Blame it on the Stones.

For those in the aromatic multitude who looked like they'd still be wearing flowers in their hair if they'd still been wearing hair, Micko's magic bash at Slane was a juddering joy-ride back to the dear, dead days when they really believed Route 66 was the Ammerican Road To Socialism. And us kids enjoyed it, too. So that's all right.

Last month I personally, myself, exclusively, broke the dramatic news that the Stones gig at Slane would be formally announced in Dublin's Gresham Hotel at half eight in the morning of June 10 - Magill publication day.

The announcement that the Rolling Stones are indeed going to play Slane next month comes at half past eight this morning (June 10) at a press conference in Dublin's Gresham Hotel. Tickets go on sale ninety minutes later - just enough time for the pirate radios to flash the news to a thrilled city and for the evening papers to send photographers round to picture the queues and maybe chaos outside ticket outlets.

The Senate election is the most 'insiders' of all Irish elections and it has one underlying theme - survival. It is essentially an underground campaign with the deals and double-deals, the back-stabbing and character assassination carefully hidden from media and public view.

THE RETURN of Douglas Gageby as editor of The Irish Times, hailed in some quarters as a victory for "workers' power", was nothing of the sort. It was a last ditch effort by a desperate manageement to save its business from deepening financial worries, and three months later there is no guarantee it will succeed.

The journalists who have been floating in a cloud of euphoria since Gageby reoccupied his old office seem to have forgotten that the second coming usually presages the final Day of Judgement.