Whowouldathunkit? There they go, along Lexington Avenue, laden down with their shopping bags. In through the revolving doors at Tiffany's. Laughing and leaning on each other on the escalators in Bloomingdales. Tramping through Lord and Taylors. Slinking through the perfume aisles at Macy's. Emerging, slightly pampered, from the trendy Soho nail salon. Standing in the queue for the bus up to the Woodbury Commons. Coming out, slightly punchdrunk, from the lingerie aisles at Victoria's Secret.

The second part of In Search of the Pope's Children, which looked at the property boom in Ireland, descended into sweeping generalisations, far-fetched propositions and cliché

Daire Whelan charts the rise and fall, but mostly the fall, of the League of Ireland, while Patrick West looks at some of the spectacular Irish soccer players of the past 50 years. Reviewed by Ken Early

The term 'lifetime's work' is bandied about with irritating regularity. If we read every book whose blurb uses this old ruse, there would be little time for anything else. This makes the discovery of a work that can truly justify this boast a singular event.

A clever but strained production, Cyrano is saved by its final act when the script finds its voice and we realise it's all about love, writes Colin Murphy

Brendan O'Carroll tells Colin Murphy about making people laugh, stealing jokes, plans for his political party and why critics are nothing but 'failed writers' 

While serving in the RUC, John Weir colluded with the UVF in at least 10 murders in Ulster in the mid-1970s. In an interview with Frank Connolly, he claims high-ranking RUC officers knew about the activities of the loyalist gang that killed at least 76 people between 1972 and 1977

As the budget approaches, the campaign waged by Independent Newspapers against stamp duty intensifies. For the second week running, the Sunday Independent's lead story focused on the issue, although it was enough to glance at the headline – 'Stamp duty changes are not ruled out' – to appreciate how little information it contained. Not only was the headline a quote from an anonymous "informed source", it was formulated in such a way as to be quite meaningless.

The official sequel to Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Scarlet, has been commissioned by Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital Charity to compensate for the fact that the copyright on the original book, donated to the hospital by JM Barrie, has expired.

On 30 July, Alan Ruddock produced a long opinion piece in the Sunday Independent attacking stamp duty as "the mother of all rip-offs". Over the following weeks, the iniquities of stamp duty and its injurious effects on Irish society were repeatedly denounced by Independent Newspapers' writers. For example, on 13 September, the Independent ran an article, entitled 'Stamp duty is now the most effective contraception', which went so far as to blame the tax for Ireland's declining birth rate.