News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Wednesday 28th December 2016

Almost 50% of speeding drivers in Ireland escape court appearance as summons not served

Gardaí probe as nearly half of all cases thrown out.

     

Almost half of summonses for speeding motorists to appear in court were not served in the past two years

Almost half of summonses for speeding motorists to appear in court were not served in the past two years, shock new figures has revealed.

The scale of the problem is so big that Garda management has been forced to set up a group to examine the issue.

The force says several issues, including inaccurate address information, are contributing to the issue.

Courts Service data shows that of 66,800 speeding cases listed in the courts between January 2015 and October 2016, some 30,600 or 45.8% -were struck out as summonses were never served on the defendants.

The problem was most acute in the Manorhamilton area in Co Leitrim, where 84 out of 99 summonses were not served.

In Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, 248 out of 391 summonses and some 63% went unserved.

Other summons service ‘blackspots’ included Killarney, Co Kerry, where 558 of 910 summonses went unserved, and Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, where 24 out of 39 summonses were not served.

At county level, the issue was most prevalent in Monaghan and Kerry, where 61%c and 59% of summons respectively were not served.

The best performing county was Wexford, but even there 30% of summonses went unserved.

The data on non-served summons was released by Tánaiste and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald following questions from Independent TD Tommy Broughan.

Ms Fitzgerald said her officials were seeking clarification on the “significant percentage” of cases being struck out for non-service.

She revealed a working group had been set up in An Garda Síochána to examine how the service rate can be improved and to monitor the level of service around the country.

Ms Fitzgerald said there were challenges to serving summonses in certain circumstances.

These included situations where there was “inaccurate address data, persons moving address, or living in multi occupancy dwellings or other settings which make service difficult”.

“In addition, certain persons will take steps to evade service. Similar difficulties are experienced by many other police forces,” she added.

The PARC Road Safety Group, which has carried out an analysis of the data, said urgent action was needed as the non-service rate was inexplicably high.

Other Courts Service data released by Ms Fitzgerald indicated many motorists who were convicted of speeding offences may have avoided penalty points by not producing their licence in court.

Although it is an offence to not to produce your licence, it has not been regularly enforced and there have been difficulties securing prosecutions.

A new Road Traffic Bill is expected to include measures to ensure drivers produce their licences in court, while the wording of summonses is to be changed so Gardaí can prosecute those who fail to produce their licence.

In counties such as Sligo and Kildare, the rate of recording of licence numbers in court between January 2015 and October 2016 was just 22%.

However, this does not mean everyone who failed to produce a licence escaped penalty points.

All convictions for penalty points offences, whether the driver licence number is produced in court or not, are provided electronically to the Transport Department.

Where a driving licence number is not provided, the Road Safety Authority undertakes a matching exercise to match the conviction with a specific driving licence.

Matching takes place on the National Vehicle Driver File, where other available information makes this possible.

DNA screening of taxi drivers in rape case is welcomed as long as a balanced approach is taken?

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre has welcomed the Garda initiative which aims to solve the 2015 case.

   

THE (DRCC) has welcomed reports of mass DNA screening being used by Gardaí in an effort to solve an alleged sexual assault case, but cautioned that a balanced approach must be taken.

Reports say that 84 taxi drivers in Dublin will be requested to provide DNA samples in an effort to track down the perpetrator of an attack which took place in December 2015.

The paper reports that the search was narrowed down to drivers of a particular make and model of car through analysis of CCTV footage.

Speaking to TheJournal.ie, chief executive of the DRCC Noeleen Blackwell said it is crucial that a serious crime like this is investigated fully, adding that it is important for the victim to see that work is being carried out to solve the case.

However she cautioned that nobody’s rights can be improved by infringing on other’s.

“The rights of victims must be properly pursued, and they must be pursued in a legitimate way.”

We’re heartened to see that the case is being investigated but it will be a matter to ensure the rights of all those suspected of the crime are preserved.

Under the legislation being used to authorise the mass DNA screenings, people cannot be compelled to provide a sample.

“We recognise the right of someone not to hand over any evidence,” Blackwell said. “So it’s a question of keeping that balance, and that’s very much a question for how the guards go about it.

They have to take great care that they’re not requiring innocent people who are out earning their living to account for their movements.

The aim of the database, which became active in 2015, is to assist gardaí in tackling crime by being able to link cases and identify suspects. It also means that the Irish justice system will be able to search and be searchable in other national DNA databases.

Not only will it benefit criminal investigations, the database will also be able to identify missing and unknown persons, including unidentified human remains.

If a person is on the sex register, their DNA can be kept indefinitely.

Only eighty nurses register to attend HSE three-day recruitment fair in Dublin

Event targeting nurses home for Christmas or going back to work after some time away

   

Rosarii Mannion the HSE national director of human resources: “A lot of the negative messages that have gone out have inhibited relocation but we want to change that narrative.”

Only Eighty nurses have so far registered to attend a three-day recruitment fair taking place over the holiday period at the Health Service Executive headquarters in Dublin.

Yesterday, the first day of the event, 36 nurses had turned up at Dr Steevens’s Hospital to express an interest in working in the public health service. Some 28 were interviewed and 19 were successful and will be offered posts. However the HSE said this was only the first of a series of career events it planned to hold over the coming months.

Minister for Health Simon Harris, who plans to visit the jobs fair today, said: “One of the things I want to do is significantly overhaul the recruitment process for nurses.

Recruitment

“It needs to be more streamlined; it needs to be more accessible in terms of information for nurses.

“It is going to be a priority for 2017. Recruitment is a challenge in terms of nurses. There is global competition for nurses and therefore Ireland needs to make sure that nurses applying for jobs in a hospital here that the process is as straightforward as possible.” Mr Harris said one of the issues for nurses had been a lack of information and assistance when applying for positions in the health services.

One of the possibilities being examined is establishing a new information helpline to assist them with the process. The Minister refused to be drawn on new or enhanced payments to nurses, claiming this was a matter for Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe. Many of those attending yesterday were interviewed on the spot while others with a more tentative interest were provided with information on a range of jobs.

The event is predominantly targeting Irish nurses who are home from overseas for Christmas and who are thinking of coming back here to work. Others who turned up were thinking of returning to the workforce after time away from work or were considering switching from the nursing home sector to hospital-based work.

‘Lost graduates’

“We are very keen on changing the narrative around the nursing profession in Ireland,” said Rosarii Mannion, HSE national director of human resources. “For years, we lost graduates because we were not in a position to offer permanent positions, but that has changed now.”

As well as permanent jobs, she highlighted the “very good” pension scheme, an abundance of education and training opportunities and flexible working hours as the positive factors of working for the HSE.

Nurses returning from abroad may also qualify for a €1,500 relocation allowance.

Susan Leahy, a midwife from Limerick who left for Britain after qualifying in 2009, said she was attending because “it is time to come home”. “At the time, there weren’t a lot of positions available, so I went for the experience.”

Exiles and entrepreneur’s the target of Sligo’s new digital hub block

   

Exiles and entrepreneur’s are among the target audience for a special open day to take a sneak peek inside a digital working hub.

The Building Block in Sligo will show would-be tenants including startups around a purpose-designed facility – one of the largest in Ireland – which opens for business in January.

LOCATION

Uniquely located right in the centre of Sligo town, overlooking Sligo’s main waterway and at the centre of a regeneration quarter. The building features spectacular views on every side.

5 Minute walk from Sligo’s main train and bus station, with direct Dublin links, 3-4 times daily. 10 minute drive from spectacular beaches popular for walks and surfing.

The Building Block is a co-working space providing desks, and private office suites for startups and small businesses, and will open its doors officially in early 2017.

The 20.000 sq. ft. building has lain largely empty for ten years but is now being totally renovated and repurposed with stylish interiors inspired by Sligo’s coastal heritage – including purpose-built ‘beach hut’ meeting rooms.

It will feature lightning-fast, fibre optic broadband, providing 1 Gigabit (1G) connectivity with state-of-the art working spaces including ground-floor hot-desks, dedicated desks, private office suites as well as large social spaces, canteens and presentation areas.

On the ground floor, there will be a focus on attracting potential tenants from across the creative Industries: design, media, marketing, digital, web and startups. The building will host events and guest speakers, pitching nights and networking opportunities.

With stunning river views and offices flooded with natural light, the idea behind The Building Block is that businesses and start-ups move in to the first floor and move up through the floors to both serviced and non-serviced private office suites as they grow and develop. International companies will also be provided for through IDA Ireland.

The Building Block is taking part in the #homeforwork initiative organised by HR amd recruitment specialist Collins McNicholas which is hosting its event at the Glasshouse Hotel in Sligo from 10am until 2pm.

In tandem with this event, The Building Block, situated on the riverbank at Stephen Street car park, will open its doors to the public for the first time.

The open day provides an opportunity for those coming home to Sligo and the North West over the Christmas holidays to see and hear about this new space, the first of its kind in the region.

Sligo-based business woman Denise Rushe worked with local architect John Monohan of NOJI Architects to push the idea of The Building Block with building owner Martin Doran, a Sligo businessman who is based in Dublin.

Denise Rushe said: “We will be providing short guided tours of the ground-floor co-working space and answering any questions you might have.”

The Building Block is currently undergoing the final stages of a fit-out on the ground floor which will house the co-working space. Desks will be available from mid to late January.

To register interest, individuals can go to http://www.thebuildingblock.ie

What is Cognitive behavioural therapy and which conditions is CBT used to treat?

If your doctor has mentioned CBT, this is what you need to know about it?

     

Living with a mental health condition does not necessarily mean someone has to take daily medication and many people live happy and healthy lives with the help of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) as well.

The aim of cognitive behavioural therapy is to separate a person’s thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions

If you’re unsure about what CBT is, and how it could help you or a loved one, this is what you need to know.

What is Cognitive behavioural therapy?

CBT is a type of talking therapy, which aims to help people manage their problems by changing the way they think.

The therapy is based on the concept that thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions are all interconnected – and negative thoughts can trap you in a vicious cycle.

During CBT sessions, the therapist will encourage their patient to break their seemingly overwhelming problems into smaller parts.

It deals wholly with current problems, rather than focusing on issues from the patient’s past.

The CBT therapist will look for practical ways for the patient to improve their state of mind on a daily basis.

What conditions is Cognitive behavioural therapy used to treat?

CBT can be used to treat a whole range of mental health conditions either instead of, or alongside, medical treatment.

While Loose Women panellist Denise Welch credits CBT with helping her lose weight and quit smoking.

CBT can be effective in treating:

1. Depression
2. Anxiety
3. Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
4. Panic disorders
5. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
6. Phobias
7. Eating disorders (such as anorexia and bulimia)
8. Insomnia
9. Alcohol misuse

In addition to these mental health problems, CBT can also help with long-term conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and chronic fatigue symptoms (CFS).

Although it won’t cure the physical symptoms of these conditions, CBT can help people cope better.

What happens during Cognitive behavioural therapy sessions?

CBT is normally broken down in between five and 20 sessions, each lasting between half an hour and one hour.

During each session, you will work with your therapist to break down your problems into separate parts – and distinguish between your thoughts, physical feelings and actions.

The therapist will then help working out if these thoughts, feelings and actions are unrealistic or unhelpful, and what effect they have.

After working out what could be changed, the therapist will ask you to practice putting these processes into action.

The aim is to learn to manage your problems and stop them having a negative impact on your daily life.

The steps learnt in CBT can then be used throughout the patient’s daily life, even after they finish their sessions.

The Cheetah is much more vulnerable than previously thought

Urgent action needed to save the fastest land animal in the world from extinction

    

Scientists now estimate that just 7,100 of the fleet-footed cats remain in the wild, occupying just 9% of the territory they once lived in.

Urgent action is needed to stop the cheetah which is the world’s fastest land animal sprinting to extinction, experts have warned.

Scientists estimate that just 7,100 of the fleet-footed cats remain in the wild, occupying just 9% of the territory they once lived in.

Asiatic populations have been hit the hardest with fewer than 50 individuals surviving in Iran, according to a new investigation led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

In Zimbabwe, cheetah numbers have plummeted by 85% in little more than a decade.

The cheetah’s dramatic decline has now prompted calls for the animal’s status to be upgraded from “vulnerable” to “endangered” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species.

Dr Sarah Durant, from ZSL and WCS, project leader for the Rangewide Conservation Programme for Cheetah and African Wild Dog, said: “This study represents the most comprehensive analysis of cheetah status to date.

“Given the secretive nature of this elusive cat, it has been difficult to gather hard information on the species, leading to its plight being overlooked. Our findings show that the large space requirements for cheetah, coupled with the complex range of threats faced by the species in the wild, mean that it is likely to be much more vulnerable to extinction than was previously thought.”

The cheetah is one of the world’s most wide-ranging carnivores and needs a lot of space. Partly because of this, 77% of its remaining habitat falls outside protected areas, leaving the animal especially vulnerable to human impacts.

Even within well-managed parks and reserves the cats have suffered as a result of humans hunting their prey, habitat loss, illegal trafficking of cheetah parts, and the exotic pet trade, say the researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Zimbabwe these pressures have seen the cheetah population plunge from 1,200 to a maximum of only 170 animals in 16 years, a decline of 85%.

The experts want to see a completely new approach to cheetah conservation focusing on the landscape that transcends national borders and incorporates co-ordinated regional strategies.

It would involve motivating both governments and local communities to protect the cheetah and promoting the sustainable co-existence of humans and wildlife.

Dr Kim Young-Overton, from the wild cat conservation organisation Panthera, said: “We’ve just hit the reset button in our understanding of how close cheetahs are to extinction.

“The take-away from this pinnacle study is that securing protected areas alone is not enough. We must think bigger, conserving across the mosaic of protected and unprotected landscapes that these far-reaching cats inhabit, If we are to avert the otherwise certain loss of the cheetah forever.”

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Wednesday 3rd August 2016

Ireland’s tax revenues lower than expected for last month of July due to VAT shortfall

Latest exchequer returns show tax revenue of €26.6bn collected in first seven months

   

At the end of July, the exchequer recorded a surplus of €862 million versus a deficit of €648 million for the same period last year.

Tax revenues came in below target in July due to a shortfall in VAT receipts, while corporation taxes and excise duties also came in lower than expected. The figures indicate that consumer spending growth may have slowed in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

Tax revenues remain ahead of target for the first seven months as a whole, but analysts and government officials will now be closely monitoring the monthly figures to see if weaker trends persist in the run up to the Budget. Official forecasts for next year will be finalised in October and will determine whether, as expected, there will be €1 billion available for additional tax and spending measures on Budget day.

The latest exchequer returns show tax revenue of €26.6 billion was collected in the first seven months of the year, up €2 billion or 8.5% versus the same period in 2015 and €644 million or 2.5% ahead of target.

However, total tax revenue for the month of July were down €98 million or 2.3% below expectations as VAT receipts came in €61 million or 3.3% below the €1.83 billion target.

On a cumulative basis, Vat receipts are now down €292 million or 3.5% below expectations. However, they are still 4.2% ahead in year-on-year terms for the first seven months. This suggests that consumer spending is running ahead of last year, but that the rate of growth may have slowed in recent months.

Income tax receipts of €1.5 billion were collected in the month of July, up €65 million or 4.5% versus the same month a year earlier and on target. This reflects rising employment and some increase in wages.

In a nutshell – what are the Exchequer Returns?

The monthly exchequer returns provide details of taxes collected by the Exchequer and government spending. They are one of the most up-to-date indicators of activity in the economy. The figures for each month are published on the second working day of the following month.

The figures give details of taxes collected in all the main areas – such as income tax, VAT, corporation tax and so on. They also show how much each Government department spent. The key comparisons are usually with the same month last year, and with the targets set by the Department of Finance.

