A DARK shadow hangs over the reputations of some of Ireland’s greatest athletes and nothing, it seems, can ever remove it.

AS the Green Party’s former senator Dan Boyle launches his book detailing his party’s deeply troubled time in the previous government, many in the Labour Party should read it and worry whether the Green experience as the junior partner in a coalition government is instructive in predicting what will happen to it.

IRRESPECTIVE of the outcome of referendum votes today various individual politicians, and their parties, have been winners and losers over the campaign.

WHILE undoubtedly very important, it may not be quite correct to say that “mortgage arrears is the single biggest issue currently facing Irish people”, as Taoiseach Enda Kenny said last Tuesday in the Dáil.

GERMANY is behaving like the euro is a pain in the ass to it, that it has received little or no reward for adopting it as its currency, that it wishes that it never gave up its Deutschmark as its own prized currency and that, now that it is stuck with the euro, it will be damned if it is going to have to pick up the tab for the fecklessness of other European nations (including us).

IN RETROSPECT the introduction of civil partnerships to this country was remarkably calm and civilised.

SEAN BRADY has had some interesting things to say in the past about the exercise of conscience, about being required to do something in the course of a person’s job that went against their beliefs.

MANY people fear the monthly announcements from the European Central Bank about interest rate policy.

AT A time of crisis it can pay to be counter-intuitive, to have ideas that seem completely at odds with perceived wisdom.

RECENTLY the National Women’s Council of Ireland made a submission to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland about what it claimed to be an exclusion of women from the airwaves.