DURING the week Allied Irish Banks announced losses of more than €2.65 billion for 2009. In explaining the situation, Colm Doherty, managing director of AIB Group, described the current state of retail banking in Ireland as “quite dysfunctional”.

DOMINIC McGowan told Trevor Sargent that after seeing children tampering with a neighbourhood sign, he complained to the father of one of them, but he was head-butted and required hospitalisation as a result.

DEFENDING Willie O’Dea on Monday, Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said: “I suppose Fine Gael are returning to type. They’ve always tried to get the dirt on people. I think it is despicable, to be honest.” Of course, he undoubtedly meant it is despicable to make false accusations.

THE Winter Olympic Games opened in Vancouver, Canada, early this morning (Irish time). The controversy over the Irish bobsleigh team prompted memories of earlier controversies about Irish participation in the Olympics.

A CONCISE version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was about to be finalised when somebody noticed a howler. The encyclopaedia wrongly suggested that our civil war of 1922-23 was fought between the Catholics of the south and the Protestants of the North.

THE global warming crisis is now being rebranded as a climate change crisis because it seems that instead of getting warmer, we may actually be getting colder.

WITH Northern Ireland now being jolted by a couple of sex scandals, maybe we should ask why our politics have remained strangely free of such scandals? The whole thing undoubtedly has a lot to do with hypocrisy.

LATELY the media has been the object of considerable criticism, founded and unfounded, whether in relation to Brian Lenihan’s illness, Noel Dempsey’s holiday or the Government’s appalling lack of leadership.

THERE was an amazing interview during the week on RTÉ in relation to the final decommissioning of weapons by the UDA. It seemed strange to hear Frankie Gallagher of the Ulster Political Research Group speak in such complimentary terms about the help received in Dublin.

THE visit of Pope John Paul II was undoubtedly the most popular event that ever took place in this country. It was witnessed in person by more people than the visit of President John F Kennedy in 1963 or President Bill Clinton in 1995. Yet strangely, the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy treated Taoiseach Jack Lynch and his government with a degree of disdain.