Sean Quinn's nephew spotted at second GAA match – continues to evade arrest

The fugitive nephew of disgraced banking tycoon Seán Quinn has made his second public appearance over the weekend, being spotted once again at a GAA match.

Despite a High Court warrant having being issued for his arrest some ten days ago, and an unsuccessful 'manhunt' launched to ascertain his whereabouts, Peter Daragh Quinn looked relaxed and carefree when he was photographed by the Irish Independent attending a football fixture on Sunday.

Quinn's nephew has essentially exiled himself into Northern Ireland - a UK jurisdiction - where police authorities in the South have no powers to arrest him.

Efforts to extradite the shady clan member back to the South to face charges will likely fail, as the young Quinn is only being wanted on civil rather criminal counts, with forced re-patriation only possible in respect of the latter.

Support for the Quinn family and its patriarch tycoon Sean runs considerably stronger in some parts of the North, with a prominent support rally being held to demonstrate allegiance with the beleaguered banking clan.

Quinn, once Ireland's richest man, is credit with bringing employment to many jobs blackspots while he was at the helm of the Quinn Group, and still retains some prominent backers, including sports starts and airline bosses, who are clearly unhappy at the way things have turned out for the family.

Support for the Quinn tribe in the South, however, runs at a somewhat lower ebb.

The Commercial Court's Justice Peter Kelly - among the most outspoken members of Ireland's judiciary - launched a scathing attack on the discredited banking boss last week, describing attempts by him and his relatives to put assets outside the reach of creditors as a scheme of 'mesmerizing complexity', while accusing the fallen financial doyen of being the most devious doer whose legal dirty laundry had ever been probed by the tribunal.

Justice Elizabeth Dunne, of the High Court, has also proven herself to be not exactly enamored by the Quinns' seeming preference to do jail time rather than be forced to hand over any of their multi-million international property portfolio, and other assets, to creditors.

She described the family's contempt of Court as "outrageous", and in a stern warning to other members of the conniving Quinn cabal put Quinn Snr.'s son, Sean Jr., behind bars for three months.

Nephew Peter Darragh was also sentenced to jail-time at that hearing, but was declared a fugitive after failing to turn up at the Court hearing, despite having lodged a sworn statement just hours earlier.

Justice Dunne gave Peter's pie-in-the-sky excuse of being too 'ill' to appear before the tribunal short shrift, but efforts to coerce the man on the run to appear before an Irish court will probably falter before the Irish legal system's inability to put white collar crime on a criminal, rather than civil, footing.

Tweeters unhappy

Irish tweeters were clearly angry at the young Quinn's ability to flaunt the Court order by appearing at two GAA matches over the weekend.

"Peter Darragh Quinn on the run nips down to watch the GAA should be in jail, p**k," Neill Coyne, a musician and writer, tweeted.

Simon Harris, a Fine Gael TD for the Wicklow constituency, tweeted that, "Peter Darragh Quinn is making a mockery of the Irish Courts and laws and by extension the Irish people. Running from the law of our land."

"Brazen doesn't even begin to cover it," another Tweeter opined.

Irish health Minister Roisín Shorthall's anti-alcohol crusade: minimum pricing and ban on sports sponsorship could take effect this year

The Junior Minister with responsibility for health, Roisin Shorthall (Lab), is showing no signs of letting up on her battle to tackle Ireland's drink problem, with tough minimum pricing legislation now promised to come in as soon as this Fall.

The anti-sponsorhip proposals tabled by the Minister of State (non-Cabinet Minister) seek to impose a ruthless crackdown on drinks sponsorship for both sporting and cultural events, and have already reportedly provoked dissension from full Cabinet Ministers including Minister for Sport and Tourism, Leo Varadkar.

A rift has emerged between Fine Gael and its government partners Labour over how tough the measures the government will impose are going to be.

Many see the joint proposals as an unnecessary broadside against the drinks industry in Ireland, with some calling the promised measures the beginnings of a slip into a puritanical way of thinking.

Several recent high-profile cases of public disorder allegedly involving alcohol are also only likely to galvanize support for Shorthall's proposals among those pushing for the new laws to come into force.

Among them, the Swedish House Mafia concert in Dublin's Phoneix Park, which saw multiple stabbings and arrests as the gig quickly descended into drug and drunk fueled anarchy.

Shorthall's proposals for minimum alcohol pricing, however, could already be doomed for failure if a Scottish legal challenge being mounted by the Scotch industry against similar legislation there gets the judicial green light.

Though, unlike its Southern neighbour, not also a common law system, a successful challenge by the whiskey-makers could give government pause to re-consider the proposed legislation lest powerful bodies such as the Vitners Federation of Ireland bring forth a similar case.

The junior Minister, whose exact portfolio is in Primary Care, seems to have a strained working relationship with her Cabinet counterpart, Minister for Health Dr. James Reilly.

The Labour Deputy refused to publicly state her confidence in the burly doctor, merely saying that they needed to cooperate in the public interest.

