IRRESPECTIVE of age or sex, the decision arrived at by Mr Justice Paul Carney this week in the case of a young man who pleaded guilty to the rape of a much older man is perplexing in the extreme.

As China welcomes the year of the monkey, maybe the people of Ringaskiddy should mark the year of the three monkeys. Bureaucracy can see no evil, speak no evil and certainly hear no evil insofar as what it can dump on the community there is concerned.

THE Martians may not realise it, but they are part of US President George W Bush’s re-election plans to hang onto the lease on the White House for another term.

ACCORDING to 87% of people surveyed in a British newspaper poll, the butler definitely did not do it.

USUALLY, good advice is that when you realise you’re in a hole, you should stop digging.

IF revenge is a dish best eaten cold, then George Dubya Bush is making a meal out of freezing ‘old Europe’ out of the lucrative contracts on the table for the reconstruction of Iraq.

WAS it a Budget that Charlie McCreevy produced on Wednesday?

POSSIBLY the best piece of news that came over the radio for a long time was the announcement that Ray Burke was handed a tax bill for 2 million.

SINCE he started the war in Iraq, the nearest George Wubya Bush came to being under fire — friendly or otherwise — was the 41-gun salute he was given on arrival in London.