Media

So most of the media were credulous about the London terror plot, reporting and repeating police claims and leaks without doubt or even attribution? Ho-hum.

Mickey Devine was the last to die. He left us after 66 days on hungerstrike. I met Mickey in the big cell that passed for a canteen in the prison hospital in the H Blocks of Long Kesh a month before he died.

During the intifada, if a bus was blown up in the streets, it was taken away and the pavements were cleaned. The bodies were attended to by Orthodox volunteers who collect body parts in order that the dead be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition. The blood was cleaned from the No Parking signs. The flesh was scraped from the window panes. The arm bones were removed from stomachs. The leg bones were removed from eye sockets. The ears were lifted off engine parts.

While BBC2 wheels out the usual retrospectives – looking back from the present and the future – Channel 4 proves that life is bizarre enough without imagining new realities

Alearned professor of law, Jerry White of Trinity College, was interviewed on This Week on Sunday (6 August) and asked his opinion on whether it would be constitutional for the government to ignore the results of the recently published provisional census and hold the next election on the existing constituency boundaries.

In the aftermath of the acquital of the Pitstop Ploughshares Five on charges of criminal damage to a US military plane in Shannon, a large number of commentators speculated about the precedent established by the ruling.

If the average Latin American peasant went to his bed one night and somehow woke up in Cuba the next morning, he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

The latest shift in the attack on the Irish language and the democratic rights of those who speak it has come with a demand for 'compulsory' Irish to be dropped in the legal profession.

It is strange that the recent upholding by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of Ireland (BCCI) of a complaint against the former NewsTalk 106 presenter Eamon Dunphy has not been jumped upon by those who oppose the setting up of a press council. If ever there was a good argument against such a body, it is to be found in the skewed and dangerous logic of this finding.

The BBC are helping Andrew Lloyd Webber find a star for The Sound of Music, but they're wasting their time, says Dermot Bolger