Coward Taoiseach Enda Kenny formally turns down a TV debate with Adams
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has formally refused a second invitation to debate the European fiscal treaty with Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
With just over two weeks until referendum day, the Taoiseach turned down TV3’s latest offer for the live television broadcast.
Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald accused Mr Kenny of running from the consequences a Yes vote victory the referendum would bring.
“It is very telling that Mr Kenny is running away from this debate. He obviously does not want to debate the consequences of austerity and cutbacks for the Irish people,” she said.
The Taoiseach turned down TV3’s first invitation last week, saying he would not take part in any programme involving veteran broadcaster Vincent Browne.
The debate moderator offered to step aside from the show, given the public interest in seeing the leader of the Yes campaign go head-to-head with a senior No campaigner.
Despite the station’s political correspondent Ursula Halligan being drafted in as a replacement, the Taoiseach has insisted he will not take part.
Ms McDonald claimed Mr Kenny was worried that he will not come out of it well.
“There’s an expression that says you can run, but you cannot hide,” she said. “He may be running, but he can’t hide from this treaty and its consequences.”
Mr Kenny refused to participate in a TV3 debate in the run-up to last year’s general election due to bad blood between himself and Mr Browne.
A Government spokesman confirmed that the Taoiseach had turned down TV3’s latest offer and that he would formally inform the station in writing.
Meanwhile, Mr Kenny came under further fire from the opposition today when Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath said he needed to develop thicker skin.
The party’s finance spokesman said the Taoiseach had behaved disrespectfully towards a member of the public in Athlone yesterday when he told him he looked like he could do with a day’s work. The man was one of a number of protesters challenging Mr Kenny on septic tank and household charges.
“I think that was very disrespectful,” said Mr McGrath.
“All of us in politics have to understand that people are really hurting at the moment
A reform of job-seeker rules badly needed’ Oireachtas Committee has recommended reforms
An Oireachtas Committee has called for significant reforms to the rules governing the payment of jobseeker’s benefits to part-time workers.
In a report yesterday the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Jobs, Social Protection and Education urged that in future jobseeker’s payment should be calculated on the number of hours worked per week rather than the number of days.
Under current rules the primary requirement for jobseeker’s benefit is that an individual needs to be unemployed for three out of six days.
Fine Gael TD Anthony Lawlor, who wrote the report, said the current arrangement was “clearly unfair”.
Mr Lawlor said one person could work two 12-hour shifts over two days and be entitled to claim three days benefit, while another could work only two hours over five days and not qualify for any benefit at all.
The report recommends that part-time work should be defined as working 24 hours or less per week.
Sean Gallagher ‘Shocked with arrogance & hostility’ by RTÉ response to his complaint
Former presidential candidate Seán Gallagher has said he was “gobsmacked” by the “arrogance” and “hostility” of RTE’s response to his complaint that he had been unfairly treated during the controversial Frontline presidential debate last October.
Mr Gallagher said RTE showed “no contrition” following the programme, in which the host Pat Kenny read out an unverified tweet live on air.
Speaking at the Media Future conference in Dún Laoghaire this afternoon, Mr Gallagher said he had been contacted earlier on the day of the debate by two people in the media who warned him of a potential ambush in relation to his links to Fianna Fáil. He declined to name who had contacted him.
Mr Gallagher was interviewed by the organiser of the conference, Jack Murray, who also served as his adviser on his presidential campaign. Mr Murray said Mr Gallagher had received phone calls that “warned them about what was to come that day”.
In his first public interview since coming second to Michael D Higgins in last year’s presidential election, Mr Gallagher was critical of the media for viewing politics “through the prism of Leinster House” and not accepting that he was an independent candidate.
“I’d never been a politician and I’d never stood for election and I think that’s what put people offside initially. They didn’t see it coming,” he said. “The political media wrote me off because they didn’t understand who I was, because their view of politics was so narrow.”
A screen shot of the message on the @mcguinness4pres Twitter account that was read out during the presidential debate on RTE’s Frontline programme.
Mr Gallagher had been favourite to win the presidential election before the debate, in which a bogus tweet purporting to come from the campaign account of Sinn Féin candidate Martin McGuinness was read out by Mr Kenny, putting Mr Gallagher under increased pressure to explain his relationship to Fianna Fáil.
Mr Gallagher denied the allegation that he had gone to collect a fundraising cheque from the house or business premises of businessman Hugh Morgan.
Today, Mr Gallagher conceded his performance in the Frontline debate “wasn’t my best performance by a long shot” and that he had replayed the moment “thousands of times” since then, wondering if he could have done or said anything differently.
“It wasn’t my finest hour,” he said.
Mr Gallagher recalled that he had a sore back on the day of the Frontline debate and was taking painkillers.
He recalled his advisers testing “every conceivable question” on him in the preparation session for the debate, but that he “just wanted to lie down for an hour”. He was determined not to be riled by anything that happened during the debate, nor get involved in negative campaigning, he added.
“I believed in positive campaigning,” he said. “I said to myself ‘stay true to what you believe, Seán. Don’t get dragged into this’.”
He said “senior names” in RTÉ had contacted him since the debate to say they were horrified by his treatment.
Mr Kenny had not been in contact with him since he appeared on his radio show the morning after the debate.
Mr Gallagher said he would never know if he would have gone on to win the election were it not for what had occurred during the debate, but noted that three polls had shown he enjoyed 40 per cent support before the programme. “So you would imagine that it was an unbeatable lead.”
He drew parallels between his “unfair treatment” and RTÉ’s libel of Fr Kevin Reynolds and said in both cases the broadcaster had “gone into defence mode”, compounding the original error.
In March, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) upheld a complaint of unfair treatment made by Mr Gallagher against RTÉ, but decided the matter did not merit a full investigation.