Corporation tax receipts were 16.5% or €23 million lower than forecast for the month. However, on a cumulative basis, corporation receipts are up €482 million or 17.2% higher than expected at €3.3 billion. Corporation taxes have been very volatile, and some large one-off payments boosted figures in earlier months.

Also suggesting some weakness in spending, excise duties were €25 million or 5% below target in July. Duties of €3.6 billion were recorded at the end of the month, this is €376 million or 11.5% ahead of target and up €723 million or 24.7% in year-on-year terms.

Stamp duties receipts were €3 million above expectations at €114 million. In cumulative terms, stamp duties of €581 million at the end of July were down €35 million or 5.7% against target but up 11.8% versus the same period a year ago.

The exchequer returns show €21 million was collected in local property tax receipts last month, bringing the total for the year to date to €315 million.

At the end of July, the exchequer recorded a surplus of €862 million versus a deficit of €648 million for the same period last year. The Department of Finance attributed the improvement to a year-on-year rise in tax revenue, which was partially offset by increased expenditure and reduced non-tax revenue.

The latest returns show non-tax revenue of €2.27 billion at the end of July, were down €224 million or 9.1% versus last year. The decrease was largely due to a one-off dividend of €203 million received by the Exchequer from ESB early in 2015.

A mixed bag?

Conall Mac Coille, chief economist at Davy described the latest returns as a “mixed bag.”

“On balance, the weakness in the month probably reflects volatility and the unwinding of some of the strength in corporation taxes earlier in the year,” he said.

Elsewhere, Peter Vale, tax partner at Grant Thornton said the exchequer figures would reassure the Government that there will be some fiscal space in October’s budget, notwithstanding the impact of Brexit.

“Slightly worryingly, the figures show VAT receipts continuing to lag behind target. If this trend accelerates post Brexit, we could see the VAT figures falling further behind at the end of September. A resultant drop in VAT receipts could impact on the scope for tax cuts or spending increases in the Budget,” said Mr Vale.

“On the positive side, income tax figures remain on track, reflecting the strong labour market. Again, it will likely be some time before we see the impact of Brexit flowing through to the tax numbers, he added.

Philip O’Sullivan, chief economist at Investec said he saw little reason to quibble with the Department of Finance’s cautious guidance of a full-year deficit of €2 billion versus a deficit of €1.5 billion for the first seven months of 2016. for the same period a year earlier, a € 3.1 billion deficit was recorded.

Ireland’s youth unemployment rate rises to 16% for month of July

CSO figures show overall unemployment unchanged from June, but down from last year

   

The number of people unemployed in Ireland in July was 169,000, a rate of 7.8%, down by 29,800 from July 2015, according to CSO data.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.8% in July versus June, but was down from 9.2% compared to the same month a year ago.

New figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show the number of people unemployed last month was 169,000. This marks a decline of 29,800 compared to July 2015.

The youth unemployment rate rose to 16% from 15.4% last month, the latest data show.

The number of males unemployed fell by just 100 from June to July to 107,900. The number of women unemployed rose by 100 versus the previous month to 61,200.

Overall, the unemployment rate for men stood at 9.1% at the end of last month, unchanged from June and down from 10.6% for July 2015. The unemployment rate for women was unchanged versus June at 6.2% but declined from 7.6 per cent compared to the same month a year earlier.

Davy economist Conall Mac Coille said that while the latest figures should be taken as evidence of a slowdown in the labour market, initial estimates tend to be revised heavily. He added that it is too early to discern any negative impact from Brexit on hiring patterns.

Leo Varadkar wants new sugar tax in next October’s Irish Budget

     

Leo Varadkar believes the measures should be included in next October’s Irish Budget.

Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar has said he is in favour of introducing a so-called ‘sugar tax’ in the Budget.

A ten cent levy on a can of fizzy drink would yield the exchequer €100m, according to pre-budget documents published by the Department of Finance.

While Mr Varadkar said he believes the measures should be included in October’s Budget, he warned that a sugar tax is not the complete solution to tackling obesity.

“Yeah. I think a sugar tax is a good idea. I don’t think it’s the solution to obesity. A lot of different measures are going to be required to get on top of obesity,” he said.

The Dublin West TD also acknowledged Independent.ie reports that the drinks industry is considering legal action to stave off such a tax.

“I suppose when you introduce any change, any new tax, or any change to the law, there’s always the risk it could be challenged legally by those who don’t agree with it,” Mr Varadkar said.

Mr Varadkar made the remarks at the launch of the 23rd edition of the ‘Working for You’ handbook by the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU).

At the event in Dublin City on Wednesday, INOU chairperson Ann Fergus called on Mr Varadkar to fully restore the Christmas Bonus in the budget.

The minister told reporters the issue will be considered during discussions with Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe.

Galway City sets sights on All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil for 2020

     

Pictures from Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Sligo 2015.

Galway may host Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann for the first time in 2020.

Galway will be applying to host Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in 2020, a festival that could boost city coffers to the tune of €50m.

Never before held in Galway City, the massive event was only ever staged in County Galway in 1955 when it took place in Loughrea.

The application to host the event in the city is being made by the Moycullen branch of Galway Comhaltas. The chairman of the Moycullen branch, Caomhan Ó Fatharta, told the Galway City Tribune they were laying the groundwork for their application by manning a stand at the All-Ireland Fleadh in Ennis from August 9, urging other counties to throw their support behind the bid.

The branch has received a commitment from NUI Galway to host the event in three years’ time after successfully holding the county final last year, with plans to hold the Connacht finals there next year.

“Galway never had the facilities to apply for this before but now the university has two big halls – the Bailey Allen and the Kingfisher – that can hold 2,200 people. We will possibly need a third venue such as the Big Top which holds 1,000,” explained Caomhan.

“We have a lot of work done on this in the Moycullen branch. We’re trying to sort out meetings with the City Council, County Council and councillors to all get behind this as well as the 2020 team because of the enormous cost implications of staging this – it costs €800,000 to run.

“But we plan to definitely submit an application for 2020 after this year’s All-Ireland.”

The spin-offs are huge. In 2013 the jamboree of music, song and dance went north for the first time to Derry City, which staged the biggest event ever held in Comhaltas’ history when 430,000 attended.

There is no reason why Galway could not be even bigger.

Ennis will stage the event this year and next 2016-17, with a destination yet to be decided for 2018 and 2019. Sligo was the venue for the past two years where it was claimed by those in the know that it was one of the most successful Fleadh Cheoil’s ever.

The venue is decided by votes from branches from across the county and internationally. The week before the Fleadh – which generally takes place on the second or third week of August – is also a hive of activity as young musicians undertake week-long tutoring.

Peadar Brick, chairperson of the Galway Comhaltas, declined to comment ahead of a meeting on the issue next week.

He did point out that NUIG boasted the most appropriate facilities in the county as they were compact, capable of holding large crowds with 20 venues on site for different competitions.

The event is generally held in a location for two years in a row. Due to its timing, it will not clash with the other flagship events in the city such as the Galway International Arts Festival or the Galway Races.

Recently the head of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann told the Galway City Tribune that he would welcome an application to host a future Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Galway City.

Labhrás Ó Murchú, director-general of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, remarked: ”Galway City is a wonderful place, it’s such a vibrant city in so many ways because of the language and being so close to the Connemara Gaeltacht and it’s so compact – that’s why Derry was so successful, everything was near together.

“Personally, I spent my younger days in the Connemara Gaeltacht and we used to come into Galway City. I’ve often thought, gosh, wouldn’t this be a great location for the Fleadh Cheoil. The fact that Galway is well used to holding big events like the Galway Races is another Brownie point for Galway that it could well handle large crowds.”

Dwindling prey putting big cats and other carnivores on the brink of extinction

     

While direct interference by humans is still a major reason why large carnivores are under threat, prey depletion could prove their ultimate killer.

A new report into prey species across hundreds of different animals makes for worrying reading, with large carnivores’ dinner menu shortening by the day.

An widespread issue?

Noting the clouded leopard, tiger, dhole and Ethiopian wolf in a particularly worrying state, each have at least 40% of their prey classified as threatened on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.

Replace the Ethiopian wolf with the leopard and the collection have over 50% of their prey in decline. Other carnivores like snow leopards are seeing prey declines, too. Sadly protected areas won’t do the job, with just 6.9% of the 494 prey species studied actually traversing in protected zones.

Of course of the carnivores that themselves are on the IUCN Red List, a higher rate of prey depletion was apparent.

The Ethiopian wolf has less prey now than in years past,

An endangered species

“There is a strong relationship between prey and carnivore abundance,” reads the study, led by Christopher Wolf from Oregon State University College of Forestry.

“Approximately 10,000kg of prey supports about 90kg of large carnivore biomass, regardless of species.

“When sufficient prey is unavailable, large carnivore populations will decline, possibly becoming locally extinct. This can be compounded by large carnivore conflicts with livestock, which increase as carnivores search for alternative food sources.”

The study shows just how complicated conservation is, with numerous stakeholders – some unwitting, some not needed to come together and try to thrash out a plan to aid big cats and other predators.

Tigers and wolves

Earlier this year a report into tiger habitats around the world found that a doubling (and even trebling) of numbers in the wild is possible, as long as the remaining forested areas where they live survive.

Last summer we spoke with Mike Balzer, an Englishman charged with heading up the WWF’s Tigers Alive initiative. At the time, he was hopeful that the drop in the number of wild tigers around the world – which has gone from 100,000 at the start of the 20th century, to just 3,200 now – had stopped.

Tigers need significant amounts of prey to survive,

National, rather than international, approaches can work on occasion, too. For example Yellowstone National Park in the US has worked wonders on wolf populations.

Though in many examples of numbers bouncing back, human intervention is a common ingredient.

Large predators are said to be “ecologically important” in Wolf’s prey report. As well as keeping crop-damaging herbivores in check, they played a vital role in attracting tourists to developing countries.

“These results show the importance of a holistic approach to conservation that involves protecting both large carnivores directly and the prey upon which they depend,” reads the report.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Tuesday 2nd August 2016

Getting deposit back an issue for ‘60% of renters in Ireland’, USI says

Student lobby in campaign to tackle issue of landlords withholding money

   

UCD campus in Belfield. A campaign to tackle the issue of landlords withholding tenants’ deposits will be launched by the USI.

A campaign to tackle the issue of landlords withholding tenants’ deposits will be launched today by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI).

The USI said almost 60% of renters experience difficulties getting their deposit back.

As part of its Homes for Study campaign, the union will announce a partnership with deposit management service Deposify.

The company is backed by Bank of Ireland and, according to its founder, John Bayle, “gives landlords and tenants a joint account for rental deposits, and lets them manage and control how and when deposits are paid and resolve deposit-related disputes”.

Deposit management

USI president Annie Hoey said: “Last year, Ireland saw many problems in the accommodation sector, but this year USI is at the forefront of finding solutions to these problems, and a deposit management service with Deposify is a perfect solution for deposit disputes.”

The USI is urging anyone with spare rooms to rent them out to students. It will relaunch its website homes.usi.ie, which links students with landlords who can lease rooms to students during the college term tax free up to €12,000 annually.

According to Daft.ie, there is 40% less rental space available compared with last year while rents have increased by over 8% nationally.

Trinity College and UCD last week launched an accommodation campaign in Dublin to encourage homeowners to provide student digs.

The project will include blogs of students’ positive experiences in digs which will be posted online as an encouragement for potential landlords.

The universities said they hope to create several hundred new bed spaces for students in a matter of weeks.

About 2,000 accommodation places at DIT’s new Grangegorman site should be in place by 2018, along with 280 beds at Trinity’s Oisín House on-campus accommodation project.

Sharp increase in number of women dying from alcohol related illness

Half of people admitted to hospital with acute alcohol hepatitis die, says Prof Frank Murray

    

A new trend is emerging of younger women running into problems with alcohol, a liver specialist has said.

Prof Frank Murray of Beaumont Hospital and president of Royal College of Physicians in Ireland has warned that Irish people are underestimating how much they drink and the harm it can cause.

Three Irish people die every day as a result of alcohol abuse. Previously these would have been mostly older men drinking heavily in pubs on a regular basis.

However in recent times there has been a huge increase in the number of women being admitted to hospital and dying from liver failure, Prof Murray says.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Prof Murray said, “Commonly they are in their 40s, less commonly in their 30s and sometimes over 40s as well.

“We’ve seen a big change in deaths due to alcohol from being mainly older men to being much more gender balanced and much younger people.”

He said this change has come about because in Ireland and in the UK, most alcohol is now consumed at home rather than in the pub.

“What happens is people buy wine and in some cases people drink half a bottle a night several times during the week and a bottle each day at the weekends. That’s enough to cause liver failure.

  What is considered a safe level of weekly drinking?

“The awful thing is that people frequently have no premonition or warning that they’re going to develop liver failure, and to die as a result of alcohol because the vast majority of people who develop cirrhosis, develop liver failure, haven’t got symptoms before the crisis, and the life threatening component develops.”

Blood tests not precise?

He said that blood tests are not very precise and can often pick up the effects of alcohol rather than alcohol damage.

“The sad fact is we don’t have a great test of impending liver failure or impending advanced damaged leading to cirrhosis and liver death. Any abnormality should be a very serious warning to patients if they’re drinking substantially.

“Unfortunately many people with advanced liver disease will have relatively normal blood tests of the liver.”

Prof Murray said the single most important treatment is to stop consuming alcohol completely.

“There are two components, cirrhosis and the inflammatory component which will fade away if they stop drinking.

“Unfortunately when people get admitted to hospital with acute alcohol hepatitis – half of them die. Frequently that’s their first presentation. They die during that first admission, that’s the first that they know they’re in trouble.

“That’s part of the problem, people don’t identify any symptoms, they’re not out of breath, running out of energy, there’s nothing that they will recognise as specific. Interestingly people who drink heavily feel terrible all the time, that’s the alcohol, rather than the liver disease component of it.

“The majority of people who present with liver failure have not had antecedent symptoms which are attributable to the liver failure itself.”

“Unfortunately many patients who present will die in their initial presentation, or they are in hospital for a very long time with complex problems related to their liver failure.”

Prof Murray said the patients would not make it to liver transplant stage because the liver disease is too severe to get them over the six month period of abstinence that’s required for liver transplant.

He described it a complex and high mortality illness.

“There is a recklessness to it, most people underestimate how much alcohol they consume, by as much as 61%. There is a huge amount of under estimation of what they drink and of the risk.”

Tesco under pressure from Dunne’s as SuperValu remains Ireland’s top grocer

     

SuperValu has retained its position as the country’s biggest grocery retailer, with Dunnes Stores continuing to put pressure on Tesco for the number two spot, according to new data this morning from research group Kantar Worldpanel.

The survey also shows that the Euro 2016 championship boosted grocery sales here by 3.3% as fans stocked up on booze, soft drinks and snacks.

SuperValu, the brand owned by Cork’s Musgrave Group, had a 22.5% share of Ireland’s multi-billion euro grocery market in the 12 weeks ended July 17.

That was ahead of the 21.9% share held by Tesco, and the 21.3% share that Dunnes Stores has.

Read more: Tesco planning appeals halt expansion moves by supermarket rivals

Both SuperValu and Dunnes Stores enjoyed a boost to the value of their sales in the latest period, but Tesco’s declined.

Lidl has an 11.9% share of the market, while Aldi has 11.2%. The value of sales at Lidl rose 4.5% in the latest period, compared to a 3.7% rise at Aldi.

“Ireland’s involvement in the Euro 2016 certainly looks to have had a positive impact for the major supermarkets,” said Kantar Worldpanel director David Berry. “Alcohol sales over the past 12 weeks are 11pc higher than the same time last year, as consumers stocked up more often and bought more each time they shopped,” he said. “Soft drinks, confectionery, crisps and snacks all also saw positive sales growth as football fans made the most of the opportunity to treat themselves.”

