GROUCHO Marx once observed: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”

PAUL COOKE is to step down as managing director of Independent Star Limited — the publisher of the Irish Daily Star — at the end of this week.

The Star Sunday newspaper deliberately repeated false and defamatory statements about a self-confessed and convicted child porn user, a judge said yesterday.

CONVICTED child porn user Barry Watters is to ask a judge to jail Star Sunday editor Ger Colleran for contempt of court.

OVER the years the media and politicians exhibited an unhealthy deference towards the Catholic clergy and hierarchy in this country.

WITH all the talk about a possible visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland and the 3 Irish Open being played at Killarney this weekend, it is worth remembering that the queen’s great, great grandmother, Queen Victoria, was largely responsible for putting Killarney on the tourist map with her visit to the area in 1861.

LISTENING to some of the teachers and the union representatives moaning during the week one could be tempted to suggest that what we need is to bring back corporal punishment and flog those teachers.

I TOOK an additional few days off over Christmas and I think it must be affecting me.

FROM comments about the Nuala O’Loan report one would think that collusion between the RUC and murderers was a particularly British phenomenon in which the police essentially gave a licence to an informant to murder people and engage in criminal activity as part of his supposed cover.