Housing needs can be satisfied in ways that enrich an environment as well as providing badly needed homes.

Labour fall to a sorry pitch

We seem to hope that the Sugar Plum Fairy might provide a solution before rationing begins, before vital industries close.

Unfortunately, there was a flagrant disregard for social distancing long before alcohol challenged discipline.

This is a gargantuan task and its complexity probably more challenging than is obvious, an impression underlined by Education Minister Norma Foley suggesting that guidelines will provide a good platform for further discussion to allow for only the “optimum” return to school.

They and many of their Oireachtas contemporaries epitomise that long-accepted truth: Once a public representative gains a certain experience and understands how resources might be distributed, they can cling like a limpet to a seat.

Protecting the environment.

Barry Cowen’s confession.

Keeping public payments secret.

A defining characteristic of crisis is uncertainty. Crisis can mean not knowing what might or could happen next and this, naturally, intensifies frustration and generates stress, occasionally panic. Heightened tension at a time of war, natural disaster, famine, economic implosion, or like today, during a pandemic is inevitable.

The M20 — a motorway connecting Limerick and Cork — has assumed mythical, almost holy grail status. Everyone knows it might some day come to pass but no one knows when. Indeed, some sections of the road were cleared to facilitate its development so very long ago that they have, to use a contemporary phrase, naturally rewilded. Felled trees have been replaced and a second clearing will be necessary if the M20 is to be finalised.

Underlining that fate is indeed blind, Dr Holohan has had to step back from his role as chief medical officer to care for his wife Dr Emer Feely who has multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. She entered palliative care last Saturday.

Events in China, Russia, and beyond suggest that we can't take our democratic institutions for granted

Willie O’Dea, the venerable Fianna Fáil TD from Limerick, yesterday became the latest of that party’s senior figures to attack Taoiseach Micheál Martin over junior ministerial appointments.

Even if it is a glass-half-empty view of humanity, it is hard not to be disappointed, even if unsurprised, that less than half of those who, on arrival in the country, offered phone numbers so they might be tracked to help contain Covid-19 could not be contacted.

IT was Harold Wilson, the late British Labour Party prime minister, who declared that a week is a long time in politics. Make that three days.

Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill has accused the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin of “ignoring the people of the north” by not nominating Ian Marshall to the Seanad.

An elderly woman with a suspected broken hip being forced to wait for three hours in an ambulance outside Cork University Hospital’s emergency department is a situation that is intolerable and shameful.

The most important discussions are sometimes the most difficult to have.

Covid-19 has changed our world. The changes are dramatic, sobering, and humbling — they remind us emphatically of our vulnerability, of our dust-to-dust inevitability.

Success might encourage a happy union, failure might make a marriage the shotgun option of last resort

The Covid-19 lockdown brought that reality home in a hard way for many professional artists.

Bob Dylan’s 39th album, Rough And Rowdy Ways, topped the charts, while Neil Young’s Homegrown landed at number two.

Good governance is an aspiration, but unless Covid-19’s grip is broken, this government will be limited in its effectiveness.

Optimism is a fickle, mercurial thing. It can be misplaced, ultimately bruising, it involves risk.

The penultimate hurdle to a new administration has been, after almost a five-month interregnum, negotiated.

We will, one way or another, have a new minister for justice before long.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo will, on Tuesday, mark the 60th anniversary of its independence from Belgium.

Questions about how the internet is changing our world have become so general, so amorphous that the issues, especially those that cast a darkening shadow are not always examined as closely as they might be.

The WHO yesterday reported a Covid-19 surge since lockdown disciplines were relaxed.

Whatever government emerges in the coming weeks, our political leaders will have a lot to grapple with: Steering us fully out of lockdown; rebuilding a decimated economy and re-engaging with Brexit, not to mention the huge work needed in health, education and climate change.

Legislation that allows for the setting of legally enforceable pay and conditions for thousands of workers has been ruled unconstitutional by the High Court.

The chief executive of Ryanair DAC, Eddie Wilson, has criticised the Government for “fudging around” with plans for air bridges between Ireland and other countries.

It is not necessary to be one of those self-contained souls happy to wallow in the calm that lockdown offered to wonder why anyone enters politics.

If there was any doubt that we lived in a strange old world before coronavirus united the world almost in an unprecedented way, it can be dismissed, as we certainly live in a strange old world today.

There is, in almost every country, a tradition of the old decrying the young.

The Green Party might have forced Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to take environmental matters more seriously than they otherwise would have, but it remains to be seen if the government deal moves beyond the theoretical.

Ireland never had, at least outside of the main urban centres, an enduring, celebratory restaurant culture comparable to other European countries.

It is unlikely that any Kremlin decision-makers — if there are more than one — will filter their work through what might be called The Lenin Perspective.

Detective Garda Colm Horkan, who was shot dead as he patrolled Castlerea, Co Roscommon, alone last week, was buried yesterday.

This is a small country, physically and in terms of population.

Language has a flexibility that can, even if with glaring implausibility, present events in a way that serves causes other than probity or the common good.

Should the weather gods celebrate today’s summer solstice, the longest day of the year, by bestowing the gift of clear, blue skies and a few hours of restorative sunshine, many of us will flee to the outdoors, the uplands or the coast.

Anyone who campaigned to save a rural school, post office, or bus service has run into the use-it-or-lose ultimatum.