The probe will then take a sample from the asteroid before heading back to Earth for 2023.

Kenmare Resources first-half production more than doubled first six months this year

   

Kenmare’s managing director Michael Carvill (left pic), The company says power situation at Moma mine is stable

Dublin-listed Kenmare Resources has reported a big increase in production at its Moma mine in Mozambique in the first half of this year.

The company said this morning that it shipped 309,000 tonnes of finished products from the mine in the second quarter of this year, an increase of 133% compared with the same period last year and a record quarterly figure.

Ilmenite production rose by 18% to 217,900 tonnes and zircon production was up 46% to 16,900 tonnes. The company said market conditions had improved and it had implemented price increases on ilmenite due to be shipped in the third quarter.

The amount of ore mined increased by 5% to just under 7.4 million tonnes.

Kenmare maintained its target of producing 950,000 tonnes of ilmenite this year. It also said production was in the second half of the year was expected to increase further.

Kenmare has also completed a capital restructuring which has reduced its gross debt by 74% to $100m and left it with 75m of additional cash for working capital.

“The strengthening of the balance sheet, allied with falling cash costs and consistent productivity gains at Moma, positions Kenmare to benefit from the improvement in the titanium feedstock market we are currently experiencing as higher ilmenite prices are reflected in revenues for the second half of 2016,” said managing director Michael Carvill.

The company also said that the mine had continued to experience stability in power quality and reliability as a result of the additional transmission capacity commissioned by Electricidade de Mocambique in December.

Last woolly mammoths ‘died of thirst’ some 5,600 years ago

   

One of the last known groups of woolly mammoths died out because of a lack of drinking water, scientists believe.

The Ice Age beasts were living on a remote island off the coast of Alaska, and scientists have dated their demise to about 5,600 years ago.

They believe that a warming climate caused lakes to become shallower, leaving the animals unable to quench their thirst.

Most of the world’s woolly mammoths had died out by about 10,500 years ago.

Scientists believe that human hunting and environmental changes played a role in their extinction.

But the group living on St Paul Island, which is located in the Bering Sea, managed to cling on for another 5,000 years.

This study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that these animals faced a different threat from their mainland cousins.

The mammoths were contributing to their own demise says Prof Russell Graham, Pennsylvania State University

As the Earth warmed up after the Ice Age, sea levels rose, causing the mammoths’ island home to shrink in size.

This meant that some lakes were lost to the ocean, and as salt water flowed into the remaining reservoirs, freshwater diminished further.

The fur-covered giants were forced to share the ever-scarcer watering holes. But their over-use also caused a major problem.

Lead author Prof Russell Graham, from Pennsylvania State University, said: “As the other lakes dried up, the animals congregated around the water holes.

“They were milling around, which would destroy the vegetation – we see this with modern elephants.

“And this allows for the erosion of sediments to go into the lake, which is creating less and less fresh water.

“The mammoths were contributing to their own demise.”

This study highlights that small populations are very sensitive to changes in the environmentLove Dalen, Swedish Museum of Natural History

He said that if there was not enough rain or melting snow to top the lakes up, the animals may have died very quickly.

“We do know modern elephants require between 70 and 200 litres of water daily,” Prof Graham said.

“We assume mammoths did the same thing. It wouldn’t have taken long if the water hole had dried up. If it had only dried up for a month, it could have been fatal.”

The researchers say climate change happening today could have a similar impact on small islands, with a threat to freshwater putting both animals and humans at risk.

‘Best understood extinction’

Commenting on the study, Love Dalen, professor in evolutionary genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said: “With this paper, the St Paul Island mammoth population likely represents the most well-described and best understood prehistoric extinction events.

“In a broader perspective, this study highlights that small populations are very sensitive to changes in the environment.”

The very last surviving mammoths lived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean. It is thought they died out 4,000 years ago.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 15th May 2016

Ireland regains its coveted A grade credit rating as expected

Moody’s says that budget deficit should continue to fall under new government guidelines?

  

Moody’s has maintained a B rating on Irish debt for much longer than other agencies.

The new Government received a boost last night as the last of three major credit rating agencies assigned an A-grade on Irish debt for the first time in five years.

One week after Taoiseach Enda Kenny returned to office, the move by Moody’s marks a public assertion of confidence in his minority administration and its broad economic plan.

Early on Saturday morning Moody’s upgraded Ireland’s long-term government to an A-grade rating , saying that the recent election of a Government gave confidence that the budget deficit would continue to fall. It also said that the outlook remained “positive”, indicating that further upgrades might be possible. It has upgraded Ireland’s rating to an A3 from a Baa1.

In a statement, the agency said that Ireland’s debt position continued to improve more rapidly than expected, with the debt ratio falling to 94 per cent of GDP by the end of last year. It said that the risk of a reversal of course on budget policy looked small, following the election of a Government led by Fine Gael, which had established a strong record of budget management in recent years.

In an upbeat assessment, Moody’s said Ireland was poised for further growth which would lead to continued improvements in its public finances.It pointed to the risk of a British exit from the EU but said that even if this happens the situaiton should be “manageable”for Ireland.

In its statement the agency said: “In Moody’s view, the risk of a reversal of the fiscal consolidation seen over the past several years is low. The recent political agreement between the two largest parties in parliament and the recent election of a minority goverment led by Fine Gael, which has established a strong track record of fiscal management over the past several years, give comfort that the budget deficit wil be reduced further in coming years.”

The Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, said the move proved Ireland was progressing in the right direction. “That progression will carry on under the new Government. The decison shows that Moody’s are confident that the Programme for Government, published earlier this week, will reinforce that upward trend.”

The upgrade was also welcomed by the National Treasury Management Agency. Frank O’Connor, NTMA’s director of funding and debt management said: “Moody’s upgrade represents further affirmation of Ireland’s fiscal and economic recovery. While the rating is still two notches below Ireland’s highest rating it is encouraging that the “positive outlook was maintained, allowing potential for more upgrades.”

He said that while an eventual uplift to a A-grade had already been discounted by many investors, “the formal upgrade will assist our ongoing efforts to broaden the market for Irish sovereign debt, particularly to those who are obliged to use the lowest ratings across the major rating agencies.”

Last to upgrade

Moody’s had previously refused to follow rivals Standard & Poor’s and Fitch when they upgraded their assessments of Ireland’s debt to the A level in light of the advancing economic recovery.

Any A-grade on a sovereign bond increases its appeal to risk-averse investors, who accept lower interest payments in return for greater security.

Although the State has large post-crash debts, the fact that each of “big three” global rating agencies now have A-grades on Irish bonds will underpin investor confidence. This should help maintain lower borrowing costs, which is of benefit to the public finances.

The upgrade by Moody’s, the most conservative of the rating agencies, also expands the range of potential buyers of Irish bonds. Some low-risk investors insist on an A-grade from all three big agencies as the minimum requirement to take a position in any sovereign debt. Fiscal rules

The development comes despite uncertainty over the durability of the minority Government and its adoption of many uncosted promises in its political programme. But the Government also pledged to uphold stringent fiscal rules set out in domestic and EU law, a crucial declaration to financial markets of its intent to maintain spending discipline.

The Government has also pledged to take “all necessary action” to tackle high variable mortgage rates but earlier in the week Minister for Finance Michael Noonan insisted nothing would be done to undermine the banks.

Moody’s had been seen as an outlier by markets as Standard & Poor’s has an A+ rank on Ireland’s debt and Fitch has an A. As a result, some analysts have cast its anticipated action as a “catch-up” manoeuvre to put it on the same footing as its rivals.

Growing anticipation of an upgrade by Moody’s drove Irish 10-year borrowing costs down in Friday’s trading session.

The bonds changed hands at 0.8439 per cent as markets opened in the morning. By the close in Dublin the yield was at 0.8009 per cent, a mark of confidence in some quarters that an upgrade might be imminent.

Investors in Irish debt have been encouraged by swift economic growth and the restoration of order in the public finances. At the same time, intensive bond market interventions by the European Central Bank have also helped to cut the cost at which the State borrows.

Such trends are significant as Ireland’s large post-crash debt imposes very heavy costs on the public finances. The State spent €6.98 billion last year to service the debt.

With €22.93 billion in debt to mature in the next three years, maintaining investor confidence in the debt is a priority for the Government.

State service MABS writes off millions in debt for people struggling in Ireland

    

The State’s free money advice service has secured millions of euro in debt write-offs since January for people struggling with problem debt.

New figures show that the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (Mabs) has used the debt relief notice (DRN) scheme to secure €238,000 in debt write-offs for 17 qualifying clients who engaged with its Cork City service alone in the first quarter of the year.

It is one of the highest rates of DRN write-offs in the country. The individual write-offs ranged from €3,000 for one client to €32,000 for another.

Cork Mabs co-ordinator Margaret O’Neill described the DRN scheme as a “golden ticket” for people struggling with unsecured debt.

“It really is a once-in-a-lifetime golden ticket. You can simply walk away from the debts. There are no hidden strings. This is a means to a fresh start,” she said. “We all know the symptoms of carrying problem debt. When this kind of unsecured debt becomes unmanageable, people need support.

“This scheme is aimed at people trying to get their life back on track, and can provide for full relief of burden debt up to a maximum of €35,000.”

The DRN scheme is part of the Government’s insolvency legislation introduced in 2012.

It is designed for people who have less than €35,000 in qualifying debt such as Revenue, credit card and utility bills, bank, credit union, or money lender loans, and other forms of unsecured debt, and who have few assets and a low income.

Applicants cannot have an interest in property, and must be living in rented accommodation or with their parents. Ms O’Neill said people who apply to Mabs to avail of the scheme will meet with one of their ‘approved intermediaries’ who assess each case individually.

Subject to certain criteria, successful applicants must agree to certain obligations for three years, after which the debts are simply written off, thanks to an agreed protocol with the Irish Banking Federation Institute.

Ms O’Neill said the DNR scheme is just one of the many free and confidential debt solutions provided by Mabs.

“We are the gateway to debt solutions. For some people, the DRN is the perfect solution, but there are others,” she said.

New figures show that Mabs is also negotiating with lenders on behalf of 1,440 long-term mortgage arrears householders.

Mabs staff have been attending all repossession hearings since last October 1 and are now seeing more referrals from the courts to their dedicated mortgage arrears advice team.

Mabs national development officer Michael Culloty said these specialist mortgage advisers are giving people in mortgage distress a “fighting chance”.

“It is evident that even at a late stage, deals can be put in place that will keep people in their homes,” he said.

However, he said that, in other cases, lenders need to “get real” in terms of their expectations and demands.

“Unfortunately, some lenders and credit servicing firms have their eye only on the rising property market and, where there is an amount of equity in the property, some seem fixated on getting their hands on an appreciating asset no matter what the cost to the homeowner,” he said.

Big Oil companies on a borrowing binge as price point rates fall

So what do oil companies do when their price point is plummeting? They borrow,

      

Oil rigs in the Golf of Mexico. The price of oil has gone through the floor in the past three years

The world’s biggest oil companies are borrowing record amounts of money to cope with a slump in crude prices. Luckily, there’s rarely been a better time to go on a debt binge.

Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Total, BP and Eni have together sold the equivalent of $37bn of bonds this year, about double the amount issued in the period before oil prices plunged, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While this is stretching their balance sheets and even resulting in credit-rating downgrades, the lowest debt costs in a year are softening the blow.

“They’re making hay while the sun shines,” benefiting from improved investor sentiment as oil prices have recovered, said Alex Griffiths, a London-based managing director at Fitch Ratings. “Treasurers are making use of good market conditions to maintain liquidity buffers.”

Even though oil has increased from the lows of January as a global surplus diminished, prices are still less than half their level two years ago. The world’s biggest companies have sought to keep investors happy through the downturn by maintaining dividend payouts and investing for the future at the same time. With profit and revenue sharply down, the only way to do that is borrow more money.

Debt markets are opening up for companies worldwide as central banks in the US and Europe keep benchmark borrowing rates low. Investors currently demand a return of 3.09% to hold dollar-denominated debt of companies with an investment-grade rating, the lowest level in a year, according to data from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. For euro securities, they seek 1.01%, close to the record low of 0.93% in March 2015, the data shows.

Oil companies have further benefited from the recovery in prices. Brent Crude, the global benchmark, has increased 70pc since January, aided by supply disruptions from Canada to Nigeria and falling production in the US. This has seen the 20-company Stoxx Europe 600 Oil & Gas Index rebound 3.8pc in 2016 following two years of declines.

At the same time, the premiums for credit default swaps for the biggest US and European oil companies, which investors use to protect against defaults, have dropped from the highest level in at least five years.

Shell sold $1.5bn of five-year bonds this month, which were priced to yield 1.99%, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A $2bn five-year debt sold by the company about a year ago yielded 2.13% on the first day of trading, the data shows.

BP sold $1.25bn of 10-year notes last month with a 3.12% coupon, versus 3.51% for a similar issue in March 2015. Both bonds were sold at face value. Chevron issued $1.35bn of five-year notes this month with a yield that was 32 basis points, or 0.32 of a percentage point, lower than a sale in November.

Shell’s net borrowing has increased to about $70bn and its gearing (the ratio of net debt to total capital) has risen to above 26pc from 14pc at the end of last year. In addition to the plunge in oil prices, the $54bn acquisition of BG Group added to Shell’s debt, prompting Fitch to cut the company’s credit rating in February. BP’s gearing was 23.6% at the end of the last quarter compared with 21.6% in December.

“The majors still have strong balance sheets to raise debt at competitive rates so they can manage their capital agenda, for example, to maintain dividends and strategic capital investments,” said Jon Clark, leader for oil and gas transaction-advisory services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Ernst & Young. “It’s also a good opportunity to refinance more expensive debt.”

Oil’s slide has forced companies to cut billions of dollars of spending, delay or cancel projects and renegotiate contracts – yet they continue to make dividends their top priority.

Shell hasn’t cut its payments to investors since at least the Second World War. Exxon even increased its pay out a day after losing its coveted AAA credit rating last month.

Shell, BP, Eni, Total, Exxon and Chevron will together pay out about $14bn for the first quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Some of those companies may pay a portion of these dividends in shares rather than cash.

Jim Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates, said on Thursday that he is shorting Shell and Chevron’s shares because they have negative free cash flow and are relying on borrowed money to pay dividends.

“What that means is the CEOs have convinced the boards that they should borrow to pay their dividend,” Chanos said in an interview with Bloomberg. “How long that will be sustainable, we don’t know.”

Last February, BP chief executive Bob Dudley said he was happy to let the company’s debt rise this year to maintain dividends.

Debt and gearing is “something that I might lose sleep about, but not just yet,” Shell’s CFO Simon Henry said earlier this month.

“You’ve recently seen an easing of bond market risk aversion and a higher oil price,” Fitch’s Griffiths said. “That makes it a good time for Big Oil to tap the market.”

Man diagnosed with terminal cancer left stunned after friend secretly renovates his entire home

Keith Ellick asked for his fence to be fixed and never expected an army of volunteers would transform his whole home?

    

The man Keith Ellick (pictured above with his family right) was given just a year to live and was left speechless after his boss organised a team of volunteers to renovate his house

Keith Ellick, 41, broke the news to his boss Addam Smith by telling him he might not last a year and could not even afford to pay for a funeral.

But when Mr Ellick asked his boss, who owns a landscaping and fencing company, if he would help mend his fence, his friend went a step further and organised a team of volunteer builders to give his home a makeover.

After sending Mr Ellick and his family away for a week, Mr Smith got to work with a team of builders from the Facebook group Builders Talk and used donated supplies to get the job done.

“I had the opportunity to work with the SAS of the building world… the best lads I’ve ever met,” Mr Smith said of the team of volunteers. “They’re he best lads I’ve ever met.”

