Despite yesterday’s dreadful if unexpected health cuts, despite yesterday’s report that residential property prices fell by 13.6% in the year to July, and despite the frightening news that one in 12 households with a mortgage is headed by an unemployed person, almost 4,000 people from 115 countries chose to become citizens of this country yesterday.

For too long people who were physically disabled were hidden away, either for their own protection, or in some instances because they were seen as an embarrassment to their families.

According to figures just published by the Central Statistics Office, the disparity between wages in the public and private sectors is actually growing.

Anyone who has even casually studied how our Great Famine needlessly became the devastating catastrophe in our history cannot but be appalled at how British civil servants and politicians used starvation and the denial of food aid — life — to try to advance inhuman political and social philosophies.

It is very welcome that Justice Minister Alan Shatter has supported the view offered by the outgoing director of corporate enforcement, Paul Appleby — retiring at 58 — that the time allowed to question those arrested during an investigation needs to be extended.

Every now and then an event, an issue, a business collapse or an episode of wrongdoing comes to light that challenges the very notion that this is a society where the rule of law represents justice, that social cohesion and responsibility mean something beyond being hollow ballast for politicians’ hired speech writers.

Most of us are happy to make an effort to accommodate cultural or religious differences as long as they do not jeopardise the rights of others.

The shot across the bows from Catholic Primate of All-Ireland Cardinal Seán Brady, asserting that the Government is not obliged to legislate for any form of abortion because of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights on the so-called ABC case, was as predictable as it is divisive.

The death of astronaut and first man on the moon Neil Armstrong reminds us all of a time when nothing seemed impossible and that a political leader — John F Kennedy — might accept a challenge “not because it was easy, but because it was hard”.

Any comparison between Lance Armstrong, the 40-year-old Texan stripped of seven Tour de France titles at the end of a decades-long doping scandal, and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik may seem incongruous but they have at least one thing in common.