JUST over three million people — 3,167,484 — were entitled to vote on the last constitutional amendment put before the people. However, only 1,240,729 — 39.17% of the electorate — thought it worth their while to exercise the franchise in a referendum that ensured the survival of the Seanad for the immediate future at least.

SOCIETIES evolve by leaving behind beliefs and practices once thought eternal; by embracing alternatives that better fit the world as it is, not as it was or as is imagined.

FOLLOWING the visible firmness of the handshake between Britain’s Prince Charles and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, the visit of the Prince and his wife Camilla to Ireland has been transformed into an occasion of peace and reconciliation.

EVER since the avoidable death of Savita Halappanavar, in October 2012 at University Hospital Galway, our maternity services have, for all the right and all the wrong reasons, been the subject of questioning, often outraged, attention.

JUST over 30 years ago, John Hume, Nobel Peace laureate and one of the architects of modern Ireland, realised a new, radical approach was needed to break the cycle of violence in the North.

HUMANITY has been subjected to, and benefitted from, immense change in the last century or so. However, compared to the change imposed on the wildlife and fauna around us, the changes we have faced are as a thing of nothing.

LIKE nearly every institution in the State, An Garda Síochána has been the subject of ongoing criticism in recent years and, like nearly every other national institution, the force has had to accept that some of that criticism was justified.

IT is not at all surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency has reported that we are unlikely to meet our target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020.

SOMETIMES it’s difficult to understand your own family, usually it’s even more difficult to work out what really makes your neighbours tick, but the shooting dead of nine people in a biker gang shootout in a Texas car park seems to make America an even more incomprehensible concept.

IT seems pointless, and probably wrong too, to try to establish a hierarchy of atrocity inflicted on this small island during the three decades of terror that preceded the Good Friday peace agreement.