Unions representing staff at RTE are to appear before the joint Oireachtas committee on media today to say that outsourcing the production of shows like the Late Late and Fair CIty amounts to "putting more licence payers’ money “into the pockets of private-for-profit entities.”"
The thing about the housing crisis is that bleeds into everything, including news yesterday that more than 1,800 teaching posts were left vacant this year, while many schools in the Greater Dublin Area report that they are struggling to hire qualified staff in the run-up to the new academic year. It's not exactly a mystery lads.
Elsewhere, research by Barnardos shows that almost 20% of families have cut back on or gone without heating in the past six months. Already this year, two in five families are going without other essentials, including food, while 28% said at times, from January to June, they didn’t have enough food to feed their children.
Last month, the Children's Rights Alliance reported that the number of children in consistent poverty rose by a “staggering” 45,000 to more than 103,000 last year. At the turn of the millennium, the number of children going to bed hungry was one in six. 25 years later, the country is staggeringly wealthy, but the number of children going to bed hungry has risen to one in five.