Revelations over the weekend by Environment Minister Alan Kelly that he, his family and his staff have been subjected to death threats by dissident republicans should be profoundly shocking. 

SEAFEST 2015 has just opened in Cork and will bring together investors, academics, key figures, and stakeholders from the private and public sector to try to map a future for one of the greatest resources this country has at its disposal — the seas that surround it.

THE recovery of the body of Barry Davis Ryan, aged 20, from the sea at Baltimore in West Cork, comes 10 days after his father Barry Ryan and his girlfriend, Niamh O’Connor, entered the sea and drowned while they were out walking on June 30.

A series of reports, and Wednesday’s budget in Britain, confirm that being average describes an increasingly unattractive place in this world. “Average” now describes something far less secure than it did a decade ago. Social advances realised over generations are being rolled back, inch by inch, expectation by expectation, opportunity by opportunity.

The early decision to ask the UK’s top law enforcement body to lead the investigation into allegations of corruption around the largest ever property deal in the North stands in stark contrast to our relaxed attitude to the allegations.

A recovering economy and a looming election meant that one-for-everyone-in-the-audience largesse would inevitably underpin October’s budget. It is after all as much about being re-elected as it is about balancing the books.

AS night follows day, this is the time of year that gnawing worries about the cost of children going back to school invariably spoil the summer holidays, such as they are, of cash-strapped parents. 

NEWS that police in Northern Ireland have launched an investigation into an alleged political pay-off of £7m in the biggest property deal in the North’s history is certain to lead to calls for a similar probe in the Republic. The deal at the centre of the hugely damaging scandal involved last year’s £1.1bn sale of assets owned by Nama to a US private equity firm, Cerberus.

TODAY’S insatiable appetite for information about family roots will certainly be satisfied by the National Library’s initiative to put almost 300 years of Catholic parish registers online. Effectively this means that, for the first time, accurate details on births and marriages, the very stuff of genealogy, will be available free of charge to anyone who has a basic computer.

IT is becoming increasingly difficult to tell fact from propaganda, ideologically driven positioning from the uncoloured and unattractive reality faced by ordinary Greeks struggling to live basic, decent and dignified lives. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell political ambition or dogma, national or individual, from the pressing humanitarian needs generated by the deepening crisis.