AN irritant in Anglo Irish relations at present is the personality of the British ambassador, Walter Haydon. Jack Lynch cannot abide the man, all because of an incident at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Garret FitzGerald has been reviled for excluding women from his shadow cabinet, but the fact is that it isn't his fault. He offered the Posts and Teleegraphs "shadow" to Joan Burke, who took 24 hours to think about it and then turned it down.

TWO MORNING newspapers have indulged in the ludicrous journalistic excercise of writing on the treatment of prisoners while being denied access to the prisoners themselves. Inevitably the reports were hopelessly biased and selective. Dave O'Connell, Vice President of Sinn Fein (Provisional), recently emerged from Portlaoise jail and has given us this first hand account of conditions there.

THE LABOUR Party is gearing itself for its bi-annual purge and as usual the target is what remains of the left wing. The Labour bosses, however, might just pause before completing their purge file and contemplate . the inclusion of one Brendan Halligan.

On the 80th Anniversary of the Petrograd Rising should we celebrate the Russian Revolution. By Paul Foot

THE RECENTLY announced £33.5 million loss by CIE in 1976 hardly surrprised taxpayers long used to heavy loss making by the company. The loss costs every man, woman and child in the country £11 a year and the cost to the taxpayer is £1 a week. '  By Sean D. Barrett

This month the Irish mass market place is due to be invaded by two British super hucksters. Albert Gubay opens the first of his discount supermarkets at Firhouse, with the promise of 12 more, and British Home Stores breaches the very heart of Dublin's shopping area on October 12th when its first Irish store opens on a prime site in O'Connell Street. Here Pamela Readhead and Lindy Naughton assess the effect of these two new arrivals ori Irish shopping patterns, and in particular on our own mass marketeers. By Pamela Readhead and Lindie Naughton .

YOU WOULD think that the authorities would have learned a lesson. They have made a wilderness. socially and economically of central Dublin. Few live there; few walk around it at night. Security men, dogs and the occasional wino have taken cover. The middle classes have uprooted and gone long ago. The poorer classes are left isolated in their high tenements institutionalised poverty, it is - from Donore Flats, through Fatima, across Cook Street by the barren wastes of Sean MacDermott Street to Summerhill, ending in the world's end of Railway Street and Sheriff Street.

What follows is a guide to the complexities of leftwing political groupings in Ireland, and to pressure groups with no particular political affiliation which campaign on a broad spectrum of issues from civil liberties through women's rights to tax r.eform. N~ such directory can possibly hope to be comprehensive given the shifting nature of the political alliances. We've done our best and will welcome brief statements of aims, details of meetings etc from all comers to the political spectrum.

IF MR. James Joyce were to return to Dublin today and if Mr. Leopold Bloom were to come back and make his famous journey through the city as he did on the first "Bloomsday" in 1904, they would both find great changes indeed. Being the kind of persons they were, they would certainly notice very quickly the change in musical taste and the changing face of the Dublin pubs; and, in our day, music and pubs are not unconnected subjects.