Our bad, heads-in-the-sand habit of believing that by just enacting legislation we have resolved the difficulties that made the legislation necessary in the first place, has the potential to trip us up one more time.

That some 1.1m of the 1.6m eligible households have registered for the property tax must amaze those who promised campaigns of civil disobedience to oppose the new levy.

At a moment when the capacity of politics to deliver, lead or even describe the kind of social change and economic rejuvenation we urgently need is in question, the future of an institution as detached and as apparently irrelevant as the Seanad may seem unimportant but, as anyone who does not live in an active, participatory democracy will confirm, it is not.

There is more than enough evidence to show that health costs have gathered an out-of-control momentum.

A winter of discontent is looming over the country’s secondary schools as teachers and Government continue on a head-on collision course that could prove disastrous for thousands of pupils.

Any Irish university that becomes largely self-funding deserves to be applauded.

As the time-worn adage goes, people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones. If ever he doubted that truism, Justice Minister Alan Shatter has learned how dangerous a pastime stone-throwing can be.

The sheer brutality of a British soldier butchered in broad daylight on a London street brings a new and chilling dimension to the meaning of terrorism. If, as widely suspected, the work of two machete-wielding assassins was a so-called ‘lone-wolf’ operation, it is very worrying indeed.

There was a time when people joked about obese Americans waddling off busses in this country.

The Oireachtas Committee on Health, chaired by Fine Gael’s Jerry Buttimer, has begun compiling a report on its hearings on the heads of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.