At an event on Monday marking the centre’s 20th anniversary, he thanked the Muslim community there “for the important role you have played throughout those two decades in enabling Ireland’s Islamic community to become fully engaged, and active members of their wider social and national community.”

The Islamic community had played “its own important role in creating the great tapestry of multiple cultures that forms modern-day Ireland,” he said.

Noting how “our Muslim population has grown significantly in the past 20 years and today an estimated 65,000 Muslims call Ireland home,” he said “your community is a multidimensional one encompassing citizens from Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, Algeria, Libya, Somalia, South Africa, Syria and Iraq who bring with them their own unique customs, culture, language and family traditions.”

Like so many others “who have arrived on our shores as strangers, but with minds open to the forging of new friendships and connections, your road has not always been an easy one,” he said.

In Ireland “we must ensure we create a landscape in which different cultural identities are enabled to exist in harmony, neither subservient to the other; one which encourages a respectful curiosity about different cultures and enables easy access to all points of entry to Irish culture,” he said.

Second visit

It was Mr Higgins’s second visit to the centre where he opened a Celebration of Islamic Arts exhibition. It, he said, provided “an impressive overview of the great culture and heritage which so defines your community”.

It was important “in a world where advocates of a distorted and hateful version of Islam are persecuting those of other persuasions, first and foremost other Muslims, and seeking, in their fanatical fury, to destroy the cultural traces of previous civilisations,” he said.

Today, “at this particularly historic juncture, opportunities to encounter Islamic culture directly are an important tool in counteracting an increasingly wide-spread Islamophobia.”

This, he said, was “fuelled by an ignorance of the politics and history of the Middle East, ill-informed stereotyping, a blindness to the many ways in which our Muslim citizens and residents enrich our lives, and a misrepresentation of the tenets of the Islamic faith itself.”

Last month, the society brought High Court proceedings against Waterford-based Agenda Computers Ltd and its director David Smyth, alleging breach of solicitors’ regulations by purporting to act as as solicitor.

“Claims harvesting” occurs when members of the public searching the Internet for the possibility of bringing a legal action are given the impression they are getting in touch with a legal firm when they are not.

The society on Monday also brought proceedings against Anthony Russell and the website of his company, Accident Claims Helpline Ltd

Paul Anthony McDermott SC, said this was another case about a “claims-harvesting website”. He said Mr Russell had written to the society saying the site had been taken down, he had no intention of being in breach of the law and the company was also to be wound down.

The president of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Kelly, said he was prepared to adjourn the matter for three weeks. If Mr Russell and his company had not entered a formal appearance to the case by then, an order could be made in his absence, he said.

The judge also adjourned for three weeks the case against Agenda Computers and Mr Smyth. Mr Smyth, who denies the allegations, told the court he had had difficulty getting legal representation but had an appointment with a solicitor in Waterford this week.

U.S. Soccer did not announce a replacement for Klinsmann, but the former United States coach Bruce Arena is considered the leading candidate.

U.S. Soccer, the federation that oversees the sport in the United States and runs the national team programs, announced the change. Klinsmann also was dismissed as U.S. Soccer’s technical director, a lower-profile — but significantly important — role that gave him broad responsibility to overhaul soccer development in the United States.

Klinsmann’s firing was not a surprise. The United States sustained two painful losses in its opening games of the final round of regional World Cup qualifying recently, starting with a 2-1 defeat against Mexico that was the Americans’ first loss in a home World Cup qualifier in 15 years. Then came the 4-0 thrashing against the Ticos in which Klinsmann’s team looked alternately disorganized, dispirited and — perhaps most damningly — disinterested.

“While we remain confident that we have quality players to help us advance to Russia 2018, the form and growth of the team up to this point left us convinced that we need to go in a different direction,” Sunil Gulati, U.S. Soccer’s president, said in a statement.

Klinsmann, 52, was a polarising figure as the United States coach, attracting both praise and disdain from hard-core fans throughout his tenure.

He arrived to much fanfare in 2011, finally agreeing to a contract after Gulati had pursued him on-and-off for five years. Vowing to elevate the national team program in a way that “suits the American game,” he led the team through a successful qualifying campaign for the 2014 World Cup. But he was criticized for saying in an article published in The New York Times Magazine that he did not believe the Americans had any chance to win the World Cup, as well as for his decision to leave the popular veteran Landon Donovan off the final squad he took to Brazil and for a string of comments denigrating the American professional league, Major League Soccer, even as it produced nearly half his roster.

Drawn into a very difficult group, the United States beat Ghana, drew with Portugal and lost to the eventual winners, Germany, but advanced to the knockout round on goal difference. The Americans were eliminated by Belgium in extra time in the round of 16, nearly winning a match in which they were significantly outplayed.

Some thought Klinsmann’s tenure should have ended then. In many other countries, the national team coach generally keeps a job for no more than one four-year cycle — Klinsmann himself stepped down as coach of the German national team after just two years despite leading his home country to a third-place finish in the 2006 World Cup — but the United States has often opted for more stability. Gulati actually gave Klinsmann a contract extension for another four years even before a single game was played in Brazil. It was a surprising show of confidence, and Klinsmann also was made technical director of the federation in his new contract, further strengthening his connection to U.S. Soccer.

It did not take long, however, for criticism of Klinsmann to escalate during his second cycle. The previous coach, Bob Bradley, had been fired after a poor performance in the 2011 Concacaf Gold Cup, the continental championship, and while Klinsmann’s team won that tournament in 2013, it was upset in the semi-finals by Jamaica in 2015 — the first in a series of poor performances in the kind of important games and tournaments that Klinsmann had long preached were the teams’ most important tests.

Klinsmann’s tactical knowledge, his penchant for using players out of position and his habit of blaming his team — not his team selection or his own game plans — for defeats became perpetual talking points for those agitating for a change.

Klinsmann rarely looked concerned about his job status, however, including after last week’s Costa Rica defeat.

“I’m not afraid,” Klinsmann said in an interview with The New York Times on Sunday night. “What you need to do is stick to the facts. Soccer is emotional, and a lot of people make conclusions without knowing anything about the inside of the team or the sport. I still believe we will get the points we need to qualify, and I am even confident we could win the group.”

He added: “The fact is, we lost two games. There is a lot of talk from people who don’t understand soccer or the team.”

Klinsmann’s confidence might have been rooted in a faith in Gulati’s penchant for taking the long view. An economics professor at Columbia, Gulati is renowned for rarely allowing emotion to color his decisions on hirings, firings or judgments on the progress of the national team. And by placing so much power in Klinsmann’s control, Gulati effectively had linked his own legacy to the coach.

And yet, still: Even Gulati’s backing of Klinsmann had begun to crack as the team struggled over the past year: the Gold Cup defeat, another in a regional championship game against Mexico late last year, and the recent qualifiers.

“No one has ironclad job security,” Gulati told reporters ominously in June, when a humiliating first-round elimination from the Copa América tournament, played on home soil, was possible. “For coaches and players, it’s about results.”

(New York Times service)

“I henceforth grant to all priests, in virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion. The provision I had made in this regard, limited to the duration of the Extraordinary Holy Year, is hereby extended ...,” he wrote in an apostolic letter, Misericordia et Misera, concluding his jubilee Holy Year of Mercy. “There is no sin that God’s mercy cannot reach,” he insisted, while staunchly reiterating that “abortion is a grave sin”.

The absolution granted by any priest would also trigger the simultaneous lifting of excommunication. Previously in many places in the world, even if the absolution was granted by a priest, it was the bishop’s task to lift that.

Although some theologians have found Francis’s emphasis on mercy excessive, suggesting – as veteran Vatican observer John Allen describes the criticism – that “ it comes at the expense of calling sin by its real name”, the pope stressed in the letter that forgiveness is central to the church’s message and the essence of God’s love.

“Mercy cannot become a mere parenthesis in the life of the church,” Francis writes. “It constitutes her very existence, through which the profound truths of the Gospel are made manifest and tangible. Everything is revealed in mercy; everything is resolved in the merciful love of the Father.”

He has criticised the church in the past for being “obsessed” with issues like abortion and homosexuality and denies that his emphasis on mercy undermines the mission to preach the truth. “Remaining only at the level of the law is equivalent to thwarting faith and divine mercy,” he warns in the document. “Even in the most complex cases, where there is a temptation to apply a justice derived from rules alone, we must believe in the power flowing from divine grace.”

