POLITICS

Imagine your chances of keeping your job if you didn’t bother showing up? Yet, just 17 of the country’s 166 TDs turned up for work at Leinster House every day in the first two weeks after a clocking-in system was introduced on March 1.

The Sunday Times’ lead article reports Willie O’Dea and Jim McDaid were two of the worst offenders.

McDaid, who is refusing to return his ministerial pension, only managed to attend on two days. He said he had “no reason” to travel to the Dail on Mondays or Fridays because he was one of the few TDs not to be sitting on committees.

O’Dea, meanwhile, put the absences down to the “trauma” he had experienced after resigning as defence minister.