Fingal County Council (FCC) recently issued a statement saying the information supplied by the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) for their planning application for a new runway was "insufficient and inadequate". This was the second time FCC had to ask the DAA for further information or clarification on future traffic projections they had supplied. The inadequate traffic assessment isn't the only area on which a lack of clarification appears.

Is Ireland a multicultural society? No. I am Irish, my wife is Irish and my daughter is Irish. Ordinarily, such a statement would not be a big deal. By "ordinarily", I mean if I were from Galway, Roscommon or Cork, in the same way that my wife is from Mayo. But I am from the Yoruba land of western Nigeria. Therefore, many people here don't regard me as being really Irish. Nor, for that matter, do many of these people regard my mixed-race daughter to be as equally Irish as other children born on the same day in Dublin's Holles Street hospital.

More than 3,000 people have signed a petition asking the Government for an independent inquiry into the death of a young man who died after being in Garda custody. Terence Wheelock died on 16 September last, having been found unconscious in a cell in Store St Garda station on 2 June. According to gardaí, they found him with a ligature around his neck, indicating he tried to hang himself.

Fr Donal Collins

In 1966, Fr Donal Collins, a teacher in St Peter's secondary school, was transferred to a parish in London after complaints that he was abusing boys in the school's attic dormitory at night.

Two years later, Collins returned to teaching at St Peter's. In 1974 he was placed in charge of swimming lessons. In 1988, he was appointed principal of St Peter's by Bishop Brendan Comiskey.

The Bar Council has been reserved in publicising its own scheme, which provides direct access to barristers, on a no-fee basis. The Bar Council Voluntary Assistance Scheme was established in 2004 and facilitates direct, free access to barristers by the public, if the case is brought through a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Historians, according to one of ourselves, share with psychoanalysts a predilection for moments of high drama. "It is the great upheaval," observed T K Rabb, "the explosion of new possibilities that arouses most attention." This predilection is partly a product of the nature of history; it is, after all, the study of change over time, so it is scarcely surprising that sudden changes or changes of great scale attract most attention. And it is partly a product of the nature of the historical record.

Chairman: Frank Murphy

Murphy is a retired Supreme Court judge. He was appointed to the High Court in 1982, and to the Supreme Court in 1996. He had a significant practice in commercial law prior to that at the Bar. He is currently chair of the Residential Institutions Redress Review Committee, which hears appeals of awards by the Redress Board to victims of institutional abuse.

The first annual Human Security Report finds – despite evidence from Afghanistan to Iraq, Chechnya to Congo – that violent conflict around the world is declining. Can this really be true, asks Paul Rogers

A heated Dáil debate between Mary Harney and Liz McManus errupted as news broke that the health services' pay-roll system may have to be scrapped

Tony Blair's statements since the London bombings make clear there will be no safe hiding place for terrorists. Yet he has refused to provide access to crucial files on the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and suspicion of British involvement remains.