Renua Ireland will crack down on white collar crime if elected
SAYS LUCINDA CREIGHTON
Lucinda Creighton
Renua founder Lucinda Creighton has vowed that her party will make reckless lending by bankers a crime, if her party gets into government after the next election.
“It happens in other jurisdictions and we are unique in how difficult it is to prosecute people who behave recklessly in the corporate sphere, whether it’s in banks or in other corporate environments,” she said.
Speaking at the MacGill summer school in Glenties, she described as “extraordinary” that nothing has changed in Ireland when it came to jailing white-collar criminals.
“Seven or eight years on the from the banking collapse in this country, nothing has changed.
“Most of the people who have been prosecuted have either gotten off or managed to frustrate the judicial system, so we need not just to put in a crime of reckless lending, but also equip the office of the director of corporate enforcement (ODCE) and the Regulator to do their job properly.”
She added that the party will be launching their policy on white collar crime on Friday, and will also roll out more policy initiatives over the next few weeks, including what she described as “a very radical tax policy” in September.
Lucinda Creighton with her daughter Gwendolyn (15 months).
Ms Creighton also criticised the declaration by new party the Social Democrats that they would abolish water charges.
“I think it’s disingenuous fo any political movement to say they want to achieve Scandinavian standards of public services, but they don’t believe that people should pay for it,” she said.
Commenting on former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s assertion during a radio interview last weekend that he didn’t believe that the Mahon Tribunal’s judgment that he had been untruthful were correct, Ms. Creighton said, “We either believe in our justice system, or we don’t. It’s a bit rich for the former Taoiseach to simply say that he doesn’t believe them, or criticise the judge who presided over the tribunal.
Irish Water denies cold calling people who have not paid their bills
Irish water is being accused of cold calling people who have not yet paid their bills.
The accusation was made by socialist TD Paul Murphy who told TheJournal.ie that he has heard of cases where elderly people are being called by the utility.
However, Irish Water says that no calls requesting payments have yet been made.
The utility stated that the process of seeking unpaid payments from customers over the phone will not start until 21 days after the second unpaid bill has been issued.
Speaking at an Anti-Austerity Alliance press conference, Murphy advised people who received calls not to feel intimidated, to politely explain their position on why they are not paying and then hang up.
A spokesperson for Irish Water told TheJournal.ie that Irish Water has not yet made calls to customers who have not paid and a follow-up call would only be made to registered customers at this time if there was an error with information given for a direct debit.
“All utility companies issue reminders to customers when unpaid bills extend beyond a certain period. Irish Water will be contacting our customers in the most cost efficient manner and depending on the contact details we have for customers.
We may send reminder letters or text messages to customers initially and as the payment follow-up process evolves, Irish water may then contact customers by phone.
‘Scare tactics & frighten Irish people’
It comes as Irish Water revealed last week that just under half of Irish Water customers have paid their water charges so far.
Paul Murphy said, “The next step for Irish Water and the government will be to try to once again engage in scare tactics to frighten some more people into paying. This is likely to focus on tenants who are one of the most vulnerable groups.
We are calling on landlords not to act as enforcers for Irish Water.
He also added that the tenant is liable for the bill so the landlord has nothing to gain by trying to enforce the charge.
TD Ruth Coppinger said, “The biggest step forward for the boycott campaign would be if those opposed to the tax who haven’t explicitly called for a boycott such as Sinn Fein and the unions affiliated with Right2Water now called for one”.
Right to Water are organising a protest against the water charges in Dublin on 29 August.
The cost price of a family home in Ireland on the rise
The cost of buying a family home has rocketed across the country, despite a marked fall in the number of properties being sold.
Analysis in today’s Irish Independent from the Property Price Register shows a 10% fall in houses and apartments being sold in the second quarter of this year.
Over 8,000 houses and apartments were sold, a drop of 10.5% compared with the first three months.
Yet prices have actually risen by as much as 14%.
The lack of properties on the market is also said to be pushing prices up with a rise in sales of million euro homes.
A call for the hunt and cull of vicious seagulls after killing of a dog
FF Senator says David Cameron highlighted gull dangers after dog killed.
