POLITICAL catchphrases can sometimes come back to haunt the person who first uses them. Those who invent them usually just slink back into the shadows, unbruised, while they wait for their next client.

IT’S Monday so that must mean another HSE scandal. That assertion may be just a tad too sceptical but — unfortunately — yet another blockbuster of mismanagement and waste of public funds in our health service is reported today.

THE story of Cork Airport has not been an entirely happy one for some years. Labouring under a heavy debt, passenger numbers are down and flights are being curtailed and freight services have moved to Shannon. 

FOR the last century or more America has been the world’s great and largely benign superpower. The country has afforded opportunity and protection to tens of millions of people, millions of them Irish, millions more destitute European economic or war refugees.

THE suggestion that the European Central Bank has agreed to raise the cap on emergency funding for the Greek banking sector may do little more that defer the unavoidable day of reckoning, but it is an infinitely better decision than any of the alternatives immediately available.

THE Eurostat survey that confirms that Irish alcohol and tobacco prices are the highest in the European Union will not surprise bon vivants still capable of indulging in both.

THE Eurostat survey that confirms that Irish alcohol and tobacco prices are the highest in the European Union will not surprise bon vivants still capable of indulging in both.

TWO sobering but illustrative events played out simultaneously yesterday. Each showed how powerless democratically elected, supposedly sovereign, governments can be in the face of unflinching international creditors or too-big-to-fail banks tottering towards collapse asking — demanding if you prefer — that they be rescued with public funds.

A SOCIETY where light-touch building regulation, among other things, facilitated the construction of a fire trap so dangerous — Priory Hall in Dublin — that residents had to be removed by court order for their own safety should probably think twice before responding angrily to the news that the company that built the Berkeley apartments where six students died this week paid $3m last year to settle a case over alleged defects in apartment buildings.

THERE is a reassuring coincidence in the fact that in the very week that Pope Francis published an encyclical that argued strongly for a new, responsible attitude to environmental protection that a retired parish priest called for the badly eroded Croagh Patrick to be declared off-limits for many activities until a proper conservation plan is implemented.