I have some concern at what I perceive to be a lack of objectivity in the reporting of the current situation in Syria.

As a 29-year-old lay Catholic I thought I might offer my own opinion on the Fr Flannery debacle.

Given that thousands of decent hardworking people in the private sector are suffering through no fault of their own, they have every right to be angry.

Your editorial commentaries today (Apr 12) clearly conjure a starkly contrasting take on the innate qualities of Irishness, as manifest throughout various social realities and workplace tapestries (or should that be travesties?).

In voicing his opposition to the proposal to ban smoking in cars, John Mallon (Irish Examiner, Apr 12) states that “... a responsible parent will not smoke with young children present anyway, whether it is in their car or their home”.

While commemorating the Home Rule Bill of Apr 1912, one would do well to consider if it was as dangerous a recipe as any for insular civil war had not the Great War intervened.

In his piece last Saturday (Apr 7) Michael Clifford likened the burning of an unoccupied house in Co. Kilkenny to the horrors perpetrated upon Negroes in the Deep South of the US in the Sixties, and to the burning of houses in Catholic neighbourhoods of Belfast during the Troubles.

I refer to a number of letters which were recently published in the Irish Examiner, in particular the letter from Barry Fitzgerald and Kathy Sinnott.

In the year that’s in it, perhaps we could just reflect on the last couple of years rather than the previous hundred.

It was good to see an article from a beekeeper’s perspective in your newspaper (Apr 9).