When she opened the National Women’s Council’s new offices in Dublin earlier this week Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald emphasised again that a lot more needs to be done to support women — and families — to ensure that more women are in a position to be decision makers in defining roles in society.

The dysfunction in our housing market was underlined again yesterday when MEP and former minister Brian Hayes warned that the Central Bank requirement that potential home buyers must have a 20% deposit before they can be considered for finance was “unfair”.

It is to be welcomed that a taskforce has been set up to try to avert a looming environmental disaster in the Midlands.

It might not be entirely wise to allow the extreme violence and criminality of Love/Hate to influence how An Garda Síochána is managed or reformed but the series did give a glimpse of the extremes, the threat and personal risk, some members of our police force might face. Even if the television drama used poetic licence, it looked into a world most of us are more than happy not to know.

Last weekend’s decision by Pope Francis to remove the conservative US Cardinal Raymond Burke from his position as head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Signature, the Holy See’s Supreme Court, signals a new, harder edge in the battle within the Vatican between those who would modernise the Catholic Church and those who would, as they see it, defend its traditions and truths.

At a moment in human history when data of all kind, music, images, text, and film was never more easily accessed or shared, it may be seen as pointless to try to control what people watch on all sorts of electronic devices. 

Fitting tributes

Postcode introduction

Meat price protests

At a moment in our public life when the cradle-to-grave perspective and the kind of vibrant, looking-ahead imagination that brought the impressive Web Summit to Dublin seems in short enough supply tomorrow’s 25th anniversary of the removal of the Berlin Wall offers an opportunity to indulge in that almost penitential process that has, on occasion, saved many of us from delusion — mature reflection.