The Constitution stipulates that the remuneration of judges “may not be diminished during their continuance in office”.

Everybody knew that things were going to have to change economically in the current crisis and it was dishonest of any politicians to pretend otherwise. The issue has always been where to make the changes.

In the midst of the angst over health cuts the exposure of the monetary abuses by bureaucrats at the Health Service Executive (HSE) appear all the more outrageous.

Minister for Education and Skills Ruairi Quinn announced a new strategy to ensure that every pupil has mastered literacy and numeracy before finishing secondary school. “No child should leave school unable to read and write and use mathematics to solve problems,” the minister stated.

Irish society has changed greatly in recent years. The access that young people now have to information was unheard of when their parents or grandparents were growing up. In their days censorship was still strong in Ireland and even English daily newspapers were banned as promiscuous.

The High Court yesterday found that there were insufficient principles and policies in the legislation governing the Joint Labour Committee (JLC) system to permit it to operate constitutionally.

The last issue of the News of the World will be published on Sunday. Its parent company, News Corporation, has decided to shut down the newspaper in the wake of the current hacking scandal.

The controversy over the amount of money the religious orders should pay to indemnify the state for compensation in relation to the abuse highlighted in the Ryan Report has no more to do with the tenets of faith or religion than the actual abuse had anything to do with religion.

There was a time when people liked to think that brothels and prostitution were confined to larger cities, where the comings and goings of people would not generally be noticed. In a small town, however, a constant flow of strangers inevitably attracts the attention of neighbours.

The horn of Africa is again in serious trouble, on the verge of massive famine, even worse than the famine that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s.