AS ever more people, individuals and families, come to depend on the rental market for their housing needs it is appropriate that some measures are being prepared to offer some sort of stability and security to tenants.

WE’RE not quite at the stage when it’s as hard to buy a Lotto ticket as it is to win it, but if ticket terminals keep crashing at the rate they have been then it won’t be long more before we reach that point.

THE violent death of yet another opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin adds another layer of complexity to the deteriorating relationship between the democratic world and an increasingly autocratic Kremlin. 

ANYONE who has gone through an acrimonious divorce, a complicated business-related court case, or God forbid, a case involving medical negligence where the defendants are not fighting with their own money, did not need the Troika to tell them that Ireland’s legal fees are among the most spectacularly prohibitive in the world or that they were a barrier to the proper conduct of public life. 

EDUCATION Minister Jan O’Sullivan’s declaration that she intends to continue rolling out the planned new junior cycle programme without the agreement of teachers’ unions suggests that she is running out of patience with the unions and it is hard to blame her.

JUST as those people who live where public transport, decent broadband, a bank, a reassuring Garda presence, post offices, health services, and even schools are so easily accessible that they are taken for granted are bored by their country cousins’ constant complaints about the closure of what are, in 2015, basic social services, those people living in a hollowed-out, downgraded rural Ireland find the dismissive response from those lucky people insensitive, indifferent, and increasingly unacceptable.

ABBOTT Mark Patrick Hederman, who was principal at Glenstal Abbey until 1991, is the latest in a long line of admirable commentators to point out that our educational system can hardly be described as such.

HOW disheartening it is that a third-level institution charged with the higher education of tens of thousands of young Irish people should feel free to ask questions as detailed and as intrusive, as inappropriate and biased, as those asked of women who wished to apply for various positions at NUI Galway.

THE principle of having a minimum wage that can allow low-paid workers live with dignity is one of the most hotly contested interfaces between business and the ideas of human dignity and social equity.

THE two reports on the sexual predations — and perversions — of the late paedophile Jimmy Savile published yesterday are a shocking reminder of what can happen when position and authority are misused to protect criminal behaviour.