THE European Commission’s stiff warning to the Government over budget targets for 2015 and 2016 cannot be sensibly ignored. That response must stand even if it means that some of our ambitions are deferred. The warning is particularly pertinent as an election looms. 

THIS week’s sale of Picasso’s 1955 painting Les Femmes D’Alger for $179.4m may be a temporary high water mark in two of the age’s defining characteristics — consumerism and materialism. It also points to an increasing concentration of wealth.

APART from the issues that were in play, the costs ruling in the Ian Bailey case confirms that our justice system and all its quirks and formalities, and its spectacular time scales, is either for the very rich or — just possibly — for the very poor. The figure involved — anything between €2m and €5m — means that only the bravest and most determined citizen can contemplate a challenge that might expose them to a bill on this life-defining scale.

AT one stage or another, we’ve all paid the price for the follies of youth but figures released today show that people aged between 18 and 24 make up a quarter of all people in jail. This seems a matrix of some sort of failure. That more than two thirds of them reoffend just confirms that feeling.

PRIVATISATION is one of those red-rag-to-a-bull ideas permanently associated with union-breaking Thatcherism and it is immediately divisive. Those who believe in the God-given virtue and efficiency of market economies imagine the process as a way to rescue a business or a service from the dead hand of the State.

IT would be presumptious and probably unwise to try to imagine what is going on in the mind of the mother of the baby abandoned in a shopping bag outside of Dublin, but it is reasonable to assume that she is distressed, unhappy, and frightened for herself and her baby.

PUBLIC sector pay talks open this week and the unions hope to reverse some of the pay cuts, reforms, and pension levies forced upon us all.

IN A world where grim, disheartening news seems almost relentless the weekend announcement by the World Health Organisation that Liberia is believed to be free of the ebola virus is cheering and very welcome.

EVEN in a country that has endured more than enough reports on damming failure and wilful neglect in our care and health systems last week’s Hiqa relevations about deaths among newborn babies in Portlaoise were particularly distressing and infuriating.

EVEN if you allow for the vanity that sometimes convinces us that this fleeting moment is the most historically significant, it is still very difficult to imagine that there has been, in the history of this State, a British general election result with the potential to have a greater impact on this island than the Conservatives’ resounding and totally unexpected victory yesterday.