There’s a fatal flaw in the logic of why the new Garda Reserve is being introduced. The original reason for the Reserve was to bring the Gardai closer to the communities they serve.

There’s no doubt that the failure to build a national conference centre in Dublin’s is one of the top ten scandals of the last ten years.

A lot of people believe in evil. They believe that bad people do bad things because they’re bad. Anyone who says different is a pinko, liberal, commie, do-gooder.

The most interesting about the whole Afghans-in-the-cathedral spat was the sheer hostility to the hunger strikers from a large number of ordinary Dubliners.

So they don’t want cars using the port tunnel in case they might be heading for town. Now the truckers don’t want to use it either.

Republicans who still support the Easter Rising have to live with one uncomfortable fact: the conflict that started in the GPO ended in the partition of Ireland.

I remember going to an England vs Hungary friendly in Wembley in September 1990. As a child I watched FA Cup Finals with huge excitement and dreamed, like most other kids, of walking out in front of the 100,000 capacity crowd.

‘Stupid Unionism’ was a term coined around the time of the Good Friday Agreement back in 1998 to describe the thickos from the loyal side of Irish life who couldn’t grasp that they had essentially won the war.

“The stone age didn’t end for the want of stone”. This clever insight, now cliche, sums up the prospects for oil. The closer it gets to getting scarce, the more plentiful will become the alternatives.

You may have noticed the low level political wrestling going on in the background as candidates are selected to stand in the next general election.