A packed Court Three shows the huge level of interest in the case, writes Michael Clifford.

IT’S Tuesday of this week and I’m driving my child home thinking there’s a strange silence about Gerry Adams’s arrest and I want to break it but I don’t know how.

Tracks ****

Charlie Haughey was warned about potential embarrassment from sponsoring a trust set up in memory of a British ambassador blown up by the IRA.

Caroline O’Doherty talks to Booker shortlisted author Julia O’Faolain who recalls her revolutionary and complex parents with warmth and candour

Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof is bringing the band back to Cork, and feels their music deserves more respect, writes Marc O’Sullivan

The year which saw two governments fall is best summed up by the phrase coined that August: Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented. Ryle Dwyer reports

The MasterChef Ireland final runs over two nights, Wednesday and Thursday, on RTÉ Two. The remaining three contestants are Nicha Maguire, Tamarin Blackmur and Terry Lyons.

Diarmaid Ferriter’s Ambiguous Republic portrays an Ireland where change came very slowly. Alan Dukes wonders how much, if anything, has changed

It’s 30 years since the “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented” events that led to the resignation of the attorney general, writes Richard Fitzpatrick

Enda Kenny should have reminded the Chinese vice-president that it was Frank Aiken, acting on the advice of Conor Cruise O’Brien, who stubbornly insisted that all of the small nations in the UN should be free to discuss China’s representation in the General Assembly.

A LANDMARK case against a man who admitted creating a Facebook page called “Promote the use of knacker babies as shark bait” has been dismissed by a judge who said there was reasonable doubt about an intent to incite hatred towards members of the Travelling community.

THERE was a genuine sense of loss yesterday as the Dáil said goodbye to one of its greatest gentlemen.

WHILE attending university in Texas in 1964 I was about to play golf one day when somebody asked if he could join me. I was going to agree, until I saw the man was black.

WE are asking Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, to reverse the party’s stated policy of making Irish an optional subject at Leaving Certificate level.

LISTS that aim to honour greatness are usually no more than a snapshot of the moment we live in.

IT’S been quite a while, but GUBU is making a comeback. An acronym for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented, the phrase was paraphrased from a comment by then Taoiseach Charles Haughey while describing a strange series of incidents in 1982 that led to a double murderer being apprehended in the house of the attorney general. It was a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance.

THE indignant rant of Pierce Martin (Letters, January 12) in response to my letter of January 5 (‘Intellectual giant who turned into a political pygmy’) clearly shows that even three generations into partition, and all the horrors that have flowed from that seismic event, there are still some among us who resent the removal of British colonialism from Ireland.

IN his letter (January 10), Brendan Cafferty questions the protocol of the Taoiseach and Government ministers attending the funeral of Tony Gregory TD and not that of Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien.

TOM COOPER’S diatribe (Letters, January 5) against the late Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien cannot be allowed to go unanswered.

TAOISEACH Brian Cowen, along with his predecessor Bertie Ahern and other FF office-holders, attended Tony Gregory’s funeral this week. No doubt, from their point of view, this a very proper thing to do.

BY any standards, the contribution to political life in Ireland over many decades by the late Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien has been both enormous and controversial.

FORMER minister Conor Cruise O’Brien’s forthright style saw him accused of many things during his long and distinguished career but few would have blamed him of facilitating communist infiltration in RTÉ.

THE death of Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien robs us of one of the best and brightest we have had in the past century in Irish politics.

The late Government minister Conor Cruise O’Brien was a modern-day prophet who wasn’t afraid to pay the price for his controversial views, his funeral mass heard today.

Conor Cruise O'Brien is due to be laid to rest at Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin today.

The Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, has been leading tributes for former government minister and journalist Conor Cruise O'Brien, who died last night at the age of 91.

THE political world expressed its sadness last night following the death of former government minister Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Tributes were paid tonight following the death of former government minister and journalist Conor Cruise O’Brien.

SHE told them to put him in the bath and melted all the jelly she had, poured it into the hot water with which she had surrounded his comatose form, and left it to solidify around him with a spoon on the ledge, together with a note reading ‘Eat your way out’My phone made its text noise when I was starting to cook. I ignored it.

MY father learned all about mistakes at a wedding. Not his own wedding. He and my mother were guests, and to keep her end up, my mother borrowed a fur stole, described by its owner as “coney”.

GERARD HOGAN, in his extended foreword to Dermot Keogh’s and Andrew McCarthy’s book, The Making of the Irish Constitution 1937, wonders if it is asking too much to give Eamon de Valera some credit where credit is due?

FORMER government minister Ivor Callely got a “parachute payment” of €31,754 after stepping down from his job for accepting a free perk, it was revealed yesterday.

THE reaction to the Taoiseach’s unpredictable nomination of the indomitable Eoghan Harris to the Seanad was so, well, predictable.

LAST Sunday, as the media had wall-to-wall coverage of Joe O’Reilly’s conviction for the murder of his wife, the 25th anniversary of one of the most notorious murders in Irish history went unnoticed.

TWO Southern politicians above all had the courage to stand against the IRA murder machine: Conor Cruise O’Brien and Michael McDowell.

THE moment of truth is approaching in the North. On past performance one might be hard pressed to believe Ian Paisley is finally going to say ‘yes’.

ON September 26, 1974 there was embarrassment in Government circles when the contents of a memorandum prepared by Conor Cruise O’Brien for the Administrative Council of the Labour Party was leaked. It was an assessment predicting the distinct possibility of civil war.

STUART NEILSON’S poignant evocation of the bullying and injustice of disciplinary procedures in Ireland’s universities (Irish Examiner letters, October 18) serves as a timely reminder that no effective action is being taken by heads of universities, their officers and the academic unions to address the problem.

A Donegal politician hopes to continue a 36-year unbroken family tradition of serving local constituents in the Dáil.

THE current rumblings within Fianna Fáil and Mary Harney’s hand bagging of MichaelMcDowell this week were reminders that prior to the arrival of Charlie Haughey on the political scene, there were no power struggles in the main political parties within Leinster House.

A HIGH Court challenge by convicted murderer Malcolm MacArthur to his continuing imprisonment will be responded to by the State within three weeks with a file, the High Court was told yesterday.

HIS dramatic arrest sparked the phrase that is forever associated with Charles Haughey.

SEÁN HAUGHEY has commanded acres of newsprint in the past week while the Taoiseach has been savaged for dithering so long over the appointment of a replacement for Ivor Callely and then getting it so badly wrong.