But Mr Smith didn’t stop there, and is now fundraising extra money to help his friend buy the house for his family to live in, get his affairs in order, and send him to a specialist in London.

On his fundraising page, Mr Smith wrote: “This is for my mate Keith Ellick, a hard working loving family man. Keith has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and been given a year to live, let’s get him and his family on holiday and sort him out with a few quid to get his affairs in order.”

Having seen his newly renovated family home, Mr Ellick shared his own thank you message with those who had helped on the fundraising page.

“I’ve been through a rough few months, but this is not about me, this is about me telling all you people thank you for what you’ve done for me and my family,” the brave father said in a video.

“What you’ve done for me is like wow, you people you’re kind decent amazing people. I was never even taught there were people out there like you.

“All I wanted them to do was finish off my fence and he decided to do this and I’m like wow and he even got the charity to take me down to London to see this professor… all I can say is thank you very much, I appreciate everything,” he added tearfully.

Row over plan to save extinct white rhino’s by advanced reproductive technology 

    

‘Other creatures that might benefit from this new technology could include the kouprey, an ox-like creature from Cambodia, and the buffalo-like anoa, from Sulawesi and many more.

Under the watchful eyes of a group of heavily armed guards, three rhinos graze on the grassland of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Most of the world knows that the rhinoceros is threatened, but the status of these animals is in another league. They are the planet’s last three northern white rhinos. None is capable of breeding. The northern white, which once roamed Africa in its thousands, is in effect extinct. The three rhinos named Sudan, Najin and Fatu now are the last of their kind?

In a few months, however, a group of scientists from the US, Germany, Italy and Japan will attempt the seemingly impossible task to rescue the northern white rhino somewhat smaller and hairier than its southern cousin from the jaws of extinction. In October, they plan to remove the last eggs from the two female northern whites and by using advanced reproductive techniques, including stem cell technology and IVF, create embryos that could be carried to term by surrogate rhino mothers. The northern white could then be restored to its former glory. The procedure would be a world first.

It is an audacious plan -and a controversial one. Many conservation experts believe the resources being used to create northern white embryos would be better spent on saving other rhino species by providing them with protection in the wild. Why try to restore the species if the cause of its extinction has still not been tackled, they ask. Others say that taking a hi-tech approach to species preservation could lull the conservation movement into thinking it would always be able to fall back on science to help reproduce a species once it gets into trouble.

These points are rejected by project scientists. “Unless we act now, the northern white rhino will go extinct. And don’t forget that, once we have developed IVF and stem cell technologies to save it, we will then be able to use them to rescue other threatened species,” said one of the project’s leading scientists, Professor Thomas Hildebrandt, of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. “For example, there are only three or four rhinoceros from Borneo left in captivity and none known in the wild,” said Hildebrandt. “We could use this technology to rescue them.”

Other creatures that might benefit from this technology include the kouprey, an ox-like creature from Cambodia, and the buffalo-like anoa, from Sulawesi.

But not everyone agrees with the hi-tech approach.

“We put millions of dollars into protecting the northern white rhino in Garamba national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” said Susie Ellis, of the International Rhino Foundation.

“However, the species was lost there when the park became a conflict zone and we had to pull out to ensure the safety of our staff. If there is no political will, there is only so much that organisations like ours can do.”

“We need to take a multifaceted approach to this challenge, and hi-tech science is certainly one of them,” added Ellis.

“In fact, there is no easy answer regarding the northern white rhino. It is now functionally extinct.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Thursday 3rd. March 2016

Allied Irish Bank wrote off some €605m in mortgages in 2015

Bank made a pre-tax profit of €1.9bn last year it was up 72% on 2014?

    

AIB chief executive Bernard Byrne at a press conference to announce pre-tax profits at the bank.

AIB wrote off €604.3 million worth of residential mortgage loans in the Republic last year, an increase of 35% on 2014.

It wrote off an additional €214 million in other personal loans here last year, down from €385 million in the previous 12 months.

These figures emerge in the bank’s annual report for last year and suggest AIB is taking a pragmatic view to debt restructuring with borrowers.

The total loans written off by AIB in Ireland and abroad amounted to €4.6 billion last year, down slightly on 2014.

AIB’s results show it made a pre-tax profit of €1.9 billion in 2015, an increase of 72% on 2014. This was driven by “high-quality new lending” and provision writebacks.

This profit figure allowed for exceptional items of €296 million, which included restitution, restructuring and voluntary severance.

It has made a €105 million provision relating to the Central Bank of Ireland’s sector-wide redress programme for tracker mortgage customers.

AIB’s pre-provision operating profit was 18% higher at €1.3 billion.

The bank achieved a substantial reduction in impaired loans to €13.1 billion, down €9.1 billion from December 2014.

The bank, which is 99.9% owned by the State, said new lending draw-downs amounted to €8.7 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%.

Credit provision writebacks last year of €925 million reflected “progress in case-by-case restructuring of impaired loans and the improved economic environment”.

Its total operating income rose by 4% to €2.6 billion while its net interest margin, a key measure of profitability, increased to 1.97% from 1.69% in 2014.

AIB had a cost-income ratio of 49% as operating expenses declined by 8% or €107 million.

Commenting on the results, AIB chief executive Bernard Byrne said: “There can be no doubt that the group’s financial performance has confirmed our transition from a work-in-progress to a fully functioning, sustainable well-capitalised bank.

“This bank is now well positioned to enable the State to recover its full investment of €20.8 billion.”

He said the bank was ready to IPO its shares subject to market conditions and the green light from Government.

Mr Byrne said it wasn’t a “big issue” if the mooted IPO in the third quarter of this year “slipped by three months or six months”.

“Obviously we would like Q3 because it takes away uncertainty and allows you to actually progress towards it but it’s not the big thing in terms of when it happens.”

Total remuneration

AIB paid Mr Byrne €587,000 in total remuneration last year, an increase of 3% on 2014.

His basic salary increased to €479,000 from €450,000 in the previous year following his elevation to the top job in May 2015.

AIB’s chief financial officer Mark Bourke received €570,000 in total remuneration compared with €337,000 in 2014, when he served just more than seven months with the company. His basic salary was €450,000.

IBOA general secretary Larry Broderick was “surprised” about the increased remuneration levels for certain executives.

“We have been inundated with calls from our members in AIB keen to know if this change of approach to remuneration has been evident in the pay talks with the bank’s senior management since late 2015,” he said.

“These talks have been protracted and difficult up to this point.

“However, I hope that in light of this disclosure about the increases paid to AIB’s highest earners, our members can now expect similar consideration when the current conciliation talks resume under the auspices of the Workplace Relations Commission.”

Meanwhile:

A CSO survey shows Irish SMEs heavily dependent on bank finance

Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland urges SMEs to look at new sources of funding

   

The Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland (SBCI) urged Irish SMEs to explore new sources of funding in addition to traditional bank lending.

Bank finance is the most popular type of finance sought by small and medium sized enterprises, according to a new survey from the Central Statistics Office.

More than a fifth of all small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) applied for bank finance in 2014 according to the CSO’s Access to Finance survey.

A total of 20% of micro sized enterprises applied for bank finance, with the rate rising to 35% for small sized enterprises and to 39.8% for medium sized enterprises.

The survey found exporting SMEs were more successful than non-exporting SMEs when applying for bank finance. Almost 95% of exporting SMEs were successful compared to 67% for non-exporting enterprises.

The Information and Communications (ICT) sector is less likely to look for bank finance than other sectors, but more likely to be successful, according to the survey.

The Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland (SBCI) urged Irish SMEs to explore new sources of funding in addition to traditional bank lending.

SBCI chief executive Nick Ashmore said Irish SMEs are more dependent on banks than SMEs in other countries and that they should be alert to the increasing number of non-bank funding options that have emerged in recent months.

“Irish SMEs have been paying more to borrow than similar businesses across Europe.”

Big Red Cloud chief executive Marc O’Dwyer said the survey shows the disparity that exists between SME’s that are export focused and those that serve the local economy.

He said micro and small businesses in Ireland face an uphill struggle when it comes to raising bank finance.

“This report should serve as a timely reminder to the next Government of its elected responsibility to the 190,000 small businesses in Ireland that employer nearly 1.3 million people,” he said.

More women than men die from cancer say Irish Life

  

Significantly more women than men die of cancer every year, according to figures from an insurance company.

An Irish Life analysis of claimants found that 48% of women died of cancer last year, compared to 39% of men, but men had higher rates of heart-related deaths and illnesses.

The analysis shows cancer accounted for 41% of life insurance claims last year and 64% for specified illness claims.

Heart-related conditions accounted for 13% of deaths and specified illnesses for 18%. Heart-related conditions were the cause of death for twice as many men (16%) as women (8%). Men also accounted for four-in-every-five specified illness claims paid for heart-related conditions.

While cancer accounted for a similar proportion of specified illness claims for both men and women, both sexes experienced different cancer-related illnesses.

Breast cancer was the main cancer for women, followed by cervical cancer, while for men, prostate cancer was the main cause, followed by lung and colon cancers.

In the case of income protection, mental health illness was the cause of most claims paid, accounting for almost one-in-five (19%) of those unable to work during the year.

Back pain and cancer were the second most frequent conditions for income protection claims, at 14% for each of these conditions.

The insurance company paid out €204m to customers and their families affected by injury, illness, and death last year, with payments made for 5,449 life insurance, specified illness cover, and income protection claims.

Around €4m a week was paid to people and families affected by illness and death, with 40% of specified illness claims made to people under 50 years of age. The largest life insurance claim of €938,000 was paid out to the family of a man in his 50s who died of colon cancer.

Of the life insurance claims, 7%, or 104, were paid for accidental death — €13.2m. The accidental death rate for men (8%) was higher than that for women (3%).

The average age of people for accidental death claims was 47 and over 80% were men. Road traffic accidents accounted for 17% of accidental deaths.

Irish Life found that many people diagnosed with a terminal illness likely to lead to death within 12 months did not realise they may be eligible to claim some, or all, of their life insurance benefits before death.

It noticed that the number of terminal illness claims had fallen from 55 in 2014 to 31 last year.

Irish Life’s head of underwriting and protection claims, Martin Duffy, said 95% of claims received last year were paid and those declined were for non-disclosure of medical information or because the illness was not covered. While almost two thirds of life insurance claims were for men, the proportion was more evenly spread between the sexes for specified illness claims, with 55% of cover paid to men.

Cancer discovery may lead to bespoke treatment trials in two years

Cancer Research UK-funded researchers spot ‘flag’ proteins on surface of tumour cells

    

Researchers have spotted rare “flag” proteins that act as immune system targets and are displayed on the surface of all of a patient’s tumour cells (above), wherever they might be in the body.

A major British discovery is expected to lead to revolutionary bespoke treatments for patients with advanced cancer that could enter trials within two years.

Researchers have spotted rare “flag” proteins that act as immune system targets and are displayed on the surface of all of a patient’s tumour cells, wherever they might be in the body.

Normally they are shielded from the immune system, or missed because rapidly evolving cancers present too many constantly changing targets.

Once the omnipresent proteins, or antigens, are isolated, potent immune system cells called T-cells can be employed as homing missiles to zero in on them and destroy the cancer.

Such an approach, which involves mapping the DNA in a patient’s tumour sample, would help to overcome the ability of cancers to resist therapies by altering their genetic make-up.

The work is at an early stage and so far just two of the special antigens, plus the T-cells that recognise them, have been identified in two lung cancer patients.

The scientists hope to see rapid progress leading to patient trials, and are optimistic about similar targets for other cancers being found.

Prof Charles Swanton of University College London’s Cancer Institute, a leading member of the Cancer Research UK-funded team, said: “I will be disappointed if we haven’t treated a patient within two years.

“Do we think it’s going to work? I hope this is going to result in improvements in survival outcomes. If this doesn’t work I’ll probably hang my hat up and do something else.”

He pointed out that a tumour evolutionary tree was like a “snowflake or fingerprint”, unique to each patient. That presented a problem for clinicians and patients, because as tumours developed the tree grew new branches containing novel genetic mutations which helped the cancer to resist treatment.

The new research had shown there were potential immunotherapy targets from the “trunk” of the tree that are flagged up on all of a tumour’s multiplying cells.

Prof Swanton added: “This is exciting … now we can prioritise and target tumour antigens that are present in every cell – the Achilles heel of these highly complex cancers.

“This is really fascinating and takes personalised medicine to its absolute limit, where each patient would have a unique, bespoke treatment.”

One way of exploiting the discovery would be to develop T-cell-activating vaccines based on the antigens, said the researchers, whose findings are reported in the journal Science.

Another would be to “fish out” the small number of T-cells in tumours that are naturally primed to recognise the antigens, multiplying them in a laboratory, and returning them to the patient.

Currently there are too few of the ready-primed T-cells in patients to make a difference. In the samples analysed by the scientists, they only made up 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the T-cells in a tumour.

Another hurdle to be crossed is the way cancer protects itself using proteins that are normally employed to keep the immune system in check and prevent it running out of control.

In practice, the new antigen-targeting therapies would have to be accompanied by so-called “checkpoint inhibitors” – drugs that are already being used to treat cancer patients.

Prof Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: “This … research gives us vital clues about how to specifically tailor treatment for a patient using their immune system.

“It gets us closer to knowing why some patients respond to immunotherapy treatment and others don’t, and how we might select which patients will benefit the most.”

The research was also funded by the Rosetrees Trust, set up in 1987 to support life-changing medical science.

More gold and platinum in Irish rivers than previously thought

   

Irish gold hunters are readying themselves for action after it emerged Ireland’s rivers have more precious metals in them than previously thought.

The finding is the result of new tests by geological experts using modern technology, and is sure to spark the interest of gold panners here.

“There is more platinum, gold and precious metals in the streams and rivers of the south east of Ireland than previously believed,” the Geological Survey of Ireland – the agency responsible for providing geological information – said yesterday.

“The most notable levels of platinum are found mainly in the area to the southeast of the towns of Aughrim and Tinahely on the Wicklow-Wexford border,” it said. Platinum has uses in jewellery, electronics and catalytic converters in cars.

“As well as reconfirming high levels of gold in streams near the Goldmines River and Avoca regions of Wicklow, the new data identifies high gold values in streams that flow across and along the edges of the Leinster granite, a complex area long thought to be a source for the gold mineralisation in the region,” said the agency.

“The recently re-analysed data . . . also highlights a broad zone of gold in Co Wicklow, north of the Sugar Loaf region where only small traces of the precious metal have been found previously.”

High gold values in streams have also been identified in Co Waterford, in the Dungarvan to Stradbally area, known locally as the ‘Gold Coast’.

The agency hopes the findings will spark the interest of mineral exploration companies, leading to investment in the country.

“The industry is currently suffering from a major global downturn due to low commodity prices, which coupled with a scarcity of recent economically significant discoveries, has seen Ireland’s indigenous production of metals retreat with the closure of a number of mines,” said Koen Verbruggen, director of the Geological Survey of Ireland.

Richard Conroy, chairman of gold exploration company Conroy Gold and Natural Resources, said the discovery of platinum for the first time in stream sediments, and more gold than previously known in Wicklow, Wexford and Waterford, is positive news for the mineral exploration industry in Ireland, which contributes significantly to the economy each year.

“It won’t spark a gold rush but it will encourage local and international companies to look at Ireland with more interest,” he told the Irish Independent.

The discovery could eventually lead to the creation of up to 1,000 jobs over the next decade in rural areas, he added.

“You could be looking at immediate employment of between 200 and 300, and up to 1,000, within the next decade for one significant discovery.

“I don’t think we’re the new Yukon, but people don’t realise the hundreds of people employed in mining and spin-off industries,” he added.

What the law says when it comes to panning Irish rivers for gold

Mining activity in Ireland requires a licence from the State, but “recreational” panning is allowed.

