Next Tuesday, August 9, will be the 10th anniversary of one of the events that toppled the Ponzi scheme we had disastrously regarded as an exemplary way of ordering society.

Apart from television programmes about redesigning your home, suggesting you can turn a modest semi-D into something that might be seen in an architectural magazine’s centre-spread, few activities freely undertaken threaten the harmony of long-standing relationships.

The air has been thick with accusations of misogyny and antisemitism over recent days. 

SCHOOLDAYS may be the happiest period of children’s lives but they can be the most miserable time for parents.

TWO reminders of the horror of the Holocaust emerged yesterday, one in the German town of Luneberg near Hamburg; the other in Dublin.

IF Ryanair were a TV cartoon it might be called The Little Airline That Could.

WHEN Peter the Great decided, in the early 1700s, that Russia needed access to the Baltic Sea, he built a port city on the river Neva, on the Gulf of Finland. 

FOR generations we accepted the authority of institutions that have not survived scrutiny.

THERE can hardly be a bar owner in the country whose generosity in extending credit to regular customers has not been misplaced. Bar tabs are often the abandoned and unloved children of excess, so it is not surprising to hear that the Dáil bar has had to write off bills because there is “no realistic prospect of recovery of the sums due”.

THE old classroom admonishment “tell the truth and shame the devil” may not ring out as loudly as it once did. Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that the instruction was never as widely observed as our teachers or parents might have hoped.