EACH WEEKDAY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you five news stories that you really should check out before 5pm.

1. #ABORTION: An average of 12 women a day travelled from Ireland to England and Wales last year to have terminations. The 4,402 women who gave Irish home addresses represented over 67 per cent of non-residents seeking terminations.

2. #ASH CLOUD: The eruption of the Grimsvotn volcano in Iceland has caused major disruption to flights in and out of Scotland and other parts of the UK this afternoon. Irish airports are remaining open and the Irish Aviation Authority said it expects to update information at 9pm tonight.

3. #TRAGEDY: An Irish climber, John Delaney, has become the first Irishman to die on Mount Everest. He perished just 50 metres from the top – and just three days after his wife gave birth to their third child.

4. #SKY HIGH: Irish gardener Diarmuid Gavin has won gold at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show. His ‘Irish Sky Garden’ is suspended 82 feet off the ground and contains 25 water pools.

5. #IT’S ONLY WORDS: Taoiseach Enda Kenny has defended his adaptation of the opening lines of a Barack Obama speech from 2008 for his own speech yesterday at College Green. East Coast radio noticed the similarities between Kenny’s ‘homage’ and Obama’s original speech at a Chicago rally on the night he won the US presidential election.