It was vicious to watch. Two elderly tramps taunt and attack each other.

Abolition is about a politics fearful of other ideas. Abolition would stymie the challenge to the dominance every Irish government has had over a directly elected Dáil and an indirectly-elected Seanad

Apart from bumper stickers, there’s not much to look at in three lanes of back-to-school commuter traffic during rush hour in a city suburb.

DOG years are the best measure in government for counting the budgetary cycle. In human years this Government is not yet at the mid-life cycle. But come budget day on October 15 its third budget will be done and dusted.

THE images emerging from Syria — from the hysterical young girl to the rows of corpses — should be a turning point in a conflict that has killed 100,000 people. The deaths, if proven, demonstrate either the depravity of Bashar al-Assad — or the rebels fighting him.

NORMAL service resumes next week.

HE’S right, the Bishop of Meath, for wanting to rescue the Catholic funeral from modern misconceptions of what it is meant to be.

The Dublin Bus strike is a skirmish in a long war.

POWER is at its most potent when it is implied. Revealed it loses its mystique. What inspires awe at a distance, provokes resentment not understanding in the actual encounter. So it proved in Seanad Éireann. Largely ignored for decades, some senators forgot that the cameras and microphones fixed to the furnishings in the Duke of Leinster’s former ballroom allow others to look in as well as them shout out.

IF the people abolish the Seanad, in a referendum in October, then that outcome will most likely be traceable to this week’s act of self-sabotage by members of the Upper House.