EVERY WEEKDAY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you up to speed with the five things you should know as you head out the door.
1. #MAGDALENE: The government has confirmed details of the redress scheme for the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries. Survivors will receive up to €100,000 depending on how long they spent in a laundry, with payments above €50,000 being split so that some payments are received weekly. The women are also to be granted enhanced medical cards and an income equivalent to a contributory State pension.
2. #LABOUR PAINS: Colm Keaveney has quit the Labour party – six months after losing the party whip after voting against the Budget. The Galway East TD said he could “no longer go along with what is increasingly like a political charade”.
3. #UNITED STATES: The US Supreme Court has struck down a law which prohibited same-sex couples from getting the same federal tax treatment as opposite-sex marriages. The ‘Defence of Marriage Act’ had withheld tax, health and retirement benefits to same-sex couples. The ruling means that if a US state recognises same-sex marriage, the United States must also do so.
In a separate ruling, the court upheld the Californian Supreme Court’s ruling that a ban on same-sex marriage was improperly enacted – throwing out a subsequent appeal because the people who brought it were not affected by the case.
4. #GLASS BOTTLE SITE: The former chairman of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority has claimed the taxpayer lost tens of millions of euro because five successive governments failed to address a legal loophole. Lar Bradshaw told the Public Accounts Committee that a loophole identified in 1992 allowed the tenant of the Irish Glass Bottle Site to take the lion’s share of the proceeds from its sale – money lost by the Dublin Port Company as a result.
5. #COURTS: Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has settled a claim for damages taken against him over a personal injury claim. The former Taoiseach was not in Dublin Circuit Civil Court when it was told that Marie Therese O’Loughlin had settled her claim over an incident at Ahern’s St Luke’s office in 2007.
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