AS European equities held steady yesterday key French and German politicians planned the latest round of interventions strategists say are needed to restore market equilibrium.

PEOPLE have been encouraged to embrace their past, to understand it and to learn from it more or less since history began.

JUST as soaring unemployment encourages the black economy, social welfare fraud can provoke a sense of outrage among legitimate, tax-paying businesses.

IT is almost impossible to believe that any previous leader of Fianna Fáil would have publicly offered the party’s support to a potential candidate for the presidency without establishing that the individual was fully committed to the idea.

WHEN Christiaan Barnard placed another person’s heart in Louis Washkansky’s torso in 1967 he had reached one of the great milestones of medicine.

YESTERDAY’S news that American consumer sentiment has dropped to its lowest point in more than three decades will do little to lift spirits across a western world battered and bruised by seemingly incessant bad economic news.

LAST February’s evisceration of Fianna Fáil at the polls was a direct response to their championing of the Hollywood slogan that greed is good, to their lazy, self-serving conservatism and to their habit of borrowing money to buy support that beggared the country.

EDUCATION Minister Ruairí Quinn is to be encouraged in his efforts to reduce the cost of schoolbooks.

The possible entry of Gay Byrne into the race for the presidency has generated a considerable amount of attention, especially in the light of recent reports that the Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has promised Mr Byrne the backing of his party, which has essentially been behind the successful candidacy of all but one of our eight presidents.

The announcement yesterday of 24 new start-up companies with 425 new jobs is very welcome news, but in relation to the overall problem — with 470,284 people on the Live Register in July — the new jobs are just a drop in the ocean of need.