The Rose of Tralee pageant has become something of an Irish institution. Tonight the 50th Rose of Tralee will be chosen in a pageant whose popularity has sometimes baffled and often defied explanation in the media.

AS ONE great spectacle closed yesterday another moved inexorably towards its climax in November.

FASHION is a lucrative wing of the entertainment business; sometimes imposing the most demanding strictures for very limited and passing returns — as anyone who has come to regret a tattoo will confirm.

THAT hackneyed, black-humour warning seen on car stickers — “Be nice to your children, after all they will choose your nursing home” — has taken on a macabre relevance.

THERE is something rotten in our prison service. This week mobile phone pictures were published of murderer Charlotte Mulhall — one of the infamous Scissors Sisters — jokingly holding a carving knife to the throat of drug offender Denis Gibney in Mountjoy.

THE fact that we have been here before — when Cian O’Connor was stripped of a gold medal in Athens four years ago because his horse tested positive for a banned sedative — does not make it any easier to accept the disappointment that another Irish horseman has been disqualified from the Olympics.

DESPITE all the legislation and social advances introduced over the past four decades European women earn on average almost 16% less than men doing similar jobs.

WE HAVE been under siege from the prophets of doom, each of whom has, like an Old Testament avenger waving his flaming sword, rattled off figures so depressing that they would make a decent man kick his dog.

IN ANY downturn, the weakest, those with the smallest, most easily silenced voice, are always the most vulnerable.

It WAS nice to have something to cheer about in the Olympics.