IF we expect our political leaders to be perfect then Taoiseach Brian Cowen fell well short of that mark on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland yesterday.

IT might be cheering to record that nothing other than practical patriotism is behind the impressive uptake of the National Solidarity Bond but it may also be a comment on the great difficulties facing the banks.

THE Financial Times yesterday added its t’uppence worth to the groundswell of opposition to the Government’s economic, banking and job-creation policies.

IT is no great calamity that the centrality of the pub in Irish culture is no longer secure but it would be foolish to imagine that a fall in drink sales in pubs, of 14%, means people are drinking less.

Focus Ireland should not be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year because the Government promised to eradicate homelessness by the end of 2010, but instead of meeting the targets, the problems are actually getting worse.

Former Minister Willie O’Dea has called on the Taoiseach to move the writs for byelections to fill the three vacant Dáil seats.

ONE of the great questions about humanity is the one that wonders why we believe what we believe.

MODERN psychiatry has for some decades recognised the value of the talking cure but Roy Keane, as in so many other ways, went his own route, and recognised the value of the walking cure.

WHEN St Brendan, one of the great figures of early Irish monasticism, left Kerry’s Brandon Creek in the early years of the fifth century on his seven-year voyage to try to discover Paradise, he must have had many supporters who wished him nothing but the very best though they did not have any great comprehension of where he was going, why he was going or what he might discover.

THE Government was right yesterday to move quickly and firmly to nip in the bud suggestions that proposals in a draft European Commission communique regarding corporation tax would have implications for our relatively low 12.5% rate.