Page 4 - John Downing News Today

Even in a time of war, the day-to-day business of living must somehow continue – and that includes burying the dead.

Ursula von der Leyen lives “over the shop” in a small EU-adapted apartment on the 13th floor of the commission HQ, close to her offices. It allows her to devote her time to steering things across 27 member states, which amount to 450 million people.

Three weeks from now, on March 8, Irish voters will be asked to vote on two very important constitutional changes – changes so important that most people say they know “hardly anything” about them.

My grandfather, Tom Downing, was abducted and murdered by the IRA in Cork city back in the violent days of late November 1920, and his body has never been recovered to this day. His story has lain idle for a century, and was unsurprisingly a family taboo in the uber-nationalist decades which followed, when retrospectively everyone had been “out fighting the Tans”.

Tributes have been paid to journalist, author, broadcaster, and Radio Kerry contributor Michael O’Regan, who has passed away.

Suddenly the world looks like an increasingly dangerous place: the war in Ukraine approaches a third year this day next week; the unspeakable suffering of people in Gaza makes the Middle East look like a tinder box on the point of mass explosion. And these are only the wars among dozens of global conflicts inflicted upon innocent people which make it to our television screens.

We are facing into “a year of voting” after four pent-up years of no call to the polling booths.

My favourite story about the politics of Ash Wednesday concerns a roguish former TD who found himself rushing at the last minute to a cemetery, chasing the last chance to register presence with the bereaved family of an important constituent and party activist.

In Brussels, a Flemish colleague once told me of the French-speaking Catholic bishop who publicly insisted that “Jesus cannot speak Dutch”.

The acrid smell of burning tractor tyres and the scary sight of Belgian riot police, water cannon at the ready, took many veteran EU summit watchers on a trip down memory lane this week.