Dear Santa... Irish celebs write their Christmas letters

There’s no harm in wishing for a better year than the procession of misery served up by 2016, writes Jonathan deBurca Butler

It has been a funny old year. 2016 has taken away some of the brightest starmen, some of our most handsome princes and our funniest deputy sheriff. In return, it has offered us uncertainty, antagonism, suspicion and belligerence. In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko told us that greed is good”. Almost 30 years on, and with the election of Donald Trump we discover that apparently crude is good too.

Or at least it’s something that can be waved away. It seems that fact and truth have suffered a similar fate. In every corner of the planet from riots in Brazil and Venezuela to the tension in South China Sea to the Middle East there is potential for large-scale conflict. And yet like every other year there are always chinks of light.