THE Government will today publish the long-awaited details of how it proposes to officially mark the 1916 Easter Rising.

THE Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (ASGI) have set the pace but, as the unions’ conference season gets into full swing over Easter, union after union will argue for pay rises. 

THERE seems to be a growing sense that the worst excesses of commercial fishing on our oceans and their fish stocks cannot be policed in a way that reflects the threat huge, modern trawlers, equipped with state-of-the-art fish-finding technology, pose to once-abundant species.

WANTED: Charismatic, unrelenting, imaginative, high-energy, world-class dancer (35 toe-taps a second is the required standard) to help change how a staid traditional idiom is perceived.

EVEN the most ardent, one-eyed champion of An Garda Síochána would have to concede that the force’s credibility took a battering over the penalty points scandal and how two whistleblowers — Sergeant Maurice McCabe and former Garda John Wilson — were treated so poorly by the force’s officer corps. 

THIS week, an Irish Times political poll recorded a five-point increase in support for the main Government party, Fine Gael, suggesting the economic recovery is beginning to bear fruit — that theory is being translated into spending power.

PEOPLE of a certain age will remember, though many have deliberately forgotten, how strident some Catholic churchmen were in the pronouncements they made about issues that had little or nothing to do with religious life or faith.

THERE has been a consistency to political polling over the last two or three years that suggests the next Dáil will be very different to any elected in at least 50 years. 

DESPITE the much-vaunted promise to cherish all the children of the nation equally, successive governments have been grossly negligent towards young people with mental health problems — the very children who deserve to be cherished above all others. 

THERE is a certain satisfaction to be derived from convincing tardy politicians to take action on human rights issues.