IT is good that all top-level staff in the civil service who earn more than €200,000 have agreed to accept significant pay cuts. Earlier this week, Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin said he expected this to be replicated across the public service though semi-state bosses may or may not comply.

Minister for Education and Skills Ruairí Quinn yesterday opened the three-day Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. It has been set up to decide what role the Church will play in the area of school patronage into the future.

In the midst of what should have been celebrations over Rory McIlroy’s phenomenal success at the US Open Golf Championship, Belfast has once again been convulsed in violence.

THE economic news has been so relentlessly disheartening for the last few years that it is understandable that our instinct is to turn away, to turn a deaf ear to the next set of predictions of doom, of pay cuts, job losses and the dismal “era of austerity” we know will follow.

TODAY is the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Russia, a central event in the ultimate defeat of Hitler’s Nazis and victory for European democracy.

GIVEN the disastrous repercussions of the stock market crash it defies credulity that trustees of Irish pension schemes continue to put members at significant risk of further losses.

DESTINED to be the best golfer in the world?

IT WAS almost inevitable that Catholic figures less amenable to change than Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin would adopt positions on school patronage far less compromising than his in advance of this week’s forum on school patronage.

IRELAND’S restaurants employ more than 64,000 people and have a turnover of over €2 billion each year.