Echoing a particular sensitivity that some see as coming from his experience of the church in Latin America, he argues that that centrality of mercy is intimately linked to the specific challenges of contemporary culture: “The culture of extreme individualism, especially in the West, has led to a loss of a sense of solidarity with and responsibility for others.”

But, be in no doubt, the church is not changing its position on abortion per se. Its opposition to legislative liberalising, like the call for repeal of the Eighth Amendment, will not soften. Real repentance by the sinner is required, is its underlying message. Forgiveness is only called for if there is a sin – and the view of the Vatican remains that abortion is a grave sin.

All the madness was organised to mark the hospital’s 60th birthday. Alongside a staff fancy-dress parade, the children were treated to a magic show, face painting, a disco and an enormous birthday cake.

It is far from all that levity and cake the hospital was reared, and staff were on hand to marvel at the way it has grown over the past 60 years and at the changes, too, in its technological and philosophical perspectives.

In 1957, it had 3,683 inpatients and 19,000 outpatients. Last year it treated 28,637 children on an inpatient basis, and 114,225 outpatients. The average length of stay for a patient was 17 days in 1957, compared with just five days last year.

It is not just science that has improved the outcomes for many patients; the manner in which they are cared for has changed dramatically too.

Lorraine Smith does a job that would have been unthinkable when the hospital opened: play specialist.

“We work with children to make their hospital visits as positive an experience as it can possibly be,” she said as the party got under way. “We know that it can be a very scary time for a child, especially if they are hooked up to all sorts of apparatus. So we have special dolls to show them what procedures are what and other dolls to help children cope with needle phobias. What is most important is that we explain everything to them in a play way, in a way they can understand. Our job is to take the fear out of what is happening.”

Relationship

Dr Paul Oslizlok has been a paediatric cardiologist since the early 1990s, but his relationship with the hospital dates back to 1978, when he first walked through the doors as a medical student. The birthday celebration caused him to reflect on how far the hospital has come and how far it has to go.

“I think this birthday is important because we are about to merge this hospital with the other children’s hospitals and there is an understandable fear that a lot of what is great about Crumlin will be lost,” he said. “Having said that, most of us do long for a time when all the children’s hospitals will come together, because it will be so much better. But there is a fear that some of the loyalty and camaraderie here will be lost.”

Since he first started training here almost 40 years ago, he has looked after “tens of thousands of children” and remembers many cases, both those with happy outcomes and others that he described as “devastating”.

Rachel Kenna, director of nursing at the hospital, described the birthday as “a huge day” for the hospital. She said it was “important that we make a big effort to celebrate what we have become. I have been here for 25 years and the changes over that time have been phenomenal”.

When asked what challenges are faced by the nursing staff, she did not hesitate.

“One of the biggest challenges we face is that we simply do not have enough nurses,” she said.

She added that one of the reasons paediatric nurses are in such short supply is that “you need to have something special to be a children’s nurse and you need to have a bag full of resilience. It can be a very long journey, and nurses build relationships with children. The children are very tactile and need to be hugged a lot. I think children’s nurses have that extra special ingredient and it is a very humbling experience to be a children’s nurse, to have the responsibility for looking after all these little people.”

Father of three, Noel Clancy from Leitrim in Kilworth, Co Cork, said that the government and Irish society needed to reflect on the number of young learner drivers who drive cars unaccompanied in contravention of the law.

“I think it is important to reflect on the question on any given day how many learner drivers are on the roads of Ireland unaccompanied and how many parents or family members allow their cars to be driven by these drivers?

“”I am calling on the Minister for Transport to implement legislation so that allowing one’s car to be driven by an unaccompanied learner driver is an offence and would make the car owner and driver equally accountable in law.”

Mr Clancy was speaking outside Cork Circuit Criminal Court where Susan Gleeson (21) was given a three-year suspended sentence for dangerous driving causing the deaths of his wife, Geraldine (58) and daughter Louise (22) in a car crash near their home on December 22nd, 2015.

Ms Clancy’s car ended up being flipped on its roof and pushed through a gap in a stone wall only to fall into a flooded ditch where she and her daughter remained trapped and drowned despite the best efforts of locals including Mr Clancy to rescue them.

Gleeson pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death and although Mr Clancy said in a victim impact statement that he could not find it in his heart to forgive Gleeson, he said afterwards that he was glad the court recognised that his wife was blameless when it came to the crash.

“We have always known that my wife Geraldine was a safe careful driver and we knew that she was in no way responsible for the collision. Today this has been publicly recognised by the court,” he said flanked by his children, Fiona and Declan.

“Regardless of the sentence handed down to the defendant, Geraldine and Louise are dead and they are in their graves for all eternity. We miss them greatly and we are serving a life sentence of loss without them.”

Disappointed

Although Mr Clancy would not comment on the three-year suspended sentenced given to Gleeson by Judge Seán Ó Donnabhain, Susan Gray of Parc (Promoting Awareness, Responsibilty and Care) said she and her fellow members of the group were very disappointed with the sentence.

“The Parc Road Safety group are very disappointed by the sentence imposed today for this family. What sort of message is this sentence giving to learners? There is a reason for learner drivers having to have L plates up, having to drive accompanied and having to take 12 compulsory lessons.

Ms Gray – who lost her husband Stephen in a car crash involving a learner driver in 2004 – said Parc backed Mr Clancy’s call for the parents and owners of cars used by learner drivers to be held equally responsible if their child takes the car out unaccompanied by a qualified driver.

“Parents have a grave responsibility to ensure these rules are obeyed. Far too often families are coming to us where a learner driver was responsible for their loved one’s death,” she said, adding seven families in the past five months had come to them after losing loved ones to learner drivers.

“We must have stronger deterrents and far more serious consequences for learners responsible for fatal collisions if we are to reduce the number of families that are coming to Parc when it all far too late for them.”

Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), junior coalition partner for the second time under Dr Merkel, said her decision to run again was “completely unsurprising”.

“After almost 12 years, it’s clear that Dr Merkel has run out of steam,” said Katarina Barley, SPD general secretary.

Federal family minister Manuela Schwesig, a rising SPD star who sees Dr Merkel at weekly cabinet meetings, said her government boss “had her achievements but no longer stands for the future”.

The SPD has yet to announce its Merkel challenger, a decision it has promised next January, nor has it ruled in or out a Merkel-beating centre-left coalition with the Greens and Left Party.

The two front-runners for the SPD candidacy are party leader Sigmar Gabriel or European Parliament president Martin Schulz.

In the opposition benches, hoping for a change of government after next September’s election, the widespread view was that Dr Merkel was running again because she had no better idea of what to do, but had no new ideas to secure climate-change agreements or to tackle rising right-wing populism.

“She has stayed true to herself and was unable to make clear why she wants to run a fourth time,” said Anton Hofreiter, co-leader of the Greens.

Refugee crisis

Opinion poll agencies said that, with Dr Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) some 10 points behind their 2013 result, the German leader was far from unbeatable in the 2017 federal election.

“The refugee crisis has created a serious mood swing, the CDU has lost every fourth vote,” said Hermann Binkert, of the INSA polling agency to Bild. Increasingly, he said, Dr Merkel’s “presidential style” polarises German voters.

The main beneficiary of a rising anti-Merkel mood is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). With steady, double-digit support in opinion polls, its leaders welcomed Dr Merkel’s renewed candidacy.

“Standing for re-election is the woman who caused the multibillion, dangerous migration crisis,” said Frauke Petry, AfD co-leader.

After emerging from the euro crisis, a study of the AfD published yesterday suggested the refugee crisis had not just grown its supporters but radicalised them.

Negative image

The study, by the SPD-allied Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that almost three-quarters of AfD supporters had a negative image of asylum seekers, up from 57 per cent in 2014. Some 28 per cent of all Germans now hold anti-elitist, “neo-right wing” protest views, the study found, rising to 84 per cent among AfD voters.

Across the media reaction to Dr Merkel’s announcement, there was widespread agreement that, after 11 years in power, the German leader may be past her untouchable peak but still leagues ahead of the competition.

“Did anyone understand why Angela Merkel wants to run again and what she wants to do in the next four years in office? I didn’t,” wrote Dirk Kurbjuweit, commentator for Spiegel Online. “We can expect Merkel to simply plod on, and that can’t be the solution.”

It is understandable Conte should have arrived in west London less than refreshed given his summer at Euro 2016, the burdens of starting a major job and his own full-body absorption in the process: the hair-tearing grief at every setback, the tendency to celebrate each high with uncontained, eye-popping joy, haring about like a man who has just struck oil beneath his patio decking or made the first ever recorded discovery of chocolate ice cream.

