MY granny was a very practical woman who believed that a dose of common sense was the answer to most problems in life.

And for her generation, which straddled most of the 20th century, there were no shortage of problems.

My generation benefited enormously from the sacrifices her generation made, battling a hostile social and economic environment in a statelet determined to treat her and her kind as second-class citizens.

We live, as they say, in different times, but surrounded still by a wealth of problems – some inflicted on us, but many of our own making.

Róisín Lanigan: To be Irish in England today is to be the punchline of an unfunny joke

One of the reasons why people are so frustrated by politics and politicians is the failure to apply common sense to decision-making.

Here’s a thought experiment.

Let’s set aside for a moment the Northern Ireland Assembly and its 90 members and replace them with 90 people selected at random from the electorate and charged with sorting things out through the application of common sense.

How do you think they would do?

Common sense tells us that pouring millions of tons of human and animal effluent into Lough Neagh is killing it; and common sense tells us that it we stop doing that, things can only get better.........

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