‘THAT was Gavin Duffy,” came the back announcement from Pat Kenny, mid-morning on Saturday. “Eloquent and generous in defeat”, writes Terry Prone.

The fuller than full house made the whole thing worse. More than three hundred guests were gathered in a massive dining room in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, at lunchtime last Friday, for the inaugural Women of Concern awards.

This is not a complaint. Outages happen. Particularly in the wake of bad storms, outages happen. Eir puts its vans on the road after bad weather and tries to get everybody back online as soon as possible.

The problem was that Boris has absolutely no idea what would work in practice, writes Terry Prone

Presidential elections now come with two great myths attached to them, writes Terry Prone. 

The majority of families who had babies damaged by Thalodimide have never been recognised, writes Terry Prone. 

You’re too young to have seen the movie. Of course you are. 

Lady Caroline Lamb would have loved social media. She would have been a highly-paid fashion influencer, offering tips like “spray a fine mist of water on your gauzy gown, before you go out for the night, because the mist will make it cling to your body in a way that’s to die for”.

Most readers of this newspaper get their fix before they tackle the front page.

It’s over. Two thousand years of power and authority, of intellectual superstructure designed to continuously create learned helplessness and obedience may not have ended during the papal visit to Ireland, 2018, but the decline accelerated.