On the immediate appointment of the new Irish minister for the diaspora, I wrote to Jimmy Deenihan TD asking him what he would be doing with the recommendation of the Constitutional Convention on extending votes to Irish citizens abroad in future presidential elections?

Budget 2015 presents a crucial opportunity to support a real and sustainable recovery — but only if the right choices are made.

Noel Baker’s article on the Child and Family Agency/TUSLA’s “unsustainable” legal spend, (Irish Examiner, September 26) quoted Eibhlín Byrne, executive manager of TUSLA: “the current system in which we operate is broken, and increasingly adversarial”.

They say there’s more than one way to skin a Cat. Tipperary manager Eamon O’Shea said that Kilkenny were ‘ferocious’ and ‘formidable’ and that the Tipp players ‘tried to match this but couldn’t on the day’.

At present Irish Water does not come within the remit of the cross-party Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC) which, as things stand, is our most tangible and important link between the people and democratic governance.

When my late uncle opened an early version of a supermarket on a new housing estate in Drogheda, Co Louth in the mid-1950s, he (aggrievedly) lost out to the shop next door in the winning of the sole licence to sell newspapers in the area.

As a city-dweller, I think it’s long past time we ended the urban/rural divide on suicide and other major social issues.

In the 50s I was a young barman. At the time there was no tv and the radio was for news only, so there were lots of discussions between patrons.

Farming as probably the oldest economic activity in existence is surely the greatest example of phenomenal economic success in the world today.

Could there be a better example of the utter contempt of those in power for the electorate than the appointment of Mr John McNulty to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)?