A project to improve the lives of young Northern Ireland people caring for sick parents is to benefit from lottery funding. It is one of 12 programmes to receive more than £5.2m from the Big Lottery Fund in its latest round of grants.

Dismissing the Government’s claims to have delivered a world-class health service Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, highlighted the experience of one of his own constituents in Mayo during a three day stay at the General Hospital in Castlebar.

Figures obtained by the Irish Examiner show the State is facing almost 400 compensation claims from current and former prisoners who are claiming damages for the distress of cleaning out their cells and a lack of access to flushing toilets.

A Dublin teenager, who became the first person in the State to be charged with a newly designated offence for smuggling drugs into a prison, has been remanded in custody pending sentence.

The family of an Ulster man left brain damaged after being attacked with a hammer while he lay in his bed said yesterday they were “disgusted and upset” that his attacker has gone missing after being let out of jail on compassionate leave.

A new suicide prevention programme is being launched today. The initiative at the Cluain Mhuire Clinic in Blackrock, Co Dublin, will have a Suicide Crisis Assessment Nurse that will refer patients to services that best meet their needs.

A hospital probe is under way into how an Ulster pensioner received more than 30 fractures to her body after her death. The move comes after Mary McGinley (78), from Orchard Street in Strabane, who died from pneumonia at Altnagelvin Hospital on January 3, was found to have 34 rib fractures before a post mortem was carried out.

Anti-poverty campaigners have slammed the Government’s policies on tackling poverty as a “catalogue of missed targets and opportunities”.

The Oireachtas health committee is meeting this week to discuss new legislation aimed at reforming the way the medical profession is regulated. Under the proposed Medical Practitioners Bill, a majority of members of the Medical Council will be lay people rather than doctors.

A high-profile committee of MPs is to investigate health and education provision at Northern Ireland’s prisons. The move comes after Roseanne Irvine, 34, hanged herself in her Maghaberry cell in March 2004 after failing to see a doctor about mental health problems.