Previously: So Why ARE Women With Non-Viable Pregnancies Being Forced To Travel To The UK?
Category Archives: News
“In recent days certain allegations which have been made against me have become public. Initially, their anonymous and non-specific nature led me to contest them,” the statement read.
“However, I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal.
“To those I have offended, I apologise and ask forgiveness. To the Catholic Church and people of Scotland, I also apologise. I will now spend the rest of my life in retirement. I will play no further part in the public life of the Catholic Church in Scotland.”
Cardinal O’Brien’s admission of guilt is rendered all the more dramatic by the fact that he is the prelate who last year labelled gay marriage “a grotesque subversion”.
Previously: Looks Like We Got Us A Breedah (how wrong we were)
Cardinal Apologises For Sexual Conduct (Paddy Agnew, Irish Times)
Meanwhile…
Yesterday’s Irish Mail on Sunday’s ‘Letter of the Week’.
Eric Conway? He has a bit of form.
Via Joe Brennan
(pic: The Edinburgh Echo)
Greeting the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg at Government Buildings in Dublin yesterday.
It’s all in the hands.
(Wanderley Massafelli/Photocall Ireland)
Employment figures published yesterday give the strongest indication in half a decade that economic recovery has begun. For the first time since the recession started in 2008, the numbers at work have risen over a six month period. In the final quarter of the year, 1.85 million people were in jobs, a rise of 6,500 on three months earlier according to seasonally adjusted figures from the Central Statistics Office.
Revisions to the third quarter data show that employment growth was also recorded in that period. Those revisions put the net increase in employment in the third quarter at 2,200.
Oh, wait now….
By region, Dublin and the south-west accounted for almost all of the Irish economy’s expansion in employment in the second half of last year.
That most of the increase in employment was accounted for by part-time rather than full-time jobs took some of the shine off yesterday’s numbers.
Rise in jobs figures signals start of recovery (Dan O’Brien, Irish Times)
The Government plans special legislation to cut the pensions of the highest-paid former public servants by some 5 per cent.
Although the move is part of a general cut in all public pensions above €32,500, the greatest reductions will be imposed on senior figures who held high public office and those who led State and other public institutions.
Those affected by the measure include former taoisigh Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen, John Bruton and Albert Reynolds and many members of the previous government.
Mr Ahern and Mr Cowen will see their pensions cut to €142,655 from €150,163 under the move; Mr Reynolds’s pension will drop to €141,513 from €148,961;and Mr Bruton’s pension will fall to €134,728 from €141,819.
How will they get by?
Former top public servants face 5% pension cut (Arthur Beesley, Martin Wall, Pamela Duncan, Irish Times)
(Laura Hutton, Eamonn Farrell/Photocall Ireland)
Abnormal/wide load traveling Dun Laoghaire Port to At James Gatethis evening 10pm -3 am .Motorist advised to useN11 and M50 .
— An Garda Síochána (@GardaTraffic) February 26, 2013
Related: Container Yourself
(Thanks Cathal O’Rourke)
UPDATE: Chris Donoghue tweetz:
Saw your tweet too late & got stuck…
Britain’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has said that priests should be allowed to marry and that younger colleagues should have “the choice”.
Now 74, the Irish-born Cardinal O’Brien, a frequently conservative voice in Scotland, will vote for Pope Benedict XVI’s successor when he attends the Vatican conclave.
“I’d be very happy if others had the opportunity of considering whether or not they could or should be married. It’s a free world,” he told BBC Scotland before his departure for Rome.
Closed ranks and ‘clarification’ in 3…2…1…
Priests should be able to marry, says Cardinal O’Brien (Mark Hennessy, Irish Times)
Elsewhere in the ‘free world’….
“When you were a student for the priesthood, well it was part of the package, as it were, that you were celibate, that you didn’t get married and you didn’t really consider it all that much, you just took your vows of celibacy the way someone else would naturally take their vows of marriage.”
O’Brien welcomed Pope Benedict when he visited Scotland in 2010.
He has been an outspoken opponent of the Scottish government’s plans to legalise same-sex marriage and was named “bigot of the year” by the gay rights charity Stonewall last November. It said he was given the title because he went “well beyond what any normal person would call a decent level of public discourse” in the debate.
Hmm.
Allow Catholic priests to marry, urges Cardinal Keith O’Brien (PA, The Guardian)
(pic: RTE)
En Garde
at
There is deep anger in Government at the militant tactics adopted by the Garda Representative Association (GRA) in an effort to scuttle talks on the extension of the Croke Park agreement.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Minister for Justice Alan Shatter yesterday rebuked the GRA for picketing the venue where talks between the Government and union leaders were taking place.
Mr Kenny called on the GRA to return to the talks, which he said were critical for the Republic’s future.
“The place to be is at the table and the opportunity is there for the GRA to go back in there and to discuss in a rational and a professional manner the concerns and the anxieties that they might have,” he said after an event in Sandyford, Co Dublin.
Yeah? Say that to their faces…
*popcorn*
(Sam Boal/Photocall Ireland)
Senior Government figures are becoming apprehensive about the prospect of Independent News & Media (INM), Ireland’s largest newspaper group, having some of its debts written off by State-supported banks.
INM, publisher of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent, owes more than €400 million to a consortium of eight lenders that includes the State-owned Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland, in which the State has a 15 per cent stake.
Financial pressure on INM has led it to enter talks with its banks to restructure this debt. Political and business sources believe a write-down of up to €100 million may be in play.
Awk-ward…
…again.
Unease in Government over INM debt-relief moves (Arthur Beesley, Irish Times)
(Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland)
The Government is holding firm in its plans to cut premium payments for frontline staff in the public service, despite a major protest last night involving thousands of nurses, gardaí, prison officers and fire and ambulance personnel.
Government sources said even after the proposed cuts, it would still be paying a significant premium payment to public service staff for working on a Sunday.
About 4,000 frontline staff took part in the rally against the Government’s proposals to reduce Sunday premium payments from double time to time and a half and to abolish special Saturday and “twilight” evening payments.
Union leaders at the rally urged frontline public service staff to lobby their TDs and senators and to warn them that it would never be forgotten if legislators supported such plans to cut the premium payments.
The government. It likes big cuts and it can not lie….
Coalition to stand firm over cuts to premium pay for staff (Martin Wall, Irish Times)
(Laura Hutton/ Photocall Ireland)