Some years ago, I received a very unusual (but very beautiful) card from a gentle friend in West Australia. It pictured a mother kangaroo guarding her baby in a manger, capturing something of the essence of Christmas in an authentic Australian setting.

Over the years, it’s become fashionable to describe many countries, including Ireland, as post-Christian societies.

Some months ago, a pastor in Northern Ireland mangled an attempt to talk about Sharia law. He was ridiculed and laughed at, naturally.

A FEW ideas for the Catholic Church, a bit tongue in cheek of necessity.

WITH all due respect to your columnist Steven King’s sceptical demythologising of the Northern Executive’s head honchos (January 16), the two old political cons (Paisley and McGuinness) have surprised more than themselves on their road to Damascus.

LIKE most Irishmen and women, I left home at a very early age.

The Times of India carried a banner headline in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination: “We’ve terminated US’s most precious asset: Al-Qaida.”

ROGER COTTRELL’S critique of “flawed Marxism” (Irish Examiner letters, April 24), especially in relation to the Rising of 1916, was as good an example of pure farce as we are likely to read in any of the national dailies.

EIRCOM has been playing games with their customers for quite a while.

IF Government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, and formal religion no place in the governance of the State, then why should Government be able to make the study of Irish compulsory in the classrooms?

AMERICA, like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain, has absorbed millions of Irish emigrants, most of whom went on to repay that ‘debt’ by adding immeasurably to the vibrancy of life in their adopted countries.

THE chairman of the Reform Movement, Robin Bury, makes a simple but effective case for a celebration of Ireland’s constitutional past (Irish Examiner letters, November 8).

THE Sinn Féin press officer, Michael Nolan, now sitting pretty in Leinster House, must be aware that his party is carrying substantially more baggage than either Labour or Fine Gael — even without the sartorially challenged dress uniforms of the IRA being taken into the equation.

AUGUST 15 (the Feast of the Assumption) is fondly remembered by Danny Morrison (Irish Examiner, August 18). The bonfires, the innocence, sense of identity and... memories.

HOW are things in Mississauga this fine day? And in Toronto by the lake? Do the natives make you welcome, my Irish friends?

HERE’S a little sample, expressed as articles of faith, of the type of questions which Sinn Féin would only be too happy to answer, I’m sure.

YOUR correspondent Treasa Collins has no love for the IRA (Irish Examiner letters, January 13).

THE IRA wants peace. Perhaps. But it wants power even more. Hence, the ‘harm offensive’ of the IRA becomes the charm offensive of Sinn Féin when dealing with Dublin.

FORGET the lost photo opportunity. Never mind the rhetoric.

AND behold. A delegation came down from the North, snaking its way across the Border towards Dublin.

THOSE iodine tablets sent to every household some time back were never meant to protect us from nuclear meltdown, but they could have captured the thermal traces of our DNA for posterity.

RUAIRÍ Ó BRÁDAIGH of Republican Sinn Féin (president, no less) should get it through his head that 98% of the people of this island want nothing to do with his mock-republicanism, or with his party's flying the Real and Continuity IRA's flags of convenience.

HARRY MCGEE takes us on a nice trip down memory lane in his column (Irish Examiner, February 7).