In reality Conte is simply a manager who works best coiled tight and always on the edge. In this respect he looks a pretty good fit for a Premier League season where top spot has changed hands nine times and where the ability to cajole a cohesive whole out of a new-ish group of players while simultaneously sliding down the banisters and performing complex calculus on an abacus is likely to decide the destiny of an open title race.

With just under a third of the season gone four points separate the top five teams, all of whom have a reasonable chance of going on to win it. Beyond this the league is unusually interesting in a tactical sense, with a shared attempt at the top to marry technical players and positional fluidity with a full-throttle physicality that feels quite English in its unquestioning intensity.

As Conte nipped off for a lie-down at the start of October there was a view in these pages that any team finishing ahead of Liverpool at the end of the season would do so “bloodied and blistered and breathless”. Six weeks on the latest club to take up the slack at the front of the peloton are Chelsea, to whom the same reasoning might now be applied. Chelsea’s current run of six league wins without conceding a goal has its roots in Conte’s bold shift of shape in September. The early attempts at a 4-2-4 had already begun to elide into a 4-3-3. Defeat by Arsenal brought some soul-searching and a more profound change to 3-4-3, with Cesc Fàbregas discarded and the roles of three key players clarified with thrilling results.

At which point, enter David Luiz, defensive giant. Yes, that David Luiz, a player who has had a peculiar double-life, damned by his own relentlessly trumpeted mistakes and at the same time rewarded with ever more extravagant playing contracts. During the last World Cup in Brazil there was an airline advert that featured a zanily grinning David Luiz in full pilot’s outfit proudly inviting you to board his waiting jet, arguably the least reassuring passenger safety message ever devised.

And yet he has been key to Chelsea’s recent stability, not just as a deep playmaker at the heart of that three but as the aggressive, spirited defensive leader he has always been in between the odd horrific performance. Aged 29 now, the only major club football medal to escape the world’s most expensive defender across European three countries is - so far - a Premier League title medal. Which is fairly steady going for a man routinely dismissed as a flake and a saboteur.

Further upfield Eden Hazard has been liberated by the 3-4-3, allowed to operate in forward gear by a manager who has accepted his lack of cover rather than simply fuming at it like a disappointed stepdad. In 12 league games Hazard has made 52 successful dribbles, compared with 89 the whole of last season. He should pass his total of 36 shots in the whole of 2015-16 against Tottenham on Saturday. Against that Hazard has made just four tackles. But Chelsea are top, and their best player has rediscovered his lateral spring, the ability to take the ball and turn in a single movement.

Victor Moses, high-class wing-back, has been the most obvious gain. Moses is also the epitome of a common trait among the insurgent Conte-Klopp-Guardiola managerial type, the ability to make good use of the things that they find, recycling some talented but dormant part into a key component. Like James Milner’s fine turn at left-back, or Guardiola’s tweaking of key creative midfielders, Moses has been Conte’s own Womble-player, an itinerant winger and No10 across five English clubs before the age of 25 but now in the best period of his career as a powerful and utterly committed right wing-back.

The sudden surge of eviscerating form, sparked by a decisive switch of shape, is nothing new in a Conte team. There are parallels with his first season at Juventus in 2011-12, where 14 of his first 27 Serie A matches were drawn but Juve ended up winning the title unbeaten in the league. Conte had been desperate to fit the thrillingly energetic Arturo Vidal into his team. In late September Vidal finally made the starting XI, Juve ran through Milan in Turin, a new 4-3-3 shape was up and running and Conte was on his way to a hat-trick of titles.

As with Juve that year the lack of European football looks a significant advantage for Chelsea. There is an idea that the major plus here is to do with fatigue or injury, but managers talk instead of simply having those extra two days to plan and drill their players. Such is the way of the modern coach. In contract with the old Alex Ferguson-era idea of momentum, winning teams rolling on with the same system, combinations ever-more grooved under pressure, it is the interventionist, hands-in-the-cake-mix tendencies of the modern breed that stand out.

Conte is obsessed with the fitness and physicality of his players, talking constantly with his medical staff, brooding over sprockets and hinges like an F1 pit boss, shifting his team on reports of twinges and twangs. Similarly the hands-on nature of Jurgen Klopp’s coaching has been noted, the tendency to physically haul players around the training pitch, something Ron Greenwood could be seen doing at West Ham in the 1970s.

Klopp’s Liverpool experienced their first little gulp this weekend, as Southampton set out to defend against a slightly depleted team. Like a batsman who comes out and hits a flurry of fours, then has to change gear as the field drops back, Klopp will now look to adjust, to pick up the ones and twos, to hold Liverpool’s attacking fire for the right moment.

No doubt the same process of reeling in and counter-adjustment will hit Chelsea in the coming weeks as opposition managers find a way to get behind the wing-backs or to harry David Luiz as Middlesbrough did on Sunday. Chelsea’s next two opponents are Tottenham and Manchester City. This evolving team may find life less comfortable against similar high-intensity machines, fellow hard-pressers. But a year on from the last days of José they can at least be sure they will not fail for want of sheer, thrilling focus.

(Guardian service)

My husband and I have been living in the Cayman Islands for the last 4 years. We are planning to come back next year.

Before we left Ireland, my husband was using my tax free allowance as I was a stay at home mum. My husband must come back in July to avoid paying tax on his income earned in 2017. Do I also need to be out of the country until July as he is using my tax free allowance, or can I return before him?

A: Barry Flanagan, tax manager with Taxback.com

The short answer is no - your return date is not relevant, as a tax relief known as “aggregation relief” should offset any negative tax consequences. However there are many factors to consider.

I understand from your query that both you are your spouse are Irish and non-resident in Ireland for tax purposes, as a result of your relocation to the Cayman Islands. In addition, I understand that you have spent most of the last four years in the Caymans and that you are not working outside of the home.

The charge to income tax in Ireland is based on the interaction of three determinants - residency, ordinary residency and domicile status. Residency is based on the number of days you have in Ireland in any given year; ordinary residency is based on your residency pattern, while domicile is connected with where you intend to base yourself permanently.

Based on the information provided, it would appear that at present you are non-resident, non-ordinarily resident and domiciled in Ireland. In such circumstances, an individual is taxable on their Irish source income only, including income from employment exercised in Ireland.

Depending on the date on your return next year, you and your spouse will either be resident or non-resident in Ireland for tax purposes. It seems likely that a return prior to July 1st would mean your spouse may have enough days in Ireland to be resident, while a post July 1st return would usually mean your spouse would be non-resident, though his movements in the prior year could impact. While residency potentially means more income is taxable in Ireland, it also means that your spouse will be entitled to full tax credits.

Considering both scenarios, if your spouse is resident in Ireland in 2017, he will be taxable on his worldwide income from all sources. As a resident, he would be entitled to tax credits and the increased standard rate band you referred to, under joint assessment. While joint assessment is only available where both individuals are resident, aggregation relief would mean you are effectively treated as jointly assessed. A further relief known as “Split Year relief” could also be claimed, which would exclude your spouse’s employment income earned prior to his return from the charge to Irish tax.

If non-resident, then your spouse would be taxable on his Irish sourced income and employment income from the date of return.

You mentioned that you are a stay at home mum. You should also consider whether you would also qualify for the Home Carer tax credit, which is now worth €1,000.

Barry Flanagan is tax manager with Taxback.com. He is a is a qualified Chartered Accountant, Chartered Tax Consultant and Chartered Company Secretary.

Have a query for our panel of experts about emigrating, life abroad or moving home? Email them to abroad@irishtimes.com. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice.

His fiction is that of a confirmed realist; he has chronicled the lonely, the eccentric, the pathetic and the unloved. He knew how damaged people could be; he was also acutely aware of the cruelty and coldness of which humans are capable.

While the world debated the conflicting merits of awarding this year’s Nobel prize for literature to the great American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, others wondered why not honour a supreme storyteller such as William Trevor?

Indeed, in 2013 when the Stockholm committee did select a writer, Canadian Alice Munro, I can recall writing “wonderful”, while adding, it could just as easily have been, should have been Trevor, a short-story writer of far wider range who has also written superb novels, such as Fools of Fortune, Reading Turgenev, The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer.

Few writers had as strong a claim; perhaps none have been as regrettably overlooked. Seamus Heaney deserved to win the Nobel Prize; Trevor would have been an equally deserving winner.

Many novelists and short-story writers when asked about their major influences invariably single him out. An Irish writer, an international writer, a great writer. Put bluntly he is revered by writers. “I don’t have language rich enough to describe all I owe to William Trevor, ” said Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri when I interviewed her in 2008.

Throughout his career Trevor defied the stock “write what you know” advice given to aspiring writers. The least autobiographical of major Irish writers, he looked to the imagination and as an astute, natural psychologist believed in foraging the unpredictable depths of human behaviour. He knew the value of distance, the role of the observer. A writer must listen, he did and it shows.

This apparently most unexperimental of writers experimented every time he sat down to write. Sophisticated but never slick, he was adventurous; prepared to try anything in the pursuit of a story needing to be told.

In all wrote 14 novels – 15, if Reading Turgenev (from Two Lives, 1991), at 222 pages, is correctly considered a novel – and 11 individual short story collections, or more than 140 stories, many among the finest written in English.

Trevor the writer is extraordinary, familiar yet elusive. In person he was gentle, kind, unassuming and gracious, a very rare gentleman who could conceal the relentless concentration he applied to pursuing the ideas and the characters which occupied his busy mind.

Missing

At a time such as this, death, the expected tributes will flow. But the truth remains that Trevor, who ranks high among the world’s greatest writers and has an undisputed international reputation, has frequently, inexplicably, drifted out from the central Irish literary consciousness. Asodána conferred the honour of Saoi, or wise man, on Trevor as recently – one might suggest belatedly – as 2015.

All too often whether in debate or conversation when Irish writers are discussing the national literature, Trevor is overlooked, or seen as not entirely Irish – how wrong.

One need look no further than The Hill Bachelors (2000), a superb collection of wonderful stories set mostly in Ireland, which includes Against the Odds. Trevor knew Ireland – and at every vocal and cultural register.

If there is one telling sentence among so very many as his admirers look to his work in the initial stages of absorbing the loss of a writer who so honoured and graced the art of story, it may be this from Reading Turgenev: “Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.”

Describing him as a miniaturist exploring quiet lives of desperation is akin to saying Jane Austen wrote about girls in need of wealthy husbands. Trevor, in common with Austen, was an instinctive stylist, alert to the exactness of language, the power of nuance, be it Irish or English, Anglo-Irish Protestant, middle class Irish Protestant – the social milieu to which he belonged – or Catholic, and above all, he delighted in the captivating allure of ambivalence. “The two youths walked the way they’d come that morning, both of them wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired.” (A Bit of Business, from After Rain, 1995).

He could also be very funny. In Honeymoon in Tramore (From Family Sins, 1990), a woman already pregnant by one man succeeds in getting another to marry her and, as they enjoy their wedding breakfast, the landlady is heard remarking of her husband’s dim-witted greyhound, “Would any animal in its sane mind keep getting into the cement mixer?”

Wide range

Trevor looked to the forgotten, the despairing losers trapped on shabby, failing family farms, or caught up in the non-life of a provincial town, perhaps working in a defeated local shop. He examined the innocent and also the devious. This much is true, yet there is also so much more. The marvel and also the dilemma of Trevor’s unflustered, sophisticated vision, filtered through his understated prose is that it has a deceptively wide range.

Even admirers of Trevor’s work may not have experienced the full extent of his canvas – there is a great deal of reading in Trevor’s oeuvre. Not by chance were so many British and American critics initially convinced Trevor was an English writer. To fully appreciate the extent of his gifts, from the humane to the sinister, it is vital to read as much of it as possible – in fact all of it. Read a few stories, you will agree that he is a great writer; read most or all of it and you will be awestruck.

It is as if he inherited the qualities of the great 19th century Russian masters and allowed them to mingle freely with the finest Irish and American masters of the short-story form. He often said that his novels were in fact each a series of story stories contained within one story; he may well be right, yet that does not diminish their success as novels.

Trevor’s rare versatility lies in his command of voice – he matched Elizabeth Bowen’s cool authority, could mimic the stiff manners of the English middle classes yet was equally at home in the world of Kavanagh’s virtuoso exploration of the tragic comedy of rural Ireland. His stories stand equal to those of Frank O’Connor, Somerset Maugham, V.S. Pritchett, John Updike and John Cheever.

The most obvious comparison though is Anton Chekhov – that is where one most accurately places Trevor, the heir of Chekhov.

It has been suggested that Trevor’s vision is a genteel variation of John McGahern’s powerfully emotive rigour. Yet McGahern’s abiding focus on the individual is strongly autobiographical and is in tone as well as stylistically and thematically y narrower than that of Trevor, who drew so astutely on his peripatetic childhood in the small towns of provincial Munster.

Clouding easy assessment of Trevor are the insightful, sharply ironic tales featuring the bored and prosperous middle classes of west London suburbs populated by idle, adulterous characters at the mercy of their devious ploys and haphazard deceptions, all as adroit and authentic as his Irish narratives.

The details are irrelevant, whether a lonely shadowy character is enduring existence in an Irish provincial town or a London bedsit, Trevor was an all-seeing, witty and at times, unpredictable observer capable of empathy and savagery. “People run away to be alone ... Some people had to be alone.” (From Death and Summer, 2009).

Trevor catches the voice of everywhere because he always considered himself to have come from nowhere in particular. There is the humour in his work, yet so much sorrow. Why?

‘Middle-class gypsy’

Born William Trevor Cox in Cork in 1928, the middle of three children of a bank official father whose job kept the family in transit, Trevor once referred to his parents as having “carted” their unhappy marriage around with them. A child who has witnessed adults at each other’s throats tends not to forget the spectacle and Trevor didn’t.

He described his childhood as that of a “middle-class gypsy” during which he attended 13 schools throughout provincial Ireland before arriving at Sandford Park, Dublin, in 1941 when he was 13. Two years later he moved on to St Columba’s, also in Dublin. From there he entered Trinity College and after a day as a medical student, opted for a history degree. Initially, he was drawn sculpture not writing because he didn’t much care for the ‘literary’ set among his fellow pupils.

He worked as a teacher in Ireland for three years but when the school closed, no further posts were forthcoming. Employment caused Trevor to move to England in 1953.

By then he had married the London-born but very Irish Jane Ryan whom he had met at Trinity. He taught art in the English midlands for three years before settling in Devon. There he returned to sculpture and also began to write.

In the time-honoured tradition of many writers, he spent five years in advertising.There was a first novel, Standard Behaviour, published in 1958. But he disowned it and continued writing.

The Old Boys (1964) is generally regarded as his debut. It began his career in some style; prizes and the freedom to become a full-time writer. Evelyn Waugh hailed it as “uncommonly well-written, gruesome, funny and original”. What more would an aspiring writer need? Trevor was 36.

The Old Boys is a hilarious and accomplished account of Mr Jaraby’s determined bid to become president of the Old Boys Association, despite many victims of his cruel schoolboy bullying are still alive, as are their grievances. Jaraby is delightfully vile: constantly goading his disgruntled wife, who is no slouch at vicious repartee.

The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966), both less memorable, quickly followed.

The publication of The Day We Got Drunk (1967) proved significant. It was his first collection and several of its seven stories concentrated on themes which were to become Trevor territory – loneliness, alienation, middle-class marriage, the elderly reduced to easy prey.

The nastiness of human interaction is also evident in Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Within a year, Trevor published what was to be a landmark book for him, his second volume of stories, The Ballroom of Romance. The poignant title story reveals the early maturity of Trevor’s daunting narrative skill. Bridie, tends her widower father, and is a middle-aged child, waiting for her chance at love. Her only hope rests in the pathetic Bowser Egan, a representative of a familiar type, the aging bachelor content to delay marriage until a widowed mother dies.

In O Fat White Woman, Mrs Digby-Hunter is one of the first of Trevor’s many studies of disappointed wives. She knows how to treat her pain: “On the short grass of the lawn, tucked out of sight beneath her deck-chair, was a small box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates, and on her lap, open at page eight, lay a paper-backed novel by her second favourite writer of historical fiction.”

Defining strength

Characterisation is possibly Trevor’s defining strength, he was particularly skilful with female characters who range from the vulnerable to the vengeful; the likeable to the predatory. Elizabeth Alone (1973), a landmark novel for him in many ways, is about the lives of four very different women who are patients in a London hospital ward. Their collective experiences weave in and out of Trevor territory; bad marriages, failed romance, age, sexual repression, religious fanaticism and always, the randomness of existence. Elizabeth is a memorable and sympathetic creation, conscious that “the years were like useless leaves, dead now. Yielding no memories that she wanted”.

