News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 15th January 2017

Irish mortgage rates still nearly double the euro area average?

Variable rate holders continue to pay price for profligate bank lending during boom years

   

Irish mortgage interest rates remain nearly double the euro area average, according to data published by the Central Bank last Friday.

The weighted average interest rate on new mortgages, excluding renegotiation’s, was 3.38% in November, down 28 basis points year-on-year. The equivalent euro area rate was 1.72%.

Mortgage interest rates in Ireland used to reflect the main European Central Bank (ECB) lending rate, primarily because of the high proportion of tracker mortgages issued during the boom years.

The more recent divergence reflects the premium Irish banks have attached to variable rate mortgages issued since the start of the financial crisis.

Lenders here have resisted political pressure to lower their rates, insisting that lending into to Irish market represents a riskier proposition.

They also argue that Irish costs remain higher because of the higher funding costs they face as a result of the crisis.

Variable rates can rise or fall depending on wholesale interest rates, which are set by the ECB, though banks are not obliged to pass these changes on to customers.

Fianna Fáil is pushing for legislation that would give the Central Bank powers to cap variable mortgage rates, a move that is being resisted by the Central Bank and the Government.

The latest Central Bank data also show the volume of new mortgage agreements amounted to €548 million in November, bringing new agreements to €4.9 billion over the past 12 months.

Oxfam World report reveals ‘an obscene gap’ between the rich and poor.

Eight men’s wealth same as world’s poorest 50%, indicates study ahead of Davos forum

    

The gap between rich and poor is becoming increasingly large, with just eight individuals owning the same wealth as 3.6 billion of the world’s poorest people, according to new research.

A report from Oxfam, launched on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, found that the poorest half of the world has less wealth than previously thought, due to new data emanating from China and India. This means that the eight richest men in the world are worth the same as the poorest half of the world’s population, according to wealth distribution data provided by Credit Suisse.

“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of just eight men . . . particularly when one in nine people in the world go to bed hungry every night,” said Oxfam Ireland chief executive Jim Clarke. “A fundamental change in the way we manage our economies is required so they benefit everyone, not just a fortunate few. We need a global economy for the 99%, not just the 1%.”

More than 3,000 participants, including Taoiseach Enda Kenny, will descend on the snowy peaks of Davos, Switzerland, this week for the 47th World Economic Forum.

While the annual gathering has long been seen as a playground for the rich and powerful, the event this year is taking place against a background of resurgent populism and increasing public opposition to globalisation. This mood has been manifested in the election success of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union.

Although the US president-elect will not be attending the event, his inauguration as president of the US on Friday is expected to overshadow the summit. A number of sessions during the week are devoted to globalisation and the challenges posed by growing inequality and the question of wealth distribution. The theme of this year’s forum is “Responsive and Responsible Leadership”, a barely veiled acknowledgement of anxieties about the incoming regime in Washington and the series of elections scheduled to take place across Europe in 2017.

Xi Jinping Keynote address.

Among the most high-profile participants this year is Chinese premier Xi Jinping, who will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday. His presence marks the first visit to Davos by a Chinese leader.

British prime minister Theresa May will deliver a special address on Thursday morning, two days after she is expected to unveil details of her government’s vision for Brexit in a major speech.

British chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond will be in Davos on Friday, when he is expected to do a series of interviews and participate in a session titled “Britain and the EU: The Way Forward” with the former Italian prime minister and EU commissioner Mario Monti and others.

While more than 50 heads of state and government will travel to the exclusive Swiss ski resort, some of the world’s most senior banking and corporate executives will also attend the five-day event.

Among the economic heavy-hitters in attendance will be Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, as well as senior executives from the world’s biggest banks, such as UBS, Goldman Sachs and Deutschebank.

One familiar face on the Davos circuit, the Goldman Sachs chief operating officer Gary Cohn, won’t be present this time. He’s likely to be busy preparing to become Donald Trump’s new chairman of the National Economic Council.

Senior officials from Trump’s transition team will attend the event, however, and are expected to hold a series of bilateral meetings with senior political leaders, including possibly Xi Jinping, on the fringes of the event.

Outgoing US vice-president Joe Biden will address the summit on Wednesday, while US Secretary of State John Kerry will also attend the forum, undoubtedly one of his final official engagements of the Obama presidency.

