A referendum this year on either the intergovernmental agreement on fiscal union or on amendments to existing EU treaties would offer the Irish people a welcome chance to express their outrage. By Vincent Browne.

There is the prospect for the Irish people of a welcome opportunity this year to express their rage at the EU, which has inflicted €100 billion of debt on this country to safeguard financial institutions in Germany, France, Belgium and elsewhere.

2011 was a miserable year, and we face the prospect of more misery in 2012 and beyond. By Vincent Browne.

It was the Bryan Dobson interview with Seán Gallagher on the evening of Tuesday, 2 October, that scuttled Gallagher's presidential campaign, not so much the theatrics of the previous night on Frontline.

There are press conferences most days in Buswells Hotel across from Leinster House - press conferences of the smaller political parties, of various lobby groups and protest movements. The press conferences are often vacuous and forgettable.

I showed up there last Wednesday morning because Margaret Irwin of Justice for the Forgotten had phoned me. I was not expecting much, except to express solidarity again with the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974.

Ireland faces the loss of its right to choose its own economic and budgetary policy. By Vincent Browne.

We are on the verge of one of the following – an economic catastrophe – made all the more likely by the Brussels European Council meeting last Thursday and Friday; a constitutional crisis in the EU, which may collapse the union; or a surrender of sovereignty, which will nullify a lot of what remains of Ireland’s independence as a state.

Enda Kenny's assertion last week that Irish people are not responsible for the crisis was a bogus one. By Vincent Browne.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said in his television address to the Irish people last Sunday: "You are not responsible for the crisis." If no Irish person is responsible for the crisis, then who is?

The political classes and the media seem largely indifferent to the deep inequality in Irish society. By Vincent Browne.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty which established quasi-independence for 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland was signed 90 years ago yesterday.

Journalists spend an awful lot of time demanding better of others. Perhaps it's time they did the same for themselves. By Vincent Browne.

Over the last several weeks in Britain, the Leveson Inquiry, chaired by Judge Brian Leveson, has heard evidence of grotesque media intrusion into the private lives of individuals.

Given the scope of the Broadcasting Authority's powers, its investigation into RTÉ's libel of Fr Kevin Reynolds seems pointless. By Vincent Browne.

It is not at all clear what powers the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland has to institute an inquiry into how RTÉ managed to perpetrate the horrendous libel on the Mill Hill Missionaries priest, Kevin Reynolds.

RTÉ still has questions to answer about its defamation of Fr Kevin Reynolds. By Vincent Browne.

In March or April of this year, a person approached RTE with sensational claims concerning a priest of the Mill Hill Missionaries, Fr Kevin Reynolds, who had been a missionary in Kenya from 1971 to 2004 and who was then parish priest of Ahascragh, Co Galway.

It seems that the person approached was the journalist Aoife Kavanagh, a Morning Ireland presenter who also worked with Prime Time.

Irish politics is based on the idea that the State's job is to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. By Vincent Browne.

Enda Kenny, Michael Noonan and the others in this Cabinet can reasonably anticipate that the more outrageously unfair the coming budget will be, the more it will be welcomed in the corridors of power in Brussels, Berlin, Frankfurt and Paris, and the more Ministers will congratulate themselves for taking tough decisions that are in fact not remotely tough on themselves or their cronies.