A LARGE prison population is a challenging expression of social failure. Commiting offenders to prison is also how society asserts itself over those who break its rules.

OBESITY, the escalating curse of our time, has changed many lives for the worse — and prematurely ended many more — and now researchers have warned that obese women should lose weight before trying to have a child or risk unnececssary complications.

THE catalogue of horrors uncovered about institution after institution entrusted with the care of our most vulnerable infants, children, young girls, and women is so disturbing that it is hard to know how to react to another series of shocking revelations.

LAST week’s BBC Panorama programme about collusion by British security forces with terrorists in the North, a seedy relationship that former police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan suggested was responsible for hundreds of deaths, was another reminder that the terrible events of the past still overshadow the present and colour the future.

IN ALL but the most exceptional circumstances, all public expenditure, the great majority of Government spending, should be open to rigorous and easy public scrutiny — scrutiny that might lead to a novel degree of accountability that could provoke real sanctions if wrongdoing is uncovered.

IT is chastening for a society of less than 5m citizens to realise that there are 200,000 fewer people in their twenties living in Ireland now than there were six years ago.

WORLD No Smoking Day was marked at the weekend and our public health policy-makers, and some politicians too, were entitled to mark the occasion with some degree of satisfaction. 

IN a country more than willing to celebrate great sportsmen and women, very few have made such a positive and inspiring impression as Paul O’Connell, the Young Munsters, Munster, Ireland, British and Irish Lions forward, and leader among leaders. 

WHEN a person stands for election to any forum they can expect a considerable degree of scrutiny. Their objectives are questioned. Their record and abilities are examined in an intrusive and unforgiving way. If they have skeletons in the cupboard, even very small ones, they will be dragged into the full, merciless glare of public judgment and criticism.

IT seems tragic that none of us on this small island can fully escape the atrocities of the past or that we cannot live beyond the cold, dark shadow cast by the memories of the terrible wrongs inflicted by one community on the other.