicide, can hardly be imagined.

THOUGH a date for the general election has not yet been announced, various party campaigns to win enough seats to form the next government — or be a thorn in its side — are well under way.