Gaybo (Gay Byrne) hopes for best in battle against prostate cancer?

‘He is doing well. The treatment is ongoing’

    

Left Pic. Broadcaster Gay Byrne, with wife Kathleen, right pic. the old, the middle & the new L.L.S. hosts. Gay remains positive despite being diagnosed with prostate cancer

Ireland’s most-loved broadcaster Gay Byrne is upbeat and positive as he comes to terms with his cancer diagnosis, telling the Sunday Independent: “The treatment continues and we hope for the best.”

Gay was his usual sanguine self as he talked about his illness – echoing the thoughts of millions of well-wishers up and down the country who hope for his return to the airwaves in full health.

Last November, with typical understatement, Gay revealed to shocked listeners on RTE’s Lyric FM the disheartening news that he was suffering from cancer.

“I shall not be with our listeners on this day next week. Have to go to hospital… They think they may have discovered a bit of cancer in the prostate and they think it may have moved up into my back.

“I’ve had the most wonderful, fantastic, robust, good health all my broadcasting life,” he said in usual breezy style during his enormously popular show on the classical radio station.

“It’s my turn now… many, many people much worse off. Thank you for your good wishes,” he signed off.

Now, nearly three months on, Gay is in the throes of cancer treatment, but he is tough and resilient and well aware that he is undergoing the same difficulties endured by so many who are touched by the disease in this country.

And he is aware that prostate cancer is very treatable and the chances of a favourable outcome are quite high.

In short, Gay is not feeling sorry for himself but ongoing medical treatment obviously interrupted the usual Christmas and New Year celebrations – a favourite time of year for the couple who were married in 1964.

“Everything is on hold while we do our best to look after Gay,” his wife Kathleen Watkins told the Sunday Independent yesterday.

“He is doing well. The treatment is ongoing. Do thank the many people all over the country who have been in touch,” Kathleen requested.

“We got all the notes and letters and cards. We read all of them. Thank you. Thank you to all those kind people.It’s so much appreciated.”

The broadcasting legend is being looked after by his devoted wife at their home in Ballsbridge and there is lots of help and encouragement from the family – as well as the good wishes of an entire nation.

Local Property Tax in Sligo has highest compliance rate of almost 97% in Ireland

    

There was a compliance rate of 96.8% with the Local Property Tax in Sligo in 2016 according to the figures just released by Revenue.

The national compliance rate is is estimated at 97% which is in line with previous years.

Revenue, which oversees its collection, say some €5.3 million was collected through the tax in county Sligo last year from almost 30,000 properties. Laois and South Dublin had the highest compliance rate in the country at 99.8%.

The vast majority of householders in County Sligo (43.8%) valued their homes in the lowest bracket of up to €100,000 with 32.1% valuing their houses up to €150,000 and 16.4 falling into the €150,001 to €200,000 category. Just 1.5% valued their homes at over €300,000 and a further 1.5% were in the €250,001 to €300,000 bracket. Approximately 42% of property owners self-assessed the same valuation band as the Revenue estimate and 58% of property owners self-assessed a different LPT valuation band compared to Revenue.

LPT Exchequer receipts in 2016 (at end December) are €463m. This includes approximately €50m in pre-payments for 2017 LPT as well as €70m in payments for 2015 LPT and earlier years. Exchequer receipts also include Household Charge (HHC) arrears. Revenue assumed responsibility for the collection of arrears of HHC from July 2013. By end 2016 in excess of €64m was collected (including nearly €8m in 2016) and over 360,000 additional properties are now HHC compliant.

For 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 Revenue issued 212,000, 148,000 and 324,000 and 300,000 compliance letters respectively. In the vast majority of these cases property owners fully complied with their LPT payment obligations, either on a phased basis or by way of a single payment. However, in each year there were a relatively small number of cases that chose to remain non-compliant,

Revenue say it left them with no alternative but to deploy debt collection/enforcement measures or other sanctions to ensure payment. Some 864 cases were referred to the Sheriff in 2016 and 40 cases to external solicitors for collection. Over 20,300 tax clearance requests were refused on foot of LPT non-compliance, of which almost 97% were subsequently granted clearance following mutually acceptable payment solutions.

Revenue deducted LPT from the salaries or pensions of almost 89,000 property owners last year of which over 49,000 ‘rolled over’ from mandatory deductions applied in 2015. Over 11,000 valuations were also increased in 2016 following Revenue compliance interventions.

