THERE have been suggestions that the recession is over, but it is very hard to find anyone in business or on the street who believes this, other than those who ridiculed the suggestion that we were heading for a crash in the first place.

No self-respecting society should compel vulnerable citizens to vegetate behind locked doors, but this is effectively what is happening to some people suffering mental illness.

IT is difficult to understand how, in September 2008, less than three days after the country’s two top finance watchdogs – the Central Bank chief John Hurley and financial regulator Patrick Neary – told Government that Ireland’s banks were not facing a debt or cash-flow crisis that a €440 billion deposit guarantee was deemed unavoidable.

WE are all familiar with the story of the writer who, because he has told this story so often to his drinking friends, never gets to finish the great Irish novel. His idea is lost and his talent wasted because he cannot make his vision real.

THERE will be a general election within two years but it would not be surprising if one was called earlier.

ALMOST 20 people have been shot to death in this country this year. Others have been terribly injured.

The funerals of three of the eight people killed in Sunday night’s horrific crash on the road between Clonmany and Buncrana took place yesterday in Co Donegal.

Juvenile crime has always been with us, but that is no grounds for complacency.

THE dissident republicans who orchestrated the rioting in the North on Monday night are putting all of the progress made, through tortuous negotiations and considerable concessions made over decades by everyone involved, in great jeopardy.

IT is hard to imagine that a society that has had its failings laid bare by the Ryan, Ferns and Murphy reports; a society that has seen so many vulnerable children die while in the care of the State and, most frighteningly of all, seen scores of immigrant children and minors disappear without trace, should need to be badgered into holding a referendum on children’s rights.