WHAT a fickle bunch we are. Leo Varadkar has been Taoiseach for two months and a few days but the warm, or at least the lukewarm, general welcome that greeted his elevation as a manifestation of generational change, and as a person with a more progressive worldview than his predecessor, has soured already.

That US president Donald Trump seems to have been energised by the opprobrium expressed over his ambivalence on racism is another indication of his lack of character. 

Hardly a day passes without some story of failure in our health services. 

AS America tears itself apart again, the fact that Alberta Martin, one of the last known Confederate war widows, died as recently as 2004 and that Gertrude Janeway, the last known widow of a Union veteran, died just a year earlier, reconfirms William Faulkner’s perceptive line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Over the weekend the BBC rebroadcast a documentary about Alan Bennett. In it, Bennett made a speech at the opening of a London health centre during which he sings the praises of Britain’s National Health Service. 

When Susan Bro spoke at a memorial for her daughter, Heather Heyer, who was murdered by a right-wing extremist in Charlottesville just over a week ago, her powerful response resonated with families on this island who had lost a loved-one to bewildered extremism.

It is a fair indication of how sport in general, and rugby in particular, has changed so very dramatically that New Zealand legend Colin Meads, who died aged 81 yesterday and stopped playing the game in 1971, was the same size as Irish centre Robbie Henshaw. 

THE attack on us all, on our way of life, in Barcelona on Thursday night, was the seventh terrorist atrocity where a vehicle was used as a weapon during the last year in Europe.

AMERICA has embarked on a great festival of denial.

BACK in the day, a win in the hospital sweepstakes or maybe a prize bond windfall was the stuff of fairytales. Many an hour was wasted, whiling away the day deciding how life would change when that boat, as it most certainly would, came in.