Today With Pat Kenny collected the GOLD award for Best Current-Affairs Programme at the 2009 PPI Awards. Visit the gallery

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Stability Treaty

Michael O’Regan, Parliamentary Correspondent with the Irish Times and Fionnan, Sheehan Political Editor of the Irish Independent review last night’s Frontline debate on the Stability Treaty

Collins Family Move

Steve Collins, who’s son Roy was murdered by the McCarthy Dundon gang three years ago, has been given an opportunity to start a new life.

The state has made a million euro available to the Collins family to allow them to make a fresh start in the UK. Barry Duggan from the Irish Independent has the story.

Greece

Two elections in three months, protests on the street, the rise of nationalism and the right wing and the spectre of a default. Anybody who has listened to a news bulletin in the past month will know that the country we're referring to is Greece.

James Pettifer is a member of the Oxford University History Faculty and St Cross College and his ebook, ‘The Making of the Greek Crisis’ has just been published.

He writes that a basic problem in dealing with the crisis is that Brussels beurocrats fundamentally misunderstand Greek culture and history. Furthermore, they misunderstand the complexities of the Greek personality.

The Consumer Show

Data issued by the Central Bank this week gave a stark indication of not only the level of mortgage debt in this country, but the behaviour of mortgage holders and their lenders. As much as 10.5% of private residential mortgages are now in arrears – that’s 80,000 loans – in their payments by at least 90 days. In this evening’s Consumer Show on RTE 1 Eddie Hobbs will meet some consumers who are trying their best to meet with their lenders.

Silent

Last night a minimum 80 people slept on the streets of Dublin. A further are 5000 officially homeless, of no fixed abode, countrywide. Allied to the problem of being homeless, of having nowhere to sleep, are issues of depression, mental illness, poverty and the loss of hope.

In his play, Silent, which will open at the Peacock Theatre on the 30th May, Pat Kinevane tackles the problems of being homeless. The play tells the touching and challenging story of homeless McGoldrig, who once had splendid things. But he has lost it all – including his mind. He now dives into the wonderful wounds of this past through the romantic world of Rudolph Valentino, one of the most recognized stars of the 1920s silent film era.

I’m joined in studio by Pat Kinevane and by Sam McGuinness, CEO Dublin Simon Community and by Brian Cahill who himself has personal experience with the problem of homelessness.

Penguin Paperbacks

How can you be well read? Hold your own in a conversation that skips from Dickens, to Elliot or from Stoker to H.G Wells.. Well the publisher Allen Lane came up with the idea of publishing good quality fiction at accessible prices back in 1935 in the form of the paperback. The first Penguin paperbacks cost just sixpence and changed the way the reader thought about books for ever.
Well Penguin are re publishing many of the hit novels they introduced to the public through the sixpenny paperback, costing a little more today you can feast on Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster, the Murder in Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe.....and hundreds more.....Pat was joined on the line by the editor of the series Simon Winder to re introduce us to these classics