FEW issues today cause greater anxiety among young couples than the cost of housing.

EARLIER this week the plight of Glenville National School was highlighted where, just like the situation in hundreds of other communities across the country, the local school is no longer capable of providing the service it, and everyone involved with it, would wish.

PUTTING the body of Padre Pio on display 40 years after his death gives those who would deride such expressions of faith an opportunity to deride and sneer.

YESTERDAY’S ruling that allows doctors to intervene and give blood transfusions to save the lives of two severely anaemic babies immediately after their birth, despite their parents’ objections on religious grounds, is very welcome.

A SETTLEMENT was reached on the fourth day of a High Court action yesterday, in which three people sued the Garda commissioner, the Minister for Justice and Law Reform, Ireland and the Attorney-General for damages for alleged wrongful arrest, assault and malicious prosecution.

THE Government yesterday funked an opportunity to begin to confront the country’s drink crisis. What had been flagged as a decisive intervention has turned out to be yet another spineless, feeble, pathetic dodge.

JUST as his fellow politicians eulogised Mr Ahern yesterday afternoon, in what was his last day in the Dáil as taoiseach the general secretary of the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association, Des Kavanagh claimed that the psychiatric sector “faces cutbacks unimagined since the 1980s” and that “people are dying because of... low investment in mental healthcare”.

UNLESS you are very rich you probably rely on the banks to help you through life’s challenges. You depend on them, and pay them very well, for mortgages, business loans, car loans, pensions or whatever other kind of financial package you decide you need.

LIKE hundreds of communities around the country Glenville, in Cork, was promised a new national school a decade ago.

This country could have a particularly — and literally — dark future unless it gets its energy act together.