Forget all that. Focus, instead, on little things that make the daily business of living here hopeful and pleasant. You won't have to look far.

Without trying - without even thinking what I was doing - I noticed in the space of a few hours the other day three things in public life that struck me as things to be grateful for.

One was the vitality and exuberance of Gay Byrne on his Sunday afternoon programme on Lyric FM. In general, Lyric FM is 'dumbing down' in the afternoons - if you think that only classical forms of music at classical length are not dumb. But if you think that any kind of music has its bad, good and better levels of accomplishment, then you can accept John Kelly's and Gaybo's programmes as very engaging compilations of stuff that is the best of its kind. Gay's linking monologue last Sunday bounced with bravura confidence and energy from the meaninglessness of the words of 'Moon River', to how good it feels to be walking along briskly in good health on a fine day, to hearing the playwright Tom Murphy sing 'Have You Not Seen My Lady' (surely the most elegant love song ever written) at a party, to what Nora Barnacle said to Ernest Hemingway when he brought James Joyce home drunk, to Gaybo's crusade against speakers on radio pronouncing a final t as if it is th - a practice which he presents, characteristically, as an outrage signalling the end of civilisation.

What we have to be grateful for is the breadth of reference. First of all, that he knows and feels and thinks and remarks so much and, second of all, that he trusts us to follow. The man is a national treasure; so is his audience.

More controversially - my heart was also made the lighter by hearing a clip of Mary Harney talking about the medical consultants, and the possibility of changing the financial relationship they've had until now with the state - that is, with us. Mary Harney as a radio personality is perhaps the polar opposite of Gay. She is strictly a one-note speaker, and that note is a kind of sulky muttering which belies the energy and intelligence she brings to her job.

And belies her courage. What she was saying the other day - and I just hope she meant it - was that this time the situation whereby many consultants do private work in public hospitals may, in fact, be reformed. Before their patients write to me to say what great doctors they are, and a few of them write to tell me how hard they work, let me say that I know they are very good at their jobs - usually - and many of them are almost incredibly hardworking. But the structure of their profession is part of the reason for their hurried, harried work. They shouldn't prop up a system where there's too few of them and where, when choices have to be made, a consultant cannot but have different perspectives depending on a patient's paying power. The big Dublin hospitals are bottomless pits of public money badly spent. A lot of different interests and individuals - civil servants even more culpably than politicians - have responsibility for the mess.

But you can't on the one hand say that our system is 'consultant-led' and on the other that nothing about the situation is the fault of the consultants.

They're a hangover from the past, the consultants who earn huge money in a profession restricted, in practice, to a certain kind of white male - a profession which disempowers all the other players in the health system.

Tomorrow is a day to be grateful that we may have a minister for health who will not bow before them.

Then - and not purely as light relief - have you ever, while waiting for a traffic light to change in a small Irish town, observed a dog or dogs mooch along the street on dog business? I am always delighted to see the animals accepted as part of town life, entitled to visit their own friends - or whatever it is they are doing - the same as the rest of us, without being on a lead, without being de-barked or de-clawed, without being pursued by petty bureaucrats who want to create bureaucracies full of wardens and penalties and enquiries and double penalties. One of the few drawbacks of dogs is that they don't know that it's Christmas Day tomorrow. But if they did know they'd be grateful they live in Ireland.

Meanwhile, let us be grateful on their behalf and on our own. Thank you, powers that be, this Christmas of 2006, for Gay Byrne on Lyric FM; the Minister for Health and what can only be called her cojones; and the civil rights accorded, in certain parts of Ireland, to our friends, the dogs.

A mixed bag. Like life.