ARTS Minister Heather Humphreys is reputationally dead-on-arrival. Her demise is less about dastardly deeds than the damning belief she was led by the nose. That impression was confirmed by her near incoherence when questioned by the media and her refusal to answer questions since. There is nothing so debilitating for a minister as a fool’s pardon.

Beneath the palaver about budgetary arithmetic and you find a shark-like instinct for political survival. Deadlines famously focus the mind, and there is no deadline is like a looming election.

Dáil Éireann sits again this afternoon after the summer recess, serene in the knowledge that alone of the five main legislative assemblies on these islands it is impervious to the possibility of effective change. 

LAST Sunday’s YouGov opinion poll showing a lead for the yes side in the Scottish independence referendum, was a bowel- loosening moment for the British establishment. 

WE don’t get out as much as we should. Not that you would know it from the notions we have.

I remember when August 15 was the turning point in summer. A last festival, both holiday and holy day. It was the end of the builders’ holidays (and for lots of other businesses that closed for the first two weeks in August, too).

ON radio yesterday morning, Olivia O’Leary, who chronicled his era in power as a political reporter, recalled the time she danced with Albert Reynolds. He was, she said, a great dancer.

IT is hardly credible that the hue and cry in the aftermath of the Savita Halappanavar tragedy was to legislate for the X case.

The national conversation about 1916 is starting in earnest. What did it mean then; what does it say about us now?

SELF-AWARENESS is a virtue that should never, ever be taken too far. It can trip over into insanity.