My Wife arrived home with two small bags of shopping from Tesco during the week, regular small plastic bags that you buy at the till, the ones that are so light they keep ripping.

Well these bags didn’t rip in spite of having over E90 worth of groceries inside! There was nothing special in there, no expensive meat cuts, free range chicken’s, endangered species of fish, nothing but regular essentials that would cost a fraction of the cost in France or Spain.

Maybe some fruit and veg, a few cartons of orange juice and the like. What’s all this bull about abolishing the groceries act about?, things are as bad as ever, if not worse, and while there is no evidence directly of price fixing the main supermarket chains have it sown up between them.

 I don’t include Lidl or Aldi in my little rant because I don’t regard them as destination supermarkets, as in I don’t feel you can get everything you need from them.

We are insane here it’s so expensive, to the point that if a couple of bags cost nearly one hundred Euro, a shopping trolley full (which they now manufacture bigger) runs to three or four hundred. Added to this is the shocking quality of fresh fruit and veg.

I can honestly say that it’s becoming more and more the norm for me to see rotting pieces of fruit and veg packed in trays in supermarkets still within the expiry date.

I’ve tasted supermarket fruit that’s so old it’s both tasteless and juiceless and yet we pay way over the price for it.

Imported from the far corners of the planet.  Is it any wonder that families on the breadline avail of two for one rubbish, or frozen this and tinned that?

Depression
It saddens me when I think about the amount of people silently suffering with various levels of depression in Ireland.

The figure could be one in three, perhaps even slightly higher. Many of them are on various forms of medication, from Prozac, to Seroxat, Effexor to Diazepam. I spoke with numerous women during the week on air about their conditions.

Funnily enough as I write this no men had come on to talk; perhaps women are more up for talking about so-called taboo conditions than men.

A lot of women had been twenty or thirty years religiously taking their tablets but yet still trapped in a sad, dark lonely place, feeling that their lives had been wasted.

It doesn’t matter here what triggered the depression, perhaps in many causes it was just a dose of the blues that could have been worked through, but what does matter is that for years Irish people have been doled out medication by doctors like smarties at a kids party while the underlying causes of the unhappiness (for that is what it is) were never examined.

It’s made even sadder this week with the news that in cases of mild depression Prozac and the likes are of no more use than a sugar cube or a placebo tablet.

Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry, who makes vast fortunes on the sale of these supposed “wonder-drugs”.