NOT content with turning our prepubescent daughters into playground Lolitas, it seems we’ve decided to confer membership of the slow food movement on our dogs.

WHEN he was education minister Noel Dempsey announced plans to review the entry requirements needed to study medicine in one of our five undergraduate medical schools.

IN YEARS to come the walls of anthropology departments in universities will be lined with theses considering our inaction when confronted with our impact on the environment.

With the start of the new school year the media spotlight is inevitably turned on teachers and pupils.

Despite their high visibility, the Roma community is one of the smaller migrant groups in Ireland.

IT IS entirely possible that Brian De Palma’s harrowing new film about the horrors of the Iraq war may add sufficiently to the anti-war momentum in America to force President George W Bush to accelerate an inevitable withdrawal of US forces from that devastated country.

A MODERN, European society is no more than an attempt at the organisation of all its members, no matter what their religion, no matter what their origin, no matter which cultural background informs their ambitions, for the mutual security and benefit of every member of that society.

FIGURES just released about our shopping habits show that we are less impressed by brands than was once imagined.

YESTERDAY morning nearly 60,000 Irish children began their primary school education.

THE mean spiritedness and ignorance shown by the person who shot and killed one of the 30 red kites reintroduced to Wicklow almost six weeks ago is so staggering that it brings shame on us all.