What makes me maddest is that caring for a seven-year-old child isn’t work any more. 

Last night I read for the first time the account my father made of entering Germany as the first Irish journalist to report from there after the war, says Victoria White.

TWO BABIES born late last year in Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe have died. Seven families in all have had their babies referred for “brain cooling” because of suspected “apoxia” — lack of oxygen to the brain — during their births at the hospital.

You were meant to be reading an article that began: “My teenage boys are sleeping upstairs. Any minute now, they’ll be down to raid the fridge and go on the internet. This is what our teachers are doing to our children, blah, blah, blah.”

Je ne suis pas Charlie. 

THE new year is not about whether Enda is under pressure from Leo or not. It’s not about how many people will register for the water charge. 

SMOKED salmon is the easy part of Christmas. Throw it on brown bread, with lemon and black pepper, and the innocents will think it’s posh and that you’ve spent a lot. 

The Government’s actions contradict the coalition parties’ pronouncements in the run-up to the 2011 general election. That is why it was possible to get tens of thousands of people out on the streets of Dublin yesterday, a freezing Wednesday afternoon, argues Victoria White.

When will it be Christmas night? ”He looks up at me with such innocent excitement in his sapphire-blue eyes that I just have to hug him. I love his excitement, though I know it’s a symptom of his intellectual disability. He shouldn’t be that excited at 13.

I KNOW one of them fell off a train on his way home from school and two people have told me his shoe-laces were tied together. I know he never came back to school, and no-one ever mentioned him again, recalls Victoria White.