The massacre at a US primary school will unite families everywhere in grief.

Over the past few weeks the very worst characteristics of Irish political practice have dominated the public square.

Once again we are at the point where words are unequal to the task of expressing the anguish every parent must feel for the family of Shannon Gallagher, 15, who took her own life less than two months after her younger sister Erin died in the same way.

Desmond de Silva’s report into the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane may have added detail to what is already widely believed, but the confirmation that security forces could have intervened and saved Mr Finucane’s life still has, more than two decades later, the capacity to shock.

The Department of Education is set to, thankfully, continue the process of handing over Catholic-run schools to alternative patron bodies after the results of parent surveys were published yesterday.

Alcohol misuse causes more damage than poverty, violent crime, unemployment, all the cancers, and all the other drug addictions combined in this society.

Oireachtas hearings on how we might change our laws to try to control the sex business begin today.

Today’s report from the ESRI showing that 22% of the population are living in households where none of the residents have a job is more than sobering.

It is easy, as Ireland struggles to cope with impossible bank debt, to scoff at the fact that the Nobel prize for peace has been awarded to the European Union.

An obsession with cutbacks and increasingly centralised control over local and regional administration are having disastrous repercussions on the lives of tens of thousands in rural Ireland.