WHEN you have the privilege of writing an opinion column, you try as hard as you can to be fair. By inclination and temperament, I’m always inclined to take sides and I can get emotional about some things.

DO YOU remember the currency crisis at the end of 1992? Well, I’ll never forget it. I took out a mortgage in the month it started. Like most of us, it was more than I could afford and the first mortgage payment was about double the rent I had been paying in the month before that.

Expectations are the great double-edged sword of politics.

IS it OK for us to introduce internment without trial in Ireland? Of course, we would seek to ensure that the only people interned were black people. Would that make it OK?

YOU will recognise the passage, won’t you? “The State … guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.

WISE old political commentators who made their names by predicting the outcome of elections and other momentous events used to have a saying when things went wrong.

A COUPLE of years ago, I was asked to deputise for Santa Claus in one of our projects at Barnardos. Santa himself was having a particularly busy time and although he had promised he would visit each child personally on Christmas eve, he just wasn’t going to be able to make their Christmas party on time.

THERE is always a bombshell in a budget. Sometimes it can take a long time to spot, or to oppose. Sometimes the bombshells don’t get spotted for years. But there’s always something that, once it’s discovered, leads to unravelling.

THE times we live in are “undoubtedly the most exciting time ever in the history of this island”, President McAleese said the other day.

The trend towards centralisation started in 1970 and has never really stopped. And so, now, a head office in Dublin has ultimate responsibility for, say, home help for an elderly woman in Clonakilty, just as it has for the design and financing of a major new children’s hospital in Dublin.