IT’S getting ugly out there in party politics. To say all has changed utterly since last year’s general election would be stretching the point. Still, the last two leaders left standing — Enda Kenny and Gerry Adams — must be hoping the tumbrils will not roll up outside their doors, too. But will they?

WHAT are you doing this summer? Just think: if it weren’t for Juan Antonio Samaranch, one-time crony of Spanish dictator General Franco, we might all be looking forward to a fortnight on the sofa this August taking in a blissfully uncontroversial Olympic Games from the shores of Lake Ontario.

TEN YEARS on from that Good Friday, and despite Anglo-Irish relations never having been so good, it’s still a tale of three cities. London, Dublin and Belfast continue to inhabit very different mental worlds. Reactions to a newly-published account of the search for Northern peace by Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, are a case in point.

WHEN Shakespeare wrote that all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, he had the acting profession pretty well sized up. The genius is in the writing and the direction, not the performing.

YOU can have too much of a good thing. All those debates, all those ordinary citizens actively participating in the democratic process: who couldn’t have be energised by the hard fought US Presidential battle? I’m fast becoming disillusioned.

Maybe it’s just because, in some irrational way, the Holocaust just feels worse than the Cultural Revolution or Stalin’s purges.

FOR a brief moment last year it seemed Ian Paisley would defy Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. At the grand old age of 81, he was at the height of his powers with prime ministers and presidents flattering him at every turn.

Kosovo has never been a state and its parliament isn’t deemed worthy to do anything very much beyond collecting rubbish.

IF like me you are one of that (literally) dying breed of smokers, take a look at your cigarette packet.

IT used to be said that everyone had two countries: their own and France. Nowadays, it’s the US. We all have a stake in the presidential election, even if we don’t unfortunately have a vote.