It’s almost two years to the day — June 26 — since the great scriptwriter Nora Ephron died. She was the creator of Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and Julie & Julia — and many other wonderfully light pieces that looked at our endless foolishness with kindness and good humour.

In the face of escalating and ever more frightening warnings around pensions, and the very real prospect of real poverty for hundreds of thousands of people and their dependants, the Government’s inaction on this festering crisis seems at best recklessly negligent.

Even the most ardent Government supporter must cringe at its handling of the fiasco around finalising the membership of the Oireachtas banking inquiry.

As our own history shows, chaos — or as the victors might call it, revolutionary restructuring and reeducation, often fills the vacuum left by a retreating imperial force.

Though the world’s eyes are on the World Cup, which is just beginning to gather momentum in Brazil, it is hard not to see the sports events in Limerick this weekend as far more meaningful and — in human terms — far more important.

The generation of women approaching the end of their professional careers have seen changes in how society, the workplace and politics regard and facilitate women that their mothers could only have dreamt of.

Nearly all of the politicians involved in the fiasco around the membership of the banking inquiry committee have done their profession a disservice and have further diminished our parliament in the eyes of a weary, increasingly cynical citizenship.

You pay your money and you take your chances. That old cliché neatly sums up a dilemma following publication of the Cooke report. Bluntly put, people are now more confused than ever as to whether alleged bugging happened at the Dublin headquarters of GSOC, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission.

Contrasting sporting events of immense significance to all those involved take place today at opposite sides of the globe.

Yesterday afternoon’s announcement that a statutory commission will inquire into unfolding scandals in religious-run mother-and-baby homes is very welcome despite its inevitability and the horrors it will undoubtedly uncover.