SINCE Madeleine McCann went missing from the Ocean Club resort in the Algarve village of Praia da Luz in the earliest days of May, the story has hardly left the front pages of Europe’s newspapers.

IT HAS been used by more than 30 million men and exists only because of side effects discovered in a Welsh village while testing a drug aimed at treating angina.

RICHARD HARRIS was deservedly honoured in his home town yesterday.

IRELAND’S Catholic Church has endured over two decades of deserved criticism, facing well-founded accusations of hypocrisy and sheltering the most reprehensible individuals and practices, of hurting many of the most vulnerable people entrusted to its care.

THOUGH the legacy of great creative artists assumes a permanent place in the consciousness of humanity until relatively recently the work of great performing artists died with them. They left nothing but memories.

A LOOK through the latest batch of inspection reports of nursing homes reveals an appalling list of failures.

To mark the National Day of Commemoration yesterday, President Mary McAleese and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern participated in the ceremony at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham in memory of all Irishmen and women who died in wars or on service with the UN.

IT IS expected that Eamon Gilmore will be confirmed as the 10th leader of the Irish Labour Party at noon today, continuing the process that began with the appointment of Tom Johnson in 1922.

THIS morning 30 young Irishmen will wake up in Bordeaux. Like so many millions of Irish people before them they will wake in a foreign place, their hearts full of hope, their ambitions fervently shared by everyone they left behind at home.

THOUGH the poor may always be with us it is difficult to understand why so very many of our fellow citizens remain in its relentless, cross-generational grip.