The past can reintroduce itself sometimes in the most unexpected ways.

Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. A vacuum facilitates change that may or may not be anticipated.

IN the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, Irish voters got a chance to elect 15 MEPs. Some candidates were excellent. Others, not so much.

SIGNS that the economic recovery is finally taking hold include the growing number of Irish emigrants returning home, having lived and worked abroad for a number of years. 

MOST boxers, their coaches and medical advisers are well aware of the dangers associated with their sport.

THE arrangements agreed yesterday between Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his supply-and-demand colleague Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin have restored a degree of stability at Leinster House. 

OUR report that officials are secretly identifying where post-Brexit customs checkpoints might be re-established along the almost forgotten Northern Ireland border is a sobering reality check.

THOUGH our parliament is mired in its own security scandal, and despite its chilling implications, we are still some distance from the bizarre events that forced President Donald Trump to accept the resignation of his national security advisor Mike Flynn. 

Even the most determined society struggles to eradicate the kind of disadvantage that condemns people, from a very young age and through no fault of their own, to a life where hardship is the dominant theme.

Walter Scott’s admonishment — “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” — perfectly describes just one layer of the now runaway McCabe scandal.