That’s defined as activity that uses only hand-held, non-motorised equipment. The Department of Communications, Energy and National Resources asks panners to seek permission from various parties, including relevant landowners and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, to ensure the site they wish to use isn’t environmentally sensitive.

Precious metals in the ground are the property of the State but panners are allowed to keep small quantities “as a souvenir”. Any finds which return more than 20 gold flakes or individual nuggets that weigh more than two grammes are to be notified to the department.

But selling the gold is a no-no. That’s defined by law as ‘working’ of minerals – which requires permission from the Government.

Six things we can do now to save Wildlife from Extinction

      

World Wildlife Day reminds us all that the future of our planet is in our hands. In the past 40 years, we have lost 52% of wildlife from the face of Earth. While it may be difficult to fathom the fact that mankind has been responsible for this enormous amount of damage, it is the reality.  Some of the most iconic animals on our planet – tigers, elephants, rhinos – are closer to extinction than we realize. 

More than 100 elephants are killed every day for their ivory, and a rhino is killed every eight hours by poachers, and due to the illegal pet trade, there are more tigers in people’s backyards than there are in the wild. This day is a critical reminder to our world leaders that we must chase down these criminals to end the unconscionable trafficking of these vulnerable species, but protecting these species also means changing our own habits. Here are five things you can do right now to help animals on World Wildlife Day:

1. Change your food

It may seem like a hard concept to grasp, but the food choices we make every day are intrinsically tied to Earth’s destruction. Especially, our appetite for meat, dairy and eggs.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the livestock system occupies 45% of global land. Our appetite for meat and dairy is destroying our rainforests and increasing our Earth’s temperature due to the sheer volume of greenhouse gases created by animal agriculture. In fact, it is estimated that the livestock industry alone could drive 175 different species into extinction!

An estimated 80% of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is due to agriculture expansion and an area the size of Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands in South America has been converted to soy plantations to feed cows, chickens and pigs. In total, more than  136 million rainforest acres have been cleared for animal agriculture. This is devastating as an estimated 110 plant, animal, and insect species are lost every day due to rainforest destruction. The Pantanal jaguar, American wolf, and wild horse have paid the ultimate price for our hamburgers. Rainforests and resource destruction isn’t something most of us give much thought to when we’re chowing down on a sandwich or chicken wing, but it’s about time we start!

The incredible thing is, if every person in the U.S. were to choose more plant-based foods, we could cut our carbon footprint in half, save around 200,000 gallons of water. To start using your food choices for the benefit of the planet, join One Green Planet’s #EatForThePlanet movement!

2. Avoid plastic

Convenience often trumps conservation in our daily habits. Sure, it’s easy to grab a plastic water bottle on the go, or take a single-use bag on a shopping trip, but such products that we use for just a few minutes have forever-lasting impacts on our planet and its inhabitants. Currently, around 700 marine species are faced with extinction due to the threat plastic poses to them from entanglement, pollution, and ingestion.

An international study from the University of Queensland discovered that 50% of sea turtles have plastic in their stomachs. Additionally, a recent study posited that by 2050, 99% of all seabird species will have ingested plastic waste. According to a study by the World Economic Forum, there will be one tonne of plastic for every three tonnes of fish by 2025, and if things go on business as usual, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050! If you’re ready to kick your plastic habit to save marine animals, join One Green Planet’s #CrushPlastic campaign!

3. Put down Palm oil

The production of palm oil, one of the world’s most popular vegetable oils, is destroying rainforests around the globe and in turn hundreds of animal species are suffering. Orangutanshave become the most common victims of palm oil. It’s estimated that over 50,000 orangutans have already died as a result of deforestation in the last two decades. Palm oil is certainly not a necessity and there are much kinder alternatives. Click here to learn how to kick your palm oil habit.

3. Don’t support Circuses, Zoos, or attractions that hold animals in captivity

With so few elephants, tigers, and lions left in the wild, the very last thing we should be doing is capturing them from their homes and locking them up in cages for our entertainment. It’s an incredible thing to see a wild animal up close, but not at the expense of their well-being. Animals in the circus are often stolen from their families as babies and have their spirits “broken” with physical abuse until they are submissive to their trainers.

These animals will never live the way they are supposed to and will likely never see their families, or possibly even another memeber of their species again. Yes, it’s pretty cool to see these amazing beings up close, but wouldn’t we all rather see happy animals in the wild than tormented ones behind bars? Even zoos, which claim to be facilities for conservation, do nothing to help these species, as their animals are hardly ever reintroduced to the wild. Don’t let such facilities fool you – animal attractions exist for profits, not protection.

4. Do not support rescues and animal rights organizations

There are some incredible people on the ground, risking their lives to protect animals. Whether tackling poachers, rehabilitating orangutans affected by the palm oil industry, orraising orphaned elephants whose parents have been killed for ivory, these individuals are working every day to help save the lives of the most vulnerable. You can be a part of their work by supporting their efforts. Click here for a list of some of the top organizations working to protect endangered species.

5. Use your voice!

There is no tool more powerful than your own voice. You can help our fellow animal species by sharing articles and using social media to spread information. Every single one of us has the ability to make a difference for the future of our world and all of its beings, but we must act quickly. Whether by writing to your elected officials, speaking to your friends, or joining an organization working to protect our planet, you can speak out for animals who have no voice of their own. Start by sharing this article to maximize your impact!

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie`

Thursday 3rd September 2015

Taoiseach says ‘not realistic’ to set figure for refugees

Kenny says he instructed Minister Fitzgerald to attend crisis meeting with a ‘flexible mind’

   

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said it is “not realistic” to set a figure immediately on the number of refugees Ireland can take.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said it is “not realistic” to set a figure immediately on the number of refugees Ireland can take.

EU justice ministers will meet to discuss the migration crisis on September 14th.

“The past experience is that countries will not measure up if they’re asked to do so purely voluntarily,” said Mr Kenny. “So it may well be that they are going to have to work out a formula here to say what numbers are appropriate for each individual country, and then get on with having a plan and a strategy that can deal with that catastrophic human situation.”

Asked whether Ireland would be happy to accept a mandatory number, Mr Kenny said: “That’s a decision that’s going to be taken by the EU Council — whether you can have a compulsory, mandatory number fixed for each country, be it based on their population as a percentage of the overall population, or in whatever way.”

Mr Kenny said he instructed Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald “to go to the meeting with a flexible mind here. We’ve got to be realistic in what we can contribute. We’re not within the protocol, but we are opting in because of our personality and tradition.”

Speaking after meeting with President Francois Hollande in Paris, Mr Kenny said the photograph of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying dead on the beach at Bodrun was “absolutely shocking.”

“Any parent could see that child in their own arms. Here’s a body of a young boy; a life lost, potential wasted, washed up on a beach like driftwood. That picture more than any I’ve seen of all the tragedies may well shock political processes into taking action here, in terms of the stream of migrants and the causes that underlie that.”

Regarding the numbers of asylum-seekers Ireland will accept, Mr Kenny noted that “We have opted into the protocol” (that is to say an EU Council decision in the Justice and Home Affairs area, where Ireland normally has an opt-out).

Mr Kenny said Ireland’s “investment in humanitarian issues in Syria is substantial for a country of 4.8 million,” adding that “because of our tradition, we have indicated an extension of the naval humanitarian mission in the Mediterranean.”

Numbers

Asked what order of numbers of additional refugees Ireland could take Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “Speaking to Minister Frances Fitzgerald, we have already undertaken to take in over 1,000 for relocation purposes. We would expect to process about 3,500 asylum applications this year. And Ireland has taken in 85,000 new citizens over the last number of years.”

The EU had talked about distributing 40,000 asylum-seekers throughout the Union. “Now we’re talking about over 100,000 people,” Mr Kenny said. “The root causes of these things in countries where there are no governments and tragic circumstances unfolding every day with no plan to deal with it has got to be sorted out.”

Minister Fitzgerald said Ireland is “of course” willing to take more refugees than already committed to, and its ability to do that “will be looked at”.

  Speaking today she said she shared the “total upset the entire country feels at the images of the little boy [Aylan Kurdi], drowned on a beach”.

“It is one of the most distressing images we have ever seen.”

She said there was “a huge sense that we must do more” but said the figure of 600, which is the number of refugees the Government has committed to take under the current European refugee relocation programme, was “just one statistic in a wider context” of increased numbers of people seeking asylum here and seeking residency under other criteria.

Ireland would be “very proactive” on putting forward measures to deal with the crisis at the meeting on 14th September.

Assessed

“Obviously we will need to look at numbers again. Of course we are open to taking more here, but they have to be assessed in the first instance. It is not possible to put numbers on it at this stage.”

She agreed there was an “appetite” among the Irish people for the Government to take more but said any increase in numbers had to be co-ordinated at an EU-level and a plan had to be in place here as to where and how they would be housed.

“The reality is there have to be criteria. There are three full-time staff in my Department working out the process for taking 600. If that number were to double for instance, there would have to be additional resources. Other countries are building tented cities, using schools and gymnasiums.”

Asked if Ireland could do this, she said: “Of course, but it’s not ideal. The whole point is that this all has to be worked out.”

She said there were already hundreds of people, who had been recognised as refugees but still living in direct provision centres, because they could not find housing. There was also a 50 per cent increase in the number of people arriving in Ireland and seeking asylum here, apart from those caught up in this crisis.

“There is a wide range range of significant pressures and challenges,” she said.

Her junior minister, Aodhán Ó Ríordain, said however he was “confident” the numbers to be given protection here would “increase substantially”.

“I am confident Ireland is going to take a lead. The numbers will increase. They will increase substantially. The mechanisms as to how that will happen will have to be worked out but the Irish people are demanding we do more and want their Government to take a lead on this. It’s a moment in history and we must step up to the plate.”

Hot-spots

Minister Fitzgerald said there would be discussion at the September 14th meeting on how to best support countries with ‘hot-spots’ for migrants and refugees arriving.

She expected extra aid to be provided so temporary housing and processing centres could be built to better accommodate the needs of arriving people.

She also said the Dublin Convention, according to which asylum seekers must make their application for protection in the first EU country in which they land, was “clearly not working”.

Asked whether she thought the rule should be shelved or changed, she said: “It is going to have to be looked at. It is not being adhered to and we will have to discuss with our European colleagues where we are going with that.”

Most important, she said, was the safety of the migrating people, particularly during their attempts to cross the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. She said people-smugglers’ activities had to be disrupted while those desperate to make the crossing had to be rescued.

Ministers and TDs have said Ireland must take more refugees than it has committed to so far. They have also said Ireland must take a leading role in pushing for a comprehensive EU response to the refugee crisis.

Seán Sherlock, Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, said there was “a case to be made for taking in more refugees.”.

He said Ireland had contributed €31 million towards the humanitarian effort on the ground in refugee camps along the Syrian borders, and pointed to the deployment of the Irish naval vessels in the Mediterranean who had saved hundreds of people from drowning while trying to cross toEurope.

“As a nation I think we have genuinely lived up to part of our end of the bargain but yes, there is case to be made that we should take in more.”

Pat Breen, chair of the joint committee on foreign affairs, said: “I think we could take more. It’s a balancing act. If we were to take an amount proportionate to the numbersGermany is taking, that would be 40,000. Obviously our economy couldn’t take that. But there is room for us to take more.

“It needs to be a co-ordinated response from the European Union. There are countries who don’t want to take any.”

Spiralling numbers.

He said the EU meeting of justice and home affairs ministers, scheduled for 10 days’ time in Brussels, should now be brought forward. An emergency discussion of the spiralling refugee crisis would be held when his committee reconvenes in coming weeks.

“I also think the Dáil must have a debate on this within a day or two when it’s back on September 22nd,” he said.

Jerry Buttimer, chair of the Oireachtas committee on health, when asked whether Ireland should accept more than planned number of refugees said, “Yes. Yes because it’s the right thing to do.”

Joanna Tuffy, chair of the Oireachtas committee on education, also called for a larger number of refugees to be taken by Ireland, and said Ireland needed to “take a leadership role in Europe among other countries. We should be calling for a co-ordinated response across Europe.

“The question of where more refugees would be accommodated is something that could be worked out. There are hotels. There are vacant buildings. The priority for these people is that they reach safety.”

Labour TD Joe Costello said: “We certainly should be doing a lot more. We have to be prepared to take more refugees. We have a huge diaspora of our own and we have had our people welcomed in other countries.

“It could be done at parish-level. There needs to be a buy-in at grassroots level, with people in each parish taking people in.

“We should be taking a lead in Europe. Heads need to be banged together in Europe and it needs to be done urgently. People are dying.”

I will go to Garda over disappearance of Martin Callinan’s SIM card

 

                               Lucinda Creighton

leader Lucinda Creighton says she is to go directly to An Garda Siochana over the disposal of personal papers and disappearance of a SIM card belonging to former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan.

The Dublin Bay South TD today expressed deep concern over the Fennelly report finding that potentially valuable information was not made available to the Commission.

And she said she intends to directly contact Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan, Mr Callinan’s success, to call for a full probe.

“I will yes, I’ll be making contact with the Garda Commissioner

I don’t know the facts or circumstances here, all I’m aware of are very very serious allegations and if they are true then I think it absolutely merits a full investigation,” Ms Creighton said.

She made the remarks ahead of the party’s think-in in Dublin this morning.

In his report, Mr Fennelly said it has been striking how little documentary evidence was available to his team.

Mr Callinan told the Commission that he had cleared out all personal papers after he announced his retirement and he did not have any written notes to support his evidence. He was, however, able to produce his diary for the year 2014.

On March 25, Mr Callinan went to a filing unit in the Conference Room, where he kept personal papers, and requested black refuse sacks as he wished to sort through his files.

He later asked a Superintendent to dispose of 8 to 10 bags of personal papers, which were shredded on April 4th, 2014.

The report also details how the SIM card in Commissioner Callinan’s phone was removed and subsequently destroyed.

The Commission again wrote to Mr Callinan and asked him to search for the phone.

He found it and furnished it to the Commission but it had no SIM card in it and no information stored on it.

An Assistant Commissioner said that the phone had been returned to the force by Mr Callinan – but that the SIM card had been removed.

The issue of the shredded papers and missing SIM are among the factors that prompted calls to recall the Dáil next week to discuss the Fennelly report.

Renua Ireland wants a new flat tax on all incomes

Declan Ganley urges party not to shy away from big ideas at first think-in in Dublin

  

(Right pic.) Lucinda Creighton and Declan Ganley at a Renua Ireland think-in in Wood Quay, Dublin.

Renua Ireland is working on a radical new policy that would see the introduction of a flat tax on all income, with bands and most allowances being scrapped.

The disclosure was made during the party’s first think-in in Dublin, during a session on the economy.

Businessman Declan Ganley, who was a guest speaker, told delegates that a flat tax regime was a “great disrupter” and would create a huge buzz that would attract international business and finance to Ireland.

“It’s going to be controversial. You can welcome the debate. It’s going to create a long-term sustainable economy,” he said.

A flat rate is a system of taxation where one tax rate is applied from the smallest incomes, including social welfare, to the largest.

There are variations on the idea, including the concept of a negative income tax, put forward by Milton Friedman in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom.

A negative income tax would allow personal deductions, or a threshold, before the flat tax was applied.

If the person’s income did not reach that threshold, they would be paid a negative tax calculated on the amount of the shortfall. This would replace some welfare payments.

Renua chairman Eddie Hobbs disclosed that Mr Ganley’s idea had already been taken up by the party and work on a policy was at an advanced stage.

It is thought that Renua does not favour a true flat tax, but one that would include deductions and balancing measures to protect vulnerable families and individuals.

Mr Ganley urged the party not to shy away from big ideas.

