AS the media were reporting here on the finding of the Saville Inquiry into the events in Derry on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, I was in the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, where 5,075 American soldiers and one American nurse were buried. All were victims of the Second World War.

PEOPLE have become so disillusioned with politics in this country that there are calls for scrapping the Seanad and a significant reduction in the number of Dáil deputies. It would not be the first time for the Seanad to be abolished.

THE present state of disillusionment with politics is the worst I have witnessed. In this week’s public opinion poll, the Government satisfaction rating was a mere 12%, which is the lowest I can remember in any democracy.

WITH the World Cup about to start, people will inevitably regret that Ireland are not there. “France are going to the World Cup,” as Roy Keane rather infamously said, “get over it!”

ALBERT Einstein’s defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It is a fitting description of our drug strategy in this country.

THERE are currently three vacancies in the Dáil brought about by resignations. Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher stood down in 2009 after his election to the European Parliament. Earlier this year George Lee of Fine Gael resigned his South Dublin seat in a tizzy and Martin Cullen stepped down from his Waterford seat due to health reasons.

THE controversy over the European Commission’s efforts to compel the 16 euro states to submit their draft budgets to Brussels before presenting them to their respective parliaments made somewhat confused reading this week. Surely this would be an incursion into Irish sovereignty.

FOLLOWING the publication of my book, Haughey’s Forty Years of Controversy, I was invited on the late Gerry Ryan’s radio programme. I assumed the interview would be for about 12 minutes. I had done a couple of other interviews with him previously about Éamon de Valera, but we were in separate studios for each of those and had never actually met before.

THE do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do style of leadership received a hammering this week. For the past couple of years the Government has been according politicians special privileges while calling on the public to demonstrate patriotism by accepting cuts.

IF Michael O’Leary of Ryanair could make money selling toilet paper on his planes, he would do it, and he has been quite candid about it.