Come back and write another chapter, Daphne. That’s what Victoria White kept thinking as she stared in horror at the security fencing which now surrounds the Puxley Mansion outside Castletownbere. She explains why.

My column last week, urging Ireland to stand with the Palestinians, drew such a huge and often angry response that I re-read my history.

MORE than 650 Palestinians and 31 Israelis have died, so far, as a result of ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ For two weeks, each day’s news has brought fresh horrors: yesterday, 12-year-old Palestinian, Rabee Qasim, was killed by an Israeli shell as he led a donkey and cart through a Bedouin village.

THIS month we made a big step towards abolishing the idea that children need care over the age of seven. On July 3 we did away with the notion that children over 16 need care if they were receiving a One Parent Family payment before April 27, 2011.

WHATEVER the new Cabinet dredges up to present as the buried treasure for which it is worth staying in Government, I hope it’s not a second year of free preschool education.

I’VE SPENT a day reading back over Joan Burton’s speeches and I feel like Ryan Tubridy, when he begged impressionist Mario Rosenstock to stop imitating Burton: "I don’t think I can take too much more of her."

THE man is out to ruin me. All I’m doing is sitting in my palatial home in leafy south Dublin, minding my own business and the steady rise in the value of my property. Which is quite a relief, as you can appreciate, given I paid at least a third more for it than it’s currently worth.

"IN the good old days when you couldn’t cope the nuns would take them in," said the middle-aged mother of an intellectually disabled teen. "Now if anyone says they can’t cope — good luck."

WHEN is a dead baby in an unmarked grave not a dead baby in an unmarked grave? When it’s a Protestant baby!

THE Government’s Green Paper on Energy Policy in Ireland, which is out to public consultation until the end of July, reads like a manuscript from the past discovered during an archaeological dig.