IT is said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In relation to Dáil elections, that is broadly true. In 1957 and 1961, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael between them secured 81% - 82% of the popular vote. Come 2007, an economic transformation and a 30-odd year terrorist campaign later, that had dipped, but only slightly, to 77.5%.

LIKE most people from one of the minority faiths, I intended to maintain a discrete silence on the revelations about child rape and the surrounding cover-up documented in Judge Yvonne Murphy’s report last week, except to relate one anecdote.

GREAT news. Green shoots, at last. One of the key drivers of the Irish economy has officially emerged from recession. Yes, the Cassandras are back in business. What with bombs here and shootings there, the Troubles junkies can hardly believe their luck.

SO how was it for you? Good, bad or indifferent? It can’t have been that bad, I guess: you’re reading this so that means you got through to the end. What am I banging on about? The first decade of the 21st century, of course. It’s hard to believe it’s in its dying days: I can still remember the hangover from what we learned to call “millennium night”. But time speeds up as we get older, I’m finding.

IF YOU have only read one economics book — and one is, understandably, too many for some people — it was probably Freakonomics.

THERE’S a sort of poetic justice to it: having written back in April about the danger to mental health arising from swine flu hysteria, I have now come down with the bug myself. Perhaps 100,000 people in the State have likewise been struck.

ONE of the biggest and most keenly awaited trials of the past half century opened on Monday but without the benefit of the defendant. The infamous Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs’ political leader during the Bosnian war of 1992-’95 which left at least 100,000 dead, refused to attend because he said he needs more time to prepare his defence.

Perhaps inevitably, Andrew’s account of MI5’s activities in relation to the Provisionals is not a full one, although interesting new details emerge.

In the real world, there is no way the Conservatives would spend their first months in power expending political capital on a referendum on Europe if Lisbon had already been ratified. As a political priority, Britain’s debt crisis puts Europe in the shade. But can they just hack the treaty? That seems unlikely too

As it is, though, Hollywood apart, most Americans seem to think that Polanski must have what is coming to him and that those who call for bygones to be bygones fail to understand that the law is bigger than any of thosewho break it.