🚨 NEW: Heather Humphreys tells #Dáil her Dept "could have communicated more effectively" that PUP and JA recipients were not allowed to leave Ireland - Dept will review all cases where holidaymakers had payment stripped (1/3)
🚨 Humphreys also accepts [!!] that the travel advice has changed and that there is now no advice against travel to the Green List countries - regulations will be revised to make this clear, and Jobseekers will be permitted to travel there. (2/3)
🚨 She says once legislation to pup PUP on a legal footing has been enacted, she will sign regulations to put PUP on a similar footing.
She also says PUP and JA claimants will be allowed to go to non-Green List areas for essential reasons, if they notify a welfare office first.
(She restated, however, that the Department believes it was never permitted for PUP claimants to leave Ireland - so there might only be limited scope for any appeals from the 104 people who have had it stripped for going on holiday)
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Everything You Didn’t Really Want To Know About The Seanad Elections And Didn’t Really Want To Ask!
(🧵)
It often passes under the public radar - because only a fraction of the public has a vote, and only for a fraction of the seats - but within 90 days of a general election being called, there’s also an election to Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish parliament.
Senators are elected or appointed in one of three ways:
1️⃣ They can be elected by university graduates (the NUI and Trinity have three each; 2025 is the last election before that becomes a single six-seater voted upon by all Irish graduates);
Catherine Martin opens her appearance at Oireachtas Media Committee by saying the two external reports into culture and governance at RTÉ - which were notionally due to report by end of February - are delayed and will now be handed over next month.
First question, on the button, from SF's Fintan Warfield: shouldn't you have spent last Thursday evening meeting with Siún Ní Raghallaigh instead of being on TV?
Answer: It would be wrong to pull out of a prearranged interview, and it needed more than a rushed evening meeting
Warfield puts it to her that, as politicians, both know that interview plans change and guests often cancel at short notice. "I don't think your first job as minister is to go on television… surely you know you were going to be asked, had you confidence in Siún Ní Raghallaigh"
📺 Coverage of the Oireachtas Media Committee getting underway in a mo on Virgin Media One.
Be advised: Tubridy and Kelly intend to read the same opening statements (as PAC) in full to open the meeting, to contextualise answers for the nine members who weren’t there earlier
Huzzah. By consent, Tubridy and Kelly won't re-read the full opening statements (to do so was a deferential act to a committee that doesn't want it) so into the questions we go.
FF's Christopher O'Sullivan goes first
O'Sullivan picks up the baton from PAC. You know you were issuing invoices for consultancy fees for services that wen't consultancy…
Imelda Munster is first up, asking about the genesis of the 'tripartite' deal (RTE/Renault/Tubridy).
Kelly: "This is nothing about pay cuts, this is a separate commercial deal…" Says it was proposed to him by Breda O'Keeffe, then RTE CFO.
Kelly frames the idea of underwriting the €75k deal suggesting it was to insulate Tubridy from any Late Late sponsor change.
"It was never for RTÉ to pay. The guarantee was for, if another sponsor came on", that they would inherit a similar arrangement for personal appearances
Munster: But the deal was underwritten, at your request, from the public purse?
Kelly: I asked for the deal to be underwritten because the relationship with the sponsor is with RTE and not us.
…which is that there was a petition sent to the Oireachtas Petitions Committee in 2017 making a broadly similar argument - that Albert was the consort of a much unloved imperial monarch and there was no justification for the Leinster House authorities to keep him there.
Except:
Firstly it turned out that the statue was the property of the OPW and not of the Oireachtas, so Leinster House didn’t have the authority to simply remove it: it wasn’t theirs to throw away.
But then the committee members did a bit of digging and…
Niall Collins now on his feet in the Dáil. "I am in absolutely no doubt that … my actions were at all times legally correct"
"The question of the potential sale of the property followed various expressions of interest by members of the public… one of the people… was Dr Eimear O'Connor, who is also my wife. It was agreed at the area committee meeting that the property should be sold on open market"
"An area committee of a local authority, which in the case of the Bruss area committee included only seven councillors, does not have disposal rights for the sale of council property. This is a reserved and statutory function of the full county council by law"