THIS week a 94 year-old man was sent to jail for four years because of his complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz. Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer, was a bookkeeper who kept records of the personal belongings stolen from concentration camp inmates before they were murdered. 

IN the relatively short time since it was established Irish Water has managed to put the Ballymagash back into Irish politics and public life. For that alone, in entertainment terms at least, we are in its debt.

RURAL decline, especially in coastal villages, is probably more apparent at this time of the year than any other. 

THERE is an apocryphal tale of a verbal joust between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and US president John F Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962.

THE appalling scenes on the streets of Belfast on Monday are evidence of an uncomfortable truth: whatever about the IRA and other paramilitary organisations, violence in Northern Ireland has not gone away.

THE continuing uncertainty over the operation of Ireland’s only oil refinery, at Whitegate in Cork Harbour, could have serious implications for the State’s energy supplies and consequently for our economy.

THE Greek deal cannot be described as a victory for anyone. Rather, it might be seen as a partially successful but bloody rearguard action — significant casualties on both sides but anyone still standing lives to fight another day.

OUR record in introducing change, always intended as improvements on how we conduct business — Irish Water, the HSE and, say, Seanad reform — have been shambolic.

ANYONE who regularly listens to radio programmes that carry reports from outside our courts will realise that being sent to prison for the non-payment of fines is hardly a discomfort, much less a deterrant, to those regularly in that position. 

HUMANITY has just passed a threshold that took several millennia to reach — for the first time more people live in cities than on the land. Homo sapiens are irreversibly urban — or suburban — and it is very hard to imagine that trend slowing in what we describe as normal circumstances.