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Enda Kenny shares a joke with an attendee at the Fine Gael Árd-Fheis earlier today. Stephen Kilkenny/Light Curve Photo
Daily Fix

The Daily Fix: Saturday

Your essential news round-up from the day’s main happenings, plus the little bits you may have missed.

EVERY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you a round-up of all the day’s main news, as well as the bits and pieces you may have missed along the way.

  • With a little over four hours to go until the deadline for registration for the Household Charge, figures from the Department of the Environment show that 770,980 households have signed up either to pay for the €100 charge, or to get their waiver. That’s roughly half of the eligible households.
  • Earlier, around 5,000 people gathered outside the Fine Gael Árd-Fheis at the National Convention Centre in Dublin to protest against the charge. Among those were people who had walked the distance from Malin Head in Donegal.
  • Inside the Ard Fheis, members have been hearing speeches from cabinet ministers, and voting on party policy – including a landmark motion which will see the constitutional convention prioritise the discussion of full gay marriage rights.
  • We’ll be liveblogging Enda Kenny’s keynote speech from 8:30pm this evening.
  • There was also some furore when the protesters arrived, however – as Fine Gael closed the blinds in the convention centre, meaning staff in the media areas couldn’t see the protesters outside. FG claimed they acted on Garda advice.
  • There’s been a security alert in Belfast for much of the day, after a suspicious device was spotted in the Queen’s Bridge area of the city centre. A bomb disposal unit has been present since lunchtime.
  • It was reported last night that Ireland’s involved in talks which would see the promissory notes replaced with EFSF bonds. Here, we’ve tried to figure out what that means – and whether it would be a positive move for us.
  • The Syrian government has declared victory in its year-long battle against the uprising there.

The light shines in through the glass front of the National Convention Centre, which today played host to the second day of the Fine Gael Árd-Fheis – and demonstrations against the household charge. Photo: Stephen Kilkenny/LightCurvePhoto.com.

  • Crossmaglen Rangers have won their sixth All-Ireland club football championship since 1997 with a 2-19 to 1-7 win over Garrycastle of Westmeath. The win means Paul Hearty and Oisin McConville set a new record with six All-Ireland medals each. Here’s how it went down.
  • In other sporting news, Munster and Leinster are squaring off in the RaboDirect Pro-12 – you can catch our liveblog of that here
  • …while it was a significant afternoon of action in the Barclays Premier League, including some incredible drama at Eastlands.
  • Do you feel lucky, punk? Probably not as lucky as three people in the states of Maryland, Illinois and Kansas. They’ve shared the top prize in the most lucrative lottery of all time – taking equal shares in a jackpot of $640 million (€480 million).
  • Today would have been actor and comedian Dermot Morgan’s 60th birthday. We’ve found a video including gags which were, literally, 18 years ahead of their time. Take a look.
  • You must have been living under a rock if you missed the Kony2012 video, which became the most viral video of all time. Well, its reign didn’t last long – a movie about the Ugandan child army overlord has been usurped by a two-year-old dancing to Elvis.
  • New MP wins election in new constituency. New MP tweets his gratitude, and gets the name of the constituency wrong. New MP claims his Twitter account has been hacked. World nods its head and says ‘Yeah, sure it was.’
  • The world is getting pretty excited waiting for the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, coming out in July. The trailers, if you haven’t seem them, are pretty epic… but if you haven’t seen them, don’t bother: watch this Lego one instead.

(YouTube credit: )

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