DURING the week Bertie Ahern made an extraordinary admission about costing the State a fortune.

BACK in the first week in January four prominent American political figures raised the need for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The issue was followed up this week in an article by Mikhail Gorbachev calling for urgent action.

FROM comments about the Nuala O’Loan report one would think that collusion between the RUC and murderers was a particularly British phenomenon in which the police essentially gave a licence to an informant to murder people and engage in criminal activity as part of his supposed cover.

BRENDAN HOWLIN and Pat Rabbitte were squabbling about what Labour will or will not do after the next general election.

THE contemptible arrogance of the Government seems to know no bounds. Last year, Eamon Ó Cuív announced that the name of Dingle was being changed to An Daingean on all road signs, whether the people of Dingle liked it or not.

IN the past week we had posthumous pronouncements from both Judge Seán O’Leary and the late US President Gerald Ford.

IT was a year of hope in the North, with realistic signs of progress in that there was so little talk about ending partition. It was not even mentioned during the talks at St Andrews.

IN THE concluding paragraph of my book, Haughey’s 40 Years of Controversy, I wrote that in the end he “probably destroyed his political legacy. It was a great pity because he was unquestionably a very talented politician”.

MUCH of the publicity for this week’s Hidden Ireland programme on Frank Aiken projected dark secrets of his past that were to be exposed.

MORE than a quarter of Irish prisoners are back in jail within a year of release, and a majority are back in jail within four years, according to a study of 19,995 inmates undertaken over a four-year period up to 2004.