GIVEN the weather we’ve been enduring here lately, you have to envy the Australian lifestyle. They can plan open air events with confidence, and if you were thinking of celebrating the first months of 2014 down under, then Sydney is the place to head for, where on Feb 1 you can enjoy Opera in the Domain free.

A SATIRICAL comedy called The Mouse that Roared, starring Peter Sellars, was produced many years ago, but in the past week the Government has seen a normally well-mannered and decorous demographic roaring its rage at its mean-spirited, almost contemptuous, attitude to the first generation born into a newly-liberated Free State.

THE chins of the political scribes were slumped on their chests when a magical sentence jolted them back into semi-consciousness.

WHEN Dermot Ahern was being elevated to near-sainthood on the Late Late Show by GOAL’s John O’Shea, it must have felt to him a bit like being embraced by Mike Tyson.