IT is not very often that this newspaper chooses to make public awards or commendations it receives for its journalists’ work.

IT might be as naive as asking why Iceland — population 330,000 — jailed so many bankers and we jailed so few to suggest that the tit-for-tat sense of entitlement so embedded in our society has become a driver of inequality, the rawest, ugliest expression of greed and the greatest impediment to reform. 

WE do not have an exemplary record in long-term planning. 

EARLY this year when it was revealed that Garda statistics recorded almost 1m drink-driving tests that never took place even those brought up on a diet of Darby O’Gill and the Little People fantasy struggled to grasp what was going on. 

THE debate around college fees is one of the most ideologically divisive alive in our world. 

WHEN the extent and the virulent toxicity of the dump used for industrial waste at the former Irish Steel mill in Cork Harbour were first realised more than a decade ago, alarm bells rang loudly and for some considerable time. 

YESTERDAY’S warning from the State’s debt agency the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) was a sobering reality check.

NOT every community is lucky enough to have an Erin Brockovich, the fearless American legal clerk who successfully challenged the powerful Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California in 1993 over water supplies degraded by mining. 

THE lot of a peace-time army, especially in a country that insists on its neutrality, is not always a happy one.

NO generation is an island; like bricks in a wall, one supports the other. Each is interdependent.