I'm not saying there's a hint of insider trading about it, but there is something squirm-making that a major shareholder would, by their own admission, sit on information speci"cally because it might have an affect on share price. Martha Stewart, after all, ended up in the slammer for something far less (remember, she was found not guilty of insider trading, but guilty of not being forthright with the feds in their investigations. Yes I know what you're thinking . . . our prisons wouldn't be big enoughf). And if, as Willie O'Dea conscientiously explained as the basis for his moral duty not to deprive us of his contribution to government, the cabinet shares collective responsibility for all decision making, does this not mean that if we were in the States right now every leading politician in the country would be in some prison in West Virginia baking blueberry muf"ns? Now, 'that', as Martha used to say, 'would be a good thing.'

Anywayf to planning. A couple of months back, the minister for the environment, John Gormley, 'called in' the Draft County Monaghan Plan because its proposals to increase the amount of development in the county over the next "ve years were not in line with the Government's vision as expressed in the National Spatial Strategy and the National Development Plan. A strong 'central' approach can sometimes work provided (amongst other things) it is consistent. Fast forward to August and the announcement of the end of the Shannon-Heathrow connection. A more important blow to the Government's national development vision, I would have thought, than a handful of unwanted houses in Monaghan. Cue some Monaghan-style central government intervention in Shannon, I "gured. But that didn't happen. Not only did it not act, nobody in Government uttered a meaningful word except to sheepishly suggest that policies on planning and development were trumped by commercial interests.

Sorry lads. You can't have it both ways. After all, couldn't the Monaghan County proposal to bump up its housing numbers be seen as a commercial decision to compete with Dublin in offering families a better quality of life?

My point isn't that Monaghan and Clare should be able to do whatever they want. My point is that both these situations highlight the amount of power the Government has in relation to planning and development in the rest of the country. And how arbitrary its intervention can be: the Government acts in Monaghan, where it doesn't have to but does because it can get away with it; it does nothing in Shannon, where it ought to, but runs off and hides instead because action is inconvenient. Inconsistency: heavy handed one minute, hands off the next.

What we need is stronger local government. It's an almost universally accepted principle of democracy that as much power as is necessary is vested in regional or local authorities. Universal, except in Ireland where it's universally accepted that local authorities have limited powers to act in any area.

I had thought that when Aer Lingus made their now famous announcement the whole issue of decentralisation of power would become a theme.

Perhaps it's a measure of how emasculated Irish local authorities have become that reaction to the news was, instead, dominated by calls from Mid West representatives for Government intervention and, when it was clear that nobody in the Cabinet thought the matter serious enough to disrupt their holidays, the formation of ad hoc committees, action groups and alliances. Ad hoc committees and alliances are all well and good, but they don't "ll the gap left by the absence of a powered-up local authority. As long as this is the case, planning and development in this country will remain an inconsistent, vision-free-zone.

Back to the whole Aer Lingus/Shannon debate. While Ryanair was getting all righteously indignant about the Aer Lingus pull-out, raising the Munster "ag and belting out the 'Fields of Athenry', it was singing a different tune elsewhere. The biggest story in Belgium in the middle of last week was an announcement by Ryanair that it intends to pull completely out of Charleroi, the airline's base south of Brussels, from the end of November unless it gets a guarantee from a local union that a strike by security personnel last June won't happen again.

They also want 1m in compensation. Listening to people being interviewed I was struck by the uncanny parallels with the Shannon-Heathrow situation . . . loss of connectivity to the rest of Europe, jobs under threat, accusations of sharp business practise, and so on. I swear, if somebody didn't tell you you were listening to Belgian radio you'd think that the people of the Mid West had taken to speaking French. All we need now is Aer Lingus to step in and offer to save the Brussels hub.