Rural broadband promises

Katie’s fifth title

For several years, many of Ireland’s principal institutions, ranging from An Garda Síochána to the Catholic Church, have been embroiled in controversies of their own making.

Judging by today’s front-page report on the growing incidence of anti-social behaviour in property owned by eight local authorities in five Irish cities, there has seldom been a greater need for Government to accelerate the enactment of meaningful measures to tackle the intolerable carry-on by a minority of tenants.

In a sports-mad nation, Ireland’s clean sweep in the Autumn series against two of the giants of Southern Hemisphere rugby, Australia and South Africa, plus the bruising encounter with Georgia, represents the crowning glory of a year when the team in green also emerged as champions of the Northern Hemisphere.

One of the clutching-at-straws lines we used in the early stages of our economic collapse was that the calamity was too good a crisis to waste; the hope being that the failure was so great that the response, the unavoidable reform, would be on an equally dramatic scale.

That more than half of Cork city centre’s biggest ever office development — the hugely impressive €50m One Albert Quay project — has been reserved just a month after ground was broken, and 16 months before the project is scheduled for completion, suggests a vote of confidence in the region that will generate real momentum in the economic recovery.

At this time every year, as the immediacy of Christmas turns normally pragmatic and sensible people into something altogether less so, animal welfare organisations make the very same appeal. Yet statistics suggest that their campaigns are not having the desired impact.

We may not jail women for going to volleyball matches but, as yesterday’s report from Women’s Aid suggests, we still have some way to go before we can say that this is an equal society where all citizens, irrespective of their gender, are as protected by the law as they might be.

The perception that corruption plays a role in public affairs is as strong as our record in confronting white-collar crime is weak.