Yesterday morning’s raids on insurance companies were inevitable. Insurance costs are increasing at a rate far beyond inflation and have become a significant burden.

If only for a moment, set aside the Fawlty Towers ineptitude that condemned water charges.

IT is not so long ago that the idea that returning emigrants be given a short-term tax break to help them re-establish themselves in the country was guffawed out of court.

HAD William Faulkner been an Irish writer instead of a Nobel laureate born in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1897, he might not have left us his famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

PRESIDENT Trump’s relentless, dishonest attacks on media might be seen as a back-handed compliment to those who report on his inanities, ineptitude, and his disdain for much that is good in our world but far too many of his supporters swallow the Barnum and Bailey harrumph hook, line, and sinker to make that indulgence possible.

AND so it begins. 

MOST politicians would buck at the suggestion that they live in a disconnected world discussing how many appeal court judges can dance on the head of a pin.

IT is hard not to look at accelerating international, domestic, and personal debt and not feel a frisson of anxiety. 

WE have a disheartening culture of enacting legislation but then ignoring it. 

IF it was possible to encapsulate the recent history of Europe and humanity’s determination to survive and do nobel, uplifting things in one life then that person might well be Simone Veil, who died yesterday.