Monthly Archives: October 2012

DISABILITY ALLOWANCE payments to under-18s will be ended in the budget if the Government adopts a proposal from the expert group that recommended reducing the rate of child benefit.

The Coalition was forced into a U-turn after last December’s budget when its plan to stop the practice of paying disability allowance directly to 16- and 17-year-olds met strong opposition from the parents of severely disabled children and Opposition parties.

The contentious proposal to increase the minimum qualifying age for the allowance from 16 to 18, while providing a compensatory payment for the teenager’s parent or guardian, is back on the agenda as Budget 2013 approaches.

Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton has said the EU-European Central Bank-International Monetary Fund troika has raised concerns about social welfare payments going straight to under-18s and said she was worried about young people losing the incentive to stay in education.

A u-turn on an earlier u-turn.

It’ll be as if nothing had ever happened.

Dail protest in 3…2…

Advisers tell Burton to axe disability allowance for under-18s (Mary Minihan, Irish Times)

(Sam Boal/Photocall Ireland)

Pub etiquette, eh?

Orna Cunningham writes:

Dublin Does Fridays has since taken down the offending post (no doubt due to the flaming they were getting over it on Facebook). It seems women still haven’t mastered basic pub etiquette, the silly darlings. Luckily, I snapped a screen grab so we can all be better informed before we go attempting anything that could be construed as less than ‘classy’.


A CGI homage to the action films of the 70s and 80s from Passion Pictures, written and directed by Dan Sumich:

An ordinary looking guy wakes up one morning feeling the worse for wear and realises he’s run out of milk. As he drags himself out of the house to go and buy some, an extraordinary sequence of events draws him into a journey of mayhem on the streets of San Francisco.

likecool