The Irish Times reported an untrue story on its front page about Irish pro-Palestinian activists - then reported it again and again. The Press Ombudsman shrugged his shoulders, and the Press Council couldn’t be bothered. The Dervish affair tells a worrying story about the state of our press, and about the failure of Ireland’s much-vaunted “independent” form of press regulation. Harry Browne reports

Last week’s unprecedented inundation of New York and, simultaneously, an almost-routine immersion of Venice both highlighted capitalism’s indifference to the fragility of urban life, writes Harry Browne.

To be sure...

You’d like to think it must have made some sense at the time, all those weeks ago when the various PR flaks for the Yes side decided that ‘Stability’ and ‘Certainty’ would be the keynotes for their campaign.

My dad died 31 years ago this week. My mom, who has taken up web-development in her mid-70s, went looking for an obscure picture of him to scan into an anniversary email to her children and grandchildren, but instead turned up this beautiful piece of organising ephemera from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, c 1968.

Keith Duggan went to America to watch a colllege-football game. He came home to the Irish Times with a remarkable piece of militarist propaganda. By Harry Browne.

The use of Irish airspace by foreign military aircraft has cost the State €25 million in the last ten years. By Harry Browne.

The State has spent more than €25 million in the last 10 years to cover the costs of foreign military aircraft using Irish-administered airspace, most of which are US planes en route to Europe and war-zones in the Middle East and southwest Asia.

A new Wikileaks cable reveals further evidence of Irish officials at pains to help the US in its use of Shannon Airport for military purposes. By Harry Browne.

Dermot Ahern assured the US ambassador in Dublin in 2006 that the Irish government was prepared to change the law that had allowed the acquittal of five anti-war activists for damaging a US Navy plane.

A newly released Wikileaks cable reveals that the Taoiseach desperately sought US assurances on Shannon renditions. By Harry Browne.

In all the hollering and shouting and brouhaha over public service pay and conditions one point was (strangely) seldom if ever made. And that point is: why, instead of insisting the public sector should step up, get busy, and be more like the private, don't we insist that the private become more like the public?

One of the more interesting questions to be asked about this election is: Where did all the Fianna Fáilers go? Not, it seems, to H&M to buy themselves blue shirts. Having crunched the numbers, Harry Browne finds that much of the Fianna Fáil vote went left, a result that gives the lie to talk of a solidly conservative centre-right majority in Ireland.