Our strange sense of priorities will always put pigs before people

BOY, was my local shop on the ball on Sunday morning.

I was there at 8am, waiting for the croissants to come out of the oven. It may be a small thing, but it really is one of the great pleasures of modern Irish life — and to be treasured in a recession — that shops are able to open so early and to supply freshly-baked bread at that hour of the morning.

It’s one of the things we’re really going to miss when all our immigrants go home, isn’t it? But anyway, as a good citizen, I was ready to alert them in case they hadn’t seen the news the night before.