Media

And so it is that a small church on the east side of Manhattan, a famine church built by Irish shipwrights, is in danger of being knocked to the ground.

The most corrupt legal entity in the democratic world may be about to change. I refer to the family law system of England and Wales, of which I have some personal experience. It is no small thing to call it more corrupt than the Irish family law system, but I don't lightly describe it in these terms. The prospect of a change arises from a Court of Appeal ruling last week ending the automatic ban in England and Wales on identifying children involved in family court proceedings.

Tedious production and tangy glue at Hot Press in the 1980s lead to creative genius; nobody's talking Martin McGuinness on Let's Talk, but the Folks on the Hill have him down to a tee

Eamon Dunphy's departure from NewsTalk is a blow to the station. He is/was their highest profile personality and even if he can't interview and can't present, he was a sulphuric presence that always promised or threatened something – a serious loss of head, an expletive, a compelling row, or just simple, gorgeous boorishness.

To mark the tenth anniversary of Veronica Geurin's murder, Jim Cusack, writing in the Sunday Independent, produced a potted history of organised crime in the last decade. His article, entitled 'IRA crime godfathers are winning drugs war', argued that the Gardaí and the Criminal Assets Bureau had been initially successful in tackling the problem: "in the two or three years after Veronica's murder drugs importation was disrupted and gangland killing almost became a thing of the past".

The news silly season is upon us.

In fact, the coffee shop was the busiest business in a row of establishments in the station. Every seat was taken. Customers lined the walls. Even the employees were watching what was happening on the one small TV screen where Germany and Sweden were duking it out in the first knock-out round. It wasn't as if it was even a close game, yet it was extraordinary to see how every face was upward turned to the television. Nor was it as if the US were playing, or Mexico, or Trinidad. There were certainly no German jerseys or Swedish helmets among the crowd.

'Have you got a few minutes for the homeless?", a man asked me on Georges Street, Dun Laoghaire last week. I shook my head and walked on, trying to explain to myself why. I already have, I reasoned, three or four direct debits which drip from my bank account on a monthly basis towards one "good cause" or another. Any more and I'll need to keep an eye on cashflow. Nearly every day now, there's a bunch of guys with clipboards lined up between the shopping centre and Penneys.

For the initial couple of days, the coverage of the death and funeral of Charles Haughey was characterised by extremes – on the one hand, the inevitable regurgitation of historical hatreds and the replaying of Haughey's defects and misdeeds; on the other, the attempted veneration of his legendary status as statesman and cultural icon. Almost anything you could lay your eye on was manifestly written by a friend or a foe.

Nostalgia is the order of the day as BBC2 revisits Britain in the '90s and Channel 4 wheels out Noel Edmonds in a bizarre new box-obsessed quiz show