ONCE upon a time, governments used the Easter, summer and Christmas recesses to focus on implementing policies. Not this Government. Within days of the Dail finishing up for the Easter Break, the parties were sniping and attacking each other. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s Joan Burton was first into the fray. Playing to the increasingly nervous Labour gallery,

THREE years ago, this month, Roy Collins was shot in the back in his family’s pub and amusement arcade in the Roxboro Shopping Centre. As I wrote here at the time, “his killers — and the people who sent them — did more than gun down a father of two and bring pain to a

The conventional political wisdom is that a new government takes the tough actions in its first year or two so that the benefits will have started to appear in time for the next election. For whatever reason — be it confusion, lack of direction or the sheer elation of getting into office — this administration