The first real taste Irish people had of the anti-globalisation movement was the Reclaim the Streets protest that converged on Dame Street in Dublin in May 2002 and resulted in a heavy-handed Garda response.

The anti-globalisation movement is the Youth Defence of the left, except potentially much more violent. They believe in direct, high-profile action to publicise their causes.

Despite this tendency to periodical and sometimes quite serious violence by fringe elements in the movement, it continues to have a fairly cuddly image. Why? The answer, one presumes, is their claim to have the interests of the poverty-stricken peoples of the developing world front and centre among their concerns.

They have successfully presented themselves as a sort of David vs the Goliath of multinational companies who are, so the story goes, exploiting the poor of the developing world in order to turn a quick profit. Along the way, we are told, these companies are depriving people in the First World of jobs through endless outsourcing and despoiling the environment into the bargain.

Exhibit A in the anti-globalisation case is child labour and the infamous 'sweat shops' run by Western companies in the Third World.

In fact, child labour is an absolutely unavoidable part of life in the poorest parts of the Third World, and the factories operated by companies such as Nike offer their employees far better working conditions, and wages, than their indigenous counterparts.

Furthermore, if the anti-globalisers ever get their way and actually drive companies like Nike out of the developing world, that part of the world will have to be given a new name because it will have stopped developing once and for all. In other words, it is the very people the anti-globalisers say they wish to help, namely the poor, who would be, and indeed are, their pre-eminent victims.

An example. In 1993 Senator Tom Harkin proposed a piece of legislation to the US Congress called the Child Labour Deterrence Act. This would have banned the importation of textiles made by child labourers.

Anticipating the passage of his Bill, Bangladesh unilaterally sacked 50,000 children from its textile factories.

What happened to these children? Did their lives become enriched as a result? Did they return to school and spend the rest of their childhood and adolescence chasing first love. Actually, no.

Their parents couldn't afford to keep them at home, much less put them into school, so they had to go out to work anyway. That's why they were in the textile factories to begin with. The problem was, many of them ended up working in far worse places than those factories. Some of them even ended up working as prostitutes, a decisive step backwards for them, you would have thought.

So what the Harkin Act and its backers managed to do was not to help these 50,000 children, but to make their lives vastly more miserable than they had been heretofore. So beware the anti-globalisers and their agenda.

Also, please see through their rhetoric because anti-globalisation is a cover for good old-fashioned anti-capitalism and their solution to Third-World poverty suspiciously resembles failed socialism.

Therefore, don't kid yourself that the protesters this coming weekend will be demonstrating against globalisation. Their real target, whether they know it or not, is wealth-creation, meaning the May 1 protests should properly be called anti-prosperity demos.

A startling social statistic to emerge from the recently released religion volume of the Census of 2002 is that people with no stated religion are 2.5 times more likely to divorce/separate than either Catholics or Protestants. This didn't receive the attention it deserved.

What can account for it? Could it be age-related? Perhaps it could be that younger people are less likely to be religious believers and younger people are also more likely to divorce/ separate than older people.

But this doesn't appear to be the explanation because the over-50s are as likely to be divorced/separated as the under-50s. (Roughly 9-10% in both cases).

So what is it then? Perhaps it is that divorced/separated people sometimes have a more jaundiced view of life by virtue of suffering the disappointment of a failed relationship and this extends to religion causing them to withdraw from the Churches. It is hard to believe though that this accounts for a difference as big as 150%.

In the end the chief reason is probably a question of outlook. The non-religious are generally more individualistic in their philosophy than the religious, placing an enormous premium on freedom and self-fulfilment. In some cases this presumably leads to the judgment that when their marriage is no longer satisfying their need for self-fulfilment it is foolhardy to persist with it.

One way or the other, the fact that the non-religious are much more likely to divorce/separate than the religious warrants further investigation.

We're all familiar with gaffes by George W. Bush. We're rather less familiar with gaffes by his presidential rival, John Kerry. Here's a big one. He was commenting recently on the Catholic Church and freedom of conscience. In support of his contention that a Catholic politician can in good conscience be pro-choice and vote accordingly, he cited Vatican II and a mysterious Pope called "Pius XXIII". Senator Kerry, there was no Pius XXIII. The last Pius was Pius XII. Maybe it's John XXIII you have in mind. Never mind, you got away with it. George would have been slaughtered and he's not even a Catholic.