It won’t come as a really big surprise that the latest poll (published in The Sunday Times) showed that the ‘yes’ campaign in the Scottish referendum is now in the lead for the very first time, though by a very narrow margin.

What to do about the threat posed by Isis, also known as Islamic State, is now a question exercising the minds of military planners and policymakers in Westerns capitals. 

The worldwide web has had a transformative effect on the lives of countless millions, though not all those effects have been positive or benign.

The repetitive nature of history is as obvious as our unfortunate inability to break free from the almost predictable cycle of threat and counter threat, calamity and disaster. Some threats fade before wars break out, others, tragically, do not.

This is one of the great Irish sporting and social weekends, and one that hundreds of thousands of Irish people look forward to passionately each year — even more passionately if their county has a showdown date in Croke Park.

Two predictable events suggested this week that by choosing not to acknowledge that this society has changed utterly, we seem set on ensuring that an avoidable and destructive conflict becomes an inevitable one. Both events focussed on the place of religion in education and highlighted deeply-held but conflicting beliefs around this issue. Both events highlighted the complexity involved and suggested that as society becomes more diverse, this problem will become even more fraught.

The position adopted by north Kerry councillors on windfarms is rational and understandable. They want the county’s new six-year plan to ban any new turbines in an area where planning permission for 400 has been granted, half of which have not been built.

The sight of hopeful, cheery looking young people queueing overnight to try to buy a house in a Dublin development must send shivers down the spines of tens of thousands of people who did the same some years ago but are now trapped in negative equity, probably in houses or apartments that are too small for their current needs.

With €1bn more in his pocket than he expected from taxes, Finance Minister Michael Noonan might be tempted to play the old game of auction politics, a political ploy which has cost the Irish economy dearly in the past. Fortunately, as a politician he tends to err on the side of caution, and knows what a blunder it would be.

Little did Oliver Cromwell think when he infamously threatened people with the prospect of going “to hell or Connaught”, that a Mayo farmer would win the prestigious prize of Ireland’s Young Farmer of the Year.