A roundup of today's other Ireland news in brief
Security concerns on Saville ‘bogus’
National security concerns over the Saville report into Bloody Sunday are bogus and disingenuous, it has been claimed.
Sinn Féin MLA Raymond McCartney said last night that the British government should have published Lord Saville’s findings before the dissolution of parliament.
Mr McCartney said the families of the 14 men shot dead by British soldiers were frustrated at the continued delays. “The British government spurned the opportunity to do the right thing for what can only be described as partisan. . . considerations.”
Mr McCartney added: “Any suggestion that Lord Saville would not have given due regard to so-called British national interest concerns is in my opinion disingenuous and bogus.”
East Derry DUP MP Gregory Campbell said: “However painful it may be, and however many times revisionism has to rear its ugly head, it has to be confronted head on, confronted, defied and defeated.”
He said republicans were trying to indicate that Bloody Sunday provided the spark for 30 years of conflict.
“That negates and disposes of all the violence and murder that preceded the events of January 30th,” Mr Campbell added.
Barbie doll images have bad influence – study
Girls as young as five display greater dissatisfaction with their body weight after viewing images of ultra-thin Barbie dolls, according to a study, writes Pamela Duncan.
Dr Helga Dittmar, reader of psychology with the University of Sussex, yesterday gave a public lecture in Trinity College entitled Does Size matter? The Impact of Perfect Beauty Ideals in the Media.
She said the study she carried out showed that five and six-year- old girls were more likely to want to be thinner when exposed to a picture book containing a Barbie doll than when they were exposed to images of a more “average” sized doll.
“Those girls who had had the pictures of the Barbie expressed that they wanted to be thinner significantly more after seeing thin images than the other images,” Dr Dittmar said, adding that this proved that advertising could affect children at a young age.
The trend is repeated in adolescents, in adult women and, increasingly in men, all of whom displayed a greater discrepancy between how they look and how they would like to look when faced with “body perfect” media images.
An adapted study in women showed that women who were exposed to images of ultra-thin models also showed higher levels of body dissatisfaction, leading them to think they were overweight.
Dr Dittmar noted that analysis since the 1950s showed media images of women have become progressively thinner, although women’s body sizes have actually become larger.
Men are also showing an increasing tendency to view themselves negatively as they are faced with an increasing number of images of tall, lean men with muscular bodies and V-shaped torsos, she added.
Online restaurant guide launched
A new website has been set up by restaurateurs in a bid to boost business, writes Alison Healy. The Restaurants Association of Ireland introduced the website, www.wheretoeat.ie, which is supported by Fáilte Ireland, at its annual conference yesterday.
It provides listings for the restaurants of its 590 members and links to their websites, as well as details of hotels, cookery schools, special offers and food- related events around the State. The multilingual website plans to carry reviews of restaurants as more people visit it.
It also sells gift cards that can be used in more than 100 restaurants. The association’s chief executive Adrian Cummins said more than 3,000 people logged on to the site in the past week before it had received publicity. “We have a target of 100,000 hits per month,” he said.
Mr Cummins said restaurants were facing challenging times and job losses and closures were inevitable. A survey of the association’s members found business was down 75 per cent compared to last year.