In the sitting of the Roumanian Parliament on 27 December last Professor Iorga uttered these Dostojevskian words of comfort: “In our past there has been much suffering. If we have attained something it is not through the victories of our ancestors but through what they have suffered.”

Dark oblivion soon absorbs them all.

When Paddy married and settled down in Dungloe he found the reason for the unpayableness of the debt.

It seemed that what started out as a handful of isolated cases gradually turned into a tsunami of complaints.