A 76-year-old retired primary school teacher was arrested yesterday and charged with sexually assaulting a nine-year-old schoolboy eight times in the early 1990s.

A 13-year-old student, who will be scarred for life after she fell on a metal bar in a school playground, has been awarded €42,500 damages in the Circuit Civil Court.

Robot wars clicked, blinked, and whirred into the lives of 500 Cork schoolchildren this week, their months of hard work culminating in 19 of their specially-created robots doing battle on the grounds of Cork Institute of Technology.

Two friends and close neighbours from a small Cork village have been killed in separate accidents abroad in the space of just two months.