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The Journal
5 hours ago
- Politics
- The Journal
Tánaiste says efforts are being made to evacuate 15 Irish citizens from Israel
EFFORTS ARE UNDERWAY to evacuate 15 Irish citizens from Israel as the conflict between the country and its neighbour and longtime foe Iran has soured further. Last night, it was announced by US President Donald Trump that t he US had bombed three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran after Israel had earlier launched attacks on Iran over a week ago. There has been discussion in recent days regarding the potential evacuation of Irish passport holders who are residing in either country. Today, Harris said that his Foreign Affairs Department is also working with a smaller number of citizens in Iran who had requested an evacuation. Around 29 Irish citizens in Iran had registered with the Irish embassy and around 200 in Israel. The government remains in contact with embassies in Israel and Iran. Staff in Tehran left the country on Friday and have since been working remotely. Speaking to RTÉ Radio One this afternoon, Harris confirmed that a civil protection operation with EU member states is taking place in order to extract European citizens from the region. He said while it is an ongoing operation, with further and more significant updates pending, only a small number of Irish citizens are seeking assistance from the joint mission currently. Advertisement Harris said he spoke to Iran's deputy foreign minister today, at their request, who was 'full of anger'. 'He did say to me that it was the view of Iran that the aggressors would have to learn lessons and pay a price,' he told reporters at Government Buildings. 'Of course I articulated in the strongest possible terms that Ireland and the European Union doesn't want to see that, we want to see people step back from the brink and engage in dialogue.' Harris said the US strikes on Iran had made a 'volatile situation even more dangerous' and added an 'extra layer of complexity' to what was already a 'tinderbox'. When asked whether he supported Trump's strikes on Iran, Harris said: 'I think it's resulted in an extraordinarily dangerous escalation of a conflict that already best be described as a tinderbox. 'We're now entering a moment of particular danger, because I think the chances now of a spiral of escalation are more likely than ever before, and there is a real prospect now of the international community losing all control of this very, very volatile conflict.' He said there was only a 'very small' number of Irish citizens, many dual nationals, seeking an evacuation, and they were working with European counterparts. A significant update on this would be available in the hours ahead, he said. With reporting by Press Association Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Extra.ie
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Ryan Tubridy confirms engagement to partner Clare Kambamettu
Ryan Tubridy has confirmed he is set to wed his psychologist partner Dr Clare Kambamettu, admitting 'the world feels lighter.' The pair have been together since 2023, with Clare accompanying the presenter to the Irish Post Awards in London, after being spotted coming and going from his Dublin home prior to the event. In March 2023, the Rose of Tralee winner was a guest on Ryan's RTÉ Radio One show where she discussed the benefits of manifestation. Ryan Tubridy at the Irish Post Awards at The Grosvenor House Hotel in London. Pic:Speculation that wedding bells were ringing for Ryan and Clare emerged after a Galway jewellers let slip that the pair had visited the shop recently. O'Dalaigh Jewellers shared a picture of the couple alongside a member of staff when they revealed the Dublin man had 'discreetly' visited in search of a ring. Ryan Tubridy and Dr Clare Kambamettu. Pic: Instagram Ryan made the announcement on Tuesday morning as he returned to his Virgin Radio UK mid-morning show, which also broadcasts on Dublin's Q102. A slightly giddy presenter admitted that he had a 'little bit of news' that he was trying to keep private. Dr Clare Kambamettu and Ryan Tubridy. Pic: RTÉ 'Even though I'm a public person doing the job that I do, I also have quite a lot of privacy that I like to keep to myself, however, the cat has been removed from the bag for a number of different reasons and I'm very, very, very, very, very happy to confirm that I did indeed get engaged to my partner, Clare on Thursday evening in the West of Ireland,' Ryan revealed. 'It is a very beautiful feeling. We were surrounded by gorgeous people who we didn't know — strangers in the hotel and people who were working around the place. We got a beautiful ring organised and the weather was gorgeous.' Ryan added: 'It's just an accumulation of a lot of lovely things happening and I just decided now is the time. Here we go. More to follow in terms of details and all the rest of it — I'll tell my family first and then I'll let you know. 'Yeah, it's a very exciting time to be alive; I'm a very, very lucky man and I think it's one of those beautiful moments where the world feels lighter and there's a whole new adventure ahead.' He concluded: 'That's what happened. That's in the news a little bit today, at home for sure and maybe out and about. Lucky man, beautiful day and the future is bright.'
