Let’s hope the Government takes more notice of yesterday’s OECD report on pensions than its predecessor did of the 1980 EU Insolvency Directive, introduced to protect employees’ pension rights in the event of their employer becoming insolvent.

One of the votes at tomorrow’s Bank of Ireland AGM will focus on the pay of chief executive Ritchie Boucher.

For a relatively small population, we have excessive government that has been strangling our economy.

While the ECB may wish to gag the Government in relation to the liquidation of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), the former Anglo Irish Bank, no self-respecting independent country should allow itself to be gagged in this way.

Despite the attention focussed on the unnecessary death of Savita Halappanavar by coroner Dr Ciaran MacLoughlin’s revealing Galway inquest, the Ireland portrayed at South Kerry coroner Terence Casey’s quarterly court this week, where five out of six deaths considered were suicides, is a deeply disturbing and dysfunctional place.

As winter refuses to relinquish its grip on the countryside any farmer responsible for feeding livestock is in a very tight corner.

“Europe is therefore more than an economic space of contestation in which our citizens are invited or required to deliver up their lives in the service of an abstract model of economy and society whose core assumptions they may not question or put to democratic test in elections.”

Food giant Dairygold was fined the maximum €12,000 at Midleton Court yesterday after the firm admitted it was responsible for the accidental death of around 20,000 fish in the Kiltha River in East Cork.

Domestic violence is a scourge that afflicts the lives of many people in this country, especially women and children.

Margaret Thatcher has not been fondly remembered in this country.