You’d think, from media coverage, that unionist hostility to the Irish language was a recent phenomenon; as if that hostility could have been avoided if Irish speakers weren’t so unmannerly.

Northern Ireland Attorney General, John Larkin, recently had a pop at the Easter Rising — the usual stuff about it failing the ‘just war’ theory test and having no democratic mandate.

Re the Tuam babies, while it’s appropriate to focus on the role of the Government and the institutions concerned, perhaps we can look closer to home, and specifically to the grandparents who, for reasons of little more than quasi-Victorian social propriety, bullied their children into handing over their grandchildren to uncaring strangers with the implicit instructions: "do as you wish with them".