Extra.ie
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Who is Ryan Tubridy's partner Dr Clare Kambamettu?
Wedding bells might be ringing for Ryan Tubridy and Dr Clare Kambemettu, after a Galway jeweller let slip they had visited the shop together. The pair have been together since 2023 after Clare accompanied the presenter to the Irish Post Awards in London. The Rose of Tralee winner had been on Ryan's RTÉ Radio One show in March of 2023 discussing the benefits of manifestation and was later in the year spotted leaving his gated home before his move to London. Wedding bells might be ringing for Ryan Tubridy and Dr Clare Kambemettu, after a Galway jeweller let slip they had visited the shop together. Pic: RTÉ Dr Kambamettu holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and History as well as a Higher Diploma from NUI Galway (now University of Galway) before completing a Masters in Science in Mental Health. The psychologist specialises in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and provides training for The Learning Curve Institute on Mental Health-related topics. In 2010, Dr Kambamettu entered the Rose of Tralee, representing London due to being born in Leeds, England. She was just 25 years old when she won, admitting she entered as a 'bit of fun.' The publication added that the jewelers informed them they were asked to take the social media post down by father-of-two Ryan Tubridy. Pic:for The Irish Post The Irish-English woman returned to Athy, Co Kildare — where her mother is from — when she was eight years old. Elsewhere, Dr Clare did a stint as presenter of RTÉ's The Eco Eye, alongside environmentalist Duncan Steward, who fronted the show, ecologist Anja Murray and immunologist Dr Lara Duggan. It is believed Dr Kambamettu and broadcaster Ryan are set to begin the new chapter of their lives after a Galway jeweller let slip that the pair visited the shop together. Ryan Tubridy at the Irish Post Awards at The Grosvenor House Hotel in London. Pic:O'Dalaigh Jewellers shared a picture of the couple alongside a member of staff when they revealed Tubridy, 52, had 'discreetly' visited in search of a ring. The Irish Independent reports that a now-deleted post said that a ring from the West of Ireland would mean 'so much' to Clare. They revealed: 'From that, he chose a stunning 2.4 carat diamond ring which has a beautiful balance between a modern and old elegant style.' The publication added that the jewellers informed them they were asked to take the social media post down by father-of-two Ryan.
