IT WAS 8 o’clock on Sunday morning and I had woken early. Breakfast long since eaten, I thought I’d pop to church. What I hadn’t bargained for was a dozen or so armed policemen stationed outside and being frisked before I went in.

EVER since we were lumped together as PIGs, we in Ireland have been forced to pay more than a passing touristic interest in Greece and Portugal.

AND herein lies the North’s problem. The public sector grew so large when the Northern Ireland Office was running a virtual war economy that no party dares put it up to NIPSA, the public sector trade union and one of the last communist refuges between Havana and Pyongyang.

The one time I ever met her at Hillsborough Castle, she seemed refreshingly human, a very dignified — if surprisingly petite — lady with a wide open smile. I noted wryly the number of devout nationalists who at least nodded, if not quite bowed, when introduced to her.

IS NAZISM making a comeback? You might think so reading some of the headlines this week. “Behind the migrant row, Europe keeps shifting to the far-right,” warns Time magazine. “Finland leads rise of the far-right in Europe,” according to The Daily Telegraph.

NOTHING in the recent history of the Arab-Israeli struggle had done more damage to Israel’s standing of Israel than the Goldstone report.

THERE has always been a special relationship between Ireland and France going back to at least 1798. The French, unlike the brutish Brits, are a civilised, rational people, right?

THERE is one alleged problem, nay crisis, featured prominently in both the Fine Gael and Labour manifestos but there is no mention in the Programme for Government.

THE fact that I was in Japan the week before last Friday’s tsunami has given the tragedy an extra poignancy for me. How many of those people I was milling around with in Tokyo have lost relatives or their livelihoods, I can’t help but wonder?