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EVERY WEEKDAY evening, TheJournal.ie brings you the five things you really should know before you head out the door…
1. #RACE FOR THE ÁRAS: Independent candidate Mary Davis has revealed her full P60 tax filings for the last three years after facing questions about her earnings from posts on State and other boards. The documents reveal that she earned €183,083.82 from State boards over three years, contributing to a total wage of €156,310 gross last year.
- The National Library has said it does not know whether clemency appeal letters written by David Norris for his former partner Ezra Nawi are part of the Senator’s personal archive lodged with the institution in 2007. However in a statement, the library said it had agreed not to make public any of the documents without Norris’s express permission.
- Seán Gallagher has made a final appeal to his fellow candidates to produce one common election leaflet between them, which he claims will save the taxpayer more than €10 million. However, he said the silence from other presidential hopefuls on the issue has been “deafening”.
2. #FIRE: A house fire which killed a five-year-old girl in Boyle, Co Roscommon in the early hours of this morning is now being treated as suspicious by gardaí. A man in his 40s and two more children aged three and four escaped the fire, which broke out between 2.30am and 3am.
3. #AMANDA KNOX: Murder accused Amanda Knox has made an emotional final plea to the court hearing an appeal over her conviction for the 2007 murder of her flatmate Meredich Kercher in Italy, telling jury members: “I did not kill, I have not raped, I did not steal.” The verdict is due at 7pm Irish time.
4. #BANAMA REPUBLIC: Nama has confirmed it will be pursuing the pension funds of indebted developers, in an attempt to recoup money owed. The move comes as part of an apparent attempt to persuade the developers to approve Nama’s business plans for their properties.
5. #BY-ELECTION: Barry Caesar Hunt, a Dublin hairdresser best known for appearing on last year’s The Apprentice, has confirmed he will run for the Dáil in the Dublin West by-election on October 27. Hunt, who owns WestEnd Barbers in Blanchardstown, said it was “time to give people hope” and that “small changes can make huge differences”.
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Great news guys. Now get onto Hireland and pledge and give a few jobs.
@torpedo, their focus should not be on giving a few jobs, they should focus on continuation of their successful growth strategy, if they succeed jobs will follow.
They made a pre tax profit of 700 million. I think the can afford to hire one or two people.
It is that sort of attitude that leads to inefficiency and eventual ruin, you do not hire people just to sit on their arses.
‘Very challenging environment’ indeed. It’s a tough business building apartheid cement walls around Palestine, but some Irish firm has got to do it.
They are obviously working in a very challenging environment and there is still some way to go before new jobs will emerge. A profit of less than 4% on sales suggest that further cost cutting will be needed to remain competitive.
A challenging environment all right. Putting up Israel’s apartheid wall.
But its good for tricky Dicky Bruton’s portfolio.
Much of these profits have been made on the back of an illegal price-fixing cartel operating in the.concrete and cement industries. Ongoing legal actions taken by Framus Ltd and Goode Concrete serve to demonstrate the extent of the crippling stranglehold CRH have over many small businesses in this country. Compounding this is the negligence of the Competition Authority who steadfastly refuse to investigate the industry despite the severity of the allegations laid at the door of CRH. The term Regulatory Capture comes to mind here.
CRH operate a cartel with others in the cement, concrete and tarmac markets in Ireland. They have been selling concrete below average variable cost in the Dublin concrete market and abused their dominant position in their upstream cement and aggregates markets by doing so. This is illegal and criminal but they are being protected by the successive Governments due to a term called political and regulatory capture.
CRH has been found to have operated a price fixing cartel in Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992. CRH was fined by the European Commission in 1994 for conducting a pan European cartel. In 2007 CRH was fined €530,000 for obstructing an antitrust investigation and destroying evidence. In 2009 CRH was fined €25 million for participation in a price fixing cartel in Poland.
CRH is doing monumental damage to the Irish economy by overcharging for cement and tarmac and using this money to subsidise a corporate eviction strategy which is costing the economy jobs.
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