IN best Late Late Show fashion, there was something for everybody in the results of last Friday’s election down South when it came to the main three parties.
WHETHER Fine Gael will pay the price the polls suggest for a shockingly incompetent election campaign we won’t know until Sunday or Monday. But regardless of whether leader Simon Harris gets another go at the big job or not, the party’s arrogance and hubris will in future be a political case study in how not to win friends and influence people.
NEWS that Stormont has cobbled together a package that will allow pensioners in the North to receive £100 towards the cost of winter fuel is welcome – but that welcome comes of course with terms and conditions.
ANOTHER year, another toxic round of media angst and recrimination over the issue of remembrance.
The stunning victory of Donald Trump in the US Presidential election will usher in changes which will affect the entire globe - Ireland very much included.
NEWS that the DUP had been secretly meeting with Sinn Féin while telling their supporters and everyone else who would listen that they weren’t is just another indicator of the jawdropping hypocrisy that was common currency as the peace process progressed.
ANOTHER Halloween season, another distressing tale of a child suffering serious injuries from a firework.
IT is entirely possible to point out that Sinn Féin need to learn lessons about recent controversies involving party reps and employees and at the same time point out – in week three – that the party is held to a standard so much more rigorous than other parties that it makes the mind boggle.
THE worrying series of incidents that has taken place in recent days in the Suffolk Road area illustrates both the importance of a community spirit that mobilises to protect its most vulnerable and how that community spirit can easily morph into chaos.
THERE is something deeply, fundamentally wrong at the heart of this society when it comes to loyalist paramilitaries. And the thing that is wrong seems so deeply embedded that it’s hard to see what can be done to bring us to a place where we are all agreed that murdering drug-dealers can have no place in everyday life here.
POLITICAL unionism knows full well what it has to do if it is to reverse the seemingly inexorable drift towards union’s end.
WHILE the announcement on Wednesday afternoon by Secretary of State Hilary Benn of an independent public inquiry into the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane can never be a cause for celebration, the Finucane family are entitled to at least take a breath and draw quiet satisfaction from this – the single most important victory to date in their long battle for justice.
THIS week's Aisling Bursary presentation in the magnificently reimagined St Mary's University College was West Belfast at its very best.
SATURDAY sees the annual Brian Robinson Memorial Parade celebration on the Shankill. And celebration it most certainly is, going by the past footage, which shows the event to be rambunctious and supremacist in nature, with many bands giving it their kick-the-Pope best.
FIRST Minister Michelle O’Neill has been defending her decision to green-light the banning of puberty-blockers by Health Minister and soon-again-to-be UUP leader Mike Nesbitt.