We all face crisis decisions in our lives. We save and borrow to buy a house. We change houses, if we can afford to, as our families grow or we enjoy success. Sometimes this decision is made to meet a reversal in fortune. We bank our earnings and savings and trust the banks to treat us truthfully and with respect for our custom. We make other important investments -- all of them on some kind of trust. And in all of this, we depend on the law and on the part we can play in the shaping of this through the democracy to which we belong.

Most of us have pride in this system and want it protected by those who govern us. That is the nature of our society and the nature of human response to it. Out of its proper working, in good times and in bad, has been fashioned our love of country and of the places to which we belong. Older people have known bad times more than good ones. The early creation of what we hold dear was not easy; it was fashioned out of emigration, labour abroad, hard times, wartime isolation, and even, in the 1950s, misgivings about our survival as a society. Read More...

Whatever Lucinda Creighton may have meant in her reference to the possibility that we might 'revert to clinging on to the coattails of the UK', this is not our position

Ronan Fanning developed an interesting argument in the 'Sunday Independent' a week ago. It was two-pronged. It had a debating dimension that attempted to be rational and historical, dealing with Ireland's relationship with Europe and invoking Sean Lemass as the main force in what he had to say. Read More...

What I will describe as 'conventional wisdom', using the term in its most pejorative way, is still being applied -- and widely applied -- to an economic and political crisis that is in the process of devouring us. Its ingredients are as follows:

The wisdom is: we must stick together. That means the states that are in the eurozone. They have stuck together, tightly, through an increasingly long chronology of failed measures and have been failed by these. Read More...

Ireland has closer connections with Britain than with any other European country. We do more trade with Britain. We speak the same language. We have, or had, the same democratic standards, our own emerging, with independence, from the British model. The same applies to our laws and a good deal of our legislation.

There are few men and women of even moderate means who do not rely on the British financial markets and hold investments. These are quoted on the London Stock Exchange, the affairs of which are closely followed. Share prices, comment on the market and practical advice are all part of the reporting in the main Irish daily and Sunday newspapers. Read More...

The real headache facing the Government, as ministers like Leo Varadkar have indicated, is not the Budget. Other ministers are less sure of themselves about what will happen at the forthcoming EU summit and whether or not we can screw our courage to the sticking point as the euro crisis deepens. But the summit is very much our crisis as much as everyone else's and recognising this as well as knowing what to do about it overshadows our lives as nothing before has done.

Moreover, we are as much part of the solution as Germany is, and whereas Germany represents herself as being on a special level, enjoying the solitary splendour of supremacy and dictating the non-democratic terms of its fiscal empire, we are representative of a majority of the other nations. Read More...