But to suggest that this explains Berlusconi’s political success presents Italians as morons, programmed to vote for him at the flick of a switch.

IN economic good times, all the different good causes lobby for their share of the bounty.

IT’S easy to be snide about RTÉ’s Ireland’s Greatest Figures: far too many people born in the 1970s, a blank as far as the world of science is concerned, very few people who have actually made any money, no one of an identifiably unionist persuasion, and so on.

THOSE who say there is never any good news have been confounded.

A GUY walks into a bar and shouts: “Drinks all around: my wife’s next in line for the Nobel Peace Prize!”

ONE of the mixed blessings travelling beyond our archipelago is that it’s hard to avoid American TV news. BBC World is frequently not available. Even when it is, their ‘cycle’ – the time it takes before they start repeating stories – is getting wearyingly short. Maybe it’s cutbacks.

ELECTRONIC voting has a long and rather chequered history in Ireland. Cost considerations aside, part of me rather likes pen and paper, disputed ballots and the drama of interminable counts.

ASSUMING the next crop of opinion polls is dire, it will soon be all over for Brian Cowen. A fish rots from the head down and Fianna Fáil knows it. He will go down in history as the party’s shortest-serving leader.

THERE is no excuse for the bad manners shown to Tony Blair when he went to Easons in Dublin to sign copies of his memoir, A Journey.

ISN’T hindsight a wonderful thing?