MAYBE it’s because we so fervently want to believe there is commitment to improving how the public and civil services do the business of this country that we prick up our ears when union bosses acknowledge reform has to be part of the response to our difficulties.

ANY public authority that would take children into care because it deemed that their parents are incapable of looking after them properly is on thin ice.

THE coming weeks, before Brian Lenihan publishes his budget, will play a very large part in defining this country’s immediate and medium-term future.

JUST last month the secretary general of the Department of Justice, Seán Aylward, a former director of the Irish Prison Service, told the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts that drug-free prisons would be impossible in a humane system.

NOEL DEMPSEY’S proposals for changes to our drink-driving laws are a rational step along the road to making our roads safer for everyone who uses them.

COMMERCIAL fishermen stand to lose more than anyone else if stocks of fish fall below sustainable levels. Already great numbers have left a sector ever more concentrated and industrialised.

ONE couple in six is affected by it yet it remains one of the last taboos.

AID worker Sharon Commins arrived home late last night after a terrible few months.

AS has been seen on so very many occasions, great institutions that imagine they exert a powerful influence over our existence can lag behind society and how we lead our lives.

LET us hope that there is more than opportunistic populism to the weekend announcement from Fine Gael that, if elected, the party would hold a referendum on abolishing the Senate within 12 months.