No doubt, it is completely coincidental that our old friend the negligent publication case is listed (at no.16)for hearing, having been adjourned from the last appeal sessions, which - I now recall - also featured a Supreme Court judge.

As I anticipated, the decision was appealed to the High Court, and the appeal was listed for hearing this week as you will, of course already have read about here but has been adjourned to the next Appeal sessions in March 2008.

Interestingly perhaps, the delay is due (so the court was told this morning in my own presence)to difficulties in deciphering transcripts of the original criminal trial, the report of which was allegedly negligent.

The page is here.

On enquiry, one passenger told that it was a "random search".

I cannot remember a precedent and I cannot imagine that there is a power to do this. It seems a "diabolical liberty" to me.

Anyone suggest a reason that I might be wrong ?

My original belief is that this was NOT random. However, the search was so perfunctory that it was impossible to believe that it was made in the honest belief that there might be something to be found.

These creatures are not only huge (weighing up to a ton - that's the weight of several motor cars !) but are amazing travellers: they more-or-less replicate the old Triangular Route i.e. Ireland-West Africa-Caribbean. They are also awesome - for once the word is definitely apt - divers: ... a dive of 1,280 metres has been recorded.

I have run out of time; you must visit the website.

...the Lee to become a railway track ! The Venice of the South ! Where we sported and played in the green leafy shades, stroke-hauling salmon and catching bile-filled mullet - to disappear in the name of progress ! Not on, boy.

Well, maybe one dissenter could be my old friend - if he will allow me to call him that - Theo Dorgan, to whom Finbarr applies the insulting sobriquet of Great Brain of Cork. That it is intended as an insult is put beyond doubt not only by the context ("recently spotted junketing ..." - another give-away word - " ...to Jerusalem, despite an international boycott") but by the separate reference to "Fintan O'Toole, Ireland's leading intellectual (excluding our own Theo Dorgan, of course)".

However, when he refers to my old friends the Labour Party as having "the backbone of a chocolate eclair", he risks losing this fan.

When I first started this weekly feature (back in October), it was an attempt to get some attention from News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch, prop.). I assumed that the problem with distribution of a puny weekly supplement to a flagship title would immediately yield to the appropriate dose of attention.

Before that, I had already successfully obtained some attention from the editorial staff by e-mailing the newspaper. Whether resulting from that or not, there was an improvement in the position. This improvement lasted a few weeks only, though.

Six months later, it is a matter of some wonder to me that things have gotten even worse.

I am not sure that there is any point in persisting with this exercise, but I will deal with the issue at least once here.