ONE of the cardinal rules of journalism relates to statistics. Don’t drizzle them all over your articles, wizened news editors will tell you. Use no more than a pinch and then sparingly.

SO CONCERNED was the Government about feuds in Limerick last year that it sent down John Fitzgerald to sort it all out.

LATE on Wednesday night right as the confidence debate on Bertie Ahern drew to a close we learned a lot about the leader of Fianna Fáil.

THERE is a school of thought that if the report of the McCracken Tribunal into Charles Haughey’s venal trousering of other people’s money had come out a couple of months earlier, then politics would have had a different complexion over the past 10 years.

TO lose one chief executive of Aer Lingus may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like callousness.

YOU arrive back from holidays to find that your home has been robbed. You go to the police station, where a bored sergeant tells you that there’s nothing they can do about it. You protest, but the sergeant throws you in the cell to cool your heels. On the way home, you get mugged by a gang. As you arrive home injured to your burgled house, your neighbour asks: “Are you OK?” “I couldn’t be better,” you reply perkily.

IT WAS the dog that didn’t bark who decided it at the end of the day.

THE announcement yesterday that the media academic Professor John Horgan is to become Ireland’s first press ombudsman was a watershed moment for the Irish press, for freedom of expression and — most importantly — for the maturing of relationships between newspapers and their reading public.

POLITICS, during the summer, is as dead as vaudeville.

IT has been an incredibly slow summer even by the standards of incredibly slow summers in which Irish politics seems to specialise.