The zero emissions Elettrica scooter from Vespa – 100km range, 4-6 hour charge time and, best of all, smartphone integration via Vespa’s Multimedia Platform app to save you fiddling with your iPhone X as you glide down Via Del Corso.
There’ll also be an Elletrica X with a petrol-driven generator that doubles the range.
Talking orders from Spring 2018.
Former Bank of Ireland Chief Executive Richie Boucher
Asked about whether the bank had any issues impending similar to those that were identified at Permanent TSB in relation to customers and the mortgage interest rates they were entitled to secure, Mr Boucher said if the bank had any material disclosure of that kind, it would be making it.
“I’m talking to the market today. Anything that would have a material impact on our reputation is something I would disclose. If we identify a mistake, we engage with the regulatory authorities and do remediation with the customers expeditiously,” he said.
August, 2015
The bank announced on Friday that Mr Boucher had informed the company of his intention to leave and said a selection process was under way to appoint a new CEO. Mr Boucher said he would would continue in his role “pending completion” of this process, having led the bank since February 2009.
Mr Boucher said that while he enjoyed his job and was excited about the group’s “transformational investment” in its IT systems, the time was right to hand over the baton.
February 2017
Earlier this week Bank of Ireland said it had identified another 6,000 customers who were wrongly removed from low-interest tracker mortgage loans. This brings to 10,300 the number of people affected by the controversy at Bank of Ireland alone.
he total cost of putting customers back on low tracker rates, refunding them for overcharged interest payments, and compensating them at a rate of 10pc of the refunds, will cost the bank up to €200m. This is up from €26m previously set aside by the bank.
November 2017
Good times.
PTSB disaster sparks wider Central Bank tracker probe (August 2, 2915, RTÉ)
Richie Boucher to step down as Bank of Ireland CEO (Irish Times, March 24, 2017)
Tracker controversy may stop Bank of Ireland paying a dividend (Novemeber 19, 2017)
Rollingnews
This afternoon.
Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Visitors Danny Raahauge with Erik Möller (right) begin an expensive round at the Oliver St John Giogarty ahead of Republic of Ireland’s World Cup qualifier against Denmark tomorrow night at the Aviva.
Never forget Wood Quay.
Fight!
Leah Farrell/RollingNews
Bob Geldof, centre, with Dublin City Cllr Mannix Flynn, left, Dublin City Council official Oonagh Casey, outside Dublin City Hall this morning
This afternoon.
Outside Dublin City Hall.
Bob Geldof holds his Freedom of the City of Dublin award before giving it back.
Mr Geldof said he does not want to be associated with the award while it is also held by Aung San Suu Kyi.
He explained his reasons to RTE’s Sean O’Rourke this morning, saying:
“Because I don’t want, I know this sounds pious, I don’t know how to not make it sound pious but I don’t want to be on a very select row of wonderful people and be honoured thus, myself, of which I’m very proud. And I don’t want to be on it with a killer.
“Someone who is, at best, a handmaiden to genocide and an accomplice to murder.
“And I know that sounds grandstanding but forgive me if that’s the case. I don’t actually want to do this because, as I said, I’m very proud of that specific award.
“But I was over, last night, I introduced Samantha Power, at the Abbey and she was Obama’s ambassador to the UN and she wrote the bible on genocide in her book which is Genocide and US Policy.
“I’m also a founding patron of a thing called the Aegis Trust who deal with genocide prevention and genocide studies and they built the National Holocaust Museum in the UK and, on the first national Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, I spoke at Westminster.
“But, even beyond that, when Aung San Suu Kyi was lauded by Dublin, when she arrived and this city extravagantly welcomed her, I sang welcome and spoke welcomely. They asked me to make a speech to her on the stage [inaudible] theatre when she was there and you feel duped.
“You know? I mean, that’s personally, you feel a chump, like you’ve been taken for a ride. Now that seems very petty in the face of 600,000 people being bombed out of their strewed homes, mass rape, killing of the males and being forced to cross impenetrable borders to another country.
“It seems very petty but, it’s all I can do…
“…She’s now a pariah, nobody’s touched her. I spoke at length with Amnesty, with the head of Amnesty about this and would it in any way help. He just returned, literally just returned a week ago from there and he said: you’ve got to do it, Bob, because it’s just appalling.
“I spoke to this in Bogota in Columbia three weeks ago or four weeks, or whatever it was, I had to do something there, and I spoke to it. So it’s not as if this came out of the blue.
“It’s all I can do, Sean. It’s all I can do, you know, that’s it. And it’s my little thing and it will not make one wit of difference, I understand that but you’re political niceties, Sean, in the face of brutal oppression, you know, spare me.
“Spare me sophistry.”
Listen back in full here
Earlier: Take It Back
Rollingnews
Bob Geldof inside City Hall.
Rollingnews
Dublin 9. Today
Gina writes:
Hi. Spotted this on Griffith Ave. Someone completely taking the pi**. A new low surely.
