WE ARE approaching the silly season when zany stories get big play because the politicians who are supposedly running the country are off on holidays.

WINNING the Democratic nomination for president is now just a formality for Barrack Obama, and the smear tactics are already in full swing.

RTE’s environment correspondent announced on Monday that the natterjack toad is “unique to Castlemaine” and more than 40 farmers have signed up to save the toad.

THE essence of leadership is good example. The Government is suggesting that people should hold the line and forget about wage increases.

What Mr Kelly described in his email seemed more like torture than treatment.

THE rest of the country may have been preoccupied with the Lisbon Treaty, but in Kerry the topic of conversation this week was the brainstorm that seized Paul Galvin when he threw a tantrum and slapped the notebook out of the hand of referee Paddy Russell.

JUDGE Pat McCartan of Dublin Circuit Criminal Court fined Bus Éireann €2 million for breaches of the Health and Safety Act in relation to the accident in which five schoolgirls were killed in a bus accident in Navan in May 2005.

THE tribunal was back as the most popular show in Dublin this week. But this time it was not as a drama but as pure farce.

THINKING of the behaviour of the Cork train drivers this week brought Rudyard Kipling to mind. It was he who first coined the term “power without responsibility”.

The Irish were so despised that the American Party was founded against them in 1852.