RTÉ News
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Ray D'Arcy on raising teenagers in a "calm" household
Broadcaster and Leaving Cert dad, Ray D'Arcy, is looking forward to his annual 'Run with Ray' events around the country this month. He talks to Claire O'Mahony about the joy of radio, his children becoming teenagers and running au naturel! Running is where Ray D'Arcy finds his happy place. No surprise then that he is the driving force behind the 'Run with Ray' events taking place across the country this month. He is a relative latecomer to running, however, even though he played every other sport as a child in Kildare. His decision to do a triathlon before his 40th birthday, 20 years ago, necessitated learning how to swim, but it was the running part of the triathlon that hooked him. He hasn't looked back since, and he now runs daily, but without the accessory of music or podcasts. His wife, Jenny Kelly, introduced him to the concept of 'raw dogging', which sounds dodgy, but in this case, just means doing an activity like running without any added entertainment. "It's this thing that the younger generation are talking about now. I don't listen to anything. I run in the morning, and it's a good opportunity just to get your day in order in your head," Ray explains. "If I have a big interview on, I'll go over that, and sometimes you come up with the best stuff, just thinking it through." The broadcaster is in great form when we speak, full of book recommendations – he is clearly a prodigious reader – and bonhomie. The Kildare native has been a mainstay in media for three decades, and many of us have grown up with him, from his early days presenting the kids' TV show, The Den, and his Today FM years, through to his stint as a Rose of Tralee host and now with The Ray D'Arcy Show, which debuted on RTÉ Radio One in 2015. "I'm very lucky. I love what I do," he observes. He is equally content with life beyond the radio studio. He and Jenny were married in 2013. They have two children, Kate (18) and Tom, who turns 13 next month. What is life like in the D'Arcy household? "It's very calm," he says. "I'd say a huge part of that is because neither Jenny nor I drink. Not that we were big drinkers, but it has brought a calm into our life that you can only experience when you do it. Drink for a lot of reasons, even if you don't drink that much, just brings spikes in moods." Their daughter Kate is doing her Leaving Cert this month and the family is rowing in to support her. "I was talking to a guy recently and he described having somebody in Leaving Cert as playing that winter Olympic sport, where you push the thing down and then everybody paves the way in front of it [curling]. It's like that and we're happy to do that. We're there for whatever she wants. I still have nightmares about my Leaving Cert, all these years later. Now, I don't share that with Kate…" He continues: "Jenny and I are best friends and companions and husband and wife, and we've two healthy children and they're lovely. We're very lucky and we appreciate that." He acknowledges that his children's lives and his experience of growing up are different for a lot of reasons. "One of them is that I came from a family of nine, and now we have two children. We lived in a council house, a very small house, so it was completely different. As a father, you want to give your kids everything, yet you want to pass on some of your own values, which is probably an impossible task, but you do try." Is he a strict dad? "No, but you'd have to ask my children. They'd say that we are stricter than their friends' parents. Now look, we're not. We've encountered strictness. We're not strict. We're very relaxed, and we're here for them. Obviously, there are rules, and all households have them. But we've often said, we're not laissez-faire and we're not dictatorial. We're somewhere in the middle." As a family, they are keen on outdoor pursuits – sea swimming is a favourite, and Kate plays GAA and hockey, while Tom plays basketball and hockey. "Everyone has their own interests and they can exist independently of each other, which is a healthy thing," he says. Naturally, as his children get older, there has been a divergence of paths. "Kate's been a teenager for five years, so she went off and did her own thing. And we're going to lose Tom soon now because he's hitting 13 next month. You can just see it – I asked him for a hug the other day on the couch, and he wasn't up for it. The same evening, his mother asked for a hug, but she got one." Although he has presented a daily radio show for 25 years, he admits that he still gets nervous on occasion. "The ones that I get most nervous about are the ones that you feel you owe the people involved, that you feel you have to do a good job for them," he says. "They're mostly not well-known people who have decided, for whatever reason, to tell you their story. Oftentimes, it's a heart-breaking story, and you feel then under pressure not to mess it up." The pressure, one can imagine, is to make a show that navigates the line between being informative and entertaining, and on a daily basis. "I suppose most programmes eventually, unless they're current affairs or news programmes, they evolve around the person who's presenting them, their strengths and weaknesses and their interests. If not, it doesn't work because the person who's presenting it needs to feel strongly about things and be interested in things, or else it'll show," he says. "In the early days, it was very much about finding my feet. I'd come from children's television. I was an adult, but probably hadn't