The hotly unpopular minimum alcohol measures prompted a litany of hostile comments on popular online news aggregator, TheJournal.ie.

"We already have some of the highest prices for alcohol in Europe," one commented, using the pseudonym Bilbo Baggins, commented, "raising the price simply punishes responsible drinkers for the actions of others for whom price will have no bearing."

David Bond, who said he had worked as a pub owner on Continental Europe for 20 years, said that it was Ireland's 'drinking culture', not the price of liquor, that was to blame for the widespread prevalence of late-night anti-social behaviour often attributed to alcohol.

"Cheaper booze is readily available in Germany, Holland etc. People don’t abuse it to anywhere near the same extent as here. Of course they have alcohol problems but its minimal in comparison," he commented on the website.

Tomy Iona agreed, "Given the price of alcohol on mainland Europe we need to look at the problem – and that problem isn’t price."

Romanian meter-plunderers on the loose as Irish low-security prisons breeched again

Two Romanian brothers who escaped from what's been described as a low security part of Castlerea Prison are on the loose, prompting a nationwide search for the pair.

The meter-plunderers' escape is the second time this year that inmates have made a dash from detention facilities that certainly wouldn't give Alcatraz a run for its money: this April three escapees had to be re-captured after evading security personnel at an 'open prison', a kind of penal bed-and-breakfast where inmates are given a key to their own cells and trusted not to escape.

Police chiefs after that incident were forced into making an embarrassing apology when it emerged that the convict in question had made an escape from the same facility just several years previously.

This morning's unusually courteous escapees, Toader Feier (23) and his brother Basile (28), even left prison authorities a fond goodbye note, explaining "we are sorry, but we had no choice."

The Eastern European duo were not due for release until next April, according to the Irish Independent, and had committed a sleuth of robbery offences including stealing a number of parking meters in Galway.

Assignment to committal facilities in Irish prison system is often seemingly the stuff of lottery: just this June it emerged that two 'rogue prison officers' who had willingly brought drugs and various other items for inmates into their cells had been relocated from the top-security Midlands Prison to the comparative luxuries of the 'open prison' at Loughran House.

The pair's impress haulage of counterband included bringing everything from sedative tablets and recreational drugs to Bluetooth headsets into the facility.

Data from the Prison Service made available to the press last year showed that 86 inmates at open prisons made a run for it, with most returning voluntarily within a few days; this year, over sixteen such break-aways have been recorded.

Undoubtedly the most impressive prison escape ever to take place on the island of Ireland was the Maze Prison Escape of 1983 (fondly known to Republicans as the 'Great Escape') in which 38 Provisional IRA Members managed to make it past the Maze Prison, a high-security committal prison in Northern Ireland used primarily for paramilitary, subversive, and other high-risk inmates at the height of The Troubles.

The Republic's prison system is administered by the Irish Prison System.

Portlaoise Prison, situated in the Midlands and used primarily for the detention of drugs-related convicts, is the country's only high-security detainment institution.

'Project X' viral Facebook party in County Cavan stopped after police intervention - VIDEO

Irish police were forced to monitor a Co. Cavan teenager's Facebook page after an unintentional 'public' event led to a hundreds-strong crowd congregating around his house.

The panicked teenager was reportedly forced to cancel the social media fueled party after his parents informed him that a member of the police's drug unit had been in touch to inform them that possibly thousands of strangers were planning to throng the house in what had rapidly turned into a viral internet sensation.

By the time a crowd did gather, however, police were on hand to block the way, and later confirmed that no arrests had to be made.

Amazing pictures from the teen's bash – dubbed 'Project X, Cavan – show teams of perfect strangers converging on the hapless young student's house after having gotten wind of the party from Facebook and Twitter.

An apparently bemused police Inspector revealed how what had began as a simple gathering of friends suddenly turned into an out-of-control viral sensation, resulting in a mammoth influx of strangers to the young man's house.

“He sent the invitation to no more than 20 to 40 Facebook friends but it just went crazy," Inspector Farrelly, of the local police station, was reported as saying.

"Several busloads of people turned up and we asked them to disperse. There were a few hundred at least."

“This young man made the invitation to his circle of friends but it went crazy. At least he had the good sense to call us when he felt things were getting out of hand.”

Another witness told news aggergator TheJournal.ie that up to several hundred people had turned up at the height of the unexpected bash:

“The amount of cars was crazy but towards the end of he night there was good amount of gardaí present which stopped any real trouble happening."

“From around 1am people were dispersing,” an anonymous source told the website, adding that he estimated that between 300 and 500 people were in attendance.

Irish Facebook and Twitter feeds tonight remained awash with punters planning possible 'Project X's' in their localities.

The 'ProjectXCavan' shenanigans isn't the first time what started out as a moderate-scale house party has balooned into an international internet sensation.