The BT Young Scientist exhibition category winners

All the winners in each section of 2016 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition

    

Right picture the overall BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year 2017 Shane Curran from Terenure College.

And above left picture:- Shay Walsh, managing director BT Ireland (left) and Minister for Education Richard Bruton (right), with Matthew Blakeney and Mark McDermott of the Jesus & Mary Secondary School, Sligo, runners-up at the BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year 2017 with their project Flint on the Moy?

The winners in each category of the 2016 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition have been announced.

1st place Junior group Kinsale Community School, Impact of sound pitch on the biological gustatory perception mechanism, a quantitative comparative study between adults and children.

Biological and Ecological Junior Group Caoimhe Lynch , Sylvie Plant

2nd place Junior group Loreto College – Foxrock, Does Simulating a Lack of Binocular Vision Have An Impact on performance?

Biological and Ecological Junior Group, Jessica Oakley O’Kelly, Margot Moore, Jennifer Leavy

3rd place Junior group St Mary’s Diocesan School, 40 Licks ( trying to determine if being weaned onto certain foods as a baby can effect your development into a super-taster) Biological and Ecological Junior Group Seb Lennon Calum Agnew

1st place Junior individual Christ King Girls Secondary School, An investigation on whether cereal is a healthy breakfast option for Children Biological and Ecological Junior Individual Romy Kolich

2nd place Junior individual Bandon Grammar School, A novel approach to growing Nannochloropsis in a controlled environment and it’s subsequent ability to produce oil Biological and Ecological Junior Individual Gregory Tarr

3rd place Junior individual Sandford Park School Ltd, Time as a variable in bread production Biological and Ecological Junior Individual Oscar Despard

1st place intermediate group Loreto Secondary School – Balbriggan, Does consuming certain varieties of potatoes as a staple food in a diet, increase blood glucose levels & chance of high blood pressure and diabetes in a sample of Rush residents Biological and Ecological Intermediate Group Sophie Weldon Laura Weldon Emma Kleiser Byrne

2nd place intermediate group Tullamore College , Investigating The Difference In Bacterial Contamination When Handling and Using a Device to Insert Contact Lenses Biological and Ecological Intermediate Group Lucy Leonard Michele Mann

3rd place intermediate Group Avondale Community College, Biodegradable plastic pots to minimise the effects of transplant shock. Biological and Ecological Intermediate Group Ayyub Azmat Niall Gaffeny Christopher Makin.

1st place intermediate individual Ardscoil Ris ‘To Bee or not to Bee’: Investigating solutions to falling bee populations using a multifaceted problem solving approach. Biological and Ecological Intermediate Individual David Hamilton

2nd place intermediate individual Colaiste Choilm, Investigating the use of natural plants oils and extracts as an antiproliferative cancer agents. Biological and Ecological Intermediate Individual Aivan Jose

3rd place intermediate individual Bandon Grammar School, A comparison of foot biomechanics in sport playing and non-sport playing teens Biological and Ecological Intermediate Individual Alex O’ Connor

1st place Senior group Midleton College , Foal sickness containment and prevention Biological and Ecological Senior Group Cathal Mariga George Hennessy

2nd place Senior group Loreto Secondary School – Balbriggan, To investigate whether contrast sensitivity can be improved from regular exposure to action video games and the impact on everyday tasks on a teenager with myopia Biological and Ecological Senior Group Chloe Tap Dagmara Dobkowska

3rd place Senior group St Joseph’s Secondary School, Stimulating plant growth using electricity Biological and Ecological Senior Group Niamh McHugh Vitalija Janusonyte

1st place Senior individual Our Ladys College – Drogheda, The Antimicrobial Potential of Tree Bark Extracts Biological and Ecological Senior Individual Niamh Ann Kelly

2nd place Senior individual Coláiste Choilm, An Investigation into the Application of Symsagittera roscoffensis & it’s symbiont Tetraselmis convolutae in Neurobiology and Biotechnology. Biological and Ecological Senior Individual Con Moran

3rd place Senior individual Scoil Mhuire Strokestown , An investigation into the quality of effluent discharging domestic waste water treatment systems (septic tanks) and an apparatus to improve this. Biological and Ecological Senior Individual Abbie Moloney

