Dublin  - Ireland has asked its ambassador to Belarus to discuss a travel ban on children affected by the Chernobyl disaster with the Belarusian authorities, Irish national broadcaster RTE reported Monday.

Foreign Minister Micheal Martin said he had asked the ambassador to discuss formal arrangements for the children, 1,000 of whom visit Ireland each year for holidays and medical treatment, following a travel ban imposed on all children last week after a Belarusian teen refused to return home after a summer holiday in the United States.

Thousands of Belarusian children affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster enjoy foreign holidays funded by the charity the Chernobyl Children's Project.

Belfast/London  - A massive arsenal of weapons destined for criminal gangs in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic has been recovered in a major cross-border police operation that also extended to the Netherlands, police in Belfast said Friday.

Hugh Orde, the police chief of Northern Ireland, said a total of 230 handguns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, 450,000 euro in cash and drugs with an estimated street value of over four million euro were seized in the operation.

Belfast/London - The formerly terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA) has relinquished its leadership structures and would no longer be able to wage a terrorist campaign, an independent report on the disbanding of the organization said Wednesday.

The report by the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), set up to monitor paramilitary groups under the 1998 Belfast Peace Agreement, also stated that the IRA Army Council - the organization's ruling body - had "become redundant and serves no function."

Dublin - The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Ireland jumped to a 10-year high of 6.1 per cent in August from 4.5 per cent in the same month last year, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) reported Wednesday.

There were 235,100 people claiming unemployment benefits in August, up 73,200 over the 12-month period to the end of the month, the highest jump ever recorded, the CSO told national broadcaster RTE.

Unemployment in Ireland has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the year when the economy started to take a downturn.

Dublin - Ireland's Europe Minister Dick Roche has been criticised by both yes and no campaigners for saying he believes a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty will be necessary, the Irish Independent reported Tuesday.

Roche told the newspaper on Monday that it is his "personal view at this stage" that Ireland will have to vote again on the EU reform treaty the country rejected in a referendum in June.

Prior to Roche's comments government ministers had said it was too early to say how Ireland would get around the ratification dilemma. Ireland was the only EU member to hold a public referendum on the treaty which has to be ratified by all 27 member states before it can come into effect.

Dublin - Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, who is currently presiding over the severest economic crisis to hit Ireland in 20 years, is a man in need of a plan.

While his predecessor, the ever-popular Bertie Ahern, was the face of the Celtic Tiger boom, which took off in the mid-1990s and was over by 2007, Cowen - once Aherne's finance minister - has misfortune to be tied to, and blamed for, Ireland's sharp economic downturn

Since taking up office on May 7, Brian Cowen has sustained two crushing political blows.