From top: Sgt Maurice McCabe; former Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan and former Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald; Labour TD Alan Kelly
You may recall a post from Friday, entitled The Legal Strategy Against Maurice McCabe.
It centred on questions put to the Department of Justice, by Labour TD Alan Kelly, in relation to what knowledge, if any, the department had about the legal strategy employed by An Garda Siochana at the O’Higgins Commission of Investigation in 2015.
Readers will recall how at the O’Higgins Commission of Investigation – which was set up to examine complaints of Garda malpractice made by Sgt McCabe – legal counsel for former Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan said it would argue that Sgt McCabe made his complaints because of a grudge and that evidence of this would be based on a particular meeting Sgt McCabe had with two other gardai.
This line of argument was dropped after Sgt McCabe produced a recording of the meeting which proved this was untrue.
Mr Kelly has written to the Department of Justice asking what knowledge the former Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald had of this legal strategy.
He’s also written to the Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl, the now Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar about the same.
He’s now calling for Mr Varadkar to make a public statement on the matter.
He also said he believes that, if the Department of Justice was aware, then the terms of reference for the Disclosures Tribunal – which is being overseen by Supreme Court judge Peter Charleton and is examining allegations of a smear campaign against Sgt McCabe – need to be widened to include the department.
Further to this…
Mr Kelly spoke to Sean O’Rourke on RTE Radio One this morning in which he reiterated his questions.
From the interview…
Sean O’Rourke: “You lay particular emphasis on contacts between the Commissioner’s office and the office of the Secretary General of the Department of Justice on the 15th of May 2015. Why is that date important?”
Alan Kelly: “It’s very important because this is the day that everything changed in relation to O’Higgins and that Maurice McCabe became aware of a different strategy as regards the Commissioner and their legal strategy to him. And, in relation to the whole aspect of whether he had had motives, different motives…”
O’Rourke: “Yeah, a grudge.”
Kelly: “An agenda or had a grudge in relation certain aspects of the gardai and that’s why he acted in the way in which he did. It was proven to be false…”
Later
Kelly: “If they [Department of Justice] come out and say ‘no, they weren’t aware in any way, shape or form, this dies. Because it’s effectively saying look no they weren’t privy to anything. The issue is this: in the questions and answers that I’ve got back from Minister Flanagan, he doesn’t deny that there were meetings. He doesn’t deny that there was something going on.”
Readers may wish to note that, although it hasn’t been mentioned on RTE, Broadsheet previously reported how, at the outset of the O’Higgins Commission, the legal counsel for Ms O’Sullivan argued that the reason for this so-called grudge was that Sgt McCabe wanted the directions made by the DPP in 2007 – in respect of a “dry humping” allegation made by the daughter, Ms D, of a guard previously disciplined by Sgt McCabe in 2006 – overturned.
But the DPP’s directions were categorically in Sgt McCabe’s favour.
And what the gardai didn’t know, going into the commission, was that Sgt McCabe had been fully briefed of the DPP’s directions back in 2007 when they were first issued.
These were the DPP’s directions:
Dear Sir,
I acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 1st March 2007 together with copy Garda investigation file.
I agree with you and the Guards, that the evidence does not warrant a prosecution. There was no admission. The incident as described by the injured party is vague. It appears that it was only when she was eleven/twelve that she decided that whatever occurred was sexual in nature.
Even if there wasn’t a doubt over her credibility, the incident that she describes does not constitute a sexual assault or indeed an assault.
Further, the account given to her cousin [redacted] differs in a number of respects to that given to her parents and the Guards.
There is no basis for a prosecution.
And the date Sgt McCabe informed the O’Higgins Commission that he was fully aware of the DPP’s directions, knew they were strongly in his favour and, therefore, had no desire for them to be overturned?
May 15, 2015.
(Readers should note the ‘humping’ allegation mentioned above was revived in 2013 when Ms D went to a counsellor and the counsellor sent a botched referral outlining a much more serious allegation of rape to Tusla.
This botched referral would eventually reach Ms O’Sullivan’s office in May 2014 and the false allegation against Sgt McCabe remained on file in the Commissioner’s office until the Disclosures Tribunal began earlier this year).
Previously: Absence Of Malice
Listen back to Today with Sean O’Rourke in full here
An extraordinary artefact recently discovered among a cache of burial treasures at the 3,500 year old tomb of a Bronze Age warrior in southwest Greece: the Pylos Combat Agate – a carved sealstone less than 4cm wide featuring an astonishingly detailed depiction of two fighters clashing over the slain body of a third.
Professor Jack Davis of the University of Cincinnati (whose researchers originally unearthed the tomb) sez of it:
What is fascinating is that the representation of the human body is at a level of detail and musculature that one doesn’t find again until the classical period of Greek art 1,000 years later.
MORE: Unearthing A Masterpiece (UC magazine)
