Seven Days

A glance at the week that was

We now know

Chewing gum manufacturers will have to pay for the cost of removing gum from the streets.

Under a proposed new law, cigarettes sold in Australia will be in plain, logo-free wrappers, with a compulsory prominent health warning, and the brand name in small, generic print at the bottom.

Bankruptcy declarations in Ireland have doubled in the past 12 months.

"I could not stand over any situation where the HSE could take money away from services to patients and still pay people who aren't doing their jobs"- Minister for Health Mary Harney

Microphone Moan

Across the water, pensions were also under discussion, with prime minister Gordon Brown going head to head with one Rochdale voter, Gillian Duffy, on tuition fees, the deficit, eastern Europeans in Britain and the aforementioned pensions. Brown may have temporarily won Duffy round, but as he was whisked away to his next engagement, the PMneglected to remove his Sky News microphone, which picked up comments he made about Duffy and their encounter. He described her as " a bigoted woman" and their tête-à-tête as "a disaster". He was right on the latter point at least: the ensuing controversy put the prime minister on the back foot, and our own pension palaver in the ha'penny place.

Pension Tension

It all began with EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn giving up her ministerial and Oireachtas pensions of €108,000 per annum, but once the cat was out of the bag, it was claws out for all the other former ministers claiming pensions on top of their wages as public representatives. One by one, they relinquished their ministerial pensionsuntil all that remained were three TDs and one MEP. And though Galway East TD Noel Treacy and MEP Pat "the Cope" Gallagher promised to reflect on the matter, Donegal North East TD Jim McDaid  refused to be swayed. He said he was taking a stand not for the pension itself, which clocks in at €22,487, but to make a political point about the remuneration of elected representatives.

The Numbers

800

the number of redundanciesbeing sought by the joint administrators of Quinn Insurance

€45bn

The projected total of the aid package for Greececurrently being negotiated by the European Union, The IMF and the Greek government

5,000

The estimated number of barrels of oila day leaking into the Gulf of Mexico following a drilling rig explosion