LAST UPDATE | 18 May 2022
GOOD MORNING.
Here’s all the news that you need to know as you start your day.
1. Thousands of hospital appointments and procedures have been cancelled across the country as medical scientists hold a one-day strike over a decades-long pay dispute.
More than 2,000 medical scientists are involved in the industrial action, which centres on a number of issues, including a demand for pay parity with colleagues in laboratories who are doing the same work.
Medical scientists carry out a range of diagnostics tests, including blood tests and analysis of tissue samples for inpatients in hospitals and GP patients in the community.
The HSE has warned of significant disruption and service delays in hospitals from 8am-8pm due to the strike.
2. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman said the Russian military is holding more than 3,000 civilians from Mariupol at a former penal colony in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
Seven buses carrying an unknown number of Ukrainian soldiers evacuated from the Mariupol steel plant were seen arriving on Tuesday at former penal colony No 120 near Olenivka.
Ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova said on Telegram earlier that the civilians were being held at former penal colony No 52, also near Olenivka.
3. The Swedish people are worried about Nato membership having an impact on their independent voice but they have accepted the end of neutrality as a pragmatic measure to protect their country, a leading Swedish parliamentarian has said.
Olle Thorell is an MP for the ruling Social Democrats party and also a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Swedish parliament.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Niall O’Connor in today’s morning lead, Thorell said that EU military assistance was not enough and used the analogy of membership of Nato as the equivalent of having a fire department to respond to a blaze rather than the European model of having only a smoke alarm.
4. Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Finland and Sweden have officially applied to join the world’s biggest military alliance, in a move driven by security concerns over Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I warmly welcome the requests by Finland and Sweden to join Nato. You are our closest partners,” Stoltenberg said after receiving application letters from the two Nordic countries’ ambassadors.
“This is a good day at a critical moment for our security.”
5. New legislation which will offer an effective amnesty from prosecution for Troubles-era crime has been tabled at Westminster.
The proposals, first mooted last year, are almost universally opposed by political parties across the UK and Ireland as well as victims’ groups.
Immunity will be offered to those who are deemed to have cooperated with an information retrieval body.
In the Dáil on Tuesday, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald likened the actions of the UK Government to those of a “rogue state”.
6. Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said that “a lot of the arguments” against going ahead with the National Maternity Hospital plan “didn’t hold up” over the past two weeks.
Cabinet yesterday signed off on the legal framework for the planned move of the NMH to the Elm Park site alongside St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin.
The decision paves the way for the new hospital to be built, with Minister of Health Stephen Donnelly saying today that construction could take “four and a half years” once the tender had been completed.
7. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said the negligence and laziness of state officials worsened the country’s Covid outbreak, state media has reported, as the number of known cases crossed 1.7 million.
The nuclear-armed country reported its first coronavirus cases last week, and the Omicron variant-fuelled outbreak has since ballooned – marking the failure of a two-year blockade maintained since the start of the pandemic.
Chairing a meeting of the ruling party’s Politburo on Tuesday, Kim said there was “immaturity in the state capacity for coping with the crisis” and slammed the “non-positive attitude, slackness and non-activity of state leading officials”, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
8. Working remotely could save the average person up to €304 per year, according to new research set to be released today by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, enough to offset expected increases in household bills.
It comes as officials from the department are due to appear before the joint Oireachtas enterprise committee this morning.
Members of the committee are currently conducting pre-legislative scrutiny of the Government’s Right to Request Remote Working Bill, aimed at normalising remote and hybrid working arrangements following the Covid-19 pandemic.
9. And finally, the weather.
This morning will be dry and sunny, Met Éireann says. In the afternoon rain, with the possibility of thunderstorms, will move west to east over the country.
Highest temperatures will range from 13 to 17 degrees Celsius.
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