The Dublin Government may have been the toast of the European establishment this week as they played host to the EU enlargement ceremonies, but on the domestic front, Bertie and Co must have wished they'd stayed in bed. First there was Flynn. Beverly C lost her long-running libel battle against RTÉ, and while the said station gloated embarrassingly on its own news programmes, Fianna Fáil was once again faced with humiliation caused by one of its own. Free article

BY JUSTIN MORAN - There was something more than vaguely disturbing about watching Riot Squad Gardaí killing time on Saturday morning before leaving to cover the march organised by Another Europe is Possible on May Day. Perhaps it was the sheer number of officers gathered around vans in Croke Park's car park. Maybe it was the amount of equipment they had been issued, compared to what I knew would be the relatively unprotected demonstrators. Free article

And then there were 25 EU states. Europe woke up this week a very different place as, 15 years after the cold war ended, a new entity finally took shape as east and west Europe merged as never before. Not even Caesar or Hitler could manage that! In fact, the EU breached new barriers last weekend when the number of European states now members of the EU outnumbered for the first time the number of those not in. Free article

"THESE people don't belong here and we have to maintain every wee bit of Ulster soil that's left," one unionist told the Belfast News Letter this week. His comments followed the distribution of anti-Catholic leaflets and a unionist picket of an apartment block in South Belfast's Sandy Row district calling for the eviction of Catholic residents. Free article

Campaigners on behalf of the three republicans being held in Colombia for travelling on false passports have thanked the 26-County Government for its intervention on behalf of the men, but have asked it to redouble its efforts to get the men home. Last week, the Dublin Government offered to pay a €17,000 bond, after which the men would be free to leave jail. Free article

Martin McGuinness was in South Africa last week as a guest of the ANC at the inauguration of newly re-elected President Thabo Mbeki and for the celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the ending of Apartheid. Nelson Mandela was elected the first president of a democratic South Africa on 8 May 1994. Free article

Michael Finucane, the son of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, will deliver this year's Bobby Sands Memorial Lecture, the centrepiece of a weekend of activities in which British state collusion with unionist death squads will be raised during the annual commemoration of the 1981 Hunger Strikes. An Fhírinne, the campaign calling for the truth about collusion, is to launch a photographic exhibition. Free article

Mary Nelis and Raymond McCartney pause in silence at the Derry hunger strike memorial on Wednesday, which marked the 23rd anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands. The event was attended by many Derry republicans. Free article