From Cork to Toronto

Independent TDs given "party leaders allowance" - 39,000 untaxable, untraced Euros each. This should be abolished immediately and factored into the public funding per vote parties receive - it's a recipe for more and more single issue candidates.

Another chapter in the demolition of the agri-food industry in Mitchelstown. This is another blow for my home region which has been under threat pretty much since the original Mitchelstown-Ballyclough merger to form Dairygold I think. The only thing keeping things afloat is the new road to Cork. Let's hope that "Breeo". the vehicle Dairygold created to distance itself from the industries that built the brands, will at least consider some local buyout of the facilities to keep the jobs in local hands but is the entrepreneurial spirit there? History would suggest it's a long shot.

The answer to every question in the overcoddled state of Iowa seems to be someone else's money, and because of America's simply bizarre method of selecting its First Citizen, what Iowa wants it all too often gets. The last season of the West Wing described buttering up Iowans by promising subsidy as "taking the pledge". First they wanted subsidies to build ethanol plants, and despite increasing evidence that not only is corn a poor feedstock and ethanol a poor biofuel but making ethanol from corn is a greenhouse gas polluting process , they got the money. Now too many distilleries have been built, the price of ethanol is plummeting because of poor distribution and the corn farmers answer is, you've guessed it - " mo' money! "

As predicted, the Philadelphia Flyers have reacted to the 20-game suspension by sending Downie to the AHL , where he may or may not be banned for the term depending on review. Recently Chelsea were brought up by the Football Association for a charge of " failing to control their players " and it strikes me that the Flyers are getting off pretty lightly here. Downie was playing pre-season under an existing suspension after all, not to mention a well known series of other incidents starting with an on-ice finale to an off-ice hazing ritual. Indeed, the OHL and Hockey Canada might have their own case to answer on how Downie got in his current situation, since his former coach claims to have recommended Downie be told to enter counselling but nothing came of it. So what's the solution? If a player receives a suspension, even in pre-season, he may not be released, traded or sent down for the duration of the suspension, and while pay could be docked it could not be counted...

Paul Wells, writing on Gordon Brown's settling in as Prime Minister again : Brown isn't Blair. But neither is he Paul Martin. He let his predecessor pick his own departure date. He hasn't felt the need to purge the party of its old guard. He is so sure of who he is that he needn't go on about who he isn't. Stephane Dion could use some of Brown's discipline, not just for himself but for his team. Jamie Carroll's loose talk about Liberal hiring this week would probably have more severe consequences in a Brown setup, especially for someone who had already damaged the Dion brand with his blurting out about his " sleepless nights ". But then there's this bit at the end: In 1805 Horatio Nelson told his fleet: "England expects that every man will do his duty." Nelson was hard to beat, too. I'm having the oddest sense of deja vu ...

The Irish Minister of Defence, having announced a commitment of 350 troops to Chad, now wants the UN to tell him they'll be safe . I'm hoping that what he means by that is that the troops will have sufficiently robust Rules of Engagement and that when he meets the Sudanese Foreign Minister he will receive assurances that the latter's visiting oil workers (and alumni of the People's Liberation Army) will stay near to their rigs rather than freelancing with the Janjaweed.

Societies change and so do laws but it should be a priority of government to avoid retrospective actions, creating difficulties for citizens who made good faith, legal decisions only to find the law changed adversely in a way that compromises those decisions. The decision by Ontario to disclose the identity of adoptees and birth parents without the safeguard of a veto by either side was set aside by the Superior Court of Ontario this week. The change in the law was pushed by Marilyn Churley , a former NDP MPP who had gone through a lot of anguish to find the child she gave up. Unfortunately she pushed Ontario law up to and past other jurisdictions who recognised that adoption is one of the ultimate "hard cases make bad law" situations and gave little recognisance to the bargain which women made decades ago in the form of a veto. The only safeguard offered to either children or parents was to levy massive fines against the party who refused to stop attempting to make cont...