Tag Archives: Kenny

Matt Dempsey, editor of the Farmer’s Journal, spoke with Pat Kenny on RTE R1 this morning after it emerged supermarket chain ASDA has removed products, including bolognese sauce, manufactured by Greencore, which is run by Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney’s brother Patrick (above).

The sauce, which contained meat supplied by the ABP Food Group’s plant in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, was found to have traces of equine DNA. Further tests are being carried out.

Pat Kenny: “I’m just wondering where this is going to end, though? Do you, your own instincts, Matt, you’ve been around the block so many times. Do you think Irish horses are being slaughtered somewhere, boxed up as Irish meat and then somewhere along the way, people are mislabelling, in Ireland, and flogging it to Irish beef factories.”

Matt Dempsey: “Certainly it’s not happening at the moment. Did it happen? I think it’s probably likely but that’s just a probability. It certainly isn’t in anyway definite or clear but I would imagine there’ll be a lot of examinations being done by a lot of people. But on the otherhand only about 20% of the Greencore product contains Irish beef.
So there’s a lot of work to be done to find out precisely where did this beef come from and, more to the point, as you rightly say, where did the Irish cutting plants, who have full permission to cut up horses, where did that beef actually go? And there will be, in my view, there’ll have to be very clear quantitative reconciliation. In other words, the quantities in, the quantities out, were there any leakages?”

Kenny: “So, if you’re supposed to have so many tonnes of horse meat slaughtered, who did you sell it to? And where did they sell it on?

Dempsey: Correct. And where’s the paper trail?

Greencore’s Bolognese Sauce Withdrawn  By Asda (RTE)

(Laura Hutton/Photocall Ireland)

A ‘Magdalen Girl’, name and date unknown.

 

Four congregations ran the Magdalene Laundries: The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Mercy Sisters, the Sisters of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters across Ireland.

It’s believed 30,000 women were incarcerated between 1922 and 1996. They have claimed the State, most notably the gardaí, knew the nuns behind the laundries were holding these women involuntarily.

Today’s report is a response to a UN Committee Against Torture’s call for an investigation into the residents’ claims.

Records were available for eight of the ten laundries investigated. Two ran by the Sisters of Mercy (Galway and Dún Laoghaire) did not have records.

What the Taoiseach told the Dáil:

The report deals not with 30,000 women but with 10,012. He said the actual number of known admissions was 14,607, as some women entered the laundries more than once.

He said the State was involved in just 26% of cases whereby women were sent to the laundries.

The average age was 23, the median age was 20, the youngest girl was nine, the oldest woman was 89.

He said just over 10% of women sent to the laundries were sent there by their families, and 19% went there themselves.

There was no evidence of sexual abuse at the laundries.

He said “destitution and poverty” were among the reasons women ended up in the laundries.

He said the stigma of being a resident should have been removed and he was sorry it has not happened sooner.

More here.

Read the report here. 

Pic via Aine Phillips 

UPDATE: Magdalene Survivors Reject Taoiseach’s Apology (breakingnews.ie)

Enda Kenny, in Davos last week:

“Ireland’s not a tax…ehhh…you know, eh, haven for unorthodox practice in respect of tax. It’s very clear, it’s very transparent.”

Not so fast.

Last Friday, the Congressional Research Service, which works for the US Congress, identified Ireland as a tax haven in a new report. American public interest research group, the Citizens for Tax Justice, say:

“A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) finds that U.S. corporations report a huge share of their profits as officially earned in small, low-tax countries where they have very little investment and workforce while reporting a much smaller percentage of their profits in larger, industrial countries where they actually have massive investments and workforces. The report confirms that U.S. corporations are artificially inflating the proportion of their global profits that are generated in small, lowtax countries — in other words, shifting their profits to tax havens.”

“CRS looked at the location of foreign profits, as reported by U.S.-based multinationals in surveys conducted by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. CRS’s report focused on five small countries generally considered to be tax havens (the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Bermuda and Switzerland) and compared them to five of the top “traditional” foreign countries where American companies actually do business (Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico). The results are striking.”

Read more here.

Thanks Mark Malone
(RTÉ)