In a statement this evening, RTÉ said it had accepetd the BAI decision in full and had apologised for its failures. It added that the Director General and the RTÉ Board had also expressed their apologies to Mr Gallagher for the mistakes made.
Editorial review: An editorial review to identify programme-making practices and risks, giving significant attention to the production of live audience-based programmes and to the selection of audience members and questions is underway and will be completed shortly, it said.
“A new set of programme makers’ guidelines is now finalised through a process that began in February under Mr. Stephen Whittle, former Controller of Editorial Policy, BBC. It includes full new Social Media Protocols requiring systematic authentication of inputs offered to programmes. Training in key modules has begun,” it added.
In relation to a request for a meeting with the Director General made by the solicitors acting for Mr. Gallagher, the broadcaster said: “The request came in relation to a Freedom of Information request. In response, the Director General said he did not think it would be appropriate to meet while that process [the FOI process] was ongoing.”
Multi-health & Education campus site on Grangegorman lands’
To open in September 2014
Massive health and education campus is about 1km from the capital’s centre,
A proposal to locate the new national children’s hospital on the extensive Grangegorman site in Dublin 7 is being backed by the city council’s former chief planning officer, Pat McDonnell.
Yesterday An Bord Pleanála (above right) approved a planning scheme for the 73-acre site under which most of it would be developed as a new campus for Dublin Institute of Technology to replace its existing colleges in the inner city.
Mr McDonnell, who served as chief planning officer for the city until he took early retirement in 2004, said it was “not too late to halt the current proposals to create yet another extensive leafy suburban academic campus” on the Grangegorman lands.
Instead, “a high-density urban design approach would allow for all future room for expansion of the national children’s hospital as well as a co-located maternity hospital and many other uses to regenerate this part of the city in a most useful and exciting way”.
Mr McDonnell said the Grangegorman site is “minutes from the Mater hospital, Rotunda Hospital, Luas, Heuston Station, St James’s Hospital, St Patrick’s Hospital and the Navan Road/N3/M3, [which] leads directly on to the M50”.
He said the distance across the UCD campus at Belfield “is equivalent to the enclosing distance of St James’s Hospital and Grangegorman”, while the Mater is much closer, fulfilling the “co-location” criterion in a campus arrangement.
Valerin O’Shea, who represented local residents objecting to the original plan to locate the children’s hospital on the Mater site, said Grangegorman, which is in public ownership through the Health Service Executive, “ticks all the boxes” in terms of location.
Ms O’Shea has submitted the latest alternative option for the €600 million children’s hospital project to the ministerial review group, warning any move by DIT to vacate its existing colleges would cause “significant dereliction” in the inner city.
“Residents of the Grangegorman area who raised serious objections to the Grangegorman Planning Scheme for the relocation of DIT have indicated to me that they would very much prefer a hospital use on the site,” she told The Irish Times.
In her submission to the review group, chaired by Dr Frank Dolphin, Ms O’Shea says Grangegorman “would easily accommodate” a paediatric hospital as well as a maternity hospital, associated research facilities and room for any expansion required in future.
Existing buildings on the site could also be used for other medical-related activity – daycare centres for occupational therapy, rehabilitation and physiotherapy, as well as centres for the Cystic Fibrosis Association, Alzheimer’s support groups and others.
By contrast, she says, the space identified on the Mater site for the children’s hospital and the maternity hospital intended to replace the Rotunda is about 2.04 hectares (less than five acres), which meant there would be “no possibility of expansion”.
“It is blatantly obvious that the Mater is not a fit site for the development of the national paediatric hospital,” Ms O’Shea says. “We have seen enough costly planning fiascos in this city – apart from the myriad empty office and apartment blocks of recent years.”
She says the children’s hospital in Melbourne is 1km away from the adult hospital and was stated by the 2006 McKinsey report to be “co-located” in a campus model. The Mater and Rotunda hospitals are “very much closer” to Grangegorman.
“It has been stated repeatedly that there is no ideal site for the children’s hospital, and while the Grangegorman site may not be absolutely perfect, I fully concur with the former Dublin city planning officer that it is as close to ideal as we could hope to find.
“Of equal planning merit is the argument that DIT, rather than moving to Grangegorman, should remain at their existing sites throughout the city,” Ms O’Shea says, adding that relocating them to a single site “would create significant dereliction” in the inner city.
New research findings on diabetes painful side effects
New research has provided a new insight into painful side effects of diabetes that may lead to new treatments for them.
The research has found that a compound called methylglyoxal (MG) is responsible for increased pain in people who have diabetes. MG is a compound produced from glucose in people who have diabetes.
They can suffer from heightened sensitivity of pain and temperature and painful diabetic neuropathy (PDN), due to abnormal glucose metabolism. Glucose metabolism is the breakdown of sugars into energy for use in the body.
Approximately 50% of patients with diabetes experience PDN.
In diabetes patients, nerve endings become very sensitive to pain and temperature causing them to experience extremes of temperature and intense pain according to Professor Paul Thornalley, of the division of metabolic and vascular health at the University of Warwick in the UK
Patients with PND experience abnormal and persistent pain. This can have a significant impact on the patient’s quality of life as it affects, mood, mobility, sleep, relationship, ability to work, independence and self-esteem.
Until now the cause for PDN was unclear. However, Professor Thornalley believes that these findings will play a significant role in developing treatments for PDN.
This research was conducted by Warwick Medical School in collaboration with other universities in Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany and New York.
Currently further research is being conducted on the reduction pain by removing or inhibiting the activity of MG.
According to the support group Diabetes Ireland there are an estimated 160,000 people with diabetes in Ireland and a further 30,000 people with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.
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