Phil Chevron would have approved.

FÁILTE go hÉireann, your Serene Highness, Queen Elizabeth II.

THE choice of short-listed titles for this year’s Irish Book Awards features an extraordinary mix of authors and the outcome should be extraordinary too, because, for the first time, the public can vote for their favourite books.

A roomful of 800 angry shareholders, some of whom had lost thousands of euro in life savings in Anglo Irish Bank, today provided as much tension and drama as when the first Irish parliament convened in the same venue exactly 90 years ago.

Fianna Fáil stalwarts and supporters gather in Dublin tomorrow to toast the party’s 80th anniversary.