Article 9 B [15] [new article] presented and discussed below

Article 9 A [14] [new article] presented and discussed below:

New Article 8 [9] presented and discussed below 

The text of Article 6, Charter of Fundamental Rights plus commentary is presented below.

The key Articles of the Lisbon Treaty made intelligible

The Lisbon Treaty is published in a manner that is unintelligible.

It is presented as a legal document that merely amends two other legal documents, without showing what effect the amendments have on the amended documents. We have attempted to simplify this by showing both the deletions and additions, thereby we hope, making it intelligible.

For instance, we present Article 57 [64] 2 and 3 in the following manner:

Following increasing pressure to explain revelations of sterling lodgements to his bank accounts uncovered by the Mahon Tribunal, Bertie Ahern announced that he will step down as Taoiseach on 6 May, 2008. Below is the full statement he gave at Government buildings on the morning of 2 April 2008.

Click on the Bertiegate tag at the end of the article for more on Bertie's Money.

Darragh McManus, writer

Favourite book:
1984 by George Orwell. Sheer perfection.

The last book read?
Don DeLillo's Falling Man. A tremendous novel from a true master, his best since Underworld.

In the Dáil on 27 September 2006, Bertie said: “I was involved in [marriage] separation proceedings at the beginning of 1987 and they did not conclude until the end of 1993 in the High Court. Over that period my wife and I had joint [bank] accounts in our names. For obvious reasons, I did not use our joint account. I used cheques separately to deal with issues, and I did not open an account in my own name until afterwards.”

Village has calculated the average results of all national, published opinion polls since the last election, up until the day of printing, Wednesday 2 May. Individual polls are unreliable guides to election results – as the pollsters themselves stress, they give just a snapshot at a particular moment in time, and can be fickle. But when taken together, the polls show trends, and these calculations' average results bring those out. Fine Gael's recent bounce has had little impact upon the average figures, which puts them at just one per cent above their 2002 first-preference vote.