It's not even Christmas yet and Publius is feeling a bit worse for wear.

Turns out that even though we'll have to wait another year before resuming our Christmas drink in the Shelbourne there have been far, far too many occasions for sin this season as it is - though we hasten to add that our sin palate tends towards the gluttony and sloth end of the spectrum these days lest Mrs Publius get a fright.

But we digress.

A nice festive cup of coffee would be just the thing to allow us to see in Christmas morning in a reasonably sober state before adding Baileys to it around noon and moving on to other beverages before getting scuttered by dark. Once again, we digress.

What was it this item was about?

Oh yes, coffee. Which these days not only has to be coffee but is also an indicator of the ethical state of your consumerist soul.

Those needing a refresher course on this subject are invited to tune in for Rodney Rice's Worlds Apart (RTE Radio 1, Thursday 28 Dec, 8.02 pm).

The programme heads to Nicaragua to check out Fairtrade coffee plantations supplying Bewley's. We trust this shameless plug will serve as evidence to our PR, advertising and marketing friends that Publius is not just about the humbug.

DDFH&B FINDS WELCOME AT FAILTE IRELAND

Publius can reveal that DDFH&B has won the Failte Ireland business after a competitive pitch that included Rothco and the incumbent McCann Erickson. DDFH&B chief exec Jim Donnelly was thought to have played a key role during the pitch. A formal announcement is expected in the new year.

The tender indicated that the business is worth around Euro3m to DDFH&B. More imprtantly though, the account brings with it mucho prestige - it's not every day you get to help brand your own country.

HALLOWS OF HOGWARTS

Spoilers ahead. Harry Potter mania went up a notch last week as JK Rowling unexpectedly revealed to the world the title of the seventh and "nal book in the Harry Potter series.

She did so by means that would have stumped even Prof Dumbledore - at least for 40 minutes, the length of time it took for the fastest eager readers to navigate a maze of riddles, puzzles and clues posted in a complicated game which was posted at noon GMT on Thursday to www. jkrowling. com with no advance warning.

The new title, for those who were wondering and haven't already done the puzzle or gone to MuggleNet. com, the title is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Rowling's ultimate installment promises to be the darkest of any of the books - and book retailers are starting to collect email addresses to alert customers when the book is assigned an ISBN number and price and pre-orders can be taken. Expect mayhem.

EXTRACTING THE NEWS

Clipping services are quaint little creatures, and they make it possible for you to seem like you actually read 100 newspapers a day. But the writing has been on the wall since the dawn of the digital age -- LexisNexis and more recently Google News just made it hard to justify, as more and more titles go online and allow Google's robots to crawl over their pages. [This newspaper it should be noted still maintains its Google-block. ] So it didn't come as that great of a shock to hear last week that management at News Extracts, the leading Irish media monitoring firm, had informed its staff by email that the company would probably close down at the end of January after a onemonth consultation period.

News Extracts is owned by the Sweden-based Observer Group, which monitors publications worldwide and maintains a journalist database with 900,000 journalists in 150 countries.