A call has been made for a cull of seagulls who are “endangering society” and “invading towns”.
Fianna Fáil Senator Denis O’Donovan said “they’ve actually killed lambs, they’ve killed rabbits.”
He echoed the sentiments of his party colleague Ned O’Sullivan who this time last year said seagulls “have lost the run of themselves completely”.
Mr O’Sullivan got some abuse for his comments about the gulls being raucous and keeping people awake and for describing them as vermin and scavengers.
But in the Seanad on Monday Mr O’Donovan pointed out that “no less a person than prime minister of Great Britain, our neighbours – David Cameron – has come out publicly to record his concern and his worry about the way seagulls are behaving”.
Last week Mr Cameron called for a “big conversation” about seagulls after attacks by gulls in Cornwall, England last week.
Mr O’Donovan said Mr Cameron made his remarks “because a tortoise and a child’s pet, a terrier dog, had been killed in the recent past by seagulls”.
Mr O’Donovan, Leas-Cathaoirleach of the Seanad said “it’s coming to the stage where they’re actually endangering society. Their behaviour is coming to the stage, to be realistic now, it’s like a rabbit with myxomatosis or a cow with mad cow disease.”
Mr O’Donovan said they should consider a cull of “this vicious seabird. Seagulls usually live at sea and nest on cliffs, but they are now invading towns and villages.”
He said the normal food supply for seagulls was fish. “That product is getting scarce whether we like it or not. It’s probably one third of what it was 30 or 40 years ago.”
He added: “Seagulls have actually killed lambs, they’ve killed rabbits,” and he described them as a nuisance and a pest.
Labour Senator Denis Landy quipped that “there’s a seagull looking in the window at you” and warned Mr O’Donovan that he’d want to be careful.
But the Cork Senator said it was a very serious issue and calling for a debate, he said: “You see a child eating fish and chips and a seagull attacks the food that that child is eating”.
Seanad leader Maurice Cummins (FG) said he did not believe the issue of seagulls was a “flight of fantasy”. He added: “It is an important issue if seagulls are stealing the food from children and damaging animals. I heard on the radio earlier that a lady in the Botanic Gardens had her telephone taken by a seagull.”
Sinéad O’Connor becomes a grandmother
The 48-year-old singer Sinead O’Connor & her eldest son Jake pictured right with his mum, welcomed a little boy on Friday with his girlfriend.
Irish performer Sinéad O’Connor has become a grandmother for the first time.
The 48-year-old singer’s son Jake welcomed a little boy on Friday with his girlfriend. Sinéad was quick to update her fans of the happy news, taking to her Facebook page to share her delight.
“Don’t mess with abuelita. (sic)” she wrote alongside a cartoon which spelled out ‘It’s a Boy’.
Sinéad has four children and Jake is the eldest, from her first marriage to music producer John Reynolds. The Nothing Compares 2 U singer has been married a further three times, most recently to Irish therapist Barry Herridge, who she met on the Internet.
Sinéad had posted on Thursday that her son’s partner had gone into labour.
I Am literally hours away from the greatest dream of my life coming true! #Granny! (sic)” she wrote. “This for Lia and Jake and their little angel, who flew about with me in Vegas last week as I was singing the Foggy Dew for .”
Sinéad first confirmed the news of her impending grandparent duties in March on the social networking site. However she had to quickly clarify that it wasn’t her 18-year-old daughter who was expecting, but Jake.
“It’s my 27-year-old son Jake and his beautiful girlfriend, Lia! Am so delighted!!! Always wanted to be a granny. In fact that’s the only reason I had kids (joking). Baby will be arriving in July.(sic)” she wrote.
Sinéad is a prolific user of Facebook, and earlier this week she took to the site to launch a bitter tirade against Rolling Stone magazine, which had put reality star Kim Kardashian on the front cover of its latest issue.
“What is this **** doing on the cover of Rolling Stone? Music has officially died. Who knew it would be Rolling Stone that murdered it? (sic)” she raged.
Papers confirm bones sent to Sligo were not the poet’s remains?
