The Leinster Express had an "exclusive" on the case in which an 86-year-old man died in his isolated rural home just hours after he was refused admission to Portlaoise General Hospital.
Despite protests from his family, the hospital insisted that there was nothing medically wrong with Peter Brophy, even though he was distraught, vomiting and required oxygen to remain conscious.
The same newspaper highlighted the plight of 17-month-old Craig Gibbons. His parents say he is "going through torture" while waiting for a hole-in-the-heart operation at Our Lady's Hospital in Dublin. With no indication of when he will be called, his parents are trying to raise the £26,000 needed to pay for the operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
The Leinster Express said if the two cases were isolated, "they could perhaps be explained away as exceptional occurrences . . . Unfortunately, they appear to be part of a large, and hence more worrying, pattern . . ."
The Kilkenny People asked: "Are we becoming the sort of society that knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing? It's a question of how we select our priorities. Do we spend over £20 million on buying, for State use, the elegant home of Lord Iveagh in the Phoenix Park, or do we invest the same £20 million on providing CAT scanners and other urgently needed hospital equipment? Do we decide to spend £250 million on a National Sports Stadium, or do we appoint more teachers so that class sizes can be reduced and reading difficulties and illiteracy can be eliminated?"
The Kerryman highlighted the 5,000 waiting list for surgical outpatients at Tralee Hospital, where those with life-threatening conditions, such as suspected malignancies, may have to wait years to be seen.
On the subject of last week's media debate on hospital waiting lists in the Galway area, the Connacht Tribune decried the "sterile political sniping that passes for politics".
On how the Government should spend its money, the Leinster Leader said that by demanding a 30 per cent wage increase, over and above any national agreements, teachers were behaving like "jealous, petulant children determined to exploit the last vestiges of the soon-to-be-defunct catch-up system of pay awards, particularly in the public service.
"Nobody is asking teachers to remove themselves from their ivory towers. One merely asks that, occasionally, they take a look from their prestige perch at the rest of the world; in particular, the private sector, the sector which has contributed most, by far, to the success of national agreements even when teachers were making their gains, and the sector which, when times were worst, suffered most in terms of employment," it stated.
Customers in a Cadamstown pub have been rather taken aback to find a former priest pulling pints, according to the Tullamore Tribune. Father Jim Dempsey (43) recently decided to leave the priesthood and try being a publican instead. Dempsey's pub has been in his family for more than 200 years.
Back in 1996, the premises had to shut down as there was no one to run it. As a result, the village died somewhat as well.
Father Dempsey returned from a parish in Ontario, Canada, with another surprise for the locals. "In recent weeks the locals were shocked even further when it became known that Father Jim is to . . . marry his Canadian girlfriend." One loyal customer commented: "He was reared in the pub and was pulling pints since he was a young lad. He can pull the best pint in the area and that's all that matters to us."
The Mayo News used a lovely phrase to describe the precarious position of the proposal for a Co Mayo national park: "Somebody once said that there is a slowness in affairs that ripens them, and a slowness that rots them."