The Children of Dynmouth (1976), the first of Trevor’s three Whitbread-winning novels, reveals exactly how adroit he is with darkness. Young Timothy Gedge (great name – Trevor had a Dickensian flair for name) is a misfit intent on blackmailing selected individuals living in an English seaside town to secure the props required for a gruesome one-man show he is keen on staging.

The narrative highlights an aspect of Trevor’s work which is overlooked – its prevailing strangeness. Timothy, peculiar and creepily unwholesome, is a truth-teller. He also offers a glimpse of one of Trevor’s most memorable baddies, Hilditch, the deeply sinister if pathetic catering manager in Felicia’s Journey which in 1995 would win Trevor his third Whitbread Prize.

Following the publication of The Children of Dynmouth, some critics began to slightly revise their opinion of Trevor. Here was a writer capable of anything, prepared to inject a more threatening form of menace.

Another collection of stories, Lovers of their Time, dominated by Matilda’s England, a three-part story, was published in 1978. It revealed a subtle transition. In the story the narrator admits to having a life-long obsession with Challacombe Manor and its previous owner. The old woman had attempted, shortly before her death, to partly restore the place to its former glory, by way of a tennis court. The atmospheric period feel of that narrative is more usually associated with Trevor’s Anglo-Irish stories.

Sense of Ireland

Ireland had already begun to assert itself fully in Trevor’s imagination. Often criticised for being too removed from Ireland, he calmly dismissed the accusation. He always made a point of reading Irish newspapers and visited Ireland often, particularly while his sister was still alive. She had spent her life tending their parents and by cruel irony she emerged as a character he could have created.

As with Heaney, Trevor was felt not to have engaged with the conflict in the North. This is untrue; he looked to the historical and then engaged with the political. Fools of Fortune (1983) encapsulates the chaos and contradictions of post-Treaty Ireland. It is a starkly beautiful work. Trevor conveys the pathos and the anger in a narrative which helps define not only the Anglo-Irish culture but also its passing.

Ireland’s history also inspires the title story from The News From Ireland collection (1986) in which an English governess records her observations of the Famine in her journal: “Last night I could not sleep again. I lay there thinking of the starvation, of the faces of the silent women when they come to the gate lodge for food. There’s a yellow-greyness in the flesh of their faces, they are themselves like obedient animals. Their babies die when they feed them grass and roots.”

The depravity of Hilditch in Felicia’s Journey is countered by his pathetic mediocrity. He is the consummate unlikely villain with his pudgy hands, high-pitched voice and fondness for junk food. Into his orbit wanders Felicia, the ruined young Irish girl who hurries to England in pursuit of a caddish lover who had fed her lies.

The plot sounds like stock melodrama, but Trevor’s characterisation, feel for voice and use of thriller-like suspense confers tragic grandeur. Above all, in Hilditch, he has created a shocking though sympathetic study of evil spiralling out of control. As ever Trevor seemed alert to human weakness and the way desires can become corrupt and corrupting.

For sheer beauty, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) is difficult to surpass. It was an honour to be a judge for the Irish Fiction Award at Listowel Writers Week when this poignant, perfectly balanced human tragedy won the prize, and Trevor was so delighted holding the book at the presentation.

Curiosity shaped his approach to life and writing. He once told me that his head was full of characters and he had to find out what they were doing. Everything one can hope to learn about life and fiction is contained within the glimpses of humanity created by him. A bold claim? Yes it is, yet a justified one.

Trevor with his sweet smile and the puckered face of a benign schoolmaster, his slightly distracted air; how well did he know Ireland? As well as he knew people.

A story such as The Dressmaker’s Child, published in the New Yorker in 2004, and in the impressive collection, Cheating at Canasta, says so very much about the world we all inhabit. Humour, wit, ruthless clarity and elegance, he saw through pretence.

The collection After Rain was published in 1996 and I remember wondering could short stories get any better. In The Piano Tuner’s Wives, Belle in old age finally gets to marry her beloved after his first wife dies; the locals show no mercy: “Well, she got the ruins of him anyway.”

Reading Trevor’s work has been an enduring experience of my life. He makes the ordinary and familiar, new and shocking. Fiction does not have to be real, but it does have to be true.

William Trevor knew that and made sure it was.

Kendrick Investments, an Isle of Man company controlled by Mr O’Brien, and Circle K Holding Ireland, an Irish company owned by Couche-Tard, have told the Commercial Court the case is settled subject to a payment being made.

Senior counsel Rossa Fanning, for Kendrick Investments, told Mr Justice Brian McGovern on Monday that the case could be adjourned on consent for mention in two weeks to facilitate the agreement. The judge made the order.

Kendrick, which owned 99 per cent of Topaz prior to the sale to Couche-Tard, had alleged that Circle K wrongly withheld a €4.7 million portion of the sale price due to Mr O’Brien’s company. The portion corresponded to former Esso assets at Dublin Port bought by Topaz when it was owned by Mr O’Brien.

Balance

Kendrick demanded payment of the €4.7 million on September 23rd last, but Circle K failed to pay the balance and raised a “wholly unmeritorious” breach of warranty claim, it was alleged by Kendrick.

In correspondence, it was suggested by Circle K that Kendrick had failed to disclose details of the financial situation relating to the Esso Group, Kendrick director Dermot Hayes told the court in an affidavit filed several weeks ago.

Mr Hayes said the breach of warranty claim was “spurious” and said it was clear the issue Circle K had complained about was “appropriately disclosed prior to the completion of the transaction”.

Mr Hayes said Circle K had agreed to pay Kendrick €7 million under the “Dublin Port additional consideration”, relating to a February 2016 lease for certain premises at Dublin Port and a retail lease that was not to be terminated before August 2017.

Working capital

The Dublin Port consideration was satisfied and the €7 million became payable, less an agreed €480,000 related to working capital, he said.

While Circle K had paid some €1.8 million in September 2013, the remaining €4.7 million was allegedly still owing, but the agreement announced on Monday appears to have settled the matter.

The Topaz sale, which included a network of 444 filling stations, convenience stores and fuel depots, officially closed on February 1st, according to stock market filings by Couche-Tard.

Mr O’Brien and his nephew Emmet O’Neill, the chief executive, resigned as directors on that date.

Other Topaz directors, including former taoiseach Brian Cowen, long-time O’Brien ally Lucy Gaffney, Dermot Hayes, Actavo boss Seán Corkery and former AIB chief executive Colm Doherty, also resigned in February.

In his victim impact statement Noel Clancy, a farmer from near Fermoy, told Cork Circuit Criminal Court he was in a daze at the funeral Mass for his wife Geraldine and daughter Louise after they were killed in a car crash on December 22nd last.

The choir sang the Dylan anthem which was a favourite of Louise’s. “I could see Louise singing and playing her guitar – the words might well be the story of road collisions in Ireland. ‘How many deaths will it take to know that too many people have died – the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind’”.

The court heard how Mr Clancy was among local people who tried to help at the scene of the collision, without him realising it was his wife’s car and that she and their daughter were inside it.

“When the firemen pulled them from the car, I did not recognise them. They were blue and purple from the cold water. It was only after I read the number plate of the car that I knew it was Geraldine and Louise,” he said.

Mr Clancy told how he and his other children, Fiona and Declan, had gone into the funeral home in Fermoy for a rosary the day after the fatal collision.

“When we went in and saw the coffins side by side, my heart broke. I pushed the coffins apart and knelt between them and put my left hand on Geraldine’s clasped hands and my right hand on Louise’s and cried for my wife and daughter.”

Mr Clancy spoke about how Louise had overcome her struggles with autism to study English and Sociology at UCC and she was hoping to become a journalist. She had just returned home for Christmas from her Erasmus year at the University of Sussex when the crash happened.

He recalled how on Christmas Day, three days after they were killed, the undertaker asked him a question about the funeral which he hoped he would never have to ask any other family ever again.

“He asked me ‘Which coffin will we lower first?’ While most people were enjoying Christmas with their families, I was trying to make a decision. I phoned him back and told him that we would lower Geraldine first and place Louise back in her arms.”

Cut short

Fiona Clancy spoke about how close she was to her younger sister and how her sister’s life had been cut short and she would never get to graduate from university or achieve her goal of working as a journalist or travel the world as she had dreamed of doing.

“She will never get engaged or married or be a mother. She will never get to celebrate another birthday or Christmas or family occasion or spend time with her many dear friends. She will never smile, laugh or breathe again. Instead she will spend the rest of eternity in her grave, aged just 22.