really given a lot of thought to a lot of the stuff I should have because I didn't have to. Then radio allowed me to, because I had to form my own opinions about things rather than borrow somebody else's. It happened organically, and the format of the programme wasn't prescriptive when we started; it allowed us to do everything. We found that people were sharing their lives with us, and they trusted us. Now, we don't do as much as I'd like to for various reasons. But that was very encouraging." A key moment came in 2008, when the then Minister for Health, Mary Harney, said that the government wouldn't fund the HPV vaccine programme for 12-year-old girls, which would help prevent cervical cancer, because of the state of the national finances. "We got an email from a guy who had lost his wife to cervical cancer, and now his daughter was coming of age to get the HPV vaccine, and he couldn't afford it. Then it became something, and we encouraged it, which we probably shouldn't have done, but we encouraged people to send emails to the Department of Health. At the time, the technology wasn't great, so we completely closed down their system. But this came from seeing an injustice, and then somebody putting a human face to that injustice. Then, when the listeners heard that, they went with it." The role of a broadcaster is inherently performative, and no matter what's going on behind the scenes, there's a responsibility to the audience. "One day, I was having a bad day, and I got on and I said it. Then a radio reviewer took me up on it at the end of the week. I'd say anybody who knows me half well would know if I'm not having a good day. But you have to do what you do. You have to be professional. "I remember the late Larry Gogan told me in his latter years that they put one of those heart monitors on him for 24 hours. When he went back in for the results, the doctor said, 'This is when you seem to be most relaxed. What are you doing in those hours?' It was when he was on air when his heart rate was lowest. In a way, there's a bit of an escape in that you have to concentrate on what you are doing when you are on air. You can't be thinking about things that might be going on in your life." Of course, one part of life that Ray welcomes is running, and his enthusiasm for this year's 'Run with Ray' is clear. The campaign to get both runners and non-runners to do a 5km distance kicks off on June 16, with events in Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny, Drogheda and Dublin. It's been going on and off for 14 years, initially with Today FM, before coming with Ray to RTÉ, with Covid putting a temporary halt to everyone's canter. When 'Run with Ray' started, there were few opportunities for people to do 5 Ks. "At the time," he recalls, "I loved running and I was talking about it, boring myself talking about it on air. I thought, how could you encourage people? And I thought, well, maybe 10K is a bit too much for people. The other thing was to bring the run to them. That was the idea that we would go into your town and we would set up a 5K, so you'd have no excuses." Times have changed, with more people getting the benefits of running, with Ireland one of the leading lights in the global parkrun phenomenon. "Now it's more of a social event," he says. "It's a chance for us to meet some of our listeners. It's a chance for us to get out to the regions in the Roadcaster, which is always good fun. It's an adventure and there's good energy about it."
Irish Examiner
09-06-2025
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
Jarlath Burns: Gaelic football's new rules going 'really well at club level'
GAA president Jarlath Burns said there were concerns about how Gaelic football's new rules would translate to club level but those have now been allayed. "Now that the club leagues around the country are in full swing and we're watching it, I think it has gone really, really well at club level," Burns told RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland show. "I'm talking to club referees all the time. They love the fact that the discipline has improved. If you just look at a statistic from the U20 All-Ireland final two weeks ago between Louth and Tyrone: No red cards, no black cards, no yellow cards - not even a tick. One of the big advantages from this has been the increase and the improvement in the discipline of the players. "We are gradually changing that culture. Having to hand the ball over, after you give it away a free, it doesn't allow for anybody who is in the mood to be disruptive, or cantalach, as they would say in Irish, to achieve that. There is no benefit in doing that anymore." Burns also said that the GAA would examine the addition of a third tier All-Ireland championship, joining the Sam Maguire and Tailteann Cups, should the demand from counties for its creation arise. "We would always say that if there's an appetite around the country for that, in those counties, we would certainly consider that," said Burns. "Last year, when we did the consultation, we do consultations all the time in the provinces. When we went to the provinces, we found that there was an appetite in Munster for it, but not in Leinster. "We're not just ready for that yet. We don't want it to become a glorified Division 4 of the National League, because those teams already see each other. "And there is a big novelty if a team rocks up against Kildare, let's say, and beats them, or Fermanagh, or some of the teams that you might raise eyebrows at for being in it. These competitions don't lie. If you're in the Tailteann Cup, you're in it for a reason."
