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.

We watched a great little Irish movie on the telly the other night. Called Herself, it’s a movie full of hope and ambition, recovery and friendship.

I’m in Hudson Park, trying to banish negative thoughts, when something Vicky said occurs to me. Vicky is my daughter, and she works in backroom politics (not quite my backroom, alas, but that doesn’t stop her being a progressive and deep thinker).

It makes a villain out of no one, but would, I suspect, be genuinely inspiring to a lot of girls and younger women — and boys too