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OVER €1.5 MILLION has been spent policing protests at the controversial Shell refinery project in north Mayo since February 2012, it has emerged.
Justice Minister Alan Shatter informed the Dáil yesterday that the total cost of policing at the site of the Corrib gas pipeline has now reached “in excess of €16 million” not including the cost of basic salaries of garda members deployed to the area.
Campaigners from the Shell to Sea organisation have been protesting against the construction of the Corrib gas pipeline for the past seven years.
Shatter, who has previously described the protests as “scandalous”, told the Dáil yesterday: “It is deeply regrettable that so much Garda resources have had to be tied up at the north Mayo site.
“However, this is absolutely necessary in view of the actions of some of the protestors, many of whom, as I have said previously in respect of the matter, are not from the area and who have engaged in acts of public disorder as well as damage to property.”
He said that the gardaí have consistently stated that they are only concerned with the prevention of public order offences despite accusations of facilitating the interests of Shell over the concerns of local residents.
Shatter also said that the recent allegations that gardaí were supplied with a large quantity of alcohol by a company working for Shell are being investigated by the Garda Ombudsman and it would not be appropriate for him to comment further.
Last August a Glasgow based company OSSL, which procured materials and services for Shell, claimed in The Observer newspaper that it delivered €35,000 worth of alcohol, which came from Northern Ireland, to Belmullet Garda Station in December 2007.
In a statement, gardaí said that allegations were made to the district officer at Belmullet in 2011, that alcohol was distribute to officers on behalf of Shell but said that inquiries found “no evidence” of this.
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It’s all well and good to keep branches open a little later, but it’s of no use to those of us on holidays abroad with no access to our pay.
Or those of us who work shifts! They should immediately give all affected a fee free overdraught. Because of not having had a pay slip issued yet, they refused me cash today….bastards.
that is fckucking terrible Dave. Im facing the same shite on wednesday, and if i dont get my pay slip to them i miss my direct debit and my mortgage payment. And I start nights on wednesday
In the same boat with dd’s but I called a couple of companies yesterday and they said that the dd hadnt been rejected, it was showing as hanging and should go through, just late, when ulster get around to processing it and that as said companies know about the situation they won’t be penalising me.
The same Central Bank that practises”light touch regulation”. I’m sure Ulster Bank are cacking themselves.
That should sort it out so now – no doubt UB were just kicking back until the CB ‘pressed’ them.
Thought the same thing. Finally someone stepped in to have a stern word. It’s about time …
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/rbs_natwest_what_went_wrong/
“The tech problems at the RBS banking group that left millions of people unable to access money for four days last week were caused by a failure in a piece of batch scheduling software, sources have told The Register.
And at least some of the support staff for that software have been outsourced to India – as recently as February.”
Here’s how actual regulation works in the US – don’t process cheques for more than 24 hours?
Ok, Federal Reserve steps in. Your bank is probably shut down and its assets redistributed to other banks.
Oh, and how are the cost savings on all those outsourced IT workers looking now? Where are the 1500 workers that were laid off? Too busy to help? Aw shucks. By the way, did you ever catch the guy who was selling a computer with customer data on ebay?
I’m at a bit of a loss here. If they’re dealing with a backlog you would expect that to be cleared in an orderly fashion. My wages were due today, but given what’s going on I didn’t expect to be able to access the funds until the end of week at least. However, this morning when I checked my balance the money was there . Seems a bit odd, don’t u think??
Not alot the central bank can do, problems also in royal bank of scotland and natwest. Its not good for the people who cannot access their accounts.
I posted a cheque to my account last Wednesday and am still waiting for it to be processed and show in my balance. I’m sure things are a lot easier for bankers on a huge salary but when you need the money to buy the necessities and to pay bills, it’s a different story. nMy guess as to what happened is that they were making changes to their systems to allow for changes in transaction fee on accounts and someone fecked something up.
What I heard from an inside source is that they were upgrading the system (CAC7?) that basically is the master plan for every individual batch operation that the runs overnight. This upgrade didn’t go as planned so apparently they rolled back to the older version. It seems that the masterplan was no longer present in the system so no jobs were run overnight and hence the chaos started. This is inline with what The Register are saying.
The story is that this batching activity was moved offshore so I’d imagine there’s some old staff getting some handsome short term contracts to sort this out!!
You’ve got to wonder why they were upgrading all three banks at the same time. It would be bizarre if any bonuses were paid in this bank this year. It’s a basket case and I’m one of their customers. I was fortunate that my wages were processed the day before this happened!
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