“Do the stuff that vested interests will resist and they will hit you hard, but you can take them head on,” he said.

Mr Ganley also attacked what he described as crony corporatism in Ireland.

He said there was a perception that there was a very small circle of individuals who have unique access to the halls of power and have the ability to capture part of this economy and make it available for self-enrichment.

In a thinly-veiled reference to businessman Denis O’Brien, he told the meeting there should be no room for those who ignore the findings of a tribunal, or allow Dáil Éireann to be browbeaten because it does not suit their political or business agenda.

‘Honesty on tax’

Lucinda Creighton told the think-in that people needed to be honest about tax.

“If you’re in favour of tax reductions, you are a bad, evil right-winger,” she said. “If you want to increase tax you are a caring, kind-hearted, loving person.”

She pointed to the 1,200 per cent increase that occurred in the capital gains tax take in the five years after 1997, when the rate was reduced from 40 per cent to 20 per cent.

Ms Creighton also said she will ask Garda Commissioner Noirín O’Sullivan to assess whether an investigation is needed into the destruction of documents by former commissioner Martin Callinan.

The interim report of the Fennelly Commission, which investigated Mr Callinan’s resignation, found that the former commissioner had documents destroyed as he left his post.

The commission also found that a SIM card belonging to Mr Callinan could not be recovered.

Ms Creighton said she will be making contact with Ms O’Sullivan on the issue.

She also said Renua will cut the number of people working in Irish Water as part of an overhaul of the utility company if the party is in government after the next election.

She said that her party will restructure and overhaul Irish Water – which she described as “an absolute disaster” – while keeping water charges in place.

HSE to fund on limited basis cost of multiple sclerosis drug

Extended campaign by patients proves success for medicine that helps sufferers to walk

   

Patients have been paying up to €500 a month for Fampridine from their own resources.

The Health Service Executive has agreed to fund on a limited basis the cost of a drug that helps people with multiple sclerosis to walk.

The announcement that Fampridine (known commercially as Fampyra) is to be reimbursed under the State-funded drugs schemes follows a lengthy campaign by patients who says the drug has greatly aided their mobility.

The HSE says it is in the final stages of putting in place the arrangement around a “responder-based” reimbursement programme for Fampridine.

The cost of the drug will be covered where a demonstration of clinical response, based on objective criteria agreed with clinical experts, is recorded, it says. This clinical response must be shown to persist based on objective measurement at six-monthly intervals.

Annual cost

In 2013, the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, which rules on the cost-effectiveness of new drugs, found Fampridine would cost nearly €7,000 per patient each year. It said the €20 million annual cost to the State over five years would take money from other areas.

The HSE then decided that it could not approve the reimbursement of Fampridine and claimed the manufacturer, Biogen Idec, had failed to demonstrate or provide any formal justification for the prices proposed. Biogen maintained it had offered significant price reductions in the talks.

Agreement has now been reached on a reimbursement arrangement.

Patients have been paying up to €500 a month for Fampridine from their own resources after Biogen started charging for the drug last year following a free trial period.

Multiple Sclerosis Ireland expressed delight with the progress on reimbursing Fampridine, which it said had a significant impact on patients’ ability to remain independent.

Animals and not catastrophe, caused first mass extinction

   

The rise of early animals, not meteorite impacts or volcanic eruptions, led to the world’s first known mass extinction, which took place about 540 million years ago, suggests new research.

While mass extinctions are generally associated with catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and super volcanoes, the new study puts the blame on the emergence of complex animals that can change their environment.

“People have been slow to recognise that biological organisms can also drive mass extinction,” said Simon Darroch, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US.

“But our comparative study of several communities of Ediacarans, the world’s first multicellular organisms, strongly supports the hypothesis that it was the appearance of complex animals capable of altering their environments, which we define as ‘ecosystem engineers,’ that resulted in the Ediacaran’s disappearance,” Darroch said.

Researchers believe that earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes – various types of single-celled micro-organisms. They ruled the Earth for more than three billion years.

Then multi-cellular organisms like Edicarans emerged and in their heyday,they spread throughout the planet. They were a largely immobile form of marine life shaped like discs and tubes, fronds and quilted mattresses.

After 60 million years, evolution gave birth to another major innovation: animals.

Animals burst onto the scene in a frenzy of diversification that palaeontologists have labelled the Cambrian explosion, a 25-million-year period when most of the modern animal families – vertebrates, molluscs, arthropods, annelids, sponges and jellyfish – came into being.

“These new species were ‘ecological engineers’ who changed the environment in ways that made it more and more difficult for the Ediacarans to survive,” Darroch said.

The researchers performed an extensive palaeoecological and geochemical analysis of the youngest known Ediacaran community exposed in hillside strata in southern Namibia.

The site, called Farm Swartpunt, is believed to be 545 million years old.

Having ruled out any extraneous factors, Darroch and his collaborators concluded that “this study provides the first quantitative palaeoecological evidence to suggest that evolutionary innovation, ecosystem engineering and biological interactions may have ultimately caused the first mass extinction of complex life.”

The researchers believe that as humans are the most powerful ‘ecosystem engineers’ ever known”, an analogy between the Earth’s first mass extinction and what is happening today can be drawn.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. IANS

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 26th July 2015

David Drumm to give evidence by video link to Banking Inquiry team

    

Ciaran Lynch said a decision would be made on Tuesday

The Chairman of the Oireachtas banking inquiry Ciaran Lynch said it will decide on Tuesday if it will accept an offer from the former Anglo Irish Bank Chief Executive, David Drumm, to give evidence to the inquiry via video link from the United States.

Mr Lynch said by then the inquiry team will have access to the full legal advice on the matter and will make a decision on that basis.

However, he would not be drawn on the implications for the future of the inquiry if some members withdraw from the session if the inquiry does agree to hear Mr Drumm’s evidence in this way.

Mr Lynch said he was sure the work of the inquiry could be kept “out of the courts” when the full membership meet and discuss the matter with their support team and legal advisers on Tuesday.

He said it was important that the inquiry finish its work and that it has managed to complete two thirds of its work and interview 70 witnesses without encountering any major legal obstacles.

Mr Lynch said at the start of the inquiry he had asked members to leave their club jerseys at the door and he was sure they would do that when the group meets again on Tuesday.

He also said it is critical that the banking inquiry survives the recent controversies about how it is operating.

Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week programme, Mr Lynch said a Senior Counsel has been appointed to look at the internal procedures of the inquiry and it would be inappropriate for him to comment.

He said he would not speculate on what would happen if an inquiry member refused to take part in a particular hearing.

The inquiry has faced a number of challenges to date but it has operated on a collegial basis so far and he expected next weeks meeting to discuss Mr Drumm’s offer of video evidence will be in the same context, he added.

Mr Lynch said the value of the committees work will be reflected in its final report which is due to be published by the end of the year.

Earlier, a number of politicians who are members of the Banking Inquiry said that they will not participate in a proposed session where David Drumm may give evidence by video link.

Fine Gael TD Eoghan Murphy and Fianna Fáil finance spokesman McGrath said if the Banking Inquiry agrees to accept evidence via video link from the former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm they will not participate in that session.

Mr Murphy said he had made the decision to protect the integrity of the inquiry and said it would be undignified of the Oireachtas to offer Mr Drumm the privilege of giving evidence when he refuses to return to Ireland to co-operate with garda investigations.

He said agreeing to Mr Drumm’s request would be a fundamental mistake.

Mr McGrath said he believed that facilitating someone who had refused to cooperate with Justice authorities would be an affront to democracy and should not be considered.

The Socialist Party TD, Joe Higgins said he would make his final decision on the matter on Tuesday after the committee hears legal advice on the matter.

He said some people were saying that it would be interesting to hear from Mr Drumm but many others felt strongly that allowing him to give evidence in this way might treat ordinary people who had suffered as a result of the banking collapse with great contempt.

New poll shows Ireland wants Leo Varadkar as leader

  

Fine Gael Minister for Health Leo Varadkar.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar is the overwhelming favorite among the public and Fine Gael supporters to be the next leader of the party.

A poll for The Sunday Times shows 34% of people would like to see Varadkar, who came out as a gay in January, take over from Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

“It’s always nice to get positive feedback from the public, but there is no vacancy. Enda is the leader and I have my hands full in health and a lot of work to do,” Varadkar said.

The poll shows independents are up five points to 31%, a record high. Fine Gael were unchanged in the poll with 24%. Fianna Fail were down three points to 18%, Sinn Fein were down two to 17%. Labor was down one point to eight and the Greens were down a point to one %.

Recently-formed political alignments were too new to be included as separate groups in the poll and were counted with the independents.

They included the Social Democrats launched last week with three Independent TDs (members of Parliament) as joint leaders. One of them is Roisin Shortall, a former junior minister who resigned from government in 2012 when she also resigned from the Labor Party.

The other new party is Renua Ireland, whose leader is Lucinda Creighton, who also resigned as a junior minister and from Fine Gael when she voted against the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.

Both the Social Democrats and Renua have said they will run candidates in every constituency in the next general election which will be held within a year.

HSE pays €4.4m every year for mental health treatments in the UK?

   

The HSE is paying €4.4 million a year for mental health treatments in the UK.

The Sunday Times reports that 13 patients have been transferred to the UK for specialist psychiatric treatment.

The patients were moved abroad for periods of between two months and almost 14 years.

Fianna Fail’s spokesperson on Mental Health Colm Keaveney said these cases highlight the lack of investment in specialist care available in Ireland.

“We’ve seen a breach in the Programme for Government – a commitment to ring-fence specialist recruitment and expenditure in community mental health teams,” he said.

“It’s resulted in a staffing crisis on the ground … the HSE are left with no option but to export many of our complex, acute mental health needs.”

Irish study to find best way to quit smoking for ever

   

The Quit.ie programme was launched by the HSE in 2011, resulting in 600,000 “quit attempts” since then

One is a global empire with testimonials from Anjelica Houston, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Branson. These stars claim to be among the millions of smokers around the world who have kicked the habit thanks to the advice of a former 100-a-day smoker who ultimately died of lung cancer.

The other is a programme run by the HSE that uses hard-hitting media ads and an online and telephone support system to encourage smokers to quit for good.

And now, the Tobacco Free Research Institute (TFRI) at the Dublin Institute of Technology is using a controlled sample of 300 smokers as guinea pigs to test the success rates of Allen Carr’s Easyway smoking cessation programme versus the HSE’s Quit.ie initiative.

The 12-month Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT), which is free for participants and funded through the Department of Health’s Lottery Fund, is intended to show which programme – if not both – is the most likely to help smokers quit for good.

The Allen Carr method was founded by the British accountant-turned-anti-smoking crusader who devised his ‘Easyway’ method of smoking cessation after trying unsuccessfully for years to quit his 100-a-day habit.

When he finally did quit after 33 years of smoking at the age of 48, he established his now world-wide chain of clinics and self-help books promoting his concept, which kept him smoke-free until his death from lung cancer at the age 72 in 2006.

The Quit.ie programme was launched by the HSE in 2011, resulting in 600,000 “quit attempts” since then.

Along with online and telephone support – including the National Smoker’s Quit Line manned six days a week – it has run a number of hard-hitting media campaigns, including the stark message that “one in every two smokers will die of a tobacco-related disease.”

The campaigns also include a series of TV ads using the late Gerry Collins, the father-of-three from Greystones, Co Wicklow, who candidly spoke of how his addiction to cigarettes was literally killing him before he died of lung cancer due to smoking in January, 2014.

“Unusually, we have recruited publicly because we want to compare these two treatment modalities,” said TFRI founder and consultant respiratory physician Professor Luke Clancy. “The Allen Carr method is well known all over the world but the efficacy has never been established,” he told the Sunday Independent.

While the number of smokers in Ireland is at its lowest ever level, at approximately 20pc of the adult population, Prof Clancy, who was instrumental in bringing in the 2004 smoking ban, said Ireland still has a way to go if we are to achieve the health department’s goal of being virtually smoke-free, with just 5pc of the population smoking by 2025. “We worried that no matter what we do, we won’t reach this target,” he said. “So we’re looking to see can we improve things.”

Already hundreds of smokers have signed up to the free controlled trial that will take place over the next 12 months in Dublin. After completing an online survey, participants are selected based on various criteria, such as age and number of cigarettes smoked a day.

Those selected can bail out any time after being randomly selected to take part in either the Allen Carr group or Quit.ie group. They will be monitored at one, three, six and 12-month intervals after signing a consent form and being assessed by a nurse who monitors weight and carbon monoxide levels in exhaled breath.

Those who stick it out for the whole year will be rewarded with the chance to enter a draw for a trips to Paris and the Caribbean.

How Lycos almost won the search engine war

 

In 1998, a young developer named Jim Gilliam was hired at Lycos after he impressed management by finding bugs in their site. He took on the task of improving their search results to find a way to beat their biggest competitor, Yahoo.
It was exhilarating to be back in the game again, a 20-year-old college dropout with stock options, working at the center of the internet revolution. But I was overwhelmed. I’d only ever worked on a team with a half-dozen people, and Lycos was a huge company with hundreds of employees. All the developers seemed much smarter and more experienced than I was, and I was struggling to understand all the different proprietary technologies Lycos had created.

As I dug in, I realised that the scope of the problems was immense. I was paralysed. I didn’t know where to start. At the end of my first week I passed Lycos’s VP of development Dave Andre’s office on my way out for the night. No one else was around and he waved me in. He asked how everything was going, so I was honest and told him what I was feeling. With no hesitation, he dropped the most influential piece of advice I’ve ever received. He said, “Jim, you can code. You have all the power. Just go do it.” So I did.

Lycos was a search engine, and like all search engines at the time, it was trying to figure out how to make money. The key was to make our search engine into something that would appeal to advertisers. Like Excite and Yahoo, Lycos paid the browser, Netscape, to send traffic our way, and we were all trying to keep people on our sites longer, because the longer people were on our sites, the more ads they saw. Lycos’s CEO, Bob Davis, was a sales guy, and his strategy was to cut deals with new, venture-funded dot-coms and split the revenue on all the ads that we sold. We would increase our ad inventory, help the startups, and the Lycos logo would be all over the web.

I didn’t really care about all that. I cared about our search results, which seemed to be the one thing that no one was paying attention to. We were a search engine, but our results sucked, mainly because it took between six and nine months to refresh the search catalogue. This meant that even our partner sites didn’t show up in our search results, making the entire sales strategy pointless. If I could fix this, our search would be better and we’d actually sell more ads.

Climate change drove woolly mammoths to extinction, say scientists

Dramatic climate shifts made it difficult for large animals such as the woolly mammoth to survive, new research confirms.

    

The mighty megafauna of the last ice age, including the wooly mammoths, short-faced bears and cave lions, largely went extinct because of rapid climate-warming events, a new study finds.

During the unstable climate of the Late Pleistocene, about 60,000 to 12,000 years ago, abrupt climate spikes, called interstadials, increased temperatures between 7 and 29 degrees Fahrenheit (4 and 16 degrees Celsius) in a matter of decades. Large animals likely found it difficult to survive in these hot conditions, possibly because of the effects it had on their habitats and prey, the researchers said.

Interstadials “are known to have caused dramatic shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns,” the study’s first author Alan Cooper, director for the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide in Australia, said in a statement emailed to Live Science.

Temperature drops during the Late Pleistocene showed no association with animal extinctions, Cooper said. Instead, only the hot interstadial periods were associated with the large die-offs that hit populations (local events) and entire species of animals (global events), he said.

Ancient humans also played a role in the megafaunal extinction, albeit a smaller one, he said. By disrupting the animals’ environments, human societies and hunting parties likely made it harder for megafauna to migrate to new areas and to refill areas once populated by animals that had gone extinct, he said.

