LATE last week, a handful of media organisations contacted me with bad news concerning the serious illness of Dr Garret FitzGerald. Fearing the worst, they were preparing appropriate tributes. He was gravely ill, suffering from pneumonia and surviving on a ventilator in hospital.

IT’S easy to be snide about RTÉ’s Ireland’s Greatest Figures: far too many people born in the 1970s, a blank as far as the world of science is concerned, very few people who have actually made any money, no one of an identifiably unionist persuasion, and so on.

Politicians and church leaders today paid tribute to the legacy of Cardinal Cahal Daly, who died last night in Belfast City Hospital at the age of 92.

CARDINAL Cahal Daly, one of this country’s most senior Catholic churchmen, died yesterday in a Belfast hospital.

ONE of Ireland’s most senior Catholic churchmen, Cardinal Cahal Daly, is seriously ill in hospital after suffering heart problems.

Cardinal Cahal Daly is seriously ill in hospital.

THERE is general acceptance among most people that our health service is in crisis.

TWO leading hospital consultants have called for the establishment of a national forum on healthcare modelled on the lines of social partnership to drive health reform.

Former Fine Gael TD Maurice Manning was today re-appointed as president of the Human Rights Commission for a second five-year term.

ENDA KENNY delivered what many people considered his finest speech ever at the recent Fine Gael ard fheis during which he promised “a contract for a better Ireland.”

IT CAME as no great surprise that Charlie McCreevy praised Margaret Thatcher in a speech to the Association of European Journalists in Dublin.

EILEEN DESMOND, the second woman Labour deputy to be elected to Dáil Éireann and one of only nine women deputies in the party’s history was laid to rest in Crosshaven, Co Cork, yesterday.