EVERY SATURDAY MORNING we take a look at all the best comments left on the site by our readers over the past seven days.

This week there was a lot of talk about Alan Shatter (again), Angela Kerins’s salary (again), Sharon Ní Bheoláin and rugby.

So here are the standout comments from the week that was.

The 5 most popular comments this week

1. Breaking the two thousand barrier this week was Credible Alibi with his comment on an article about why emigrants do not want to return to Ireland. He got 2,051 slaps on the back for this one.

Tell you something, this country is rapidly becoming a tax trap. If new taxes and charges keep coming at the rate they are then it’s just gonna become a pointless exercise doing a days work, simply earning to be taxed purely to pay the debts of extremely wealthy financial sector gamblers. It’s a nonsense. This state has its hand in my pocket up to an unfair level, the return for my labours and indebtedness is rapidly becoming not worth it. Despite having a decent job with decent earnings and not being in negative equity, I’m actually being forced to consider moving on for simple fear of wasting my life paying someone else’s debts. Madness.

2. Following revelations this week that RTÉ news presenter Sharon Ní Bheoláin was being stalked, she considered making a complaint to the Press Council over photographs taken without her knowledge appearing in three national newspapers. About 1,354 of you agreed when David Murphy said:

I saw the pictures and it did occur to me that it looked like she was still being stalked.

3. Dara Kelleher had this to say following Gillian Godsil’s revelations that the bank turned down a €500,000 offer for her house. He got 1,298 thumbs up for his thought.

I hope the idiots who turned down the €500K offer are found and fired if they haven’t already been!

4. It was a puntastic week (as you’ll see later on) but Michael Finucane got the most green thumbs – 1,261 to be exact – for this one on a piece about dead frogs.

RIPpit

P.S. We do love frogs. And we feel terrible about the frogs.

5. Ruth McDonagh is not happy at all about Cadbury’s new chocolate bar wrappers. And lots of you (well, 1,118 of you) agreed.

I hate the new wrappers. Bring back the gold foil. Every time you opened a bar it felt like winning the golden ticket. Who needs a resealable wrapper anyway, it’s not like you just take a square or two and keep the rest for another day. Chocolate is to be demolished in one sitting! NOM.

The top 5 articles which received the most comments this week

(Image: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire/Press Association Images)

1. Gerry Adams says Hyde Park bomb accused should never have been arrested (326 comments)

2. These five graphs dig into the figures behind wind energy in Ireland (264 comments)

3. “I’d rather live in a city that literally fell down than come home” (232 comments)

4. How the Irish players rated after their narrow loss to England (230 comments)

5. Column: Why bother learning Irish? (216 comments)

Some of the best comments left on the site this week

(Image: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire/Press Association Images)

We discussed homophobia last Sunday through a number of reader-generated posts and an article on the NFL’s first openly gay player. Some readers protested that there was too much written on the subject in recent weeks. Séamus Kealey responded:

Steven thanks for another positive article, maybe some of the critics here don’t appreciate the significance of these stories. Maybe because they never experienced what it was like to receive hostility from others in their sport because of who they loved or because of their sexual orientation…or maybe when they talked about their partners or what they did together or their wedding plans no one exclaimed ‘we’re taking this straight thing way too far’…or because they never had a reason to hide away and ‘secret keep’ for part of their life or had to suppress a significant part of who they are…or because they didn’t have to ‘come out’. Attitudes in the world of sport are changing slowly but surely and that’s why these stories are important. Still a long way to go looking at some of the comments on this string. If you feel uncomfortable with a few stories that highlight inclusion or homophobia then this says more about you. It’s not a matter of ‘normalising’ it as someone mentioned, it’s just a matter of inclusion.

Sinéad Hanley shared with us the joy of having kids on a column about the seven deadly sins of parenting.

I often think i am having a heart attack but its actually wrath. I am just after leaving the young lad with a bowl of cocoa pops with no milk. Went to the loo to clean the work of art he just completed (blue toothpaste on the wall). Came back to see if he’d finished the cocoa pops and he had the bowl upside down and had hammered all the cocoa pops individually into the carpet with his toy hammer. And he denies everything.That’s a well written article though.

Junior causes a lot of mess but he is oh so cute. And bold. But more cute than bold.

It was a puntastic night on Tuesday on two particular stories – one about frogs (see above) and one about fish.

As police in the UK hunted for an Irish girl who slapped a shop worker in the face with a large bream, commenters went mad with the puns. Mad we tell you. Here’s a sample:

Jerry Mandering: Is she the sole suspect?

Huey: Did it just for the halibut

Jambon Decapabanana: Lads this isn’t the plaice for puns

Dave Spier: I don’t think the scale of the incident has hit home

Rodger 5: Well, the whiting was on the wall.

James O’Sullivan: Is she telling the trout. the whole trout and nothing but the trout?

Bishnach: It was the profishional IRA. Our fight isn’t over yet

But King Olaf took the honours with this:

The article is going to bait all kinds of floundering jokes which belong in a school….certainly this forum is not the plaice for it. Hopefully the young woman will not make a halibut of this kind of behaviour…i’m sure the police are closing the net around her for their catch of the day.Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to hang my head in shame after that lot.

Wednesday’s poll explored your honesty (or dishonesty) by asking what action you would take if you found a wallet full of cash. Ryan Carroll said:

A year in college I lost my job, had no parents’ money to fall back on, no income and was fast running out of food.Found a wallet on the 46A with €600 in it, I was gonna take it, then I saw the ID of the person who owned it, not only were they a tourist but his job was a truck driver, not someone who could afford to lose €600.

I rang his credit card company back in Amsterdam and tracked him down to his hotel, hand delivered the wallet.

I expected a relieved thank you, but when the desk lady rang upstairs he said to her tell him to just leave it there I’ll pick it up later on my way out. I’d never been more disgusted in my life, he didn’t even pass on a thanks.

Luckily, karma was a bit more generous, the very next day UCD (who had charged me €6,000 in fees for a year I was actually out on leave and due to a technicality it looked like I’d have to pay them to re-register) told me they were dropping the fee bill.

The very next week, I put my laptop down on a seat in the back of the bus and walked off without it.

I was near to tears, all my notes, journal, movie downloads ebooks lost.

I went through a week of worry. Then my sister’s mother in law rings me and says she saw an ad in the paper, some teenage girl had found my laptop and her mother put an ad in the paper to find the owner, me.

I went to see the people who had it, they lived in a council estate in a working class area and I would say were not lush with cash, so for them to do what they did was very commendable. I wasn’t going to be like the truck driver, I thanked her 100 times gave her €50 and it was so satisfying to hear her mother say “see doing the right thing always comes back to you”.

It always comes back, God may or may not exist, but karma does, the universe has it’s own sense of justice.

This week a 4.4-billion-year-old gem was found on an Australian sheep farm. And then Jeremy Usbourne made a funny:

Hipster planet was making zircon before it was cool.

On Thursday, DailyEdge.ie reminded you all to ring your mammys more often. There was a lot of story-swapping but Rachel‘s gave us the biggest laugh.

Homo erectus shared this piece of knowledge from the UK with us following a convoy of old police vehicles being moved through the city of London.

My cousins (who spent the 80’s in the UK) always called Police Cars “jam sandwiches” seeing the 1983 Rover, I now understand why.

This is what the car he refers to looks like.

Image: Met Police

Spot any good comments? Send them through to us by email at sinead@thejournal.ie.