By Helen Redwood “THERE’S NO way of preparing for Christmas, that bonus is actually Christmas”. This reaction from one single parent spells out what the Scrooge-like scrapping of the Christmas bonus will mean for the 1.3 million people previously eligible. Minister Lenihan’s

By Stephen Boyd COMMENTING ON the aftermath of the budget, Stephen Collins political editor of The Irish Times said: “This year the silence has been eerie, mainly because the large body of PAYE workers who are being hammered by the budget have

By Kevin McLoughlin AT THE start of his speech, Brian Lenihan talked about taking from each according to their means. It sounded as if he was just to about to quote Karl Marx. Alas, very quickly it became clear that he was

By Michael Murphy IN A graphic validation to the old adage “one law for the rich and one for the poor”, the decision of the Fianna Fail/Green Party government to buy the bad debts from the Irish banks for up to €90