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Dublin: 12 °C Monday 20 May, 2013

The 9 at 9: Monday

Good morning! Here’s nine things to know before you start your day…

Image: Urban Combing via Flickr/Creative Commons

EVERY DAY, TheJournal.ie brings you the nine stories you need to know as you kick off your day.

1. #USA 2012: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will attempt to convince voters in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Virginia today ahead of Tuesday’s polling with rallies and last-minute speeches. As the end draws near, TheJournal.ie has taken a look back at the long campaign – in 99 photos.

2. #SANDY: It has emerged that two of the victims of superstorm Sandy in New York were the sons of an Irish emigrant. Donegal native Damien Moore was working in Brooklyn when two-year-old Brandon and his older brother Conor, aged four, were swept away on Staten Island, reports RTÉ.

3. #SURGE: The Irish Exporters Association is expecting a record year for the sector as the worth of goods and services being shipped out of Ireland increased by 10 per cent to €46.7 billion between July and September, according to the Irish Independent.

4. #RETAIL CRIME: Shoplifting is becoming a greater headache for retailers in Ireland with a new survey revealing that over half a billion euro in stock is stolen each year.

5. #CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL: Just 24-hours ahead of a key Cabinet meeting about the location of the new National Children’s Hospital, the Irish Times reports the project could be delayed by 30 months at a cost of €140 million if the Mater site is not chosen. That is according to a memo from the National Hospital Paediatric Development Board. Meanwhile, the Irish Independent says the Coombe Hospital has emerged as the favourite.

6. #RYANAIR: Budget airline Ryanair continues in its bid to take over rival firm Aer Lingus with what it describes as an “unprecedented remedies” package to assuage EU monopoly fears. In its latest results, the company reported a half-year profit of €596 million.

7. #DAVID BLACK: Two men who were arrested by police in Northern Ireland investigating the death of prison officer David Black have been released without charge. A third man is still being held for questioning by Gardaí in Leitrim.

8. #FOOD POVERTY: A new soup kitchen is to open its doors in Athlone, Co Westmeath today. Twist is a voluntary organisation set up by Galway native Oliver Williams earlier this year “to provide hot food to anybody that needs it regardless of age, race, gender or circumstances”.

9. #THE EASTENDER EFFECT: A Fianna Fáil TD has expressed his concerns that a recent plot line in Eastenders might influence voters ahead of Saturday’s referendum on Children’s Rights. Robert Troy said the story of Lola’s baby Lexi being taken into care has had an emotional impact on viewers, according to the Irish Examiner.

Over on DailyEdge.ie: We’ve raked through this morning’s celebrity dirt so you don’t have to… Justin Bieber the hero, who isn’t fat and who isn’t gay, and One Direction holding puppies. It’s The Dredge.

Read next:

Comments (27 Comments)

  • It is a sad state of affairs when a fictional location in east London where it’s inhabitants have awful grammar, can have an influence on such an important topic in Ireland.

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  • Well you get over Eastenders. The real story here is the growing need for soup kitchens while our TDs pocket €2900 a week

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    • You don’t think the possibility of a TV soap affecting how some people vote in an Irish referendum to amend our consistution warrents itself as a “real story”?

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    • At €2,900 a week TDs get 13 times more than I do. That there should be such obscene differences in income is a national disgrace. I’m managing without the soup kitchen so far, but can’t afford to heat the house properly.

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  • Legal experts are warning citizens of Ireland about a Nov. 10 “Children’s Rights Referendum” that they fear is so ambiguous it could be used by the government to replace parents in their roles as decision-makers for their children.

    “What is proposed in the amendment is a subtle, yet definite philosophical shift short of being the legal maid-of-all work that it may or may not be,” said an analysis developed by University College Cork law professor Bénédicte Sage-Fuller and history professor Gabriel Doherty, along with Grégor Puppinck, director of the European Center for Law and Justice.

