We’re richer, but wealthy few have the biggest share of all

THE times we live in are “undoubtedly the most exciting time ever in the history of this island”, President McAleese said the other day.

She obviously hasn’t been listening to all the merchants of doom and gloom, predicting that tomorrow’s budget will be the start of the road to ruin. If she had, it would be sackcloth and ashes she’d be wearing, rather than going around the place telling us all that “no other generation in Ireland faced such a positive future with a warm wind at its back”.

Instead of listening to the misery merchants, she was influenced instead by the new relationship between the ever-smiling Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. It’s stuff we never thought we’d see, isn’t it? Ian and Martin might be the oddest couple in history — they make Felix Unger and Oscar Madison look routine — but this relationship seems to work.