7:10am It Says in the Papers

Now Lisa is here with a look at what it says in today's papers.

Budget fallout continues in the newspapers this morning. Many headlines focus on the surprise announcement yesterday that RT's funding is to be cut by twenty million euro. The Irish Independent writes of RT's fury after Minister for Culture Patrick O'Donovan announced that the annual budget for the national broadcaster would be cut from two hundred and sixty million euro to two hundred and forty million. Asked if this could lead to compulsory redundancies, the minister did not rule them out, saying that was a matter for the RT board. The Irish Examiner reports that the budget could-- the budget cut could jeopardize the purchase of a site for a new RT studio in Cork. The Irish Daily Mail says there are now concerns within the coalition that RT Director General Kevin Bakhurst could leave. "We buttered lots of parsnips." That's the front-page headline in the Irish Sun. It's a quote from Taoiseach Micheál Martin's interview on News Talk yesterday when he told Claire Byrne he was baffled by the refusal of trade unions to come to the negotiating table. But the paper also quotes ICTU General Secretary Owen Reidy as asking, "Where is this worker's budget? Because I don't see it." Other stories in today's papers. Pentobarbital has ended up being used for something its creators could never have imagined. That's in the Irish Daily Mirror. Under the headline American Horror Story, Christopher Buckton writes about Christa Pike, who was supposed to be executed by the drug but is instead lying shackled to a hospital bed while she awaits her fate. For decades, writes Buckton, pentobarbital was used as a therapeutic drug to sedate patients and control serious seizures. It's also used to put seriously ill or injured animals to sleep. A drug designed to relieve suffering has ended up being used to execute criminals and has famously failed, says the paper. A man is in a critil-critical condition in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital after the attempted robbery of his e-scooter. The Irish Daily Star reports that the victim, in his forties, was seriously injured after two men tried to take his e-scooter in Dundalk on Tuesday night. A man in his thirties with a significant history of offending was arrested and remains in custody. Twenty PSNI officers and police staff are under investigation for so-called spoofing activity on their laptops while working from home. That's in the Belfast Telegraph. The PSNI said the investigation will focus on methods being used to make it appear as if staff and officers were at their laptops when this may not have been the case. Returning to the budget, it was notable how many food items were referenced in yesterday's political reactions. Apart from the parsnips mentioned earlier, the Social Democrats' TD Cian O'Callaghan commented in the Dáil that the three euro living alone increase wouldn't even buy a cup of tea in a cafe. It would just about cover the cost of a pound of butter in the supermarket, he added. Labor leader Ivana Bacik said the money the government claimed it had put back into people's pockets could barely buy a bar of chocolate a week. It's a Kit Kat budget