Any public inquiry into how the emergency was handled may reveal mistakes were made but it was done with honesty, good faith, and unremitting hard work

I've never worried about falling on deaf ears. Sometimes you say or write things that seem to resonate with a lot of people. Sometimes nobody seems to be listening.

Facebook is a great way to get a discussion going, even now and again to have a good old argument. I tend to be more of a broadcaster than a reader — these golden words (or at least the link to them) go up on Facebook every week.

Constancy about values has never mattered more. Moral leadership has never mattered more.

If I ask you a week from now to outline the four main features of the budget, you’ll struggle to remember two of them, writes Fergus Finlay

Last week the independent Senator Tom Clonan wrote a powerful article here about people with disabilities. The headline on his piece, based on a phrase he used, was “Disability rights are in freefall”.

We need to enact the hate speech bill now. And we need to regulate the hell out of the internet access enjoyed by the haters. We should tolerate no more listening to twaddle on these subjects.

Sometimes the memories are all you take with you into older age. And then dementia comes after them, stripping them away one by one

During every critically important sporting event, every ad break features an ad for gambling

I’m sorry to swim against the ride of conventional wisdom, but enough already. We don’t need more TDs. We need better politics. Our parliament is over-stuffed, over-male, over-middle class.