Praise is due to Sean Haughey, son of former taoiseach Charlie Haughey, for his forthright reaction to the RTÉ drama about his controversial father’s behaviour in a political and personal life redolent of corruption, sleaze and betrayal.

A report released yesterday has criticised the Department of Social Protection for the way it deals with some immigrants.

For years, the old mental health unit on the ground floor of Cork University Hospital came in for criticism because of its dour, unappealing nature - hardly conducive to aiding the recovery of patients.

The revelation that 121 water treatment plants countrywide are operating way below an acceptable standard is a cause of great concern and highlights the current poor state of water supply in Ireland.

IF we did not have, like all European countries, a big-house tradition, Irish literature would be a far less spectacular vista and our politics would be pretty different too.

In an ideal world, David Duffy’s decision to quit the top job at AIB would have come after the Government had had the opportunity to sell at least a substantial proportion of the shares it holds in the once-zombie bank, but in the world of international banking where salaries are measured in millions rather than thousands his decision was inevitable.

It would be a delicious irony if the greatest opportunity given to the parties of the left in the history of this State achieved what generations of moderate, loosely Christian Democratic, Social Democratic politicians with more or less the same objectives failed to do. 

THE most remarkable thing about Minister for Health Leo Varadkar’s yes-I’m-gay announcement yesterday was that he felt the need to make it at all.

RESEARCH published yesterday by Oxfam ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, showing that the combined wealth of the richest 1% of the world’s population will overtake that of the rest of the world’s population next year unless the current trend of rising inequality is checked, must be a cause for great concern, if not anger.

IT is a mystery to most ordinary people why there have been so few convictions or meaningful sanctions imposed on people involved in selling illicit or doctored motor fuels.