THE stars have aligned to facilitate a new round of discussion around the possibility of Irish reunification; the possibility that, at last, the four green fields might be as one.

THE death, yesterday at the age of 89, of Bishop Eamonn Casey, Bishop Emeritus of Galway and Kilmacduagh after a long illness suffered in a Co Clare nursing home, could be an occasion to rehearse all of the hurt and outrage provoked by his deceit, hypocrisy and betrayal.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who is on a week-long valedictory visit to America, will not need to be reminded that Margaret Thatcher’s reign finally came to an end while she was travelling abroad.

This weekend, as Kilkenny and Tipperary enthralled; as our rugby team fell short again; as TV panellists at Crufts discussed joint replacement for dogs, the UN warned the world faces the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.

The weekend confrontation between Turkey, Holland, and Germany may seem a remote, Mitteleuropa sideshow but it is not at all.

Crufts dog show is underway. 

Even though opinion polling has taken a battering — Cameron, Brexit, Trump, etc — those who cling to the idea that the European Union, for all its myriad faults, still offers the best prospect for stability and prosperity will be cheered by the news that, for the first time, a poll predicts that Emmanuel Macron will beat Marine Le Pen in both rounds of France’s presidential election.

Paddy Lyons, the 90-year-old Waterford farmer who was beaten to death in his isolated home, was buried this week.

IT’S nearly 30 years since Albert Reynolds’s government fell over a controversy around the paedophile, the Norbertine Brendan Smyth. The intervening decades have been marked by one scandal after another, one excoriating report on child abuse after another.

THE acknowledgement yesterday, by Planning Minister Simon Coveney, that we have reached a point where large-scale windfarms are not acceptable is very welcome, but it would be even more so had he had not used the wriggle room qualifier “large-scale”.