It’s the Sunday of a Bank Holiday weekend. A time to relax and take things easy. A time to leave the worries of the working week behind.
Eh, not if your name is Ivor Callely it isn’t. We’re guessing the Dublin/Cork based Senator will have had a bit of a rude awakening today as he cast his eye across the Sunday papers. One paper in particular will have caught his attention – The Irish Mail on Sunday. Emblazoned across their whole front page is the headline ‘CALLELY CLAIMED EXPENSES ON FORGED INVOICES’.
Referring to a ‘phone scam’ and calling it ‘the story even Cowen can’t ignore’, the Mail goes on to claim, in an exclusive, that the former minister submitted receipts for four mobile phones from a Dublin telecoms firm that went bust 16 years ago. Callely is pictured in his running gear holding a Westie dog in his arms.
Elsewhere on the front pages, the Sunday Tribune leads with ‘Secret Report: HSE cutbacks put patients at severe risk. The Tribune says that a recruitment freeze means that staff are stretched across a number of department with cancer care among the departments suffering.
At the end of a week that saw Arnotts get taken over by the banks, another Irish high street institution has come out to say that the Cabinet is leaving retailers to rot. The Sunday Independent leads with the story that a report from Clerys implicitly blames the Government ‘s policies for prolonging the current economic crisis.
Also on the front of the Indo is the story that golf champ Padraig Harrington has lost €4million in a failed UK technology firm, U4EA Technologies, of which his brother Columb was a director. Billionaire financier Dermot Desmond has also taken a hit of more than €14.3million following his investment in the company. Big losses, but they’ve both still got a few million/billion to go before we need to start worrying about them being able to scrape together the change from the back of the sofa for a snackbox from the local chipper.
For cheery news we need to look to The Sunday Times which features a picture of Derval O’Rourke who bagged a silver medal in the 100m hurdles at the European Athletics Championships on Saturday night.
The Sunday Times also has the story that the German Ambassador wants to shut down the set of RTÉ’s Fair City, because he and staff at his residence, which backs onto RTÉ’s Donnybrook campus, are kept awake by the banging of set designers through the night. Amusingly it has emerged that RTÉ no longer has consent to operate the set as planning permission lapsed in 2005.
