The idea that the less well-off would have done better had the entire banking system been allowed to fail is nothing short of puerile.

THE youth guarantee scheme is looking more and more like a PR stunt. The EU-wide commitment to offer young people under 25 who exit education a quality job or training place within four months is a good one.

IF we did not deprive them of life, we deprived them of their identity. That is the hard truth about our relationship with “illegitimate” children which Stephen Frears’s film Philomena makes us face.

Savita Halappanavar has become an icon. Her death in Galway University Hospital a year ago has taken on mythic qualities.

DON’T call me a “Polyester Protestant”. There’s nothing flimsy about me. I’m an Irish Linen Protestant, woven with the blood, sweat and tears of my exiled Huguenot ancestors.

What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?

DOES our law understand the bond between a mother and her infant? I wondered about this when the High Court defended the right of the HSE to take a day-old baby away from his mother to “protect” him last week.

ABOLISH the Seanad and shut down the best chance we have of making politics truly representative. A reformed Seanad could offer a door to public office for the dark side of the moon of Irish life: the people who don’t have jobs.

I’M trying to work but suddenly my head is on the keyboard.

WE were all new to this country once. My people sailed into Cobh and built their churches on the hills of Cork. There weren’t too many Congregationalists round the city in the early years of the last century, but my grandfather integrated quickly.