EACH WEEKDAY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you five things you should know before you head out the door.

1. #PENALTY POINTS: Roscommon County Manager Frank Dawson has ‘utterly rejected’ allegations that he ‘sorted out’ an incident in which local TD Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan had two penalty points removed from his driving licence. In a statement to the Dáil last night, Flanagan explained the circumstances under which two traffic offences occurred, saying he had contacted a ‘senior council official’ in Roscommon about one of the incidents, who later ‘sorted out’ his penalty points.

2. #MORTGAGE ARREARS: The Government has launched its plan to tackle the current mortgage arrears crisis. The Mortgage Arrears Resolution document gives possible solutions, including  a split mortgage – where a lender splits a borrower’s unaffordable mortgage loan, with an amount set aside to or ‘warehoused’ at a later date – as well as deferring payment, or debt write-off.

3. #EUROPEAN ELECTIONS: The European Parliament has approved changes to the number of MEPs each country will elect next year – meaning Ireland is set to lose one seat, from 12 to 11. MEPs in Strasbourg for the parliament’s monthly plenary session voted by 536 to 111, with 44 abstentions, to approve the reallocation of seats following the elections next June.

4. #PROTEST: Up to 300 people gathered outside the Dáil this afternoon to protest against the rise of anti-Traveller racism among public representatives. The Irish Traveller Movement said it convened the rally in response to the rise in racism among politicians and judges which culminated in the burning of a house allocated to a Traveller family in Ballyshannon, county Donegal last month. A number of TDs joined the protesters.

5. #BONDS: At an auction this morning, Ireland sold its first 10-year government bonds since before its entry into the EU-IMF bailout programme. A high volume of bids for the Irish bonds led the agency to sell €5 billion of bonds instead of the €3 billion it had originally planned.