Extinction analysis

The study is the latest in a long string of research examining what caused megafauna, or animals weighing more than 99 pounds (45 kilograms), to die off during the Late Pleistocene.

George Cuvier, the French paleontologist who first recognized the mammoth and the giant ground sloth, started the speculation in 1796 when he suggested that giant biblical floods were to blame for the animals’ demise. The extinctions also baffled Charles Darwin after he encountered megafaunal remains in South America.

Since then, various studies have placed the bulk of responsibility on ice age humans, temperature swings and aperfect storm of events.

However, advances in examining ancient DNA and ancient climate allowed Cooper and his colleagues to get to the bottom of the issue.

They examined DNA from dozens of megafaunal species that lived during the Late Pleistocene, combing through more than 50,000 years of DNA records for extinction events. The ancient DNA not only told them about global extinction events, but also local population turnovers, which occur when a group of animals dies and another population of animals moves in to replace them. [Wipe Out: History’s Most Mysterious Extinctions]

They then compared the data on megafauna extinction with detailed records of severe climate events, which they gathered from Greenland ice cores and the sedimentary record of the Cariaco Basin off Venezuela.

“By combining these two records, we can place the climate and radiocarbon dating data on the same timescale, thereby allowing us to precisely align the dated fossils against climate,” Cooper said. “The high-resolution view we gained through this approach clearly showed a strong relationship between warming events and megafaunal extinctions.”

The findings also show that extinction events were staggered over time and space, likely because the interstadial warming events had different effects on different regions, Cooper said.

Modern connections

Earth’s climate is much more stable today than it was during the Late Pleistocene, making the world’s current warming trends a “major concern,” the researchers said.

“In many ways, the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and resulting warming effects are expected to have a similar rate of change to the onset of past interstadials, heralding another major phase of large mammal extinctions,” Cooper said.

In addition, humans have disrupted the habitats and surrounding areas of many wild animals, making it challenging for species to migrate or shift ranges to places where they would be better adapted to deal with climate change, he said.

Other researchers called the new study an important one.

It shows “that the extinction and population turnover of many megafauna was associated with rapid warming periods, rather than the last glacial maximum [when the ice sheets reached their maximum during the last glacial period] or Younger Dryas [a sudden, cold spell that happened when the Earth was starting to warm] as has previously been suggested,” said Eline Lorenzen, an assistant professor of paleogenetics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

In fact, understanding how the past climate change affected extinction rates may help people be better prepared for future rapid global warming events, she said.

“This study is a bit of a wake-up call,” Lorenzen said. “Here we have empirical evidence — based on data from a lot of species — that rapid climate warming has profoundly impacted megafauna communities, negatively, during the past 50,000 years.

“It doesn’t bode well for the future survival of the world’s megafauna populations,” she said.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Thursday 30th April 2015

Irish Banks refuse to pass on mortgage rate cut despite pressure

• Ministers seek reduction from banks for people of Ireland who helped to bail them out

    

Enda Kenny and Joan Burton who said it might have ‘slipped’ bankers’ minds that people’s substantial pay cuts funded the banks’ recovery.

More State banks have defended the standard variable rates (SVR) they impose on some mortgage customers. They said that while rates are kept under review there are no imminent plans to lower them.

Permanent TSB claimed that its SVR of 4.5 per cent was “competitive in the current market” adding that it “broadly reflects the various cost inputs including the cost of funds which the bank raises from a variety of sources including the retail deposit market in Ireland and the international money markets”.

When asked if there were any plans to reduce the rates in light of changing market conditions and pressure from Government, a spokesman would say no more than they “always monitor our rates and will continue to do so”.

KBC offers the same SVR as PTSB although mortgage customers can get a 0.2 per cent discount on both new and existing variable and fixed mortgage rates if they hold a KBC current account with the Bank.”

The bank would not be drawn on its plans other than to say its rates were kept on “under review”.

The average on a tracker mortgage is just over 1 per cent. The average variable rate across the euro zone, meanwhile, is 2.47 per cent. This means that someone with a €300,000 mortgage and an SVR mortgage with a leading Irish bank pays around €650 a month more than someone with a tracker.

The banks’ apparent resistance to an immediate rate cut comes just 24 hours after both Ulster Bank and Bank of Irelandruled out rate cuts for customers with SVR mortgages setting themselves on a collision course with the Government.

Earlier this week the Minister for FinanceMichael Noonan said he planned to ask banks to cut the cost of variable mortgages and expects them to follow his recommendation.

This was followed by a call from Taoiseach Enda Kenny to cut their SVRs. “From any moral point of view, from any ethical point of view, when banks are now restructured and on their way to making profit again, it is just not acceptable that when they themselves can borrow at much cheaper rates that they continue to have higher rates applied to mortgage holders,” Mr Kenny said

Tánaiste Joan Burton echoed Mr Kenny’s sentiments and suggested it might have “slipped their minds” that people’s wages cuts funded the recovery of banks.

“Gratitude will only get you so far with the banks. I’ve never known bankers to be a particularly grateful sort of people,” she said.

Former AIB chiefs ‘very sorry’ for role in banking collapse

  

Two former heads of Allied Irish Banks have expressed regret over the impact the catastrophic banking collapse had on Ireland.

Before a parliamentary inquiry into the collapse, retired chief executive Eugene Sheehy said he feels personal disappointment every day for the failures.

“I’m very sorry for what happened and for my role in those events. I know a lot of people feel very let down, and deservedly so,” Mr Sheehy said.

The former chief executive joined the bank in 1971 and worked his way up to be appointed the top banker by 2005.

He retired in 2009 at the height of Ireland’s financial and economic meltdown.

Mr Sheehy said AIB had asked the Government to adopt a four-bank guarantee scheme in September 2008 during all-night negotiations.

He said he did not ask for the blanket €440bn guarantee ultimately brought in by the then coalition.

“When we saw the guarantee document the next morning we could not see why Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide were included,” Mr Sheehy said.

Michael Buckley, who was formally appointed group chief executive in 2001 and retired in 2005, said he had no information that the bank was lending too much when he was in charge.

“I deeply regret what happened and the damage it inflicted on the lives of so many,” he said.

Mr Buckley said he had no premonition when he was retiring 10 years ago of the looming financial crisis which hit world markets and the shattering impact of the crisis on the Irish economy.

Men and women want sex at completely different times of the day

• A study finds

 

• A new survey about bedroom habits reveals that when it comes to sex, men are larks and women are owls

It’s one of mankind’s age-old quandaries – but now a new study has shed light on just why heterosexual couples never seem to feel amorous at the same time of day.

According to a survey of 2,300 adults, the two sexes simply operate in different time zones when it comes to sex.

While men are at their most amorous between the hours of 6am and 9am, women follow suit much later in the day, between 11pm and 2am.

Erotic toy brand Lovehoney analysed the data to determine that the exact time the average man reaches ‘Peak Horniness’ is 7:54am, compared to 11:21pm for his average female partner.

Only 16pc of men said they regularly want sex before falling asleep, while a meagre 11pc of women responded that they felt most passionate early in the morning.

The survey also suggested that people tend to settle down with partners who have similar sex drives.

Over half of all people polled (63pc of women and 54pc of men) said that they desired sex roughly the same amount as their current partner.

However, 44pc of women and 33pc of men reported having experienced issues in previous relationships due to mismatched sex drives.

Lovehoney co-owner Richard Longhurst said: “This shows that there are big differences in Sex O’Clock between the sexes.

“Men are ready for sex just before breakfast whereas women most want passion last thing at night.

“What is encouraging is that most people tend to find sexual happiness in the end with a partner with similar needs.

“But Lovehoney has found that most of us do have a few difficult relationships with lovers whose sex drives are different from our own along the way.”

Oil falls more than 1%, as U.S. crude stockpiles are set for another high

  

Oil fell more than 1 percent on Tuesday ahead of weekly U.S. crude inventory data that is expected to hit another high and as Saudi Arabia pledged to supply more oil to China if needed.

U.S. commercial crude stockpiles were expected to have risen last week for the 16th straight week, up from a record 489 million barrels, even though drilling activity fell, a preliminary survey by Reuters showed on Monday.

Comments from top Saudi oil officials on Monday reiterated the country’s position of keeping production high to meet demand as it maintains its market share.

Brent June crude futures had dropped 84 cents to $63.99 a barrel by 0702 GMT. U.S. June crude fell 84 cents to $56.14 a barrel.

The fall in prices “reflects the major gains that have been made in the last few weeks and a little bit of concern over what the inventory numbers in the U.S. might show”, said Michael McCarthy, chief strategist at CMC Markets in Sydney.

Brent crude hit a 4-1/2 month high last week, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) has risen for six consecutive weeks, underpinned by net long positions on both contracts as speculators bet on a decline in U.S. shale output.

While a roughly 50 percent drop in global oil prices since June last year has helped economies in Asia, it has posed “difficult challenges” for many oil producers, Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said on Tuesday.

“Sudden rises or falls in the cost of oil are not welcome … It’s in all our interests to ensure stable prices,” he said in Beijing.

Geopolitical tension, mainly in Yemen and Syria, and unplanned production outages, including in the North Sea and Brazil, have prompted Barclays to raise its oil price forecast.

The bank raised its Brent forecast by $9 to $60 a barrel for 2015 and by $8 to $68 in 2016. It also raised its WTI price outlook by $8 to $54 a barrel this year and by $7 to $64 for 2016.

Still, it warned in a research note that “the oil market is not out of the woods yet and weak fundamentals will weigh on prevailing bullish market sentiment in the second quarter”.

The two oil benchmarks are sitting just above key technical levels, with Brent above $64-$64.50 and WTI above $56, McCarthy said.

Bets on rising Brent crude prices rose for a fifth straight week to a new record, InterContinental Exchange (ICE) data showed on Monday.

One in six species on earth face extinction from climate change

  

Global temperature rise of four degrees Celsius could spell disaster for a huge number of species around the world

One out of six species faces extinction as a result of climate change and urgent action must be taken to save large numbers of animals from being wiped out, an analysis said Thursday.

The study, published in the US journal Science, found that a global temperature rise of four degrees Celsius could spell disaster for a huge number of species around the world.

“We urgently need to adopt strategies that limit further climate change if we are to avoid an acceleration of global extinction,” said study author Mark Urban, an ecology and evolutionary biology researcher at the University of Connecticut.

The analysis evaluated 131 previous studies about the impact of climate change on flora and fauna around the world.

It concluded that with each rising degree in global temperatures, more species were at risk.

A two degree increase, the study noted, could threaten 5.2 percent of species, while a three degree boost would put 8.5 percent of all species at risk.

“If we follow our current, business-as-usual trajectory (leading to a 4.3 degree Celsius rise)… climate change threatens one in six species (16 percent),” the study said.

Different regions of the world had varied extinction threats.

“Extinction risks were highest in South America, Australia and New Zealand, and risks did not vary by taxonomic group,” Urban said.

In South America, the most vulnerable region, 23 percent of species may face extinction.

Fourteen percent could be threatened in New Zealand and Australia.

Five percent of species in Europe could face extinction, compared to six percent in North America, the study found.

Urban said governments must urgently act to prevent widespread extinction.

“Climate change is poised to accelerate extinctions around the world unless we adopt new strategies to limit it and implement specific conservation strategies to protect the most threatened species,” he said.

Meanwhile, a related study in Science Thursday found that marine fossils can help identify which animals and ocean ecosystems face the greatest risk of extinction.

A team of paleontologists and ecologists looked at marine animals that died out over the past 23 million years.

They found that some groups were more vulnerable than others and the threat varied regionally.

“Whales, dolphins and seals show higher risk of extinction than sharks or invertebrates such as corals. Clams and mussels – so-called bivalves – had about one-tenth the extinction risk of mammals,” the study found.

Regions of the tropics such as the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean were most at risk. Climate change and other human-related activities such as fishing contributed to that vulnerability.

“Climate change and human activities are impacting groups of animals that have a long history, and studying that history can help us condition our expectations for how they might respond today,” said lead author Seth Finnegan, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

But he said more research is needed to protect vulnerable species.

“There is a lot more work that needs to be done to understand the causes underlying these patterns and their policy implications,” he added.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Wednesday 27th 2014

House prices in rest of Ireland rise at fastest rate in last seven years

 

Latest Property Price Index suggests recovery in property is no longer confined to capital

House prices outside Dublin are now rising at their fastest rate for seven years, suggesting recovery in the market is no longer confined to the capital.

The latest official figures show residential property prices outside of Dublin rose by 4.9% in 12 months to July, up from a rate of 3% in June and 1.8% in May.

This is the highest rate of house price inflation recorded outside the capital since 2007.

Despite the acceleration, prices outside Dublin are still on average 43% below their 2007 pre-crash peak.

The Residential Property Price Index, compiled by the Central Statistic Office (CSO), suggests residential prices nationally rose by 2% , and were 13.4% higher on an annual basis.

Dublin accounted for the main bulk of the increases with prices in the capital 23.2% higher than a year ago. However, the 2.7% monthly rise in Dublin prices was slowest rate of increase in three months.

Dublin house prices rose by 2.5% in July and were 23.1% higher compared with a year earlier, while apartment prices in the capital were 26.3% higher on an annual basis.

However, the CSO cautioned that its data for apartments were based on low volume of trades and were subject to a high degree of volatility.

Despite the recovery in values witnessed over the past two years, house prices in Dublin remain on average 41.2% lower than their 2007 peak, while apartments are still 48.4% lower than their boom-time high.

Davy analyst David McNamara said property price inflation was still being driven by cash buyers rather than mortgage lending, as evidenced by the fact that the former accounted for 50% of all transactions.

“With little new supply coming on stream, prices have trended upwards, and this could persist until construction ramps up to meet demand,” he added.

Property Industry Ireland, the group which represents businesses in the property and construction sectors, said the latest set of numbers further highlighted the serious supply problems in the market.

Director Peter Stafford said: “The figures show the real impact of a lack of new supply into the housing market. With no new major housing schemes in urban areas reaching the market, and interest amongst buyers improving, it is not surprising that prices continue to rise so fast, especially in Dublin.”

The Government has pledged to announce measures aimed at boosting supply, particularly in Dublin where pressure on prices is at its strongest.

In addition, the National Asset Management Agency said it plans to invest €1.5 billion to develop housing in Dublin.

Stand-off between evicted OAP couple and security personnel at house

 

‘We were turfed out of that house’ Evicted OAP couple speak outside court in their pyjamas.

The elderly couple evicted from their home in Dublin this morning are being refused access to their home by security personnel inside the house.

The married couple, Martin and Violet Coyne had received permission to remove their possessions from the home in Carpenterstown, west Dublin where they have lived for 15 years as tenants.

However receivers have taken ownership of the house and the couple were removed this morning.

They returned to the house around 7pm this evening but have so far not been granted access to the house by the security personnel inside the house, working on behalf of the receiver.

A large crowd carrying banners and placards in support of the couple has now gathered outside the house.

Pensioners Martin and Violet Coyne left court in tears today after their contempt of court proceedings were adjourned until October.

Earlier, bailiffs acting on an eviction order evicted the pensioners from their rented home in Carpenterstown, Dublin early this morning as they were preparing to appear in court.

Fiachra Daly ‘just tried to dull the pain of a €20k mortgage pressure’  An inquest reveals.

 

“He was a fantastic partner and dad and that is how we will remember him. Nothing can bring him back. Nothing can replace him.”

These were the words of Priory Hall widow Stephanie Meehan following the inquest of her partner Fiachra Daly who took his own life last year while under mounting pressure from banks over their mortgage.

Speaking after yesterday’s inquest into Fiachra’s death, Stephanie said she is still coming to terms with his loss and will always remember him as a loving partner and dad to their two children Oisin (9) and Cerys (3).

During the hearing Stephanie and Fiachra’s families learned that there were significant amounts of alcohol and contaminated cocaine in the 38 year-old’s system when he took his own life in July last year.

