THE prostitution business is as profitable in the west as it is anywhere, apparently. Earnings of £1,000 per week by a 34 year old British "escort girl" who has been plying her trade in the Co Sligo seaside village of Strandhill was shocking enough to make the front page headline in the Sligo Champion.

"Vice ring operates from rented houses," the newspaper told us, adding that the call girl is a "sing mother" from the Battersea area of London and has "worked in a number of Ireland's cities in the past couple of months". In the week before coming to Sligo the "attractive blonde" plied her trade in Limerick and before that in Galway. She is attached, to a Dublin based escort agency makes appointments on her mobile phone and charges £150 per hour.

"She works seven days a week does not allow clients stay overnight," and insists on payment in advance," said the Sligo Champion, which went into extraordinary detail she is a black belt karate expert who turned to prostitution after she lost her job as a beautician.

A spokesman for Sligo Garda station said no complaint or report from the public had been received on call girls and they were unaware of the woman's presence.

ADD the name of Judge Dan Shields to the growing list of people who don't know the country is coming to. He made the remark while presiding at court in Ballina, Co Mayo, when he said that in the previous few days he had dealt with two people in his district who had assaulted people over 80 years of age, the Western People reported.

"And," he said, "not one of them was an itinerant. They were, apparently, respectable citizens who apparently decided to misuse the roads and then to assault people."

Judge Shields "had not had any travellers before him for assaulting a person of 82 or 86 years of age. He said it was respectable people of the area who had committed those heinous crimes."

A judge at Waterford Circuit Court apologised for the "inadequate compensation" paid to travellers who were shot at, the Munster Express reported. Two Co Waterford brothers, who had fired shots into travellers' caravans in a row over trespassing, were ordered to pay £22,000 damages and costs.

Two travelling families in Co Wexford 12 adults and 19 children brought the suit. The defendants caused "great panic and upset" when they fired shots into two of the caravans while the adults and children were sleeping in three caravans and a van.

THINGS can get pretty testy at county council meetings, with the Laois Nationalist going so far as to give local representatives titles such as "Killer Keenan, The Destroyer and The Mauler".

But nowhere was the Christmas spirit less in evidence than at a recent meeting of North Tipperary County Council, when a Fine Gael councillor, Ger Darcy, was accused by two Fianna Fail councillors Jim Casey and Dan Smith of removing the names of some Fianna Fail supporters from the electoral register.

The Tipperay Star, Guardian and Midland Tribune all reported the meeting on their front pages, with the Midland Tribune best capturing the angry mood by quoting some of the comments which flew across the table.

This is a callous attempt to blacken my name. A callous, cowardly act."

"So much for the spirit of Christmas I am shocked. This is a scurrilous, vicious attack."

"We are becoming a kangaroo court of a kind. I don't want such a debate to continue."

Waving a piece of paper, Jim Casey said he had the list of names of those who had been removed, although he did not feel that the council chamber was the right place for them to be revealed. When Casey refused to apologise, the non-Fianna Fail members of the council walked out.

You can find a silver lining and a Christmas message just about anywhere, according to the Fermanagh Herald. No matter how objectionable the comment by the new Master of the Orange Order, Mr Robert Saulters, that the British Labour Party leader Tony Blair had sold out his birthright by marrying a Catholic, at least Mr Saulters had done the "good service" of reminding people that "there is a significant religious dimension to the Northern problem which is a challenge to all Christians who accept ecumenism on, the basis of the signs of the workings of the Holy Spirit among fellow Christians in other denominations."

Mr Saulters had claimed that Catholics who knew him personally understood his remarks. The call of the Holy Spirit, however, requires real, courage and "religious change without pretending that differences are irrelevant historical hangovers," said the newspaper.