Leaving and Junior Certificate exams get underway at centres around Ireland today as a total 131,431 students take part. It marks the full return of traditional written exams, following two years of disruption due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Government is today announcing a series of new initiatives to support remote working. A voucher scheme will give remote workers free access to local digital hubs and provide at least 10,000 hot desk facilities free of charge to existing hub users and those availing of the facilities for the first time. The scheme will initially provide three days of hub use per person between now and the end of August.

Ryanair is under fire this week for requiring South African passengers to prove their nationality before travelling by completing a test in Afrikaans. The language is used by just 12% of the population and has long been identified with apartheid and the white minority.

Meanwhile, there was a reduction of almost a third in the number of workplace fatalities last year, according to latest figures from the Health and Safety Authority.

The European Commission yesterday welcomed political agreement reached between the European Parliament and the EU Member States on the Directive on adequate minimum wages proposed by the Commission in October 2020. The Directive establishes a framework for the adequacy of statutory minimum wages, promoting collective bargaining on wage setting, and enhancing the effective access of workers to minimum wage protection in the EU.

Elsewhere, High Court actions have been launched against An Bord Pleanála’s decisions to grant planning permission for over 1,000 residential units in two separate Strategic Housing Developments in Dublin.

A new report by the Health Research Board (HRB) finds one in three young drinkers in Ireland have an alcohol use disorder (AUD), but adolescents are beginning to drink alcohol at a later age. More on that here.

A new European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is organizing a campaign to gather 1 million signatures to stop all trade with illegal settlements in occupied territories, once and for all. All trade union members on the island are urged to sign the petition by clicking here. 

Overseas, Sri Lanka's prime minister says the country needs at least $5bn (£4bn) over the next six months to pay for essential goods as it faces its worst economic crisis in more than 70 years.

Back here, early results from the census are due to be published in two weeks, giving insight into the first population-wide survey since 2016.

And finally, the days of hunting through cables to find the right charger may be coming to an end as the European Union has provisionally agreed new portable electronic devices must, by autumn 2024, use a USB Type-C charger.

Zen 

Paul McCartney and Wings went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Band On The Run' on this day in 1974. 'George Harrison unwittingly contributed the first line of one part of the song: "If we ever get out of here" when he said it during one of the many Beatles' business meetings.