THOUGH the Government will insist it is focussed on the job in hand — creating jobs and growing the economy — it is no longer possible to argue that we are not on an election footing.

IT is natural to hope that most people we meet on our journey through this ever-changing world are decent and humane and that they do not represent a threat of any kind. 

THE recent revelations by RTÉ of shocking levels of abuse of residents of a Co Mayo home for adults with intellectual disabilities was, at the very least, unnerving. 

THE expectation that a large and ever-growing proportion of second-level students would more or less automatically continue their education at a third-level institution is a relatively new phenomenon.

THE crime gangs, many of them former members of the Provos, running this country’s tobacco smuggling rackets are onto a good thing.

YESTERDAY’S weather, hard and wild, reminded us in so many ways we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control and probably beyond our rational comprehension too.

THE Government has set a new target of 2018 to return Ireland to full employment. It is an ambitious target, to say the least, as it brings it forward by two years from a previous deadline.

A COMMERCIAL site in the centre of Cork City that has been derelict for more than a decade is set for a multi-million euro investment and retail development. 

OUR new postcode system is due to be introduced in largely unamended form this spring despite the reservations expressed by civil liberty groups and the Data Protection Commissioner.

IT is a tragedy, and a very illustrative one, that as the Government elected with the strongest mandate for change in the history of this State prepares for the resumption of the Dáil today that polls suggest that something around half of the Coalition seats are in jeopardy. Had that once-in-a- lifetime mandate been grasped as energetically, and as forcefully, as it should have been then the prospect of such a purge could be dismissed with confidence.