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.

THE water charges unveiled yesterday will do nothing to conserve water or reflect ability to pay and may not work to fix our creaking system. The plan was hatched by a Government which is, as the Right to Water Campaign said this week, “on the run”.

THIS WEEK’S Remembrance Day acknowledged the fallen of the First World War nearly a century ago but you only have to turn on the news to find out that war is still going on.

THEY don’t care about the water. It’s just a tool to destabilise the Government and accumulate power. It’s what they do. It’s what they’ve always done — find an issue with which they can mobilise people, then go and do it.

WHY WAS this research published? — I thought as I read the new study by UCC academics finding a link between C section and autism. It doesn’t prove anything.

830,000 babies die every year because they weren’t even breast-fed for an hour

SWEETS for babbies. I know that’s a harsh assessment of Tuesday’s budget, but we have endured too much to be faced now with more of the same.

ENDA KENNY needs me. He needs me if John McNulty loses the Seanad by-election tomorrow and he needs me even more if John Mc Nulty wins.