IT isn’t a question that anybody would like to have to answer yet it looms in the distance with certainty. It’s a conversation nobody looks forward to but should be undertaken with seriousness, because it lurks in everybody’s future.

THE way I remember it, in secondary school our first class on civics and citizenship became our last class on civics and citizenship very quickly.

I HAVE now been single for almost three years, and the urge to run around singing ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!’ still hasn’t worn off.

FIVE years ago, in my book, The House Always Wins, I said that a whistleblower’s charter would not be effective because the culture of the organisation being reported would crush the individual doing the reporting. Whistleblowing in this country is only for the brave, well-prepared and determined.

IT’S Wednesday night and we’re around the kitchen table. Unusually for a week night, some friends are over, the craic is good, and the wine is flowing.

RELAXING into the ritual of a soft-boiled egg on Sunday morning I was astonished, actually envious, to read in several newspapers that RTÉ paid out €85,000 to named people ostensibly libelled when called homophobic by Rory O’Neill aka the drag-artist Panti Bliss on the Saturday Night Show.

TAOISEACH Enda Kenny seems to think that punctuality is for the proletariat. Yet his “people” will tell you that this is a politician without an ego.

PROPERTY, water charges, a reduction in the number of local authorities, a wholesale redistribution of county council seats to more populated areas: these were things spoken of for decades. They are now being delivered, albeit amidst considerable furore.

SO CLASS, today we are going to concentrate on the lessons learned from the great recession of recent years.

THIS is my second week writing this column and I need some advice. I’m wondering whether it’s too late to open negotiations with the editor of this fine newspaper regarding my “package”.