FORMER British prime minister Tony Blair is the latest figure to warn that his successor David Cameron’s promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership would cause economic “chaos”.

THE teachers’ conferences begin in earnest today and, like more or less any such professional assembly, they will be animated by idealism, commitment to a noble vocation, and a passionate desire to improve our education system.

IN A world that seems more adept at perpetuating conflict rather than resolving it, the negative reaction to the deal struck with Iran over its nuclear programme seems, at its mildest, unhelpful.

YESTERDAY’S events marking the 1916 Rising in Dublin’s O’Connell St was a good opening to the litany of public events planned to mark the centenary of the rebellion.

POPE FRANCIS yesterday devoted his Easter Urbi et Orbi address to one of the world’s escalating and seemingly intractable problems — religious persecution and intolerance.

THE confirmation that Cork airport is to lose its last freight service is another body blow for the struggling facility.

JUST over a week ago Communications Minister Alex White proposed that Six Nations rugby be put under the free-to-air umbrella designed to ensure free access to events designated culturally significant.

THE admission by the Irish Prison Service that 293 prisoners have escaped from jails since 2010 — more than one a week — is another blow to the integrity of our justice system and undermines public confidence in the effectiveness of our jails.

HOW wonderful it would be if the law passed in France yesterday that bans excessively thin fashion models and exposes modelling agencies and the fashion houses that use them to fines or jail was to build into a worldwide trend.

THIS week Taoiseach Enda Kenny and some senior ministers twice presented themselves as hand-tied supplicants dependent on the kindness of strangers who might do the right thing — hopefully before an election is called.