In introducing a £5 weekkly job subsidy for everybody employed in the textile and shoe industry, George Colley is really only fiddling about with a much larger prooblem in an ad hoc manner tyypical of most politicians of all shades. Of course he had been I put up to this by the British Government with its now two-year-old £20 a week temmporary employment subsidy.

OLD JURY'S : ONE of the biggest property coups was pulled off this year by, of all people, the Pembroke Estate. This latter of. course is best known for its ground rerit activities but in the last three years has become involved in property developpment, possibily because of the large number of people taking advantage of their Legal right to buyout their own ground landlord.

They lied about Bugsy:

AT one pm, Thursday, August 31, 19 people from the Sean McDermott Street-Summerhill area left Dublin airport for a holiday in Benidorm, Spain, booked through Joe Walsh Tours. Their holiday trip was to trigger the most disgraceful outburst of journalistic gutterrsnipery seen in Dublin for some time.

AT a time when other team sports are becoming better organised in Ireland, rugby at an international level remains in a state of chaos and indiscipline with inevitable consequences in international championships. Ireland has won just one match in the last two years and we were lucky at that.

YOU'D better shape up because need a man," purrs Olivia Newton John. "My heart is set on you. You're the that I want. Feel me."

Land: PROBABLY the smartest investment in the years before Ireland joined the European Economic Community was farm land. Since 1973, and especially in the last two years the price of agricultural land has soared than 150 percent.

IT seems that the issue of Brian Maguire's death will continue to bother Northern Secretary of State Roy Mason for some time yet. His attempt to speed the inquest into the death of the Castlereagh prissoner was stymied by the family's solicitor, Pascal O'Hare, who requested more time to examine evidence and assemble witnesses.

FIGURES just released by the British Government show that since the abolition of Stormont in 1972 and the imposition of direct rule in the North the number of people working for the state has jumped by nearly 40%. In 1972 just under a quarter of the workkforce held jobs in the public sector but by the end of 1977 one in every three workers, 165,000 in all, were dependent either directly or indirectly on Westminster for their weekly wage packet. As either civil servants, teachers, doctors, or utility workers it's the governnment that feeds their families.

IF the wage claim now being pressed by two hundred teleecomunications engineers in the Belfast area is successful the British government's policy of holding pay increases in the coming year to 5% will, as far as the North's 500,000 workers are concerned, be in tatters.

THAT enfant terrible of the Labour Party, Dr. John O'Connell, has fought with his colleagues in the party throughhout his career in politics. He has done so with relish and resourcefulness, and though on several occasions there have been murmurings about expullsion, and about even worse things like promotion to party office, he has managed to hold on.