IT’S the kind of satisfaction rating that Bertie Ahern can only dream about now. Where once his popularity soared, it is now, as they say, plumbing the depths.

IS a three-year-old bundle of fun more important than a bag of mail?

IT was no coincidence that on the day Fianna Fáil began their two-day sit-in in Killarney Saddam Hussein offered to allow the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq unconditionally.

IT is a measure of Bertie Ahern’s capacity to exude hypocrisy that he actually stood up before about 190 of the world’s leaders at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg and lectured them about aid to the Third World.

TAX avoidance and evasion are two knacks of creative accountancy which most people — at least those of us unfortunately unencumbered by a few spare hundred thousand — believed would not rear their embarrassed heads again for a long time.

In the course of the last awful fortnight, as we watched television and read newspapers to await with trepidation the fate of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, the only question pondered in this country was whether it could happen here.

A PARISH priest in Co Meath has come up with a novel form of penance for lapsed Catholics, which is tantamount to casting their children into an educational limbo.

LET me tell you what it was like when life was exciting, when things were going on that made the chest pound at the mere sight of them.

HAD Ariel Sharon been born in Northern Ireland, he would probably be First Minister by now.