JUST as our personal virtues, over time, become our vices, so, too, our national advantages, over time, can become disadvantages.

ON the face of it, I’m all set for Christmas. But not really.

Back in the days when I was a junior reporter with RTÉ and the Troubles were going on north of the Border, a mad young producer got the idea that someone should go Up There and capture covert recordings of just how difficult the British Army and the RUC were to people from the Republic. 

WORKING dogs are confusing. 

MOTHERS are fighting in toyshops over dolls fashioned after characters from a movie named Frozen. This is to satisfy their children this Christmas.

NORMALLY, when biographies cause problems for the subject, it’s because of something included in the book.

To find Marian Keyes eating the face off Marian Finucane on Twitter is like finding your budgie savaging your alsatian.

Natalie Facetimed me the other day. No warning. Out of the blue.

You could tell from early on that he was never going to make it, this child. Not saying he didn’t come from a good family. He did. His grandfather and then his father were our GPs.

SET to one side the morality of the quasi-judicial approach and let us deal instead with the craziness of it. The sheer, straight-up, no-messing craziness. The braindead loopiness that characterised this kind of procedure at the time and runs through any contemporary justification of it.