Tag Archives: apology

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President Michael D Higgins at the launch of Merchants Quay Ireland’s annual report this morning in Dublin

RTÉ reports:

“President Michael D Higgins has urged bodies like the City and County Managers’ Association to apologise publicly for not valuing social housing more in recent decades. Speaking in Dublin, he said that while a newspaper headline proclaims today that the economy is roaring back in Ireland, inequalities are roaring back much louder in the world.”

“President Higgins was speaking at the launch of the annual report of the housing charity, Merchant’s Quay Ireland. The report states that it delivered 19% more medical interventions to homeless people throughout the Republic last year and that homelessness and drug use continues to grow in the midst of what it terms “an unprecedented housing crisis”. The President recalled that in 1995 there were 2,000 methadone users in the State but that there are now 10,000.”

President calls for apology over social housing (RTÉ)

Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie

mingl

[Independent TD Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan]

In our edition of 3 June 2013 we published an article entitled “Flanagan has one of the worst Dáil attendance rates” which incorrectly stated that Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan had one of the worst Dáil attendance records in the first quarter of 2013.

Our information derived from the contents of the Member Sitting Days Report on the Oireachtas website.

We have learned that this website only records when TDs clock in with electronic fobs.  We accept that there were a number of sitting days when Mr. Flanagan was not officially recorded as attending the Dáil because he did not use the fob, although he was actually there.

For the first quarter of 2013, he attended 34 sitting days out of 35.  We take this opportunity to correct the record and to apologise to Mr. Flanagan.

An apology to Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan TD (Irish Independent)

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“I think this was an example of a woman of extraordinary commitment, over a long number of years, to following through her case being taken before them. Sadly, it’s one that’s indicative of a long litany of cases in Ireland, where these and other events took place. That’s why, in the past, we’ve had to deal some exceptionally sensitive cases that scar our memory. And for that reason I just think that, while this judgement is exceptionally complex and will be studied by Government, I would like to say to Louise O’Keeffe that I apologise for what happened to her in the location where she was and for the horrendous experience that she had to go through.”

Taoiseach Enda Kenny, speaking in the Dail this morning.

How committed?

Ms O’Keeffe was sexually abused by teacher Leo Hickey when she was eight and attending Dunderrow National School in Co. Cork in 1973.

In 1998 Hickey was convicted of 21 sample charges involving 21 children from 380 charges.

Ms O’Keeffe tried to hold the State liable but the High Court dismissed her case, as did the Supreme Court.

It’s believed 200 similar cases were dropped after the Supreme Court case.

This week the European Court of Human Rights overturned the Supreme Court ruling.

The State had tried to stop Ms O’Keeffe’s application to the ECHR, arguing her failure to sue the Diocese of Cork and Ross, which owned the school, showed she didn’t exhaust legal avenues in the Irish court system

The ECHR found: “That obligation [to protect her from harm] had not been met when the Irish State…continued to entrust the management of the primary education of the vast majority of young Irish children to National Schools, without putting in place any mechanism of effective State control against the risks of such abuse occurring”.

Taoiseach apologises to Louise O’Keeffe for ‘horrendous’ sex abuse suffered (Newstalk)

Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland

(Above: Magdalene survivor Maureen Sullivan)

Taoiseach Enda Kenny is expected to deliver an apology on behalf of the State to survivors of laundries run by religious orders following a meeting with a representative organisation yesterday.

The Cabinet will discuss the matter this morning and agree a Government counter-motion ahead of Fianna Fáil’s call for redress as well as an apology during Private Members’ business in the Dáil tonight.

Members of the Magdalene Survivors Together group spent three hours with Mr Kenny and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore yesterday afternoon. They believe the apology will be delivered next Tuesday when a debate on former senator Martin McAleese’s report on the Magdalene laundries’ workers begins in the Dáil.

It’s not over ’til the reluctant eejit apologises.

Previously: A Sorry Promise

Hopes rise of apology for Magdalenes (Mary Minihan, Irish Times)

(Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland)