Every morning, TheJournal.ie brings you nine things you need to know with your morning coffee.
1. #BANK BONUSES: Bank of Ireland staff have received more than €66m in bonuses since the State guaranteed the banks in September 2008. They are to due to receive €21m in payouts this year alone. A report from the Department of Finance reveals that the bank “repeatedly misled” Finance Minister Brian Lenihan on the payment of performance-related bonuses.
2. #LABOUR: As Fine Gael and Labour meet to resume hammering out the details of a possible coalition this morning, a group of grassroots Labour members say they are against the party going into government with Fine Gael. It doesn’t look likely now that the parties will finalise their talks before Enda Kenny has to go to Brussels tonight to meet Angela Merkel
3. #MING: Newly-elected independent TD for Roscommon-South Leitrim Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan has told The Star that he still grows a cannabis plant a year for his own consumption and has no plan to give it up. Flanagan also makes the Irish Independent saying that although he will be giving up half of his €90,000+ TD salary, he won’t be simply handing it back to the State. He says he’ll put it back into projects in his constituency instead.
4. #BELT UP: A study by doctors of patients in Sligo General Hospital that around one-third of children are not being properly restrained in cars by their parents. The report calls the attitude towards child safety as “appalling”.
5. #KERRY: The Independent is reporting that a deportation order had been signed for the removal of the Benin national Stephen Ukiwo on the day that his partner Katarzyna Bartowiak was strangled in their home in Tralee, Co Kerry. A search is resuming today for the body of Ukiwo who jumped from a cliff in nearby Ballybunion on the day Katarzyna died.
6. #MAYOR: An Irish doctor has become the first white foreigner to be appointed mayor of a district in Uganda. Dr Ian Clarke, who has lived and worked in Uganda since 1990, has vowed to help fix local roads, hospital services and sanitation.
7. #LEGALESE: The mother of a Special Olympics gold medallist has told The Irish Examiner of her horror that her son, who has Down’s Syndrome, was described as a “lunatic” during a court hearing. The term is still legally used in Irish courts under an archaic law that brands people of special needs as being “of unsound mind”.
8. #VEILS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is being accused of trying to win over the far-right vote as the country announces that it will be an offence from next month for a woman to wear a full-face veil.
9. #HOME VOTE: Irish novelist Liz Ryan has put her future in the hands of the public. She wants people to vote on her Facebook page on whether she should stay in France, where she has lived for the past ten years, or return home. Ryan says that, despite the recession, she misses Ireland terribly, especially walking the hill of Howth, the theme tune to the Ronan Collins Show, Irish coffee, turf fires and Eamon Dunphy.
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