A friend said to me over supper, one night this week that Brian Lenihan was showing true patriotism in his ongoing confession of what really happened over the bailout.

My own thoughts on this were eccentric enough. I thought of John Gower, the English poet and author of Confessio Amantis, a 33,000-word poem about life and love written at the time of Chaucer. Read More...

To all appearances, Micheal Martin, in the announcement of the new Fianna Fail frontbench, has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Even with the restrictions under which he operated, he had the chance to start a recovery programme for the party that he helped bring to its knees, but seems to have grasped on a programme of action not unlike that of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, Don Quixote himself, when he set out to battle windmills.

Martin is protected by the neophyte character of much of his team and it will be interesting to see how they respond to the challenge. But the real problem he faced was that of dealing with what looks like a relentless act of collective self-immolation by a once-great political organisation. Read More...