A slight bop on the nose for Paul Krugman. If you're going to claim that the gutting of the food inspection bureaucracy has led to rampant food poisoning, it would help if, following said gutting, food poisoning had actually risen.

Playing with numbers: true, there are only 3 million registered Irish voters: but their voice is perhaps louder than those of Europe's 9,225 legislators? Or perhaps should be?

The Charity Commission believes that blogs are not educational. (More here.) From that we might conclude that the Charities Commission in incapable of recognising what is in fact educational....which raises the question of why they are ruling on the tax breaks that educational charities should or should not get?

How to have very low administrative costs like Medicare: don't do any administrating.

There are indeed always unintended consequences. Just another example of why planning an economy or its manpower doesn't work.

As is said, if this lot are against it (whatever it is) there's almost certainly something to be said for it.

And finally, perhaps not the best product design of all time and bringing home the full horror of the housing crash.