Dubya is hearing voices and his pals are getting the $30bn message

IT WAS with a certain sardonic smile that I scanned the headline in one of the Sunday papers last weekend: “Bush to tell IRA it must renounce violence.”

The IRA has been on ceasefire for years, has decommissioned arms and weapons twice and has been more silent than Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, if you remember him.

It's ironic, isn't it, and a bit much, that the republicans - Irish ones - must take advice on peace from a man who has contrived a war with Iraq for no other reason than America wants to control its oil and who, as Governor of Texas, was a serial despatcher to death row.