The solution to trucks getting stuck is to erect barriers on the approaches to low bridges.

Of the 2,000 job losses reported this week, the 280 at Hewlett Packard are most significant. This is not to minimise the other losses; but people are accustomed to banks reducing staff levels.

“Skin in the game”; “What’s the playbook like?”; “The donkey in the room”; “We need the moolah”.

Watching the celebrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo as the army assisted in carrying out the will of people in removing a leader who threatened to turn a bastion of culture into a fundamentalist state, I have pangs of jealousy as we approach the centenary of 1916 and live in a despotic state.

How dare Mr Kenny call people who do not pay house tax lawbreakers. Many of these people voted for Fine Gael.

Are we in for a summer of discontent? Perhaps the key to preventing this is the re-mortgaging of all household mortgages to the present value of the house.

During the 1970s, on entering commercial premises with my late father, I heard members of staff uttering the ‘f-word’ like adolescents.

The furore over the private rantings of banking buffoons, and how this might play with our German friends, is difficult to believe, even to someone accustomed to the hypocrisy we do so well in Ireland.

A few nights before the first of the Anglo Irish Bank tapes was played, I watched an episode of Fr Ted that made me laugh.

With regard to the recent vote on the Abortion Bill, I now hope that the churches who have a pro-life/anti-abortion ethos will move as quickly to expel those TDs who voted for the recent legislation as the political parties have moved to expel those who voted against it.