Finally: Witnesses will no longer be required to swear before God or make an affirmation when filing affidavits under proposals agreed by Cabinet on Tuesday. Instead they will be able to make what will be known as a “statement of truth” and will face a maximum one year prison term for breaking it. The proposals […]
Three thousand, two hundred, and one euros. That’s the cost of the new EU deal to every man, woman and child, in Ireland. Of all the countries in the European Union, only Luxembourg residents will contribute more to the EU budget over the next few years. Irish people will pay in just under twice as […]
The report on this morning’s EU recovery deal in the Irish Times is very comprehensive, reporting all of the issues in detail, except for one, which is, very strangely, totally left out of the coverage: The 27 member states of the European Union this morning signed off on a €1.8 trillion package to fund the […]
The report on abortion presented by the Department of Health may have informed us that 6,666 terminations were carried out in Ireland last year (plus 375 in Britain), but aside from that, it is abysmally and purposely poor in terms of information given. It does not include typical data to allow us to analyse what groups are […]
In his defence, if you had to sit through one of Richard Boyd Barrett’s lengthy speeches about the oppressed proletariat of Dun Laoghaire, you’d probably consider having a quick forty winks as well. And goodness knows, anybody who’s worked in an office knows about the dangers of getting the food sleeps after a hearty lunch. […]
The problem with economic downturns is that all the bills tend to come due at once. When banks see one portion of their loan book fail, they send out the debt collectors to make good and this adds pressure to an already pressured situation. Something similar happens in politics. “Never let a good crisis go […]
It’s a relatively slow news day, so let us place on record our thanks to the British Prime Minister for this tasty and controversial content: Face masks will become mandatory in shops across England, ministers are to announce on Tuesday, following mixed messages, a cabinet split and mounting pressure on Boris Johnson to change public […]
Senators have earned a whopping €3.2 million despite sitting for just six days this year, the Irish Mirror reports. Unlike much of the country, TDs and Senators weren’t put on a Covid-19 payment but continued to earn a full salary despite the lockdown. The payout to Senators included almost €800,000 for travel and overnight accommodation expenses even though […]
In case you missed it, last week saw Europol, which is the European Union’s Agency for Law Enforcement publish its EU Terrorism Situation & Trend Report for 2019. One of the most startling, but perhaps not entirely surprising pieces of data to emerge from the Report was the fact that in 2019 a total of […]
Parents of 670 teenage students with Down syndrome have won a battle to ensure they can be enrolled in a summer education programme for children with special needs. Draft guidelines published by the Department of Education last month indicated that the students would not be eligible for the summer tuition, causing much distress to parents and […]
The current debate over the extent of Irish “white privilege” and indeed responsibility for slavery has led to the revival of what has sometimes been an unseemly debate over whether the transportation of Irish people to the West Indies during the Cromwellian plantation constituted a form of slavery. Much of the debate over such matters […]
170 Irish soldiers previously stationed in Lebanon returned home today after a delay of several months due to the covid-19 pandemic. Though originally due home in May, the men’s return was delayed following a decision by the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, who banned UN peacekeepers from returning, supposedly to prevent the spread of covid-19. […]