Some 5,000 Irish people attend anti-austerity march in Dublin
Protesters showed the Government a red card over its economic policies
Gardaí have estimated that at least 5,000 people took part in an anti-Property Tax and austerity protest in Dublin city centre.
Marchers gathered for a rally outside City Hall.
Speakers urged the crowd not to pay what they called the “home tax” and promised a national campaign of resistance.
The protest was organised by the Socialist Party and People Before Profit, along with unions and anti-austerity groups to coincide with the meeting of EU Finance Ministers in Dublin Castle.
Gardaí closed roads in the vicinity and cordoned off entrances to the castle for the duration of the event.
Judge Teehan’s rage at Irish government’s inaction on sentence term length's
Judge Tom Teehan has told a grieving family of a man who was killed, along with the relations of three assault victims, that politicians here have done their country no service by not having harsher sentences for serious assaults.
The judge made his comments at Nenagh Circuit Criminal Court where he jailed Jason Morrissey (23) for 18 years after he admitted the unprovoked manslaughter of James Tynan (25) in Thurles last year, just days after he had viciously assaulted two men and a teen.
“The infliction of physical violence in public has grown in the last 20 years or so, both in the nature of violence itself and the frequency of such incidents,” he said.
He said his court “has a duty to the good people of Thurles and elsewhere”.
Noting that Morrissey also pleaded guilty to three assaults in the five days before he killed Mr Tynan, the judge said that the “sheer savagery of the attacks almost take one’s breath away”.
SMILED
“Our legislators have done our country no service by imposing such a maximum sentence so low for these crimes.
“They hold bodily integrity in lesser regard than right to property,” he added.
He said people could be jailed for 10 years for theft “in stark contrast to assault causing harm which is half that figure”.
Morrissey, of Church Street, Toomevara, Co Tipperary, had 85 criminal convictions and was on bail for public order offences when he killed Mr Tynan (25), of Johnstown, Co Kilkenny. He smiled and smirked after the judge sentenced him.
Det Sgt James White recalled how Morrissey, who did not know Mr Tynan, struck him in the face with a clenched fist causing the victim to strike his head off the pavement in Liberty Square, Thurles, on February 19 last year.
As Mr Tynan lay dying, Morrissey danced around him in a triumphant gesture with his arms raised aloft. He was arrested less than two hours later. Mr Tynan died in Clonmel Hospital.
Shown CCTV footage of the assault, Morrissey, who had drunk 12 cans of beer and cider and taken valium beforehand, said he felt like he was in a boxing ring and won. “It was like we fought for 12 rounds, even though I knew it was only one slap. When I knocked him out, it felt good,” he said.
Frank Quirke, prosecuting for the State, read a harrowing statement prepared by James’s mother, Dolores Tynan.
The Tynan family openly cried and Mr Quirke broke down as he relayed the loss they suffered after James went out with friends and came home in a coffin.
Nightmare
“We will never forget the phone call from Clonmel Hospital to tell us that our son was gravely ill and to get there as quickly as possible, the nightmare drive, to see him lying there. The week before he died he had told me he was so happy and we knew it. Now we have to live without him.
“An illness or an accident would be hard enough, but to lose your son like this is devastating and unbearable. He loved Fiona, his girlfriend, and was so happy to be working in the family business.
“He was born on October 3, 1986, a joy to us all. I feel so robbed that I will never be a granny to his children and he would have been a wonderful dad.
“I want you all to know what one punch can do, it takes a life. It leaves us to live our lives in darkness now, as the light left us when James died,” the statement read.
Judge Teehan said it was “the most affecting victim impact statement” he has ever heard and sentenced Morrissey to 14 years’ imprisonment for the manslaughter.
The killer was also sentenced to seven years imprisonment for three unprovoked assaults on two men and a 15-year-old teenager in the five days beforehand the manslaughter, all which also occurred in Thurles. Judge Teehan suspended three years of the 21-year prison term.
Shane Filan’s brother pays €50k to keep fairy fort land in family
FILAN’S AUCTION NETS €1M
A SMALL piece of land belonging to bankrupt Westlife singer Shane Filan – with a fairy fort in it – is to be kept in the family after his brother Liam bought it in an auction.
The auctioneer’s hammer fell on the singer’s property portfolio the same day he relaunched his singing career with a new record deal.
