Category: Newswhip

The extent of the “sweeping new powers” granted to Brian Lenihan earlier this week to deal with the banking crisis became clear this morning when journalists were banned from court during an application by the finance minister. It was widely reported this morning that the minister planned to apply for permission to invest €3.7 billion…

A racy English tabloid which has all but abandoned any pretence of reporting any actual news, an American “tabloid” magazine, and a surprising number of “true detective” magazines are among the periodicals banned by the censor. But the Censorship of Publications Board, once infamous for banning works by authors from Brendan Behan (the Borstal Boy)…

Justice minister Dermot Ahern has announced details of two new Garda Inspectorate studies. The Inspectorate is headed by chief inspector Kathleen O’Toole, who was the first woman to reach the rank of police commissioner in Boston. The minister has asked the Inspectorate to undertake two studies, one on frontline supervision, the other examining the allocation…

The report on allegations of clerical sex abuse in the diocese of Cloyne, and the handling of those allegations by church authorities, will be handed to the minister for justice Dermot Ahern today. The report covers complaints made about 19 priests over a 13 year period from 1996 to 2009. The report is the latest…

In ancient times… Hundreds of years before the dawn of history Lived a strange race of people… the Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing But their legacy remains Hewn into the living rock… Of Newgrange. Well, not quite, but the Newgrange monument, a 5000 year old passage tomb, gets…

The Star, the Mirror and the Donegal Daily reported that Irish soldiers were called on to the streets of Letterkenny over the weekend to stop a snowball fight. We hate to factcheck such a fun story… According to Donegal Daily, the “teenage terrors” stopped cars in the middle of the road and pelted them with…

The saga behind Your Country, Your Call (YCYC) a competition to generate “new ideas” to revive the Irish economy, is a case study in the differences between old media and new media. Or perhaps more accurately, the differences between professional old media, and new media bloggers, most of whom are unpaid. President Mary McAleese and…

Dermot Ahern quizzed the US Ambassador about allegations that illegal “extraordinary rendition” flights holding people kidnapped by American intelligence agencies were routed through Shannon, a secret US diplomatic cable reveals. While the cable, published by Wikileaks, describes the Irish justice minister as “engaged, warm, and open, acting as if he had all the time in…

Tony Walsh the pedophile and former priest convicted in a Dublin court earlier this week, was one of only two clerics subjected to a “canonical trial” during the last 30 years, the Murphy report reveals. The Murphy report looks into clerical sex abuse allegations in the Dublin diocese, and how church authorities dealt with them.…

With Charles Flanagan’s call for a children’s rights referendum as soon as possible in the wake of the latest clerical child abuse scandal, the intriguing possibility of an unholy trinity of religious-inspired referendums now looms in the near future. Flanagan’s call for Fianna Fáil to hold the children’s rights referendum double-quick is unlikely to be…