Martin Fallon has a right to feel aggrieved.

ENDA KENNY delivered what many people considered his finest speech ever at the recent Fine Gael ard fheis during which he promised “a contract for a better Ireland.”

THE 1960s was the first time this country enjoyed prosperity since the foundation of the State, but that decade was marred by a series of strikes.

FOLLOWING my column two weeks ago, it was suggested that I was attacking Green Party policies and somehow suggesting there was no basis for conservation, recycling or cleaning up our air and water, and it was even said that I was suggesting that global warming is nonsense.

THE moment of truth is approaching in the North. On past performance one might be hard pressed to believe Ian Paisley is finally going to say ‘yes’.

ON October 31, 1992, Pope John Paul II apologised on behalf of the Vatican for the persecution of Galileo Galilei over 350 years earlier. Poor Galileo had the nerve to say that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of our universe.

YESTERDAY was a double anniversary. Both relate to the birth date of short-lived minority governments. Each lasted for less than a year.

AN editorial this week in the Wall Street Journal provided a frightening insight into US thinking about the behaviour of European governments in relation to extraordinary rendition.

“A CROWD of us were going along the Shepherd’s Bush Road when out of a lane came a chap with a donkey — just the sort of donkey and just the sort of cart they have at home,” Michael Collins recalled. “He came out quite suddenly and abruptly and we all cheered him. Nobody who has not been in exile will understand me, but I stand for that.”

THE judicial tribunals came in for some stick this week. There is little doubt that people have been turned off by extravagant costs.