A round-up of today's other news stories in brief
War protests at Fianna Fáil Ardfheis
Anti-war protesters are to demonstrate outside the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis next month as part of a campaign to make the Iraq conflict a general election issue.
Organisations, including the Irish Anti-War Movement, the Peace and Neutrality Alliance (Pana) and the Stop Bush Campaign, will picket the ardfheis which takes place in the CityWest Hotel on March 24th.
Richard Boyd Barrett, chairman of the Irish Anti-War Movement, said he expected about 2,000 people would take part in the protest which he insisted would be peaceful.
Mr Boyd Barrett said: "We want to remind the Irish Government at that event about their outrageous complicity with the Iraq war and the destruction of Irish neutrality."
The anti-war movement says it will be setting up groups in every constituency and will be writing to each general election candidate seeking their support for the end of the US military use of Shannon.
Green Party foreign affairs spokesman John Gormley said the war in Iraq does not come up at the doorstep and the strength of feeling about the issue is "difficult to gauge", although he believed there was much disquiet "under the surface" about the relationship between the Irish and US governments.
Labour's Michael D. Higgins said he was in favour of the Shannon and extraordinary rendition issues being part of any post-election agreement.
IFA warning on meat standards
A recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Bolivia and avian flu at a farm in Suffolk in England were a major new warning to the European Commission to take a much stronger stance against meat imports failing to meet EU standards, the IFA's national livestock committee chairman, John Bryan, has said.
Mr Bryan said these events should set off alarm bells in health commissioner Markos Kyprianou's office, which should understand taking unnecessary risk with meat imports was playing with fire and needlessly exposing both European consumers and producers.
Agriculture authorities in Turkey yesterday announced that the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus was detected in three more villages following a recent outbreak.
Meanwhile Bernard Matthews, whose poultry firm was at the heart of a bird flu outbreak in Britain, said he was sorry for the scare but insisted it was not his company's fault.
In an emotional article published in the Daily Mirroryesterday, he also said Bernard Matthews Plc had not imported turkey from restricted areas in Hungary.
CCTV cameras to target poachers
Close circuit television cameras are being fitted over parts of rivers in Cork and Kerry that are popular with salmon poachers.
The cameras operating 24 hours a day are linked to laptop computers and can be accessed by fisheries officers. The first of the devices was fitted yesterday on a notorious poaching area of the River Lee in Cork city.
The move comes as an all-out ban on salmon drift netting in the coast is expected to yield record numbers of salmon running in the region's rivers.
Aidan Barry, chief executive of the South Western Regional Fisheries Board, told a meeting of the board in Macroom on Tuesday that huge staff resources and thousands of euro were being spent on monitoring notorious poaching spots.
Now the cameras could do the watching, he said, and fishery control officers could immediately set out for areas showing illegal activity. There have been some serious assaults on fisheries inspectors tackling poaching.
Other rivers are also being fitted with cameras, although Mr Barry declined to disclose exact details.