“The weekends when I get home now are so strange . . . Our home will never feel the same again. Instead I go to their grave on these weekends. It is still beyond surreal to see their names and a date of death on their headstone. I cannot believe it.

“On Christmas Day, we opened the presents they had gotten each other in the funeral home and decided what gifts to have buried with them . . . after the funeral Mass, I kissed both coffins for the last time as the church bell tolled. This moment will haunt me forever.”

Declan Clancy described how the grief is all consuming, like a tidal wave crashing over him until he is left paralysed to the spot as he struggles at work to come to terms with the loss.

“And now when I go home, I’m struck by a deafening silence. No longer am I greeted excitedly by Louise telling me about her latest adventure in college or by a loving hug from my Mam. Instead as I sit the kitchen table, I stare across at two empty chairs when they should be.

“The thought of my mother and sister screaming for their lives, knowing that they were going to drown tortures me every night. The nightmares leave me physically exhausted. I hear their screams, I see them die again and again.”

Speaking outside the court after yesterday’s proceedings, Noel Clancy said the Government needed to introduce new legislation to make a car owner equally culpable if a family member on a learner permit drove the vehicle while unaccompanied.

He said the Government and Irish society needed to reflect on the number of young learner drivers who drove cars unaccompanied in contravention of the law.

“I think it is important to reflect on the question on any given day how many learner drivers are on the roads of Ireland unaccompanied and how many parents or family members allow their cars to be driven by these drivers.

“I am calling on the Minister for Transport to implement legislation so that allowing one’s car to be driven by an unaccompanied learner driver is an offence and would make the car owner and driver equally accountable in law.”

In September 2015 he announced that, as part of the celebration of the Year of Mercy, he would permit priests to absolve women of the sin of abortion until November 20th, Sunday last, when the Year of Mercy ended.

That permit has not been concluded.

Until this time last year abortion incurred the penalty of automatic excommunication in the Catholic Church for the women involved, meaning her sin could only be absolved by the Pope, a bishop or a priest specially appointed to do so.

Such is its gravity as sin in the eyes of the Church.

Excommunication is the most severe ecclesiastical penalty imposed by the Catholic Church. But excommunicants remain Catholic because of baptism and are still obliged to attend Mass, but are deprived of all sacraments except Confession/Sacrament of Reconciliation.

They are also forbidden from employment with or from holding any position of authority in a diocese or parish and, should they die, may not have a Catholic burial.

However, in allowing priests absolve abortion, Pope Francis is by no means diminishing its gravity as sin. He makes this clear in his Apostolic Letter, Misericordia et Misera, (Mercy and Misery) published to mark the end of the Year of Mercy. “I wish to restate as firmly as I can that abortion is a grave sin, since it puts an end to an innocent life,” he says.

But, he adds, “in the same way, however, I can and must state that there is no sin that God’s mercy cannot reach and wipe away when it finds a repentant heart seeking to be reconciled with the Father”.

This is very much of the Francis style with its overt preference for compassion and forgiveness over rigid implementation of a narrow interpretation of church teaching.

He stresses this in the document, pointing out that forgiveness is the essence of God’s love. “None of us has the right to make forgiveness conditional. Mercy is always a gratuitous act of our heavenly Father, an unconditional and unmerited act of love,” he says. “Consequently, we cannot risk opposing the full freedom of the love with which God enters into the life of every person.”

‘Divine mercy’

Anticipating criticism from the usual suspects he rejected suggestions that his emphasis on mercy is at odds with church dogma. “Remaining only at the level of the law is equivalent to thwarting faith and divine mercy,” he says.

It is such thinking that allowed for the creative fudge in his 2015 document on the family, Amoris Laetitia, which seemingly left the door open for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion depending on the particular situation.

“The experience of mercy enables us to regard all human problems from the standpoint of God’s love, which never tires of welcoming and accompanying,” he says in Misericordia et Misera.

It has been estimated that as many as 120,000 Irish women have had abortions over the past almost 50 years, since 1967, when it was legalised in the UK. Many are now grandmothers.

Most would have continued to practice as Catholics in the Ireland of the 1970s, where 91 per cent attended weekly Mass, and since. For many such women, and probably others of the next generation, who cherish their religion the words of Pope Francis can only bring consolation.

Similarly, where those Catholic professionals, partners, and friends, who assisted in such abortions, are concerned.

DUBLIN

The Irish market underperformed as a number of leading stocks lost ground during the day.

Weakness in bookmaker Ladbrokes Coral, which fell more than 2 per cent in London, fed through to the sector generally, knocking 1.27 per cent off Irish betting giant, Paddy Power Betfair’s price, which closed at €101.

Software specialist Datalex tumbled 3.43 per cent to close at €3.38. Traders acknowledged that it traded at a higher level for much of the day, although it was almost 6 per cent off at one point.

Property-related stocks were also weak. Green Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) was down 1.64 per cent at €1.20, its rival, Hibernian REIT was off 68 per cent at €1.166.

Irish Residential Properties REIT, one of the biggest owners of flats in Dublin, dropped 1.72 per cent to €1.137. Traders noted that investors have been selling all three in recent weeks.

Home lender Permanent TSB Holdings fell sharply, ending the day 5.11 per cent down at €2.636, wiping out gains made during a strong day on Friday when it closed almost 4 per cent ahead. Bank of Ireland was down 1.38 per cent at 21.5 cent.

LONDON

Irish convenience foods group Greencore lost 5.6 per cent to close at 290.8 pence sterling. The stock gained about 15 per cent last week after announcing that it was buying US rival Peacock.

Another US company in the same sector, Tyson Foods, reported poorer results than expected.

Recently-merged bookmaker Ladbrokes Coral, which has an extensive Irish business, was down 2.09 per cent at 122.1p.

Royal Dutch Shell’s B shares rose 30.5p to 2,100p, and BP jumped 8.6p to 456.25p, as Brent crude prices soared 4 per cent to 48.67 US dollars a barrel.

Rising copper prices pushed mining stocks to the top of the blue chip index, with shares including Randgold Resources rising 215p to 6,005p, Fresnillo up 41p to 1,330p, and Anglo American rising 33p to 1,122.5p.

Diageo fell 24p to 2,005p on news that the drinks giant will be hit by strikes in the run-up to Christmas after workers voted for industrial action over cuts to their pensions.

ITV was the worst performer on the FTSE 100, down 4.4p to 165.6p, after going ex-dividend – which means new buyers no longer qualified for the latest dividend payment.

Away from the top tier, Mitie shares plunged 20p to 190p after the company swung to a £100.4 million half-year loss and again issued a profit warning as increased economic uncertainty and higher staff costs hit the balance sheet.

EUROPE

A rally in commodity producers helped European equities erase declines, posting their longest streak of intraday fluctuations in more than three years.The Stoxx Europe 600 Index climbed 0.3 per cent at 3:16 pm in London, reversing a slide of as much as 0.8 per cent, amid gains in energy producers and miners as commodities advanced. Across Europe, the French Cac 40 and German Dax closed higher, up 0.56 per cent and 0.19 per cent, respectively.

European stocks have been trading in a tight range most of the year and remain below their level from before the UK secession referendum.

Investors are turning their focus to the region’s political risks ahead, while the recent rise in government-bond yields is making equities less attractive, according to Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank AG in London.

“The Italian referendum in two weeks’ time and concern about the future of ECB policy are starting to rise in people’s agenda,” he said.

US

The Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq hit record intraday highs on Monday as Apple and Facebook propelled technology shares and oil prices boosted energy stocks.

The energy sector surged 1.8 per cent to a 16-month high, dominating the gainers among the 11 major S&P sectors. Chevron and Exxon rose 1 per cent each and were the top influences.

Among tech gainers was LifeLock, which surged 15.2 per cent after Symantec said it would buy the identity theft protection company for $2.3 billion. Symantec rose 4.7 per cent.

Applied Micro Circuits jumped nearly 12 per cent after Macom Tech said it would buy its fellow chipmaker for $770 million.

Macom was off 4.1 per cent. Tyson Foods’ 14.7 per cent slump led the losers on the S&P after the meat processor reported a lower-than-expected profit and said its chief executive would step down.

– (Additional reporting: Bloomberg, Press Association, Reuters)

Ms May’s comments at the Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) annual conference in London were in sharp contrast to the tone she set at her Conservative Party’s conference in early October, seen as setting the course for a “hard Brexit” and prompted a sterling sell-off.

