A round-up of today's other stories in brief
EU fund to retrain SR Technics staff
The budgets committee of the European Parliament has voted to approve funding of €7,445,863 from the EU's Globalisation Adjustment Fund to help to retrain 850 former SR Technics workers made redundant in 2009, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
The full European Parliament is due to vote on the application at a plenary session to be held in Brussels on November 10th and 11th. The funding allocation also has to be approved by EU Governments at the European Council.
Labour Senator Brendan Ryan said the Government was “slow off the mark” in making its application for funding.
Vacant houses 'a scandal' - Shortall
Confirmation of 3,850 vacant local authority housing units across the State was described as a “scandal” at yesterday’s meeting of the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee, writes Mary Minihan.
Labour TD Róisín Shortall, a committee member, told the Department of the Environment’s secretary general Geraldine Tallon she was concerned about the length of time that passed between tenancies. “It’s a scandal that there are vacant units not used to meet housing demand,” she said.
Ms Tallon said approximately 3 per cent of local authority housing stock was vacant.
Loyalist paramilitaries 'ordering children on to street to riot'
Loyalist paramilitaries are "ordering" young children on to the streets of Newtownabbey, Co Antrim, to riot, a Church of Ireland minister has claimed, writes Dan Keenan.
Rev Alan Millar of St Comgall’s church blamed paramilitaries for stoking the trouble which caused some £400,000 (€458,000) damage in the Rathcoole area of Co Antrim this week.
“Paramilitaries order the children out on to the street, but when they tried to stop it the children were enjoying the mayhem,” he said.
Self-serving paramilitary groups “care nothing for the children, they care nothing for the community”.
“We need a dialogue with the people who have influence over the paramilitaries to leave the children out of it,” he said His comments support claims made by the PSNI that young children were orchestrated by loyalist paramilitary groups.
The two nights of serious street violence in the overwhelmingly unionist estate was “stimulated” by loyalist paramilitaries who had gunmen present at disturbances, the PSNI has claimed. The rioting and hijackings which flared on Monday and Tuesday involved teenagers and children as young as 10, the PSNI said.
Pay-as-you-go tax urged for trucks
Road tax for heavy goods vehicles should be replaced with a pay-as-you-go permit system for use of the State’s roads, the Irish Road Haulage Association has said.
It has told Brian Lenihan the switch would raise revenue from Northern Irish and overseas lorries which use the State’s roads.
According to the association’s pre-budget submission many hauliers do not have enough work to keep lorries busy on a full-time basis. Association president Vincent Caulfield said the downturn had left many firms with only sporadic business, but to keep a lorry on the road the minimum taxation period was three months.