THE RECENTLY announced £33.5 million loss by CIE in 1976 hardly surrprised taxpayers long used to heavy loss making by the company. The loss costs every man, woman and child in the country £11 a year and the cost to the taxpayer is £1 a week. '  By Sean D. Barrett

This month the Irish mass market place is due to be invaded by two British super hucksters. Albert Gubay opens the first of his discount supermarkets at Firhouse, with the promise of 12 more, and British Home Stores breaches the very heart of Dublin's shopping area on October 12th when its first Irish store opens on a prime site in O'Connell Street. Here Pamela Readhead and Lindy Naughton assess the effect of these two new arrivals ori Irish shopping patterns, and in particular on our own mass marketeers. By Pamela Readhead and Lindie Naughton .

YOU WOULD think that the authorities would have learned a lesson. They have made a wilderness. socially and economically of central Dublin. Few live there; few walk around it at night. Security men, dogs and the occasional wino have taken cover. The middle classes have uprooted and gone long ago. The poorer classes are left isolated in their high tenements institutionalised poverty, it is - from Donore Flats, through Fatima, across Cook Street by the barren wastes of Sean MacDermott Street to Summerhill, ending in the world's end of Railway Street and Sheriff Street.

What follows is a guide to the complexities of leftwing political groupings in Ireland, and to pressure groups with no particular political affiliation which campaign on a broad spectrum of issues from civil liberties through women's rights to tax r.eform. N~ such directory can possibly hope to be comprehensive given the shifting nature of the political alliances. We've done our best and will welcome brief statements of aims, details of meetings etc from all comers to the political spectrum.

IF MR. James Joyce were to return to Dublin today and if Mr. Leopold Bloom were to come back and make his famous journey through the city as he did on the first "Bloomsday" in 1904, they would both find great changes indeed. Being the kind of persons they were, they would certainly notice very quickly the change in musical taste and the changing face of the Dublin pubs; and, in our day, music and pubs are not unconnected subjects.

When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 at the age of 31 one hundred thousand people filed through the New York funeral parlour where his body lay. Now the legendary Hollywood lover has been brought back to the screen. Valentino, which opens in DiIblin next month, is the product of an explosively talented partnership. Ken Russell, the director, has become a byword for extravagant controversy with such films as Isadora, The Devils and Savage Messiah. To play Valentino, he chose another superstar, the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. By DEIRDRE FRIEL

'Dear Davy, send a bottle of the best over to the City Hall for myself and Carson - your's Mick.'

I HAVE ALWAYS been constrained to regard Davy Byrne's as the archtype, the doyen, the centre, the place where the trams go: in other words as the downntown pub. If somebody says on the teleephone "pub" and "down-town" I think of Davy Byrne's.

A ROSC "assemblage" entitled The Office, by the Polish artist, Wladyslaw Hasior, includes in it the broken image of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is skewered to the backside of a Polish cooking utennsil, there is a wire noose around his neck, and his feet have been broken off. From the top of his head stands up a tuft of synthetic hair, and he seems to be preesiding over a brass tap, out of which pours a stream of groszy, the coins with which Polish people buy Polish goods.

Niall Toibin remembers 'Gargantuan Galas of Gargle'.

'I for one could not help wishing the philistine wish that the players could be allowed to forget about rehearsals, and about arguing with God, and get on with the play.' Abbey Theatre: Living Quarters by Brian Friel. Directed by Joe Dowling.

Review by Conor Cruise O'Brien