“LIKE it or not, Ireland is no longer neutral and this is crunch time,” Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny declared on Thursday.

WITH inflation growing at twice the current European average, we are clearly in troubled waters, and the ship of State is taking on water.

By Ryle Dwyer

NOBODY is asking who stitched up Mickey Martin, because everybody knows who did it. It was Bertie Ahern. “He’s the man,” as Charlie Haughey once said.

THE Americans are promising democracy in Iraq, but at the same time they are saying that they are not going to allow a fundamentalist regime come to power there.

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair was explicit about the assurances that the IRA have to give if The Good Friday Agreement is to progress at this stage.

NOTWITHSTANDING the hype, the latest report of Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens may be short on specifics, but it is still a damning indictment of the British authorities.

By Ryle Dwyer OVER the decades Fianna Fáil has pulled a series of political strokes on the electorate, such as Charlie McCreevy’s promise during the last general election that there would be no budget cuts, or the election before when the party promised zero tolerance on crime.

By Ryle Dwyer

MY earliest memory of anything to do with rugby was the horror of the Christian Brothers in the early 1950s at the news that Eamon de Valera described rugby as his favourite game.