Category Archives: News

news as it is happening-ish

 

G’wan the Tommy!

(Hat Tip: Rob Smith)

UPDATE:

Ah here.

File Pics Fianna Fail has put down a motion of no confidence in Minister for Justice Alan Shatter over the garda discretion controversy.

Mr Shatter said his mentioning of the incident involving the Independent TD Mick Wallace was a mistake.
He apologised and said he would not do it again.
Minister Alan Shatter told the Dáil the motion was particularly galling given that one of his biggest jobs on entering office was to reverse Fianna Fáil’s cuts to justice and defence funding.
Addressing claims made by Mattie McGrath TD last Thursday he told the Dáil, “While I can be accused of being a workaholic, I can not be accused of abusing alcohol.”

 

Minister Shatter says FF confidence motion is disingenuous and politically opportunistic (RTE)

(Mark Stedman / Photocall Ireland)

Via: Páraic Gallagher

The Garda report filed on the 2008/9 incident in which Justice Minister Alan Shatter was stopped at a drink-drive checkpoint “has gone missing”.

Don’t worry.

A concerned and informed garda whistleblower has been found..

 

An informed source has revealed the garda who stopped Mr Shatter felt he was not fully co-operative. She was also asked by the then Fine Gael frontbench spokesman: “Don’t you know who I am?
Information made available to the Irish Independent about the incident about five years ago appears to contradict Mr Shatter’s version of events.

Informed sources familiar with the case say that the now Justice Minister:

* Said nothing about being asthmatic, preventing him completing the test.

* Intimated to the garda that it was unconstitutional to stop him as he was coming from the Dail and said: “Check your law book.”

* Appeared not to make a sufficient effort to complete the breath test.

* Drove off without being waved on by the officer.

 


‘Don’t you know who I am?’ What Shatter said to garda (Fionnan Sheahan / Ian Mallon, Irish Independent)

Meanwhile:

And we know what happens to people such as Clare Daly, in similar circumstances.

She winds up handcuffed by the side of the road, taken to a police station and put in a cell. When she gives a urine sample she’s released with the remark: “Come back when you’re sober.”

The details of her alleged “offence” are then leaked and end up in the media. The fact she subsequently passed the drink-driving test with flying colours is beside the point.

Two whistleblowers started this. They misinterpreted and got wrong significant details, but they did us a service in disclosing what’s going on. Four TDs sought to clean up what has become a very, very rotten system.

Clare Daly ended up in handcuffs. Interaction between the Garda Commissioner and the Minister for Justice led to the release of private information about Mick Wallace. Ming Flanagan was publicly skewered for his bad behaviour.

The names of the VIPs and celebrities on whose behalf senior gardai quashed penalty points remain unknown. That’s confidential.

 

Time to wake up and smell the bullshit (Gene Kerrigan, Sunday Independent)

(Photocall Ireland)

10/01/2013 Abortion hearings. Pictured Dr Sean O'D

If the shame and guilt of an abortion doesn’t get you then cancer will or so Dr Seán Ó Domhnaill would want you to believe:

The importance of the fact that US National Cancer Institute researcher Dr Louise Brinton, the chief organiser of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop in 2003 that persuaded women that “abortion is not associated with increased breast cancer risk” (April 2009) has reversed her position and now admits that abortion and oral contraceptives raise breast cancer risks, cannot be over-emphasised.

Dr Brinton’s admission that abortion raises breast cancer risk by 40% is no surprise to those on the anti-abortion side who have repeatedly stated that abortion is bad medicine; that surgical or medical intervention is inappropriate for psycho-social stress that could be better relieved by more compassionate, albeit time-consuming, intervention.

 

We should be willing to give that time, rather than jump to the supposed “quick fix” that leaves one dead and one wounded, the latter physically, psychologically and quite often spiritually. The importance of the spiritual element cannot be ignored in a society such as ours, where women often suffer tremendous spiritual angst as a result of their abortions.

 

The “anniversary reaction”, where women have attempted to take their lives on the anniversary of their abortions, or the anniversaries of the baby’s expected date of delivery, is well-recognised. I have been working in the area of post-abortion counselling since 1998, when I returned from the Channel Islands where I first encountered post-abortion psychological sequelae.

 

The National Cancer Institute concluded that having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer. A summary of their findings can be found in the Summary Report: Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer Workshop. The evidence overall still does not support early termination of pregnancy as a cause of breast cancer.

Is breast cancer linked to abortion? (Dr Sean O’Domhnaill, Life Institute)

Abortion, Miscarriage, and Breast Cancer Risk (National Cancer Institute)

Do Abortions Cause Breast Cancer? (Slate)

(Wanderley Massafelli / Photocall Ireland)