Even if you were to confine the exercise to a timeframe book-ended by Charlie McCreevy’s decentralisation proposals from 2003, the number of reports warning about unbalanced regional development would, if laid back-to-back, stretch almost the length of the main runway at Dublin Airport.

Insurers have refused to budge on a government request to provide flood insurance for areas where movable defences have already been constructed.

An Taisce has asked the Government to ignore the “self-styled” experts calling for increased dredging of the Shannon as a response to the recent flooding.

AS the evenings shorten and the back-to-school advertisements fill premium viewing slots on television we all, metaphorically at least, reach for the warm fleece to stave off the first chills of autumn.

AMERICA’S guitar-and-chorus chronicler of the Great Depression, the Dustbowl, and social injustice, Woody Guthrie, once described California as “a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see...” and even if he was warning those forlorn, destitute farmers fleeing the Midwest’s Dustbowl not to go to California, he could hardly have imagined that something approaching a Dustbowl catastrophe might hit the Golden State. 

THERE is “no end in sight” to the country’s devastating flood problems with high tides expected on top of more rainfall next week, the Government’s emergency response group warned last night.

ON APRIL 23 Fisheries Officers on a routine patrol of Lough Derg on the Shannon came across a party of French anglers fishing for pike from boats.