Category Archives: News

news as it is happening-ish

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Taoiseach Enda Kenny on RTÉ’s Nine News tonight:

“And I think it should also be said Eileen, if I may say so that the average worker, a single worker on the minimum wage of 35,000 is going to get back €400 in the income tax returns starting in January.”

A Freudian slip from An Taoiseach.

Minimum wage is €8.65 per hour, 39 hours per week, 52 weeks per year = €17,542.

He should do more of these.

New charging structure of Irish Water to cost Exchequer €84m (RTÉ News)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_GzbHDNz0

An anti-abortion protester has been convicted of harassing a Marie Stopes clinic director at her Belfast city centre offices.

Bernadette Smyth, who leads the anti-abortion group Precious Life, was warned she could face a jail sentence for her campaign against Dawn Purvis.

The judge said: “This case was run, no-holds barred, in a vicious and malicious fashion.”

He said an investigating police officer had been deliberately slandered.

Ms Purvis had been the victim of an unwarranted attack, the judge said.

Mrs Smyth was also told she will be ordered to pay compensation and would be restrained from the area around the clinic.

The 51-year-old had denied harassing Ms Purvis – a former Progressive Unionist Party assembly member – on two dates earlier this year.

With sentencing put back until next month, Mrs Smyth was told her potential punishment could be community service or prison.

The judge said anti-abortion campaigners stationed outside the clinic had been forcing any women of child-bearing age to identify their reasons for entering.

Because of that conduct, he said the range of possible sentencing may go from community service to imprisonment.

Mrs Smyth was told she will certainly have some form of restraining order imposed on her.

Although she left court without making comment, her solicitor described the verdict as “a disappointment for Christians worldwide“.

Anti-abortion protester Bernadette Smyth guilty of harassing Dawn Purvis (BBC News NI)

Previously: Bernie Smyth on Broadsheet

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Last night on BBC One, Spotlight’s Mandy McAuley investigated the use of public money to pay the rent of constituency offices of MLAs including Arlene Foster (DUP), Ross Hussey (UUP) and Sinn Féin members Martin McGuinness, Francie Molloy, Mitchel McLaughlin and Daithí McKay.

If ye can’t beat them, rob them.

The second part of the two-part exposé continues next Tuesday.

Part one is repeated tonight on BBC Two NI at 11:20pm.

Spotlight: Sir Alistair Graham calls for probe into Northern Ireland MLAs’ rent money (BBC News NI)

Previously: Kerching Féin

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An improvised grenade launcher claimed by the ‘IRA’ to have been used to attack the PSNI in North Belfast

Police officers guarding a notorious interface say they have been left like “sitting ducks” following a surge in dissident republican attacks, including a recent rocket attack.

It is claimed the police presence between Ardoyne and Twaddell Avenue in north Belfast has been scaled back in recent months because of budget pressures on the PSNI.

One officer said while patrolling the area they feel their every move is being watched by dissidents and they fear further attempts on their lives.

A senior police officer said the PSNI was making every effort to protect both its officers and the public.

On Sunday evening a man ran out of Brompton Park with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher before firing it at a PSNI Land Rover close to the loyalist camp at Twaddell.

The lethal device passed through the vehicle’s outer skin but ricocheted off heavier armour on the driver’s side. The officers inside were badly shaken but uninjured.

It was the third attempt to murder police officers at the interface in the past year.

Police: we’re sitting ducks (Chris Kilpatrick, Belfast Telegraph) [not currently available online]

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Senator McCarthy Paul Bradford (Reform Alliance) called out the Socialist Party on the latest water charges protests this afternoon.

I raised here last week, Cathaoirleach the fact that we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m sure Deputy Murphy and his colleagues in the Socialist Party and that ilk wished that the Berlin Wall and all it stood for, was still standing. Because they in their Trotsky Marxist view of the world have absolutely nothing in common with genuine working class people on this island….We must learn from this disaster but we all stand shoulder to shoulder with the Tánaiste and indeed anybody who’s been put under unfair pressure by mob rule. We must never give in to mob rule in this country. We haven’t given in to the mob rule of the Provisional IRA in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and we must not give in to mob rule now of extreme left-wing socialists who look back to a panacea of the Soviet Union and North Korea. That’s their aspiration for our island and it’s not an aspiration that I, and the vast majority of the people on this land would share.

1991 called.

They’d like their college debating rhetoric and striped shirt returned.

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 10.24.53 Ched Evans and his partner, Natasha

e3abbb54edaa1da9adae8fe08c9ce3ebStuart Gilhooly

A lawyer for a body representing footballers has likened convicted rapist Ched Evans to the Guildford Four as a fourth high-profile Sheffield United patron resigned over the ongoing row.

The Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland defended Evans on their official website, claiming he could be innocent and that even if guilty, he deserves a chance of redemption.

The article written by solicitor Stuart Gilhooly has been removed from the PFAI website but you can read it in full here.

The difficult element of this discussion, though, is the part about the scale of the crime. There are people who will say rape is rape and degrees shouldn’t come into it but in sentencing these issues matter. This crime, as alleged, was at the bottom end. There was no violence and thankfully the victim has no recollection of it. This, I hasten to add, does not make it right, or anything close to it, but it is nonetheless a mitigating factor.

From Jessica Ennis-Hill to Charlie Webster and pretty much every media commentator who has waded into this mire, the horses most of these pundits have mounted are so high, they’ll need a parachute to get down. When sanctimony takes over, there is rarely any real room for serious debate.

It’s not easy to muster up too much sympathy for Evans but there is surely nothing worse than being accused of a crime which you genuinely believe you didn’t commit.
The argument against that is that a jury convicted him of the crime. That’s right. And the same applied to the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. They got no public sympathy either.
Maybe he is guilty or perhaps he’s innocent, none of us knows for sure. Surely, either way, he deserves a chance at redemption. Don’t we all?

Stuart Gilhooly is the solicitor to the PFA Ireland. He is also a journalist and has recently been shortlisted, for the fifth year in succession, a Journalist of the Year at the Irish Magazine Awards.

 

Mr Gilhooly had also tweeted support of Ched Evans during the trial.

Update:

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William Crawley spoke to Stuart Gilhooly on BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback earlier.

So it wasn’t rape-rape?


Evans ‘has Guildford Four dilemma’ (Irish Examiner)