A LETTER writer to the Irish Examiner during the week asked if the manner in which John O’Donoghue was essentially forced to step down as Ceann Comhairle was “trial by media and mob justice.” There can be little doubt that there was an element of this in what happened. People are becoming dangerously exasperated.

THE coming few weeks could be very interesting politically. John Gormley has said that the Green Party will withdraw from government if the party’s rank and file do not approve a new programme for government by a two-thirds majority. That could prove particularly problematical, but then maybe he can secure some astonishing concessions from Fianna Fáil in the current circumstances.

EARLIER this month I was asked to discuss Irish neutrality during the Second World War on Tom McGurk’s programme on 4FM.

IT is amazing how exercised some people are about John O’Donoghue’s expenses when he was Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism. He provided an abject apology during the week to those who were paying the bills — the taxpayer.

THE publication of Albert Reynolds’s autobiography revives memories of an interesting and exciting period.

WATCHING this week’s RTÉ programme on the beginning of the Troubles in 1969, I was struck by the similarity of what happened then and what has been happening in the past year.

TED KENNEDY was both the most loved and one of most hated and divisive politicians in the United States. Republicans frequently depicted him as the embodiment of evil and amorality, as well as a relic of the self-indulgent liberalism of the 1960s.

In some respects we have aped the worst of America.

RECENTLY in this column, I wrote about the stupidity and futility of spending millions on a drug strategy that has failed so miserably elsewhere, not just over years, but over decades.

SURELY the worst kind of stupidity is the failure to learn from mistakes. Yet we persist in making the same ones. Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.