Media

The Government's new €34.4bn transport plan is visionary, but the public won't be holding its breath, given the number of such projects that have failed to materialise. By Eoin Ó Murchú

There was little novelty in the news in recent weeks.

Last week the BBC started a multi-part dramatisation of what is argueably Charles Dickens' best work, the huge novel Bleak House. It is a devastating critique of the legal system as operated around the courts of Chancery in London in the 19th Century, when lawyers acted with deep cynicism, concerned more with gaining money and power for themselves than with any sense of justice.

Aengus Fanning brazenly used a front-page apology to the Lawlor family to boast about the size of his newspaper's readership. This disingenuous act speaks a great deal about the character of the Sunday Independent, and its editor, Aengus Fanning

It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.

Right. Where was I? Oh yeah, my friend Paul's birthday do. When extending the invite to me a few weeks ago, he said, and I quote, "Hey, it's my birthday next week, so we're having a few drinks and a bit food in my place. And seriously – no gifts, okay?". So I didn't buy him a gift, much to the bemusement of another friend Declan's wife Helen, who was only dying for party night to roll around, hoping I would be shown up in polite company as some sort of tight-arse.

The makeup of the population living on the island of Ireland will change rapidly over the next 25 years. By 2030 about 1.5 million people in Ireland will be foreign-born. This new population is being ignored by media and advertisers. Is this not a missed opportunity, asks Conor Brady

Four newspapers owned or controlled by Tony O'Reilly published the story about Liam Lawlor and 'the prostitute', knowing that it was mere speculation. By Vincent Browne

A lonely Daire O'Brien talks sport; Mary T O'Connor gets a hard time for her exposé
of bad behaviour in the Garda; Frame Two looks at the brutal reign of Ceausescu
and An Bathadh Mór reminds us of a hurricane in the west of Ireland in 1927

I t was radio and the Tribunal re-enactments that gave wings to Liam Lawlor, introduced us to the twists and turns of his mind, that absolutely dazzling narcissism that maybe, in the end, blinded some to the fact that here was a real human being. Ironically enough, it was radio this week that put him back into human form, brought his family, agonised and angry, into the picture and it was there too, on Today With Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) that Senator Mary O'Rourke, in sympathising with his wife, said "She'll be on the lonely road now, the road of widowhood.