French records suggest coffin sent to Ireland after poet’s death held others’ bones.
The purported remains of the poet, WB Yeats, who died in January 1939 and was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in south-eastern France, was brought by sea from Nice to Galway in September 1948 for reinterring in Drumcliffe Churchyard in Co Sligo.
There were doubts about the authenticity of WB Yeats’s bones even before they were transferred from France for reburial in Drumcliffe churchyard in September 1948.
Aware that the poet’s remains had been scattered in an ossuary in 1946, Yeats’s friends attempted to dissuade his widow, George, from going through with the repatriation. At the ceremony in Co Sligo the poet Louis MacNeice protested that the shiny new coffin transported by the Naval Service was more likely to contain “a Frenchman with a club foot”.
Recently discovered French documents have driven the last nail into the coffin. They constitute compelling evidence that the bones gathered in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the Riviera town where he died in 1939, were little more than a haphazard assemblage.
A letter to The Irish Times, October 6th 1988
Bernard Cailloux, the French diplomat who was sent to Roquebrune to locate Yeats’s missing remains early in 1948, nine years after the poet’s death, reported that it was “impossible to return the full and authentic remains of Mr Yeats” and proposed askingDr Rebouillat, the local sworn pathologist, “to reconstitute a skeleton presenting all the characteristics of the deceased”.
At best, Cailloux wrote, it might be possible to find “an iron corset, a skull, and perhaps a Bible”. Yeats had an unusually large skull, so it is conceivable that his skull was actually found and sent to Ireland.
Alfred Hollis, an Englishman who died around the same time as Yeats, and who was initially buried next to him, wore a steel corset for spinal tuberculosis. In his certificate of exhumation from March 20th, 1948, Rebouillat based his reconstitution of Yeats’s skeleton on “the presence of a thoracic corset”. Yeats’s son, Michael, said he wore a leather truss for a hernia.
Hollis’s family have long claimed that it was he, not Yeats, who was sent for burial in Sligo. The French documents indicate it’s more likely that the remains were those of several people, chosen for their size from bones that were sorted by type into piles of, for example, skulls, fibulae and tibiae.
Subsequent diplomatic correspondencerefers to Cailloux’s report, strongly implying that his recommendation to assemble a skeleton, from bones that Cailloux described as “mixed pell-mell with other bones”, was followed. The operation received the tacit acceptance of the Yeats family and the minister for external affairs, Seán MacBride, the son of Yeats’s great love, Maud Gonne.
“We can be assured of the discretion of the family and the Irish authorities,” Stanislas Ostrorog, the head of the French legation to Ireland, wrote to Jacques Camille Paris, the Europe director of the French foreign ministry, on August 12th, 1948.
Ostrorog added that “certain precautions must be taken on our side to avoid any indiscretion about the procedure undertaken a few months ago to obtain the remains of the poet . . . so that no administrative difficulties arise giving cause for suspicion; so that no inopportune explanation is given to the Irish present at the ceremony”.
Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune on January 28th, 1939. “If I die, bury me up there” – in the churchyard at Roquebrune – “and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo,” he instructed his wife.
The second World War prevented George from carrying out Yeats’s instructions. In June 1947 the poet’s last lover, the journalist Edith Shackleton Heald, and her lover Hannah Gluckstein, the painter known as Gluck, decided to visit Yeats’s tomb. They were appalled to learn from the local curate that Yeats had been disinterred the previous year and his bones mixed with others in the ossuary.
In her 1988 biography of Gluck, Diana Souhami recounted how Heald crouched on the floor of their hotel in Monte Carlo, sobbing and saying, “I would know his bones anywhere.” Gluck and Yeats’s friend Edmund Dulac conspired to cover up the dispersal of Yeats’s remains. “All it would take would be an excessively curious tourist for the press to batten on to this with avidity and we must at all costs avoid the scandal that would arise from such a revelation,” Dulac wrote to the curate, Abbé Biancheri.
The publication of Souhami’s book led to bitter exchanges via newspaper columns between the Hollis and Yeats families, who eventually called a truce to avoid mutual distress.