1st place Junior group Synge Street CBS, Generalisations of Feynman’s Triangle Theorem Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences Junior Group Carl Jones Keiron O’Neill

2nd place Junior group Synge Street CBS, New Conjectures Concerning the Partition Function Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences Junior Group Talha Moktar Abdulrhman Abouryana

3rd place Junior group Sutton Park School, The design and testing of a safe drinking water system for developing countries Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences Junior Group Xiangyu Carbon Mallol Méabh Scahill

A huge glacier crack in the Antarctic ice shelf widens dramatically

 

A huge chunk of Antarctic ice is hanging on by a virtual thread. At the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a glacier is cracking from the inside out at an alarming speed. That’s scary because this glacier, and others like it, keep the ice from flowing into the sea, where it would raise sea levels by several feet.

The ice shelf in danger is known as Larsen C. British researchers who are monitoring the crack in this ice shelf believe that only about 12 miles now connect the chunk of ice to the rest of the continent. You can see more images of this ice crack here.

“After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km [11 miles] during the second half of December 2016,” wrote Adrian Luckman in a statement from the MIDAS Project, which is monitoring changes in the area.

Luckman, a professor at Swansea University in Wales, and head of the MIDAS Project, is referring to a crack that has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When that fissure finally reaches the far side of the shelf, British scientists believe that an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off. The ice shelf itself is almost the size of Scotland, and the fourth largest of its kind in Antarctic. The piece that it is getting ready to break off is nearly 2,000 square miles in size.

It’s true that icebergs break off from ice sheets in the Antarctic on a fairly regular basis, but this one is especially significant because of its size, and because it shows that the ice retreat is happening farther inland than scientists had previously observed.

What Could Happen After This Break?

What will happen next? Scientists are uncertain. But the consequences of the break could be dramatic.

“When it calves, the Larsen C Ice Shelf will lose more than 10 percent of its area to leave the ice front at its most retreated position ever recorded; this event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” said the MIDAS researchers in a statement about the rift.

The First Time In Over 12,000 Years and this could be part of a broader pattern for ice shelves.

It’s the latest sign of major ice loss in the fast warming Antarctic Peninsula, which has already seen the breakup of two other shelves in the same region, events that have been widely attributed to climate change. Larsen A collapsed in 1995, and much of Larsen B collapsed dramatically in 2002. Scientists have revealed that this is probably not something that has happened in the past 12,000 years or possibly, even more alarmingly, in more than 100,000 years.

So, Antarctica has lost ice shelves before, but none so huge as this one.

The iceberg resulting from this crack will not in itself raise sea levels, but if this ice shelf breaks up even more, that would have an impact on sea levels. Experts believe that if all the ice that the Larsen C shelf currently holds back entered the sea, global waters would rise by around four inches.

Antarctica is geographically a long way from most of us, but what happens there could be an indication of what’s happening with our planet Earth.

Is Climate Change To Blame?

The Project MIDAS group has not made any statement attributing the development at Larsen C to climate change, but has stated that the shelf would be “at its most retreated position ever recorded,” which suggests the possibility of climate change being the cause for this crack.

Previous research has also noted that the Larsen C ice shelf is becoming less thick, making it float lower in the water, which appears linked to the warming of the Antarctic Peninsula in recent decades.

Meanwhile, scientists wait for the anticipated break. Luckman told the BBC that “If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed.”

But there are few certainties right now apart from an imminent change to the outline of Antarctica’s icy coast. “The eventual consequences might be the ice shelf collapsing in years to decades,” said Luckman.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Thursday 27th October 2016

KBC cuts mortgage interest rates for new and existing customers

Both fixed and variable rates to be reduced, with possible savings of more than €23,000

    

Existing customers of KBC will only be able to apply for the revised mortgage interest rate after submitting an up-to-date valuation of their property by an approved valuer.

KBC Bank Ireland is to cut fixed and variable mortgage interest rates by between 0.1% and 0.6% for both new and existing customers.

The bank, which has previously been criticised for only passing on rate cuts to new customers, said the revised rates varied depending on the mortgage amount relative to the value of the home.

While the bank has reduced some of its rates, it is not cutting back its standard variable rate, which remains high at 4.25%.

KBC said that along with the new rate cuts it is also offering €2,000 towards professional fees for switchers, movers, first-time buyers and buy-to-let investors. In addition, it has extended its 50% offer of home insurance for new mortgage customers until the end of the year.

