The opening of church/state dialogue is itself indicative of a changed relationship between the church and the state in Ireland. Previously the idea of an "opening" of contacts between church and state would have been tautologous, for what passed for dialogue was a continuum. Indeed dialogue hardly captures what was essentially a one way process.

According to a recent newspaper report, the main parties are planning on spending in excess of €20m in the upcoming election campaign. Most of this is to come from private donations.

Maurice Hayes has had a major influence on the reform of the two police forces on the island, he has been a major influence on events in the North and as a senator and chairman of the National Forum on Europe he also exerts considerable influence in the South. By Vincent Browne.

However welcome are the two reports on the reform of An Garda Síochána – that of the new Garda Inspectorate and that of the new Advisory Board – there is a sense of dismay that both bodies repeat recommendations made over previous decades.

On the periphery of the vast Liffey Valley shopping centre in west Dublin, there is a wall topped by railings (see picture). Behind the wall live thousands of people, excluded not just from Liffey Valley but from society generally by poverty and neglect. Liffey Valley is a monument to one of the great injustices perpetrated on the poor of the city.

Many Irish fishermen are in serious debt and some are engaging in illegal fishing to repay bank loans that run to millions of euro. By Max McGuinness

On prime time television on Saturday night, 4 November, Bertie Ahern will address the nation from the City West hotel outside Dublin in what will be no more than an extended party political broadcast, under the guise of being a party conference. The sole purpose of Saturday's event is to garner publicity in the run-up to the next general election and Fianna Fáil will have another bite of this cherry in March when it has another "party conference".

Six weeks after we reported in a front page story that Michael McDowell had bought Thornton Hall lands for eight times the commercial value (see accompanying cover of Village of 14-20 September and the reproduction of the article by Frank Connolly), the penny has dropped with the Committee of Public Accounts and some of the media that this is, in fact, what occurred (see headline from the Irish Times of 27 October, left).

A vacancy has arisen on the Supreme Court with the retirement of Brian McCracken, who was, of course, the most successful of the tribunal chairpersons when he headed the inquiry into the Dunnes Stories payments to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry. He had been promoted from the High Court to the Supreme Court. A few others on the Supreme Court also got promotion: Catherine McGuinness, Susan Denham and Nicholas Kearns, for instance. Catherine McGuinness, incidentally, is also due to retire soon.

The report we publish in this issue of Village (in edited form) is a truly shocking indictment, not just of the Leas Cross nursing home itself, but, far more significantly, the public health system – the health boards, the HSE and the Department of Health and Children. The scale of negligence and indifference of the Department, the Health Boards (as they were) and the HSE are bordering on the criminal.