“We have in the past highlighted some of the main risks of a ‘hard Brexit’ for Ireland on the trade side, but also regarding investment,” said Frederico Barriga Salazar, Fitch Rating’s lead Ireland sovereign credit analyst.

“If there’s some leeway by the EU, it would spare Ireland some of the worst [effects].”

Sterling rallied to a two-month high of 85p against the euro after the UK prime minister signalled she was listening to British business and was open to seeking a transitional deal following Brexit, if, as is most likely, a new relationship has not been agreed by then.

Flip-flopping

This would avert a scenario of tariffs and quotas applying immediately after two years of formal talks between the United Kingdom and European Union end.

“There’s been a lot of flip-flopping and I think this is the latest step back from the cliff,” said Dermot O’Leary, an economist with Goodbody Stockbrokers in Dublin. “We would be most affected by a ‘hard Brexit’.”

While Ms May wants to invoke article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty by the end of March, setting Brexit negotiations in motion, “nobody really thought two years was a realistic timeframe for a new agreement”, said Colin Bermingham, a eurozone economist with BNP Paribas in London.

“The UK is Ireland’s biggest export market after the US, so clearly you want as open a trade deal as possible,” said Mr Bermingham. “With the UK’s friends in the room dwindling, Ireland is probably pushing its case the most.”

Competitive edge

Justin Doyle, a senior currency trader with Investec in Dublin, said a 6 per cent rebound in sterling in less than a fortnight “is a very welcome reprieve for the Irish export sector as we head into the end of a dramatic 2016”.

However, the competitive edge of Ireland’s 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate will be eroded as Ms May also told the CBI event she wants to cut the UK’s 20 per cent headline tax rate to the lowest among the world’s 20 largest economies.

Experts see the rating falling to 15 per cent, matching a US one proposed by president-elect Donald Trump, who wants to cut his country’s current 35 per cent levy.

“It’s clear that May is going to push a pro-investment and pro-innovation agenda on the taxation front, which will be a competitive pressure for Ireland,” said Fergal O’Brien, Ibec’s director of policy, who was at the UK prime minister’s CBI address.

At an event in Brussels to mark the official designation of Galway as the European Capital of Culture, Noel Larkin said: “We are aiming for about a million visitors in 2020, and estimate that it could be worth between €80 million and €100 million to the area. In addition there will be a knock-on effect in subsequent years – it’s a huge boost for the region.”

Mr Larkin said the estimated costs will be more than offset by the long-term economic dividend.

Galway was selected in July as Ireland’s nominee for European Capital of Culture, beating Limerick and a combined application by Wexford, Waterford and Kilkenny. The Croatian city of Rijeka will also hold the title that year.

Minister for Arts Heather Humphreys said Galway’s programme of events promised to make “a lasting and significant contribution” to arts and culture in the west.

Overall, the budget for the project is expected to be about €45 million, €39 million of which will come from EU, State and local funds and the remainder from private sources.

In recent years, the number of learner drivers involved in fatal crashes has declined, as has the ratio of learner drivers involved in such crashes relative to qualified drivers – that is, those with full driving licences.

In 2005 and 2006, for instance, learner drivers were involved in 9.9 per cent and 11.9 per cent of fatal crashes respectively each year, giving an average of 10.4 per cent – very close to the 10 per cent ratio between learner drivers to qualified drivers.

By 2013, however, the percentage of learner drivers involved in fatal crashes had fallen to 2.8 per cent of all such crashes.

There has been a dramatic fall also in the number of unaccompanied learner drivers involved in fatal crashes, that is, the number of learner drivers who did not have a full-licence holder with them in the vehicle when the crash occurred.

The number has fallen from 33 in 2005 to five in 2013.

Equally, the number of learner drivers who were accompanied by a qualified driver when they were involved in a fatal collision has fallen from nine in 2005 to just one in 2013.

Improvements revealed in those statistics may be traced directly to compliance with, and enforcement of, tightened laws governing new drivers in recent years, including the introduction of mandatory driving lessons for learner drivers, which came in in 2010.

There is no such thing anymore as a provisional licence, for instance. There is now only the Learner Permit. The distinction is seen as important: there is only one type of driving licence and it is the driving licence, not a provisional, or “kind-of”, driving licence.

The learner driver therefore does not have a driving licence of any sort, provisional or otherwise. They have a Learner Permit, which is an explicit statement that they are learning to drive, under a temporary permission.

Twelve lessons

A holder of a Learner Permit must take 12 driving lessons with an approved instructor before applying for a driving test to get a driving licence and they may not apply for a driving test within the first six months of holding their Learner Permit. This gives the learner a minimum period within which they can take their 12 lessons.

If a driving test is passed, the new driver will have a driving licence but will be classified as a novice driver for two years and must, for those two years, display an N sign on their vehicle.

Learner drivers must also display an L sign on their vehicle. By law, such signs must be a red letter on a white background and must be 15cm square. Those learner drivers who trim their L or novice N signs to remove the white to make them, presumably, less visible, are breaking the law.

A learner driver arriving to take the driving test and displaying a molested L sign will be refused the test.

Learner drivers are also subject to a more stringent blood-alcohol threshold, should they choose to drink and drive. Learner drivers, and novice drivers as well, may not drive with a blood-alcohol reading about 20mg of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.

This is, in effect, zero blood-alcohol. The level for fully licensed drivers is 50mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood.

The reason for applying the lower blood-alcohol threshold to novice drivers is that research shows that drivers who live with such a restriction for two years are more likely than not to adhere to a no drinking and driving approach thereafter.

Since August 2014, learner drivers who gain just seven penalty points will lose their permit, compared to qualified drivers who lose their licence after having 12 points imposed against them.

So far this year, to the end of October, more than 10,000 penalty points have been applied to learner and novice drivers. They include 6,148 points against learner drivers driving without a qualified driver being with them, 3,550 points for not displaying an L sign and 288 for not displaying an N sign.

The winger, now with West Brom, memorably spun away from Marouane Fellaini and Thomas Meunier before stroking the ball past goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois.

The strike was the highlight of Wales’ 3-1 quarter-final win over the Belgians and set up a semi-final against eventual winners Portugal.

Robson-Kanu is in good company with goals from Barcelona pair Lionel Messi and Neymar included among the 10 nominees.

Mario Gaspar’s acrobatic effort from the edge of the box for Spain against England last November is also shortlisted, as is Daniuska Rodriguez’s goal for Venezuela against Colombia in the South American Under-17 Women’s Championship.

Hlompho Kekana (for South Africa), Marlone (Corinthians), Saul Niguez (Atletico Madrid), Simon Skrabb (Atvidaberg) and Mohd Faiz Subri (Penang), complete the top 10.

Fans will vote for the best goal and winner of the award, set up to honour Hungary and Real Madrid legend Ferenc Puskas, will be announced at the FIFA Football Awards ceremony on January 9th.

Friedrich Trump, a German, was issued with the document in February 1905, and ordered to leave the kingdom of Bavaria within eight weeks as punishment for having failed to do mandatory military service and failing to give authorities notice of his departure to the US when he first emigrated in 1885.

Roland Paul, a historian from Rhineland-Palatinate who found the document in local archives, told the tabloid Bild: “Friedrich Trump emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1885. However, he failed to de-register from his homeland and had not carried out his military service, which is why the authorities rejected his attempt at repatriation.”

The decree orders the “American citizen and pensioner Friedrich Trump” to leave the area “at the very latest on 1 May . . . or else expect to be deported”. Bild called the archive find an “unspectacular piece of paper”, that had nevertheless “changed world history”.

Trump was born in Kallstadt, now in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, in 1869. He emigrated to the US aged 16 initially to escape poverty, attracted by the gold rush.

He quickly turned his attention to catering for the masses of other gold hunters in Alaska, later allegedly running a brothel for them, and there made his fortune. He habitually sent the gold nuggets with which his customers regularly paid for their food to his sisters who had already emigrated to New York and had started trading in property.

Returning on a visit to Kallstadt in 1901, Trump fell in love with his future wife, Elisabeth Christ, whom he married a year later, returning with her to the US. But when she became homesick and wanted to return to Germany, the authorities blocked his attempts to settle there.

In an effort to overturn the royal decree dated February 27th, 1905, Trump wrote an obsequious letter appealing to Prince Regent Luitpold, addressing him as “the much-loved, noble, wise and righteous sovereign and sublime ruler”.

But the prince rejected the appeal and the Trumps left Germany for New York with their daughter on the Hapag steam ship Pennsylvania on July 1st, 1905. Elisabeth was three months pregnant with Donald Trump’s father, Fred.