    At issue is a referendum that would redefine the role of government in helping children the government determines may be in need of assistance.

    While it sounds to some like a praiseworthy goal, the analysts have doubts.

    “The threshold of intervention … reveals this new approach: ‘when the safety or welfare’ of children ‘is likely to be prejudicially affected’, the state can intervene,” they write, “and take various kinds of measures, from family support to compulsory adoption.”

    The current standard allows government to intervene “when the parents fail.”

    Changing that to “when the safety or welfare … is likely to be prejudicially affected” is “revealing of the paradigm shift,” the legal experts conclude..

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  • #FOOD POVERTY. While the CEO of Bank of Ireland, Richie Boucher from Zambia, is on €839,000, soup kitchens have started to spring up around Ireland. So that is where some of my mortgage rate hike is going and the 28c they charge for every transaction. Interesting Tweet that I came across.

    “Bank of Ireland does 24-Hour Banking because it takes 24 hours for one of their ATMs to dispense Boucher’s salary”

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    • careful Aine or you will accused of being a commie, anyone voicing concern about inequality on this forum, invariably gets referred to as ‘comrade’ by our boot-licker friends, anyone would think they were anti-equality the way they sneer about it

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  • Amongst many frequent annoying and trivial stories in EastEnders the Lola / Lexi one is particularly irresponsible. During the years that my wife and I worked in North Islington running a unit for teenagers suspended from schools in the borough we met and worked with many school welfare officers and social workers . Every single one of them made efforts far beyond the requirements of their job descriptions to provide help and support to the young people .They made strenuous efforts to ensure that single parent families were not split up .East Enders story line is depicting the Social Services department as though it was still unchanged from the moralistic high handedness of the 1950’s . This does nothing to reassure young people that local government can be there to help and provide a much needed lifeline.

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    • thats because if they get power it will become like that and well before eastenders it was a no for me. what eastenders showed what is called truth. yes some ppl do not deserve children but no way in hell would i see them dragged away .

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  • We pay TD’s to watch and comment on soaps? I wonder what Judge Judy would make of that?

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  • Watching Eastenders damages the brain!

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  • i wish there was a soup kitchen here

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  • my mind was made up long before the ‘eastenders’ story broke, i would not trust this state with the lives and futures of ANY child . you only have to look at the disgraceful way children instate care were used and abused in the recent past to see that handing any more power over to these state bodies is a road to disaster. if passed this legislation would be used to remove children from their families at the word of any social worker,teacher, garda, or cleric, with little or no right of appeal or thought of the child. to call this the ‘childrens rights’ referendum is a joke, if anything it will do more to remove a childs right than invoke them.
    how anyone could vote to allow the state to have even more power than it has now is beyond me, have people forgotten the institutional schools? the Roscommon case? the thousands of court cases, still ongoing , to do with the physical,mental and sexual abuse of children while in state care?. Also with the cuts to funding for government departments(which will inevitably lead to a cut in the number of social workers) just who is going to look after the children removed into ‘state care’ ? the church perhaps? the Christian brothers? the nun’s? or should the state just ‘sell them on’ to the highest bidder for adoption, ? too many ‘mistakes’ were made by the state in the past to be able to trust them with our childrens futures.

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  • #THE EASTENDER EFFECT or is it reality in the UK in some cases? I did some reading up a while back after coming across a lady in severe distress whose 2 young kids had been taken from her. She would never see them again, until maybe when they were 18. Not even supervised access. Here is an article from the Daily Mail from 2008 “How social services are paid bonuses to snatch babies for adoption”: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

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  • Eastenders – half an hour of depression, four times a week!

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  • I know that Michael O’Leary of Ryan Air is not the most popular person in the press, but I admire and like him. Only wish he would run this Country, he seems to make money in his sleep, we all fly with him obviously but keep pulling him down. He is a success story. Well done

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  • You’re quoting an English paper and article and an English programme!!! The daily mail is a right wing paper. Says it all.

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