John Treacy On the Olympic Track

An insight into the training schedules of Ireland's gold medal prospect in the 10,000 metres.

The heat is climbing into the seventies and the humidity even higher. It bakes the synthetic track at a high school in Providence, Rhode Island, where John Treacy and a top American runner, Danny Dillon, are into the fifteenth lap of their toughest workout in the week - the speed-training.

A Bizarre Championship

So many groups of national selectors got so many things wrong in the 1980 international rugby championship that it was small wonder that it finished up in a way that no knowledgeable critic could have predicted with England winning the international championship, the Triple Crown, the Grand Slam and the Calcutta Cup; with France buried at the bottom of the table, sharing the wooden spoon with Scotland; and with Wales reduced to anonymity, having been buried by Ireland at Lansdowne Road.

Poverty in Ireland

One million people in the Republic of Ireland live in poverty. Poverty is endemic to Irish society and extends not just to the unemployed, the travellers, and the slum-dwellers, but reaches right into the middle classes.In Ireland, social inequality is greater than in any other EEC country. The proportion of total income which goes to the poorest 30% is smaller here than elsewhere in the EEC, while the richest 30% here get a higher proportion of total income than the EEC average. The 300,000 at the top of the pile receive six times the income which goes to the 500,000 at the bottom.

Showdown at Sachs

This place is a fucking kip." Large Lily, of Belfast extraction, punctured the social souffle of the charity poker finals held in Sach's Hotel, Dublin on the night of Sunday February 24. "You're a bunch of fucking phoneys," she said into the audible silence from her six opponents around the table. "I'm fucking freezing," she continued, shuffling her monopoly money, shaking her incredible bulk, wristling her solid gold bracelet. She looked over her lorgnette, tossed off another glass of brandy, and joined in the play.

The Beatification of Charles

The thousands of individual sounds rose up out of the crowds, merging to become an aural steam rising into the high rafters of the main hall of the RDS. It was 6.45 pm, thirty minutes to go. Paddy Power was babbling on endlessly about fishing, but not too many cared. Delegates came to the rostrum; their speeches lost in the hubbub, got their perfunctory applause and returned to their seats. 7.07 pm and the crowd was growing restless, the occasional yelp skimming through the air towards the platform.

Corkman in the Kremlin

Michael O'Riordan of the Communist Party of Ireland is the longest serving general secretary of any communist party in Europe. He has uncritically supported a pro-Soviet line on every major issue which partly accounts for his party's poor success here.

Budget February 1980: Striking a Balance

Dr. Martin O'Donoghue was Minister for Economic Planning and Development from July 1977 to December 1979 and, during that time, was the chief architect of the Government's economic policy, as he had been of the Fianna Fail manifesto for the 1977 general election. The dropping of Dr. O'Donoghue from the cabinet by the new Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was seen to represent a repudiation of the economic policy of the Lynch Government. In this article, Dr.

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