The findings shocked them, but today Stephanie said she did not want to see his good name tarnished by the facts that emerged.

“Fiachra’s track record as a partner and a father is impeccable and we can only assume that his use of drugs and alcohol on the night he died was in an effort to dull the pain of what he was about to do,” Stephanie told the Herald.

She had known that Fiachra had some drinks earlier in the day, and had a glass of wine with her after she had returned home from a barbecue with their children. However, Stephanie said she had not known he had cocaine.

“We are shocked to hear these findings about Fiachra and do not want his legacy as a person to be affected by this,” she explained.

“He was a fantastic partner and dad and that is how we will remember him. Nothing can bring him back. Nothing can replace him,” she added.

Despite all her experience with the seemingly endless hell of the Priory Hall debacle, and having tried to come to terms with the sudden death of Fiachra, Stephanie’s thoughts following the inquest were with anyone who might be thinking of ending their own lives.

“We would urge anybody who is thinking of doing what Fiachra did not to go down that road but turn to their family and talk, to seek help,” she said.

“We have found the services of Pieta House to be incredible, and for anybody thinking of taking their own life they need to know there is professional help out there they can get,” Stephanie added.

Fiachra Daly died last July. His body was found by his partner Stephanie.

“It happened completely out of the blue. Everybody was very surprised. He was a very happy, kind person.

“Everyone was equally shocked and still, to this day, are shocked,” she said at yesterday’s inquest.

On the Sunday evening Fiachra was anxious that she should fill out her part of a financial statement for an extension of their mortgage moratorium.

They had to do this “constantly”, she said, but he “seemed more stressed about it than usual”.

“We had gotten a letter earlier on in the week from the bank stating that we were €20,000 in arrears and they couldn’t extend our moratorium unless we completed the statement of means. It annoyed Fiachra that we had a mortgage for a house we couldn’t live in,” she said.

Fiachra’s death was ultimately the tipping point for action on the Priory Hall apartments built in Donaghmede by former IRA hunger striker Tom McFeely.

Having been evacuated from their fire-trap homes in December 2011, the residents were caught in an endless spiral of red tape and court cases about the apartment block.

Following Fiachra’s death, Stephanie wrote to Taoiseach Enda Kenny pleading for help.

She outlined her ordeal and how Fiachra had been a long-time campaigner for a solution to the ongoing Priory Hall problems that affected nearly 300 residents who were evacuated from their homes in 2011.

The on-going battle was then quickly resolved, with Dublin City Council agreeing to take control of the complex and refurbish it. Residents were then allowed to have their mortgages written off.

Last winter 2013/14 the stormiest in 143 years for Ireland

  

We in Ireland along with the UK weathered the stormiest winter in 143 years last year, scientists have now confirmed.

Climatologists at NUI Maynooth have identified the winter of 2013/2014 as the stormiest in 143 years for Ireland and the UK.

The research by Dr Tom Matthews, Dr Conor Murphy and Shaun Harrigan from NUI Maynooth’s Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units (ICARUS), together with Prof. Rob Wilby of Loughborough University (UK), used long-running atmospheric datasets to characterise winter storminess over the North Atlantic for the last 66 years and as far back as winter 1871-1872 for Ireland and the UK.

“The results indicated that last winter was the stormiest in the 66 year record across the North Atlantic due to the unprecedented strength and number of cyclones over the mid- and high-latitude North Atlantic respectively,” a staement for the college said today.

Frequency and intensity

For Ireland and the UK, although previous winters experienced more storms (e.g. 1914-1915, the first winter of World War 1), and storms that were, on average, more intense during the late 1980s to early 1990s, no year in the 143 year record had a winter as severe as 2013-2014 when both the frequency and intensity of storms are combined.

Dr Tom Matthews said: “Inspired by the severe weather we experienced last winter we decided to assess the extent to which these conditions were unusual in the long-term context.

“This is an important task as such destructive weather events are of tremendous societal significance as we saw last winter in both Ireland and the UK.

“Cyclones typically form over the North Atlantic Ocean and travel east toward Ireland and the UK. The number and intensity of cyclones experienced each year has a significant influence on the amount of rainfall and extreme wind speeds.”

The research is published in the September 2014 issue (Volume 4) of Nature Climate Change Journal.

Fota Wildlife saves three frog species from extinction

  

A frog called the mountain chicken (because it’s hunted as food), a type of salamander and the Morelet’s leaf frog are some of the species to avoid extinction thanks to Fota Wildlife Park in Cork.

The British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) has published a list of the top 10 reptiles and amphibians to benefit from the aid of its members in Ireland and the UK.

Three residents of Fota Wildlife Park’s Tropical House – the mountain chicken, axolotl and the Morelet’s leaf frog – have all made it on to the list.

The mountain chicken, the world’s biggest frog, got its name as it is commonly hunted for food.

The axolotl is a critically endangered amphibian which retains its tadpole like appearance as an adult and has an extraordinary ability to regenerate limbs.

Meanwhile, the Morelet’s leaf frog has the ability to parachute between trees.

The Komodo dragon, with less than 1,000 left in the wild, also makes the list and one of the most sought after reptiles in the illegal pet trade, the ploughshare tortoise, also makes the list as does a UK species, the sand lizard.

Dr Andrew Marshall, of BIAZA’s field programmes committee, said: “Zoos are part of a global conservation community.

“Last year, BIAZA published a report of the top 10 mammals most reliant on zoos, which highlighted the work being done by zoos to help safeguard their future.

“This year, we have focused on 10 prevailing examples of reptiles and amphibians that zoos are working to save from extinction. The list includes some fantastic species, many of which are facing a dramatic decline and are in a desperate situation in the wild.

TV presenter and naturalist Nick Baker, who is backing this year’s top 10 campaign to raise awareness of the species, said: “Zoos and aquariums have a very important role in this whole thing – at the scariest level they are the Ark.

“They are where the insurance populations of these animals can be looked after and understood and studied.”

He added: “As much as BIAZA are very important in holding the ark population, they are also very important in being that interface between these animals and the public.”

He said zoos helped people appreciate species which might not have an instant appeal to the masses, as they are not furry, and were using money from visitors and applying it “directly to try and give these creatures a happy ending”.

BIAZA’s top 10 reptiles and amphibians most reliant on zoos are:

:: Axolotl – a critically endangered amphibian that looks like a tadpole even as an adult and can regenerate limbs;

:: Golden mantella – a bright yellow frog that attracts a mate by clicking, not croaking, and will try to eat anything it can fit in its mouth;

:: Komodo dragon – the world’s largest living lizard with males growing up to 3 metres and females able to reproduce on their own if necessary;

:: Lemur leaf frog – a small frog which, at 3-4cm could fit on the end of a finger, has seen its range and population fall 80% in recent years;

:: Morelet’s leaf frog – a striking lime-green frog with a pink or orange underbelly and wide webbing between their toes which lets them parachute between trees;

:: Mountain chicken – one of the largest frogs in the world, which gets its name as it is commonly hunted for food;

:: Orange-tailed skink – a beautifully coloured and highly endangered skink which would be extinct without the help of zoos;

:: Ploughshare tortoise – one of the most sought after reptiles in the illegal pet trade and which can live up to 100 years;

:: Round Island boa – one of the few snakes that can change its colour;

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Wednesday 9th July 2014

The Members of Ireland’s banking inquiry advisory group now announced

 

Group of public and private sector banking specialists will assist our Oireachtas Committe.

The Advisory Group will assist the Oireachtas committee in its proposal for the banking inquiry.

UCD economist Colm McCarthy, comptroller and auditor general Seamus McCarthy, and US economist Megan Greene are three of the nine members of the ad-hoc advisory group announced today to assist in the impending banking inquiry.

The group, which will work on a pro-bono basis, will assist the Oireachtas Banking Inquiry committee in preparing a detailed proposal for the banking inquiry for submission to the CPPs of both Houses by September 17th 2014.

The other members of the group are: Pat Casey, principal officer (Department of Finance);Paul Gorecki, adjunct professor of economics, Trinity College Dublin (Research Affiliate ESRI); Cathal Guiomard, economist, former Aviation Commissioner for Ireland; Conor McCabe, research fellow, UCD School of Social Justice; Rafique Mottiar, consultant economist (Central Bank); and John Shaw, assistant secretary (Department of the Taoiseach).

Committee chairman Ciarán Lynch said that the group had its first meeting yesterday when members were briefed on the work of the committee and the legal and procedural framework for the inquiry. There was also a preliminary discussion on the potential scope of the inquiry.

The group will meet again on Friday July 11th, Friday July 18th and Tuesday July 22nd and an interim report will be given to the committee at its meeting on Wednesday July 23rd.

The Committee also examined potential costs and administrative and logistical issues in relation to the inquiry.

Deputy Lynch said: “A key issue for members is that expenditure related to the inquiry should be kept to a minimum and that the operation of the inquiry should at all times be cost effective, efficient and reasonable and the Committee will keep estimates of costs under continued review.”

Too few people testing  for radon in Irish homes

  

Some 181 homes with high levels of the cancer-causing gas, radon, have been detected in Ireland in the past eight months, including four homes which had levels that were 10-22 times over the acceptable limit, the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII) has said.

Radon, a naturally occurring radioactive gas present in all rocks and soils, is classified as a class A carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. When it surfaces in the open air, it is quickly diluted to harmless concentrations. However, when it enters an enclosed space, such as a house, it can sometimes build up to high concentrations, leading to an ‘unacceptable health risk’.

After smoking, long-term exposure to radon gas in the home is the greatest single cause of lung cancer in Ireland. The gas is linked to around 250 cancer deaths here every year.

According to the RPII, four homes were found to have very high radon levels of between 10 and 22 times the acceptable limit. Two of these houses were in Galway, one in Sligo and one in Wexford.

“The families living in these homes would have received a radiation dose equivalent to up to 15 chest x-rays every day,” the RPII noted.

Altogether, almost 1,200 homeowners had their homes tested for radon over the last eight months, however Dr Ann McGarry, chief executive of the RPII, believes this figure is ‘very low’.

“Our research indicates that there are over 91,000 Irish homes with high levels of radon and, so far, only about 8,000 of these have been identified. Many families are unnecessarily being exposed to high levels of radon in their home and they just don’t know it. All people have to do is take this simple test to see if their home contains radon and if so it’s easily fixed,” she said.

  In addition to the four homes with particularly high radon levels, a further 25 homes were found to have radon levels that were up to 10 times above acceptable limits. These were located in Galway (8), Wexford (5), Kerry (4), Mayo (2), Sligo (2), Waterford (2), Tipperary (1) and Dublin (1).

Meanwhile Dr McGarry also pointed out that just one in four homeowners who did test and discover a high reading, ‘have taken action to reduce the high level of radon present’.

“That means three-quarters of homeowners are living with the knowledge that they are putting their family at risk when the problem can easily be fixed,” she said.

In order to test for radon, a detector should be placed in a bedroom and a second detector should be placed in a living room for a three-month period. These detectors are available from the RPII and a number of private companies. They are sent and returned by post for analysis. Nobody needs to come to your home.

The cost of a measurement by the RPII is around €50.

If a moderate radon level is found, improving your home’s indoor ventilation may cut this by up to half. The cost of this is low. If higher levels are found, installation of a fan assisted sump is the most common method of remediation. This can reduce radon levels by over 90%.

The sump can be installed in one day by a contractor, with little disruption to the home. The typical cost of this work is around €850, with annual running costs of around €100 depending on the size of fan installed.

An interactive map is available on the RPII website here to allow you to see if you are in a high radon area. Alternatively, more information is available on 1800 300 600.

Aer Lingus moves operations to Terminal 2 in Heathrow London

 

Passengers to enjoy shorter walking distances and quicker transfer times

Aer Lingus currently operates 48 flights in and out of Heathrow Airport.

Passengers travelling to London Heathrow with Aer Linguswill enjoy shorter walking distances and quicker transfer times after the airline moves to Terminal 2 today.

All 48 Aer Lingus flights per day to and from Dublin, Cork, Shannon and Belfast City airports will now operate out of the new €3 billion terminal, known as the Queen’s Terminal, which opened last month.

The “gate to kerb” time will be 50 per cent less than before, while transfers to other flights will be “seamless”, the airline said.

New flight connections will also be made possible through the same terminal with a number of partner airlines, including United Airlines and Air Canada.

Transport links will be easier too. The Heathrow Express is accessible from beside the arrivals hall, with Paddington Station a 15-minute ride away.

The new Aer Lingus check-in desk is located inside the main departures area in Zone C. The airline is the third-largest operator at Heathrow, and is one of 26 making the move to Terminal 2.

The terminal has 52 shops and 17 bars and restaurants. A new Aer Lingus lounge for business class and Gold Circle customers is 50 per cent larger than the original, with showers, meeting rooms and a quiet area.

How to manage ewes successfully post weaning time in Ireland

 

Appropriate ewe management post-weaning is critical to ensure a successful drying off and ensuring that the ewes will be back in optimum body condition before the next mating season.

Teagasc advises farmers to dry the ewes off by restricting intake for a week to 10 days. It says a bare field is ideal for this job. If the ewes are being housed, then pay particular attention to bedding/hygiene to avoid mastitis. Once the drying off procedure has been carried out, the ewes should be condition scored and divided into groups based on their condition scores. Every farm should have a minimum of two groups of dry ewes.

The first group, which will be the ewes that are in a body condition score of less than 3.5, should receive preferential treatment so that they put on weight.

The second group will be the fatter ewes that are in body condition score of 3.5 and over and these should be managed to maintain or even lose a small bit of weight until the flushing period in the last two to three weeks prior to mating.

Teagasc advise that ewes that do not respond to additional feed in terms of putting on additional liveweight should be culled.

Grassland management

June and July are the most challenging months in terms of keeping grass leafy and highly digestible, according to Teagasc.

It says lamb performance will be maximised where lambs are allowed to preferentially graze paddocks with a grass height of between 6cm and 8cm. Once lambs are moved out of swards, it is essential that they are grazed out fully to maintain grass quality into August/September.

Because the lambs will be moved out at around 6cm, Teagasc advise that it is necessary to get other stock to graze out the sward fully (down to 4cm). Weaned ewes are ideal to clean out these swards. If there is no stock on the farm that can do this job, then the sward will need to be mowed/ topped down to 4-5cm.

Ginger haired people face extinction due to sunshine, scientists now say

  

Gingers could be facing extinction as the red hair gene – thought to be a response to cloudy weather in Ireland and Scotland – is predicted to die out with climate change.

A gene mutation that yields red hair and pale skin which is more sensitive to light leaves DNA in skill cells more prone to sun damage and cancer, and if predictions of rising temperatures are correct evolution might cause it to regress.

Dr Alistair Moffat, managing director of Galashiels-based ScotlandsDNA, said: “We think red hair in Scotland, Ireland and in the North of England is adaption to the climate.

“I think the reason for light skin and red hair is that we do not get enough sun and we have to get all the Vitamin D we can.

“If the climate is changing and it is to become more cloudy or less cloudy then this will affect the gene.

“If it was to get less cloudy and there was more sun, then yes, there would be fewer people carrying the gene.

Only 1-2% of the world’s population have red hair, though in Ireland about 10% are ginger, but it is reported that a staggering 46% are carriers of the red-head variants.

In Scotland 13% of the population are ginger and 40% are thought to carry the gene.

Another scientist, who did not wish to be named due to the theoretical nature of the work, told ScotlandNow: “I think the regressive gene is slowly dying out.

“Climate change could see a decline in the number of people with red hair in Scotland.

“It would take many hundreds of years for this to happen.

“Red hair and blue eyes are not adapted to a warm climate.

“It is just a theory but the recessive gene may likely be lost. The recessive gene could be in danger.”