In January 1948 the Times announced that George Yeats intended to repatriate the poet’s remains. Dulac and Gluck both wrote to her in protest. Gluck recounted the painstaking research she had conducted and concluded that “these remains would be almost impossible to find, and if found, identity would be open to doubt”.
Ostrorog, the French ambassador in Dublin, wrote to Paris, the Europe director at the foreign ministry: “A few months ago, the poet’s son came to see me to tell me, under the seal of secrecy, that they are unable to find the poet’s remains in the Roquebrune cemetery where the inhumation had taken place in 1939.”
If not handled carefully, Ostrorog warned, the case “risks causing us serious trouble . . . I was most anxious to resolve the issue, for if the family and the Irish legation were obviously guilty of negligence, the French authorities could also be taken to task if it were known that this great foreign poet, who had spent so many years of his life in France, had been thrown into a communal grave.
“As you know,” Ostrorog continued, “an investigation was first carried out by Mr Cailloux, sent specially by the cabinet. Following this, the remains were collected and placed in a coffin.”
On March 20th, 1948, Cailloux went with five other men to the ossuary for the exhumation. Cailloux had suggested that Dr Rebouillat reconstitute a skeleton. When Rebouillat drafted the certificate of exhumation he wrote that “recognition was established with certainty and precision These bones were placed in the coffin which was closed, soldered and sealed in our presence.”
Ostrorog then “summoned the young Yeats to inform him, without giving any details, that following an investigation, the mortal remains of his father had been collected and were currently in a coffin in Roquebrune cemetery. He thanked me wholeheartedly, avoiding asking for any other explanation.”
A few weeks later, Ostrorog continued, he met MacBride, who “expressed to me personally in the warmest terms his thanks for the care with which this affair had been resolved . . . We understood each other without it being spelled out. MacBride’s mother was formerly extremely close to the poet. There was obviously an interest that no incident would happen that could give rise to a press campaign.”
Philippe Benoist, described in correspondence as a young, intelligent and discreet diplomat who was “aware of the whole affair”, was selected to represent France at the removal. A French army honour guard escorted the coffin from Roquebrune cemetery to the town square for a lying-in-state. Draped in the Irish Tricolour, the coffin was carried on to the Irish corvette the LE Macha, in the port of Nice, to the strains of La Marseillaise and A Nation Once Again.
“It should notably be understood that if, by chance, the Irish were surprised to find themselves in front of a new coffin, we would explain that these measures were taken for the transport to Ireland,” Ostrorog advised. “The Irish ambassador in Paris will, no doubt, attend the ceremony. But he is not aware of anything. What purpose would it serve?”
Jacques Camille Paris classified his correspondence with Ostrorog, Cailloux’s report and Rebouillat’s certificate of exhumation as “personal correspondence”, an indication that he realised how sensitive they were. Paris took these documents with him to Strasbourg when he became the first secretary general of the Council of Europe.
When Paris died, in 1953, the trunk containing the documents was given to his widow, Reine, the daughter of the French writer Paul Claudel. She stored it in the Claudel family chateau, in Brangues, in southeastern France, where it was recently opened by Daniel Paris, the son of Jacques Camille and Reine.
Daniel Paris turned the documents over to the Irish Embassy in Paris in a discreet ceremony last month. The Embassy entrusted them to French foreign-ministry archivists, who will send high-quality facsimiles to theNational Library of Ireland later this year.
The fact that the documents were kept in Claudel’s chateau adds an ironic twist to the story. Yeats and Claudel had met in the early 20th century at the Tuesday literary salon of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Both writers were interested in symbolism and Japanese Noh theatre. Yeats referred several times to Claudel in his works.
A verse in WH Auden’s poem In Memory of WB Yeats said that Kipling and Claudel, who like Yeats held right-wing political views, would be forgiven because they had written well. Auden later deleted the verse.
The French diplomats who organised the sham remains in the hope of pleasing the Yeats family and the Irish government wove a tangled web. The facts so long hidden in Jacques Camille Paris’s trunk sit uneasily with the visit of reconciliation that Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, made to Yeats’s grave in Drumcliffe churchyard in May.
