The revival of social partnership would be a real danger to the wider economy and to the jobs that depend on it, writes Gerard Howlin

I lunched last Sunday with a gargantuan guzzler and bon viveur who announced his plans to take a sleeping pill tonight and retire early. New Year’s Eve is funny.

LAST weekend, I came back on the train from Wexford, laden with my mother’s Christmas pudding.

THE Government took an important tactical decision yesterday, and the opposition may do so on another issue soon. Both manoeuvres have potentially enormous strategic consequences.

FRETTING about successfully celebrating 2016 is unnecessary. I am certain the centenary of the Easter Rising will be an unforgettable event. 

IT’S commonplace in our public conversation to deify Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, but the connection between Irishness and racism is studiously avoided. Its uncomfortable, it’s ingrained, but it’s a deeply unattractive part of us.

It is at the moment of reform that an enfeebled state is most vulnerable. 

HALF of us signed up for water charges and have been made mugs of. Instead of a pay-as-you-use system, delivering revenues sufficient to make a quantum difference to a shambolic but essential infrastructure, a flat charge is coming.

We are in a national debate premised on the view that nature is like a bucket of coal to be burnt. Water is not a resource, a utility to be used — much less a so-called human ‘right’.

Most Fine Gael TDs are out of their comfort zones in attempting empathy with the unwashed, suggests Gerard Howlin.