WE have been here before.

PRESIDENT Higgins was completely right to highlight the outrage that is the denial of birth records to adopted people at the launch of his Ethics Initiative this week.

DRAG artist Panti Bliss’s speech on homophobia, in the Abbey Theatre on February 2, is one of the greats of Irish politics, up there with Robert Emmet’s parting words. For anyone who has followed Bliss’s (real name Rory O’Neill) career, this is not surprising.

Has anyone spelled out the alternatives to pylons and renewables, such as building a nuclear power station at Moneypoint and confining economic development to Dublin? Or just turning off all the lights and using candles?

THE Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, August 22, 1949, was an important day for the then Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles Mc Quaid. On that day Mount Carmel Hospital opened in Dublin run by the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary.

THE detail about the pelvic exercises got to me. Last Saturday’s Irish Examiner carried an article by the UK social scientist Catherine Hakim extolling the virtues of the relatively casual French attitude to married peoples’ affairs and the centrality of sex to French life.

THAT poor child. He is aged 11, has autism and ADHD, and was left, says his mother, alone in a converted bathroom in a school in Co Kildare for five hours. His mother posted a photograph on the web showing him dismantling a light fitting, because he was frustrated.

SOME puppet show. There are moments when you despair for this country. One of those moments was when I heard Minister for the Arts, Jimmy Deenihan, thus describe on RTÉ Royale de Luxe, the theatre company whose proposed visit finally broke the relationship between Limerick City of Culture’s board and artistic director, Karl Wallace.

“THIS festival has been a beacon in the traditional music calendar,” said traditional fiddler Paddy Glackin on Monday night at the last Frankie Kennedy Winter School in Donegal.

The Wheel, a resource organisation for charities and voluntary groups, described Section 38 agencies to me as “arms of the State in all but governance”. But shouldn’t all arms of the State be headed by the State? Isn’t governance all important?