Brian Lenihan was a man of superb intellect with a massive store of knowledge. He was hugely read and very erudite, but he wore it lightly. Many of my colleagues at the Bar wondered what he was doing in politics — he sacrificed a huge drop in his standard of living to go into politics,

Amid much noise from the government benches I attempted to find out when the Government will legislate for changes to the Joint Labour Committees (JLC) system in the Dail last Wednesday, a system set up by Sean Lemass after World War Two to ensure decent pay and working conditions for employees in a range of

According to business mentors the key to success for a new enterprise is: don’t just copy an idea, try to improve it. Maybe the person writing Enda Kenny’s College Green speech was unaware of this mantra. Even if they were, they could be forgiven for choosing to lift the US president’s script word for word,

How is it possible that ministers who have waited so long to take power could not see that their proposed four-year smash-and-grab raid on the pension savings of thousands of private-sector workers is a bad idea? Not only does the idea sound worse every time a minister comes out to promote it, their arguments make

LISTENING to Michael Noonan praising the positive tax-return figures for the first few months of the year is like hearing a rooster taking the credit for the sun rising. The difference in this case is that the rooster didn’t spend all of January and February telling everyone that those sunrises were merely illusions and that

AFTER a week in which we have seen a lot of talk about what happened in the past and some dramatic PR optics designed to suggest some change in the future, I want to bring our focus back again on to issues that may have dramatic consequences for us here and now. The first is

Having marked the 95th anniversary of the Easter 1916 Rising, it is a good time to focus on some positive news and remind ourselves of the words of Sean Lemass, who said that “there is nothing on earth that the people of this country cannot do better, or as well as any other people”. The