It seemed like a great idea — build on the success of last year’s national Gathering, harness a growing movement to think and act locally and encourage Ireland’s arts community to focus their efforts in their own back yard.

Where have all the gardaí gone? That is the question many motorists were asking themselves over the holiday period. While Justice Minister Alan Shatter may continue to insist that our roadways are being properly policed, the facts speak for themselves.

The Stormont talks led by those very patient Americans, Richard Haass and Meghan O’Sullivan, aimed at consolidating progress made in the North in recent years, may not have ended in an entirely positive way but it is not unreasonable to hope that even this inconclusive episode represents an advance of sorts, especially in a society still so unable to be at ease with itself.

North Korea seems so very alien, so very out of kilter with what passes for normal in the rest of the world, that it is difficult to imagine what life is like for the almost 25m souls who reside there.

The bitter civil war in Syria has forced more than 2m people to flee their homes and seek refuge in neighbouring countries. The conflict’s death toll has reached something around 130,000 souls already.

The resignation of Limerick City of Culture artistic director, Karl Wallace, and two of his colleagues is a very inauspicious start to the year-long celebration.

It is more than a little reassuring that as the centenary of one of Europe’s greatest tragedies moves ever closer — the outbreak of the First World War in Jul 1914 — that two relatively minor events confirmed the European project still has significant momentum and retains the capacity to change millions of lives for the better.

That six out of 10 inmates in Cork Prison are jailed because they refuse to pay fines is preposterous.

In 1933 when American president Franklin D Roosevelt declared in his first inaugural speech that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” he was speaking in the context of the Great Depression and efforts to revive the US economy.

A Red C poll published yesterday reveals a worrying lack of public awareness here of changes in how decisions that affect us all are being made at EU level.