An Australian teenager was last year forced to cancel a sixteenth birthday party after what started out as an intimate gathering of friends rapidly mushroomed into an 18,000-strong guestlist thanks to the viral powers of the internet.

The event even spawned a successful Facebook meme of its own, with online outlets such as the Official Jess Cooper Store and 'The Awkward Moment was Jessica Cooper has half of Australia in her house' cropping up to cash in on, and make fun of, the unlucky school-girl's unexpectedly massive party.

Sometimes it's not such a happy ending, though.

In 2008, a 16 year old English schoolgirl had her home effectively broken into and her mother's jewlerry stolen after what began, similarly, as an innocuous gathering of friends spun crazily out of control.

"People were having sex in bedrooms, smoking cannabis and wrecking the front garden," one party-goer told The Telegraph.

"The carpets are wrecked, the windows broken and there are all sorts of cigarette burns. I didn't see the sheets because they were all washed quite a lot."

Video: YouTube-user submitted video and photos from Project X Cavan

Eli Lilly boss confident about big pharma's future in Ireland

The CEO of one of the worlds biggest pharmaceutical giants says that he's confident about Ireland's future and points to the “quality” and “work ethic” of its young college grads as a key reason for that belief.

I spoke to Eli Lilly's highest-ranking board member, John Lechleiter, moments before he received his second honorary doctorate at University College Cork (UCC) late last month.

The fifty-eight year old, whose remuneration Business Week estimates to be in the region of $16m per annum, said that Ireland's turbulent economic history had not dented his company's enthusiasm for its Kinsale-based operating plant, and seemed extremely keen to emphasize that the talent which the pharmaceutical goliath had been able to attract in Ireland more than made up for any bumps and creases that will undoubtedly crop us along the long and windy road towards Ireland's distant economic recovery.

“We have been able to get some of the very best people here, graduates to come and work for us, and I think that one reason is that after nearly thirty years of experience operating in Ireland they can see how many of the people who joined us in the 80s and 90s have had flourishing and successful careers with us,” the pharma head, who counts an earned PhD from Harvard among his growing collection of honorary degrees, said ahead of the conferring ceremony.

Citing the quality of young graduates beginning fledgling careers at the firm as the “most decisive factor” behind Lilly's decision, thirty years ago, to make substantial investments in the South of Ireland region, Lechleiter added that the company's fulfillment of a promise to create starting opportunities for those fresh out of college and graduate school had been a point of pride for top brass at the international pharmaceutical firm.

“I'd like to think that we [Eli Lilly] really do what we say we're going to do in terms of creating opportunities for people to go and be successful with us,” the pharma boss said.

Lechleiter, who assumed the top post at 'Lilly' in 2005, reiterated that the quality of newly hired graduates remained a compelling reason for the company to favour operating in Ireland over the temptation to offshore to economies with cheaper wage-bases, while brushing asides concerns raised by a number of Irish Cabinet Ministers recently that diminishing enrollment figures in 'hard' disciplines such as sciences, engineering, and maths, would mean that the skills situation could swing from over-supply to deficit just five years down the pipeline.

“This [the skills shortage] is an issue we're debating in the US as well at the moment,” Lechleiter admitted, “but we still remain confident that there'll be enough high quality graduates to meet our manpower needs here into the foreseeable future.”

The chief executive told Conor Keane, business editor at the Irish Examiner, that the company was 'very pleased' with the $500m investment it had made to its manufacturing facility at Dunderrow, Kinsale, while announcing that the plant would now serve as the primarily launch site for all new pharmaceuticals in the company's production line.

Where bullish and full of praise for the products of Irish universities, however, Lechleiter seemed somewhat more concerned about government's stance towards the pharmaceutical industry, highlighting in particular the struggle between the company and health regulators to secure reimbursement for R&D costs incurred in bringing new medicines to market.

“Ireland's attractiveness for the kind of investment that our industry makes is also going to be connected with our ability to have our products reimbursed and to have the products that all of our people work on here available to people in Ireland now.”

“Right now we're at a bit of an impasse as we try to get back to negotiations with the government to ensure that that can happen,” he said.

Lechleiter, a medical chief executive with a noted passion for innovation and bringing breakthrough treatment strategies into the hands of the patient, said that his company would look forward to working with the Irish government to find ways that the medical system as a whole could benefit from the research and innovation being carried out at the company's worldwide operations.

“Medicines in and themselves are often necessary but seldom sufficient,” the CEO said, reiterating his oft-quoted belief that medical systems should be as integrated and holistic as possible.

“So where we've had an understanding in what's the best way to treat people with, say, diabetes – an area we're very involved in - we've tried to share and use that knowledge to help improve health delivery where we can and where it's appropriate in countries where there are other pathways of doing that,” he said.

“We've had some experience working here within the Irish medical system to try to see what systems of care for people with neuropsychiatric disease like schizophrenia can be improved and then to demonstrate how does our message work within that systems.”

“Because that's what everybody wants that it's only part of total care.”