Media

Two years ago, it was on a Friday. We had re-scheduled our classes in late morning to take the subway downtown. Rush-hour was long past. There were only two other foreigners among the crowd. We exchanged greetings, then short, conspiratorial introductions: outsiders on the same mission. Did it matter if no one else seemed to know or care? One, an "old China hand," signaled us when to get off, how to find the entrance into the baroque façade of the South Cathedral, home to Beijing's tiny community of Christians.

Over the last couple of months a quiet revolution has been taking place on the south side of Dublin. While the DART has been closed at weekends, to allow for work on making stations more accessible for disabled passengers, some of the ugliest structures ever erected in Ireland were being built.

The US secretary of state's tortuous defence of supposedly non-existent CIA torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.

Relatives, and friends of those involved in distressing high-profile court cases should not be subject of invasive press coverage

Just where will reality TV draw the line?
Dermot Bolger hazards a guess

"Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it," said the famous science fiction author Philip K Dick. Former Fianna Fáil Junior Minister Ivor Callely was having difficulty grasping this during his last stand on Pat Kenny's radio show on Thursday, 8 December.

This week, just hours after the Comptroller and Auditor General's (C&AG) report on the PPARS scandal had been published, the consultancy firm, Deloitte and Touche, issued their first statement on the affair. This fiasco has already cost the public €131 million and the report ran to 115 pages.

AN ICTU March and the Irish Ferries controversy meant that unions were top of the news.

Journalist Sam Smyth has fawned on Michael McDowell for a decade-and-a-half. Coincidentally, he has been in a position to publish several 'scoops' connected with the Department of Justice

The Sunday Independent and Irish Independent have run a series of stories undermining the CPI and it members.