Last year over €2.3 million was spent on sending 15 troubled young people abroad for specialist care.

YESTERDAY was a sad day for anyone who understands that a truly successful democracy — and therefore society — relies on men and women of the purest and most determined motives dedicating their lives and talents to public service.

YESTERDAY’S ruling by An Bórd Pleanála against a toxic waste incinerator proposed for Cork harbour may deter some investors but the fact that it took ten years to reach this point may deter even more.

AT the moment it’s hard to imagine what Ireland might be like in 50 months’ time.

WE have a great capacity to be outraged, to be angry and sad about terrible wrongs committed in our society. But we get over it quickly.

WE were naive to imagine that the scandal surrounding Leas Cross Nursing Home meant we need not be so fearful about how older people, our parents, maybe uncles or aunts, maybe neighbours or friends, might be abused in a nursing home.

YESTERDAY’S publication of the Ombudsman’s annual report was another indication of something bordering on social disintegration.

THE list of Republicans hoping to unseat president Barack Obama next year grew longer yesterday when former senator Rick Santorum announced his intention to elbow his way into an increasingly crowded field of Pennsylvania Avenue aspirants.

DECLAN COSTELLO was of the generation that pushed Ireland into the modern age and he made a very significant contribution to that process.

THE campaign for justice for the Magdalenes, for the so-called “fallen women” who were grossly mistreated in a chain of laundries run by nuns, has been resoundingly vindicated by the call for an independent investigation into the scandal from the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT).