“EVENTS, my dear boy, events.” Harold Macmillan’s truism recast as cliché, ranks with the often inaccurately quoted aphorism of Enoch Powell about all political careers ending in failure as the great barstool platitudes on politics.

If media exposure equalled political success then surely Lucinda Creighton would be fast-tracked to the office of the Taoiseach by now.

ARTISTS cannot be trusted. They are politically subversive, financially illiterate, and their management skills are commensurate with their chaotic lives.

JANUARY, from Janus, the Roman double-faced god facing in opposite directions, is here.

VACCINES work wonders.

AS Derry’s remarkable year as City of Culture closes, those of us who delivered the cultural programme can reflect.

THERE is a chink of light and it is not an oncoming train. It is at least an irony and perhaps a pun that Ireland exited the bailout on Gaudete Sunday.

MYTHS are the stories that groups tell themselves: the beautiful lies that allow life go on. This is a week of great myth making. In the death and interment of Nelson Mandela we are witnessing modern myth being made in front of our eyes. But myths can be pernicious and evil — corroding life as well as enhancing it.

OURS is the first generation in the history of the State where the provision of social services is mainly non-denominationalal.

Advisers live in the half-light between the public mandate of the elected office holders they serve and the permanent government of the civil service who eschew and usually escape the strobe lights, relentlessly searching and bleaching the political process