Bertie's City West charade is indicative of the devaluing of democracy
On prime time television on Saturday night, 4 November, Bertie Ahern will address the nation from the City West hotel outside Dublin in what will be no more than an extended party political broadcast, under the guise of being a party conference. The sole purpose of Saturday's event is to garner publicity in the run-up to the next general election and Fianna Fáil will have another bite of this cherry in March when it has another "party conference".
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Villagers: Letters to the Editor 2006-11-02
We are still discussing and trying to deal with sexual abuse of children going back 50 years in institutions run by church and state. It appears, in light of the Leas Cross nursing home scandal, that we now have further abuse to deal with – physical abuse of our elderly. Shame on the Health Executive: they buried their heads in the sand in spite of prior warnings.
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Birds: Feed the birds
 Winter is a tough time for our garden birds. Putting out food for them is one of the best ways to help them survive. It is simple to do and will make it far easier for the birds to keep warm. It is also a fantastic way to observe them at close quarters and learn all about their fascinating behaviour.
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Falling to climb
In the guise of Benjamin Black, John Banville has written a chilling crime thriller, writes Edward O'Hare
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Robert Hughes' autobiography
Two of Australia's grand old men of letters have new offerings. Things I Didn't Know is the truculent autobiography of veteran art critic Robert Hughes. A man who has lived life very keenly indeed, Hughes reminisces about his Jesuit education, his trio of catastrophic marriages and his hectic career which culminated with the publication of The Shock of the New, Hughes' landmark treatise on modern painting.
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Belle and the Magic Makeover
Belle and the Magic Makeover is book two in the Fairies of Starshine Meadow series. Despite the word "makeover" in the title, this book, happily, has nothing to do with TV beauty programmes where attempts to jazz up the dowdy often make me wish for the return of the bride of Frankenstein as a reminder of how to leave well enough alone.
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Newspaper watch: Ignoring public opinion on Iraq war
On Saturday 28 October, some 250 people travelled to Shannon Airport to protest against its continuing use by the US military and the CIA. Their numbers were bolstered by three US military veterans, all of whom were once interrogators at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, but have since become anti-war activists. The state deployed some 150 gardaí, complete with surveillance cameras and a helicopter, to keep the protestors away from the airport. All of this happened without a mention in any national newspaper.
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Cinema: Culture clash
Borat, with his naïve bluntness, coaxes unsuspecting Americans into revealing their true colours and the spotlight is on London's Jewish community as one boy struggles towards manhood in Sixty-Six. By Declan Burke
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Grab your iPod, we're going to war
'Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman," wrote PJ O'Rourke at the end of the Cold War. It was O'Rourke's contention that a whole totalitarian system was brought tumbling down because nobody wanted to wear Bulgarian shoes. O'Rourke said that Levi's 501 jeans, video players and a million other objects of consumer desire had helped to bring down the Stalinist statues. Desire won out and the hammer was sickled.
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Controversial rezonings in Cork
The greenbelt area around Cork city has been opened up for development, in defiance of the local senior planner and An Bord Pleanála. By Frank Connolly
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Discrimination towards non-EU nationals
There is individual and institutional discrimination towards non-EU nationals seeking further and third-level education in Ireland. Also there is inconsistency in relation to the fees they are charged.
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Fragments 2006-11-02
Six weeks after we reported in a front page story that Michael McDowell had bought Thornton Hall lands for eight times the commercial value (see accompanying cover of Village of 14-20 September and the reproduction of the article by Frank Connolly), the penny has dropped with the Committee of Public Accounts and some of the media that this is, in fact, what occurred (see headline from the Irish Times of 27 October, left).
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Doomed to depravity - the Mulhall sisters
 The killing and dismemberment of Farah Swaleh Noor by the Mulhall sisters started with a family 'poisoned by drugs, drink and violence'. By Justine McCarthy . PLUS Irish murders in 2006
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White Heat: The power of gamma rays
 Streaming out from the centre of the galaxy M87, in the constellation Virgo, is one of nature's most amazing phenomena: a black hole-powered jet of electrons and other sub-atomic particles travelling at nearly the speed of light. Like a cosmic searchlight, the blue of the jet contrasts with the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unseen stars in this Hubble space telescope image.
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Irish judges can no longer ignore European human-rights law
It comes as no great surprise that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Act 2003, which was passed to give further effect to the ECHR in Irish law in the context of the Belfast Agreement, has yet to yield noticeable impact in terms of outcomes of cases brought before the Irish courts.
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A national school in Dublin 4, the country's most affluent area, has been pleading for a temporary site for five years to no avail. By Justine McCarthy
Malachy Browne on the must-have accessories for the urban sophisticate.
Eanna Ni Lamhna shares with us the (very scary!) contents of her postbag