As UK bankrupt Filan signed a new record deal, nearly €1m was knocked off the €23m debt he left behind. Two of his properties went up for sale. A derelict period house with 146 acres of farming land fetched €910,000 – just 10pc below what he paid for it during the boom.
Another 3.6 acres of land adjoining his former luxury home at Carraroe – which is on the market separately – fetched €50,000. The land outside Sligo town was kept in the Filan family when Shane’s older brother, Liam, bought it.
The €910,000 sale was at Bawn, Dromahair, Co Leitrim The land was bought by farmer James Irwin, a father of two, who lives near Manorhamilton.
He said: “I bought it because it was good farm land. I didn’t buy it because of the connections. I don’t even know a Westlife song. I’m too old for that.”
Shane’s father, Peter, and another older brother, Finbar – Shane’s partner in Shafin developments – were back-seat onlookers at the auction in the Sligo Park Hotel.
Auctioneer David Reynolds said: “We got about what we expected. I advised the administrators that the best way to sell the property would be through an auction because it would attract more people.”
Almost 100 attended the auction, which was held on behalf of receiver Declan Taite, of RSM Farrell Grant Sparks.
Filan’s home at Carraroe is still on the market. He built it for €3m and was once offered €10m for it. It is now valued at about €900,000.
He now lives with his family at a £2.2m house in Surrey, England and he is expected to exit bankruptcy in June.
But things were looking up for the singer yesterday after he signed a major record deal as a solo artist with UK label London Records, with the first single due to be released in the summer.
Paddy “Red” Lydon RIP immortalized in iconic John Hinde postcard
Red heads, donkeys, creel carts and freshly cut turf – there’s only one place on earth you could be, Ireland.
This week tributes are being paid in Connemara to the man known as Paddy ‘Red’ Lydon, the red headed boy immortalized forever in an iconic John Hinde postcard taken in the west of Ireland in the early 1960′s.
According to the Irish Times, Lydon, who was photographed collecting turf with his younger sister Mary and a donkey and cart half a century ago, died in Galway this week aged 65.
Millions of visitors have reportedly been drawn to Ireland from the strength of Hinde’s 1960′s depictions of everyday peasantry working an unspoiled landscape.
Hinde went on to sell millions of his ‘Views of Ireland’ which were printed in his factory in Cabinteely, County Dublin. But Paddy Lydon often joked to friends that he was paid just half a crown for his modeling work.
The Somerset-born photographer was often accused of contriving images, many of which were later critically dismissed as the ‘apogee of kitsch.’
But Lydon’s family recalls that a genuine scene was captured. Both Lydon and his sister Mary were out collecting turf to fill their donkey’s creels when Hinde came across them.
‘All he asked them to do was to go home and change their clothes,’ first cousin Pat Lydon told The Irish Times ‘Paddy would joke that his father, Christy, had cut the turf and had made everything in it – the kids, the creels – except for the ass!’
Although the card became world famous, the red-haired boy, one of five siblings, stayed at home and never married. His sister Mary moved to England. Their mother was reportedly fatally injured in a road incident in the mid-1970′s, and their father died in 1979.
Paddy was a ‘quiet man,’ with ‘close friends,’ who would be missed in the locality, one local said.
Hinde sold his postcard business in 1972 and in 1993 his artistic reputation was ‘rehabilitated’ when an exhibition of his imagery was staged by the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Interviewed by The Irish Times, Hinde rejected the patronizing ‘kitsch’ label.
‘I photographed donkeys and cottages simply because you can’t imagine a Connemara bog without a donkey walking across with panniers filled with peat,’ he said.
‘It’s part, of the landscape the same way the Irish cottage is like a living thing which grew out of the ground. It’s true that in some cases my images were doctored and distorted, but if you photographed a beautiful scene off the west coast of Ireland, it would come out as practically monochrome, so we set out to create visually the impression you’d thought you’d had.’
Playing sounds during sleep can improve your memory
For almost a century, scientists have known that sleep plays a critical role in the creation of long-term memories. What we experience during the day is processed and stored away in our brains as we sleep.
Now, German researchers say they have found a relatively simple way to boost memory formation by playing sounds at certain times during the sleep cycle. If they are right, the discovery could be a godsend to students cramming for exams or anyone who wants to improve their recall.
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