PREDICTIONS are a mug’s game. So, instead in looking forward to the unknowns of 2014, it’s better to consider the pertinent knowns. Here are seven of my markers for 2014:

SOME people don’t react well when they’re not invited to a party. Just before Christmas, the European Commission president, Juan Manuel Barroso, a former communist from Portugal, kicked the people he held responsible for Ireland’s economic problems — the Irish.

THE Government is right to declare job creation its main ambition. Unemployment is the major economic and social curse blighting this country.

SOME people, egged on by hysterical sections of the media, suspected that ESB trade union boss Brendan Ogle had an agenda to destroy the State, to bring down the Government, to cause anarchy, that he was up to much more than defending the pension rights of ESB staffers.

THE scandal at the Central Remedial Clinic is a gift to the Government. Here we have an organisation seemingly plundering charitable funds, to feather the nests of a group of Fianna Fáil insiders, all of whom can be linked easily to former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

More reasons emerged this week to suggest that the best banking inquiry would not be one examining what happened in the run-up to Sept 2008, but instead one into what has happened at the Irish banks since and continues to happen.

THERE are so many reasons to like the idea of hosting the 2023 Rugby World Cup that it’s hard to know where to start.

POLITICIANS hate being forced by public pressure to change their minds, in case it is regarded as weakness. So, they plough on obstinately with an announced course of action, even though they know that it is wrong, and though they are attracting enormous criticism.

FAI boss John Delaney believes qualification for the European Championships in 2016 would be an appropriate way to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, especially now as we have a manager who not only was born in the six counties but was captain of its Northern Ireland football team.

LUKE MING FLANAGAN won’t be smoking a celebratory splif after the Nov 6 Dáil vote on his proposal to legalise the supply and consumption of cannabis.