I HAD a dreadful thought during the budget. It occurred to me that I had worked on or around every budget, in one capacity or another, since 1983.

Surely all investment should be accompanied by a highly public cost benefit analysis before we commit, writes Fergus Finlay

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much courage in a room as I did last Saturday. Nobody was there because they wanted to be, and yet they came from all over Ireland to be with each other, writes Fergus Finlay. 

Scrap the child benefit system entirely and start afresh, finding better ways to spend the money, writes Fergus Finlay

The politicians are still stuck in the endless revolving door of “our tribe against your tribe”, writes Fergus Finlay

You can’t find a single sentence, in anything Donald Trump has ever said, that might constitute any kind of appeal to the better angels of our nature, writes Fergus Finlay

Boy, didn’t we get huffy last week when Angela Merkel told us we weren’t doing enough to help in the refugee crisis, writes Fergus Finlay. 

Last year we shelled out €900m to provide residential services for 8,000 people with an intellectual disability, writes Fergus Finlay

Too many lives are damaged each year by the rat race that we have imposed on young people, writes Fergus Finlay