A staffing agency at Dublin Port has become the first company in Ireland found to be in breach of statutory sick leave rules which came into force last year. 

A new guide which seeks to tackle the continuing problem of sexual harassment in Northern Ireland workplaces has been launched by the Labour Relations Agency (LRA) in partnership with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). The guide is a response to a TUC poll which revealed that more than half of women had experienced some sort of sexual harassment or violence at work during their career, with almost 80% of those affected, opting not to report it or seek support.

In other news from the North, the Belfast Telegraph reports that an independent review into last August's bank holiday air traffic control (ATC) meltdown which affected nearly 750,000 passengers has highlighted a “significant lack of pre-planning”. 

Elsewhere, the European Commission is to refer Ireland to the European Court of Justice for failure to apply the habitats directive in protecting designated raised bog and blanket bogs from turf cutting, a move that Michael Fitzmaurice TD describes as "bullying."

Finally, Naomi O'Leary has this interesting piece in the Irish Times that opens with the following: "What would it mean for society if there were no taxes on income earned through labour, and it cost companies nothing to hire staff? The burden of taxation would be shifted to the use of materials like plastic or metal and the creation of pollution instead."

Zen

Your moment of Zen today features Colin Crummy writing in The Guardian about how the Irish language is establishing itself as an increasingly successful cultural phenomenon.

Slán agus beannacht.

Niall