Old news. The most insulting words in the language of a newspaper. The other adjectives aren't very pretty either. Old news is often described as dead, or cold, or over, writes Ann Marie Hourihan
Yet I am rather fond of old news, possibly because I am old enough now to remember an awful lot of old news when it was very young. When it was live, fresh and happening right in front of you.
Take the Navan bus crash, which does not take much remembering because it only happened 2 1/2 years ago. I covered the funeral of one the teenage girls who had died. Such a beautiful, sunny May day.
I can still see the sparrows bouncing about in the gutters of the church. I can hear the extraordinary silence - except for the birdsong - as a huge crowd waited for the family to arrive.
The reporters were standing almost in the ditch, among the cow parsley. I remember the tanned mother of the dead girl approaching the church on foot through the crowd. When the mother saw the hearse her legs buckled under her, like a horse startled in battle. If she had not been physically supported on either side she would have fallen to the ground.
And this was all the result of an accident. Nobody meant for it to happen. And, of course, we all knew that children die in road accidents all the time.
I suppose it was the fact that five children from a small community had been taken all at once - just like the three young men from Castletownbere who died in a single accident at the weekend.
And the community was so impressive. The area of Beauparc or Yellow Furze ( I never did learn the difference) seemed amazingly rural to Dublin eyes. I managed to get lost for an hour on my way there from Navan.
The night of the accident, the congregation had opened the church themselves as their parish priest was away and they wanted to get in to pray.
And I remember being taken into a house by a parent of one of the boys who had been travelling on the bus, because reporters have to get local colour at these events, which is bloody awful to have to do.
But this family welcomed all the hacks, as far as I could see, and gave us tea and chatted away about how nice the dead girls had been and how it was a great place to live, and how popular the parish priest was, and so on. The Taoiseach had already visited the grieving families, in private, and the general consensus was that he had been really, really good. It is easy to forget, now that we all hate Bertie, how graceful he can be.
And I remember the reporters were accommodated and briefed before the funerals in the little primary school. Two young clerical chaplains had been drafted in by the parish to handle the press.
These young chaplains were attached to the military and when one of them wanted to call the reporters together in the classroom he said "Lads, lads" to calm us down. Then he saw that quite a lot of us were female. We liked him.
And I remember being told afterward that parents of school-going children in this country, if their local school bus routes have been privatised, had to pay extra to hire buses that provided seat belts. For some reason this shocked me to the core.
So altogether it was a very vivid experience, the day of the Navan bus crash funerals - or two of them anyway. Then it became old news, really, unless you were of the family of one of the girls who died, or one of the children who was injured.
Or so I thought. But last Wednesday brought the Tyrone bus crash, in which 16-year-old Nicola Murray was killed and her cousin badly injured. For the families of the five dead Meath girls this was most upsetting.
As the parish priest of Beauparc, Fr Peter Farrelly, put it, "the memories are quite raw".
Last week also brought the postponement - the second postponement - of the trial of the two private companies charged as a result of the Navan bus crash. There was no courtroom in which the case could be heard in Dublin.
"Such a silly reason," as Gerry Frawley, father of one of the injured children, said. A week of misery and frustration for the families, after 2½ years of waiting.
The inquests on the dead girls cannot be heard until this case is finished. It was also a week of tension and stress for the accused companies, presumably.
We're great at the funerals, you see. It's the everyday grind of running a country we're not so good at, and the pain - the often unbelievable pain - that the resulting chaos causes always comes as a big surprise.
Late on Friday the Courts Service, to its credit, did a last-minute scramble and announced that both parties in the case would be called back today and offered the option of a hearing in May, or even April.
And so begins, perhaps, the end of this piece of old news.