VERY considerable progress has been made in the last three years in controlling overtime costs for hospital registrars and in the wider health services but still more needs to be done.

YESTERDAY’S dreadful weather was entirely appropriate for the publication of unemployment figures.

THE horrific rape and barbaric torture of four daughters by their father, who was jailed for life last week, has refocused the spotlight of public opinion on Ireland’s appalling crisis of child abuse and the role of the health service in this atrocity.

THE degree of uncertainty surrounding the latest bid to resolve the problems besetting the eurozone is perhaps the most worrying aspect of a crisis that will not go away.

ONCE again, from a British perspective, the Channel is fogbound and the Continent is isolated.

SUPPORTING the family is a trait that always sat easily with the Irish.

EUROPE is at a perilous crossroads.

THE cross-border report on the different rates of cancer in Ireland makes for worrying reading.

THE Government’s decision to back down and “pause” its highly controversial cut on disability allowances for young people was the only sensible course of action open to the Coalition, which had loudly trumpeted the “fairness” of its budgetary measures.

THE high cost of being ill in this country is about to get even higher for privately insured patients.