In Short

A round-up of today's other stories in brief.

A round-up of today's other stories in brief.

Undercutting wages to end with new law

Employment agencies will no longer be able to offer wages that undercut the going rates in industry, under new legislation being planned, the Government has said.

Siptu has highlighted the case of Musgrave, one of the country's largest retail operators, which it says is paying agency staff about half of what it is paying company employees at one of its main distribution centres in Dublin.

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Currently the 240 employees at the company's chilled distribution unit in Fonthill, Dublin, are paid about €17 an hour, while about 70 agency staff are paid between €9 and €11.60 an hour for the same job.

Siptu branch organiser John Dunne said the union was negotiating with Musgrave to employ most of the workers who are currently agency staff on the same pay and conditions as existing employees.

Top prices for Yeats's paintings

Two works by Irish artist Jack B Yeats sold at auction in London yesterday for three times their estimate.

His depiction of a lone figure standing at the ropes of a boxing ring in The Last Corinthian fetched €326,118 (£222,000) at Christie's Irish Sale in London.

The 1910 oil painting, recently rediscovered 60 years after the artist sold it to a private collector, was expected to be sold for about €100,000 .

Painted shortly after Yeats began working with oils, it was originally sold to John Whelan Dulanty, Ireland's first ambassador to London, in 1942, and has been in the family's possession ever since.

It was purchased by an Irish buyer.

The biggest sale of the day was for an image by Yeats entitled A Man Doing Accounts. The piece was sold to a European buyer for €440,700, well above its pre-sale tag of between €146,000-€220,000.

The sale raised almost €8 million in total.

The Christie's auction comes just a day after the Irish Sale at Sotheby's raised almost €9 million.

Lots included Sir John Lavery's Lady Evelyn Farquhar, which sold for €1 million, against an estimate of €440,000.

Thousand to join anti-nuclear march

More than 1,000 people are expected to join an anti-nuclear walk, which leaves from the GPO in Dublin for London on Sunday morning next. The Towards a Nuclear Free Future walk, organised by the international Footprints for Peace group, will take 86 days and will have a core group of about eight walkers, with hundreds joining and leaving along the way.

The walk will go up the east coast to Belfast, meeting residents in Louth concerned about the health effects of the Sellafield plant. It will take the ferry from Belfast to Scotland and stop at the Faslane Trident nuclear submarine base.

The walk will continue to the Sellafield facility in Cumbria and on to locations associated with weapons production before arriving in London on August 6th.

That date is the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Print museum exhibition opens

The National Print Museum opened an exhibition last night, with the Danish ambassador to Ireland, Mr Henrik Ree Iversen, officiating.

Entitled Paraphrases of the Bayeux Tapestry by Danish artist Susanne Thea, the exhibition features 89 copper etchings, giving the work a total length of more than 72m.

In the pictorial frieze, Ms Thea retells and modernises the story of the Battle of Hastings. There are kings, Viking ships, mythical beasts, soldiers bearing shields and spears, castles, churches, war and peace in the pictorial frieze - but there are also passionate love scenes, overweight priests, supernatural beings and far more women than the Bayeux Tapestry itself ever dreamed of including.