For the second time in four years the mother of Columba McVeigh yesterday visited the Garda search for his secret grave, writes Elaine Keogh.
The excavation of an area of bog the size of a football pitch near Emyvale, Co Monaghan, is around a quarter of the way complete, with no indication yet of human remains.
Accompanied by her son, Eugene, and her nephew, Malachy, Mrs Vera McVeigh spent about an hour with gardaí involved with the dig.
As she left she took a sprig of heather from the mountainside with her.
It was originally estimated that it would take gardaí about a week to complete the 80m by 40m area, but by yesterday afternoon they had searched a quarter of that.
The nature of the terrain and recent heavy rainfalls have delayed progress, and logs have been placed under the digger. It is going down some four feet, and each scoop is then searched by gardaí from the Cavan- Monaghan divisional search team.
Mr Eugene McVeigh, a freelance television cameraman, filmed the search, and the family left without speaking to the media although they are believed to have thanked gardaí for their work.
Estimated size of fish kill doubled
The scale of a major fish kill on the Moy river in Co Sligo rose to more than 3,000 juvenile salmon and small brown trout yesterday after the North Western Regional Fisheries Board doubled its casualty estimate.
The source of the problem has been traced to the Tubbercurry stream which feeds the Moy three miles upstream of the village of Banada in south Sligo.
Dead fish which have littered a stretch of water at Banada since the weekend have been removed by fishery officers, who are still trying to determine the cause of the deaths.
In a statement yesterday the board's manager, Mr Vincent Roche, said that the extent of the kill was much worse than was initially feared.
Cork urged to build skateparks
Cork City Council and other local authorities have a moral obligation to provide skatepark facilities for young people, because it would remove this activity from the streets while allowing young people to continue with their pastime, the Fine Gael TD for Cork South Central, Mr Simon Coveney, said yesterday.
"Cork City Council recently passed new bylaws which will prevent young people from skateboarding and rollerblading in the city centre.
"At the same time, in the recent past, we have seen a highly successful indoor skatepark facility close down in the city centre because of high insurance costs," he said.
"It is commonplace in the UK for local authorities to own and run public skatepark facilities for young people. We should be following their lead here in Ireland.
"If we are to ban skateboarding in public we have a moral obligation to provide alternative recreational facilities or alternative skateboarding areas for our young people."
More lay people study theology
Ireland now has more lay people studying theology than men studying for the priesthood. Most of them were women, and many pursued their studies to postgraduate level, Father Paschal Scallon told the annual meeting of the National Council of Priests.
He said these increasingly theologically literate people must be heard, in a context where the church depended increasingly on moral force to assert its authority.
It also meant that when the teaching authority of the church (the magisterium) addressed the faithful it must do so in a way that connected with their experience, otherwise the result could be mutual incomprehension.