Any business that did not prepare to meet staffing needs in a way that would allow it to continue delivering adequate services to its customers would not have a rosy future.

Establishing an entity intended to be as transformative as Irish Water was always going to be expensive.

It is indeed remarkable that, in 2014, Government is finally introducing measures to make senior civil servants more accountable.

More than 120,000 foreigners came here on holiday each week last year.

The unemployment rate fell again in December for the 18th consecutive month, down to 12.4% from 12.5% the previous month, as 3,300 fewer people signed on the live register.

The refusal of the State to pay the legal costs of two gardaí prosecuted for assault, despite no evidence of wrongdoing, is an unfair and spiteful response to the outcome of a criminal trial that should never have happened.

The 50th BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition has opened. Last year 1,200 students submitted 550 projects and over 45,000 people visited the exhibition.

It may just be a slip of the policy-speak tongue but the fact that the State entity charged with organising a response to storm damage is called the “emergency response group” suggests that we have yet to accept the reality of climate change or the growing threat it poses.

Those prescient advocates who 30 or even 20 years ago warned about how climate change would alter our lives profoundly could not be derided today as they were then. The evidence has become irrefutable, all too regular. Our belated response is reactive rather than proactive and the evidence has also assumed an air of threat that we ignore at our peril.

As reality comes calling, sometimes bringing the cruellest of cuts to what we came to regard as normal, virtually every advocacy group has had to cut its cloth to a new, far less splendid measure.