The Yeats family, the Church of Ireland and the Sligo tourism industry are unlikely to welcome the news, especially amid celebrations of the sesquicentenary of Yeats’s birth.
Contacted by The Irish Times, the poet’s granddaughter and closest surviving relative, Caitriona Yeats, did not wish to comment, and referred us to the letter to the editor of the newspaper by Yeats’s children, Anne and Michael, published on October 6th, 1988.
In her book George’s Ghosts: A New Life of WB Yeats, from 2000, Brenda Maddox suggested that “an analysis of the DNA of the bones buried at Drumcliffe would swiftly settle the matter with absolute finality”. Irish officials shudder at the mere mention of DNA. For as Prof Warwick Gould, of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, says, Yeats’s grave is a shrine, and “shrines are about stones, not bones. Their symbolic significance designedly outlives human remains, which rot.”
When Yeats wrote Under Ben Bulben, in the last month of his life, Gould says, the poet intended that his grave should provoke thought. The original draft read:
Draw rein; draw breath
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death:
Horseman, pass by.
So Yeats placed himself in the tradition of the siste viatorsigns on Roman roadside tombs. “The Latin words mean ‘Stop, traveller,’ ” Gould says. “They invite private reflection on what is graven upon funerary stones.”
Devout Yeatsians say it doesn’t really matter whose bones lie beneath Benbulbin; no one doubts he wrote the poems. “I feel Yeats’s soul is in Thoor Ballylee,” says the US lawyer, Yeats scholar and benefactor Joseph Hassett, referring to the poet’s former home in Co Galway. “It’s less important where the body is.”
New Horizons probe successfully completed it’s fly-by of Pluto last week.
With a high resolution cameras on board taking amazing pictures
It is cold and snowy and has polar ice caps as above photo left shows.
It sent back some amazing images of the dwarf planet, and now scientists are hard at work analysing all the data.
But, already, we’ve learned lots of amazing new things.
Here’s Newsround’s run-down of some of the coolest info New Horizons has helped us discovered about Pluto.
It’s got a heart
This image, captured by the New Horizons probe, show a newly discovered heart shaped crater on Pluto’s surface.
The high resolution cameras on board New Horizons have shown Pluto to have a distinctive heart shaped crater on it’s surface.
The shape is believed to have been caused by an impact at some point in the past. One side of the heart is smoother than the other, and researchers believe the crater is filled with frozen gases from the atmosphere – namely nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide.
It is a red planet!
The new images suggest that Mars may not be the only red planet in our solar system.
The initial image released by Nasa showed Pluto to be reddish in colour. But, this doesn’t mean it’s the same as the other famous red planet, Mars.
Both planets are red, but for different reasons, due to the ways chemicals react in their atmospheres.
It’s bigger than we thought
New Horizons has provided more accurate information about Pluto’s size, and we now know it’s about 80km wider than previously predicted. To give you an idea what that means the Nasa experts say it’s around two thirds the size of our moon.
This mean that Pluto is likely to be made of less rock and more ice beneath its surface according to members of the mission team.
It definitely has a polar ice cap
This image helped prove that there are polar ice caps on the dwarf planet.
One of the definite things we learned, is that Pluto does have a polar ice cap. Scientists had thought this before but couldn’t prove it until they saw the new images beamed back from the probe.
It is cold and snowy.
Temperatures on Pluto are extremely cold! They range from -172 to -238 degrees Celsius depending on where it is on its orbit. Experts had assumed that the dwarf planet was cooling but the new data shows that this isn’t happening.
An artists impression of Pluto’s snowy surface.
Data is coming back very sloooowly
The New Horizons probe is 5 billion kilometres from Earth and has a radio transmitter that can only output the power of a small LED bulb.
This means it can only send back its data at a very slow rate. So, just one black and white picture of Pluto would take over three hours to transmit back to earth.
Getting all the data from its flypast of Pluto last week will take almost 16 months.
So, we can look forward to lots more new discoveries about the far away dwarf planet over the next year or so.
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