Earlier this week, on the 1 o’clock news, the CSO gave the latest prognosis for the population of Ireland.

It is now 21 years since the X case, in which a traumatised 14-year-old girl was summoned back to Ireland, after she and her parents had decided that she needed an abortion in dealing with the crisis brought about by her rape and subsequent pregnancy.

The remarks by the president are needed because there are so many people in Ireland, and in the EU as a whole, who feel angry and let down by their political masters, including Labour.

Speaking from his ivory tower of cosseted privilege, President Higgins, a mostly symbolic head of a tiny impecunious country earns more than either the British prime minister or the French president, and like his party was a cheerleader for the endless squandermania that led us into the very fiscal thralldom which he now bemoans.

In the 1950s my late father, who worked as a pharmacist in a hospital, told me there were times he would hear terminally ill patients screaming in agony and asking distressed nurses to help them because a prescribed amount of pain killer could no longer ease their suffering.

When it comes to politicians, actions really do speak louder than words.

The word secular comes from the word saecularis, meaning “worldly”, making a distinction between spiritual and worldly issues.

Yet again we have this caterwauling from women about having an equal number of wallets on the gravy train of honest workers’ taxes.

Many of the distressed women that came to Cuan Mhuire over the past 50 years, came because they were suffering distress having undergone an abortion.

The fact that Richie Boucher refuses to lessen his obscene grotesque enormous salary is sick and stinks to high heaven.