Residents of Kallstadt, a small wine-growing town of about 1,200 people in south-west Germany, joke that the blame for Trump becoming US president-elect lies with the German authorities who threw his grandfather out. They have so far shown little enthusiasm for claiming the businessman turned politician as their own.

– (Guardian service)

Speaking in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Mr Draghi said that Europe needs to respond “cohesively and decisively” to the current challenges facing Europe.

“During our last plenary exchange in February, I said that the cohesion of Europe was being tested. Since then the challenges have increased. It is now more than ever important and necessary that Europe responds cohesively and decisively to the challenge that we’re facing,” he said.

Review

Quoting a speech by former Italian prime minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to the parliament more than a decade ago, he said “if we act alone we will be at the mercy of events bigger than us,” adding: “I am confident that the foundations on which the EU project is built are strong enough to achieve the objectives that have been entrusted by the people of Europe.”

In a regular update to the parliament on the ECB’s annual review, Mr Draghi said the ECB would continue its current monetary policy stance. Noting the “unprecedented level of monetary support” provided by the ECB, Mr Draghi said the bank was “committed to preserving the very substantial degree of monetary accommodation”

But he said that this must be accompanied by “decisive action” in other policy areas.

Following last week’s instruction by the European Commission that member states should embrace fiscal expansion of 0.5 per cent next year, Mr Draghi said that “more growth-friendly composition of fiscal policies could boost growth.”

Economy

On the European banking sector, Mr Draghi said the profitability of European banks remained a challenge to be addressed. While the level of bank equity prices was not a matter per se for policy makers, it could curtail lending to the real economy, he said. “We should therefore consider what factors are behind this and what we can do to resolve them.”

He said legacy and structural challenges were a factor for some banks, and, where over-capacity was an issue, “rationalisation and consolidation must form part of the answer”.

Similarly, he called for the faster resolution of non-performing loans.

Resilient

Mr Draghi’s comments come after he said last month that Brexit would have an effect on the euro zone economy, though he noted on Monday that the euro zone economy remained “surprisingly resilient” in the face of external shocks including the falling oil price, a slowdown in emerging markets, and Brexit.

Addressing the parliament ahead of Mr Draghi’s address, EU commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said the ECB’s actions had had a “positive impact on overall financing conditions in the euro area”. But he noted that monetary policy should not be the only tool to boost the European economy, arguing that member states should also play their part through structural reforms and responsible fiscal policy.

Confirmation that the sport will remain part of the Games until 2024 at least should come early in the new year.

Several leading players refused to play in Rio for a variety of reasons and it was feared golf may survive, as had been guaranteed, only for 2016 and 2020.

A source at the International Olympic Committee said it would be “very surprising” if golf is not afforded an extended run. The IOC meets early next year for a standard review and to announce what sports will feature in the 2024 Games.

Olympic golf was boosted by a thrilling gold-medal chase between Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. Television audiences are also understood to have rated positively in comparison with other sports.

The International Golf Federation, which has overseen the return of golf to the Olympics, will point to measurable, broad benefits of golf’s inclusion when it has its review session with the IOC.

The IGF is especially keen to highlight golf’s growth in the south-east Asia, with the 2020 Games to take place in Tokyo.

After Rose and Inbee Park won gold in Rio, the IGF’s Peter Dawson said. “Golf’s success has been endorsed by strong viewing figures throughout the world and genuine interest from enthusiastic crowds in Rio. To see medallists crowned from six different nations is hugely gratifying.

“It is very important that we continue to be a supportive, contributing member of the Olympic family. We believe the values of our sport complement those of the Olympic movement and I am both hopeful and confident that we will continue to play our part beyond 2020.”

(Guardian service)

It is one of 41 bullet-point suggestions, made under nine headings of what are described as “emerging recommendations” by the Cost of Insurance Working Group.

They were given recently to Minister for Finance Michael Noonan by Eoghan Murphy, Minister of State with special responsibility for financial services.

Another recommendation is that insurance companies would require policyholders to produce an NCT certificate if their vehicle is of an age requiring one. This would be similar to the way in which vehicle testing centres require drivers to produce proof of insurance when having their vehicle checked.

The recommendations were published yesterday by Mr Murphy on his website eoghanmurphy.ie together with his covering letter to Mr Noonan.

Increasing costs

The group, which started work last June and has met eight times, intends to further examine the issues identified in the emerging recommendations report, with a view to submitting a final report to Mr Noonan next month.

Among the measures under consideration is the setting up of a national claims register to collate personal injury and property damage claims and record how they were resolved.

Compensation awards

It is also suggested that the impact of legal fees be examined and a “fully functioning insurance database” should exist to allow gardaí to check compliance, using automatic number plate recognition technology.

The cost of motor insurance has risen by 66 per cent since January 2011, and by 25 per cent in the 12 months to September 2016.

The industry blames rising costs, including what it sees as excessive awards by the courts in personal injury compensation claims, some of which it regards as fraudulent.

He has tabled an amendment to the Social Welfare Bill 2016, and expects the change to come into effect in January.

Councillors, who earn a basic salary of €16,700 plus expenses, will move from paying 4 per cent PRSI at class K to class S, the same as the self-employed. As a result they will be entitled to a State contributory pension, widow, widower or surviving civil partner pension, maternity adoptive benefit and paternity benefit.

The Bill, currently at Committee Stage in the Dáil, also increases the entitlements of self-employed people to some other benefits, and these will also be extended to councillors.

In a letter to Senator Paul Coghlan, leas-cathaoirleach of the Seanad, Mr Varadkar said in March next year the treatment benefit scheme for dental, optical and hearing treatments will be extended to the self-employed. They will also be able to access an invalidity pension from December next year. Councillors will benefit from both extensions.

Option

He also said local authorities would not be required to pay employers’ PRSI on behalf of councillors so the change would “have no impact on local authority budgets”.

“This brings to an end the profoundly unfair position since 2011 whereby local authority members paid PRSI but in return received no benefits,” the Minister said.

Sexton suffered a hamstring injury (not a reoccurrence of the old one), while Henshaw was knocked unconscious by a shoulder contact to his jaw. As a reasult, the Irish centre suffered concussion and will not be available this weekend.

“The evidence is fairly clear that Robbie took a shoulder to the jaw, which knocked him unconscious,” said Irish manager Mick Kearney. “Robbie was pretty much unconscious before he hit the ground. He was back in the dressing room very groggy, very sore still. He came in this morning to see the doctor and has since returned home.”

Backrow CJ Stander was also removed from the game with suspected concussion and will complete the Head Injury Assessment process and Return To Play (RTP) protocols, while fullback Rob Kearney will also follow RTP protocols after suffering concussive symptoms post-game.

Despite going down after being caught by a high tackle, Simon Zebo has only suffered from cramp, which occurred in the last 10 minutes. He is expected to train later on in the week.

Peter O’Mahony, Keith Earls and Ultan Dillane are expected to return to training this week also.

“We don’t think it’s too bad. It’ll certainly keep him out this weekend, but the expectation is that it may not be much longer than that,” said Irish manager Mick Kearney on Sexton. “One to two weeks maybe.”

If Stander and Rob Kearney are able to train by Thursday they will be available for selection against Australia.

“It was very quiet day today, to be honest,” added the Irish manager. “The lads all came in last night, very tired and sore after a physical battle. So today they just went through a few meetings and then did a walk-through.”

Brent crude oil has risen 11 per cent in a week since Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, started a diplomatic charm offensive to persuade the group’s more reluctant members to join its proposed output plan. Opec members are due to agree a world oil freeze pact with non-Opec countries on November 30th.

In the last several days, several members of the group, including Iran, along with non-member Russia, have suggested they are likely to agree to a deal to limit output.

“When you’ve got all of the major players on board with a production cut, obviously you’re very close to getting a deal done,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

Dollar edged lower

“You never know with Opec – sometimes they go to the last minute and there are a lot of false starts.”

Brent crude futures rose $1.67 to $48.53 a barrel by late trading in Europe, having touched $48.62, the loftiest level since November 1st. US West Texas Intermediate strengthened by $1.56 to $47.25 a barrel, after climbing as high as $47.33.

The dollar also edged lower, easing off last week’s 13½-year highs as Treasury yields nudged lower, bolstering oil and the broader commodities complex including copper and gold.

Goldman Sachs analysts said in a note that the odds of an Opec cut succeeding have increased, and believe the global oil surplus will shift into a deficit by the middle of next year, which would support prices.

– (Reuters)