THE incineration of the vital research documentation behind Ireland’s lucrative benchmarking pay deal for public sector workers must rank as one of the great wage negotiation scandals of all time.

ESTATE agents want to have their cake and eat it.

People may argue about the implications of today’s vote for years, or even decades to come, but it is important to bear in mind this is not just a political beauty contest to express a preference for who should be Taoiseach in the next Dáil.

LITERACY is not only the key to education, it also empowers those on the margins of society to break out of the poverty trap, can open the door to better employment prospects and is a large plank of a buoyant economy.

UNBELIEVABLE is the only word to describe the State’s denial of dental treatment to thousands of adults with intellectual disability because of cutbacks.

FOR some time, economists have warned of an imminent downturn in Ireland’s housing boom. Depending on the guru, predictions have ranged from a flattening of the market to a tailspin, ending in a crash landing.

YESTERDAY’S launch of a public campaign to heighten awareness of suicide is an example that other communities could well follow.

Party leaders are clearly in a determined mood because it is still all to play for as the General Election campaign enters the final couple of days of full campaigning before the moratorium on radio and television coverage begins on Wednesday.

The Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU) has rightly condemned the practice by some companies and recruiting agencies of exploiting immigrant employees.

ANY lingering doubts about the underlying causes of juvenile delinquency are well and truly removed by a new report showing that four out of five young people in detention schools suffer from psychiatric problems.