PHARMACIST are threatening that in 15 days’ time medical card holders will have to pay for drugs and that they will have to seek refunds from the State unless the Health Services Executive abandons attempts to get them to sign a new, less lucrative contract.

IF THERE is something a Dáil deputy wants changed there is an established process: plan for it, lobby for it and, finally, vote for it when it comes to the floor of the house.

Roses are likely to be in great demand today as it is St Valentine’s Day, but we should give a thought to where the roses are coming from and the possible impact on society.

For many elderly people living in isolated rural areas, the pub at night was their main social outlet.

AS YOU read this at least 35 — but maybe as many as 90 — citizens of this State are in specialist care in Britain because we have no place to offer them refuge from the terrible disadvantage of their birth.

YESTERDAY’S eleventh-hour deal between Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin might well be a postcard from thefuture, warning us about what might await a small, relatively powerless economy in the world’s energy markets.

THERE is a terrible irony and sadness in the fact that on the very day that one of the traditional authority figures in our society — a cardinal of the Catholic Church — finally accepts that a person, an office, entrusted with such authority, can no longer seek refuge in secrecy, obfuscation or legal point scoring, that our Taoiseach turns to the High Court to stymie the Mahon Tribunal’s investigations into his finances.

WE HAVE just passed the 90th anniversary of the enactment of the Representation of People Act, the law that finally gave Irish women the right to vote.

SO, HALF of the serious crimes committed by people while they are on bail do not lead to a conviction, the offenders sometimes walk free.

RESEARCH carried out by Met Éireann suggests that unless many of our riverside towns quickly prepare strengthened flood defences they can expect recurring and increasingly violent winter flooding.