The bank said under the new rates, an existing customer with a €250,000 mortgage balance on a standard variable rate at 4.25% and 20 years remaining and a loan-to-value (LTV) of between 80% and 90% could save €98.19 per month and €23,565 over the term of the mortgage by availing of the reduced LTV variable rate of 3.50%.

A similar customer could also increase their savings in year 1 to €174.01 per month and €25,261 over the term by availing of the one-year fixed rate of 2.90%, the bank said.

Valuation

New mortgage customers will be able to avail of the new rates from the start of November. Existing customers will able to apply for the revised rate from early December but only after submitting an up-to-date valuation of their property by an approved valuer.

KBC has also announced a new limited offer promising what it said was the lowest personal loan rate currently available of over €10,000 at 6.3% annual percentage rate (APR).

Investec chief economist Phlip O’Sullivan said he expected the impact of both political pressure and rate cuts by the likes of KBC to feed through to similar 25 basic point cuts in lending rates by the rest of the major Irish mortgage providers during the fourth quarter.

He said downward pressure would likely remain on mortgage pricing next year, particularly with niche new entrants to the Irish market such as Frank Money expected to offer rates below 3%.

Mr O’Sullivan said he expects Permanent TSB and Bank of Ireland will continue to only focus on cutting rates for new customers to protect income from existing loans.

FF deputies vote against Government over blocking abortion Bill

Dáil approves Government amendment that blocks proposed AAA-PBP legislation

   

Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit TDs Ruth Coppinger and Bríd Smith: “The key point is we must keep women’s bodies out of the Constitution.”

Five Fianna Fáil TDs voted against a Government amendment that blocked a Bill to allow a referendum on abortion.

The Dáil approved the amendment by 96 votes to 47 and blocked the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit (AAA-PBP) Bill from being read a second time. Sinn Féin, Labour, the Green Party and the Social Democrats voted with the AAA-PBP.

Cork North-Central TD Billy Kelleher, Limerick TD Niall Collins, Mayo TD Lisa Chambers, Kildare South TD Fiona O’Loughlin and Clare TD Timmy Dooley voted against the Government amendment on the issue.

Party whip and Cork North-West TD Michael Moynihan abstained, as did Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan. A majority of Fianna Fáil’s deputies voted with the Government. The party had allowed its TDs a free vote on the issue.

The dissenting party members supported the Bill which had been introduced by Dublin West TD Ruth Coppinger and Dublin South-Central TD Bríd Smith. It proposes a referendum to remove from the Constitution the equal right to life of the mother and the unborn.

A free vote?

However, an amendment agreed between the Fine Gael and Independent Alliance coalition Government prevented a vote on the legislation, the 35th Amendment of the Constitution (Repeal of the Eighth Amendment) Bill.

Independent Alliance members insisted on a free vote on abortion and to avoid another bitter split in Cabinet, Fine Gael and the Independents in Government agreed a deal, after late night talks, preventing a vote on abortion.

The Citizens’ Assembly established by Taoiseach Enda Kenny to discuss abortion will report back to an Oireachtas committee in June next year and make recommendations.

The Government motion gives the Oireachtas committee an additional six months after the assembly reports to complete its deliberations. This means there will be no referendum on abortion before 2018 at the earliest.

A division in the Cabinet ensued in July on a Bill to allow abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, when Independent Alliance Ministers insisted on a free vote.

Bodily autonomy

During the Dáil debate on the Bill on Tuesday night, AAA-PBP TD Ruth Coppinger said the Dáil and the electorate were very clear that Fine Gael and the Independent Alliance were, in effect, opposing the repeal of the Eighth Amendment.

“What will enrage many women and young people is that Independents, who were elected on a platform of repealing the amendment, are now buckling under a whip and kicking this issue to touch,’’ she said.

Ms Coppinger said the issue was about bodily autonomy. “The key point is we must keep women’s bodies out of the Constitution,’’ she said.

Ms Smith said the public was angry that the Taoiseach and Ministers had let women down.

Minister for Health Simon Harris said during the debate that the issue cannot be answered “with one word or three words or one Bill”.

He said the Citizens’ Assembly should be allowed to conclude its deliberations and make its recommendations.

“Tabling a referendum Bill is the easy part,” he said. “Telling the Irish people what would replace that constitutional amendment in law or elsewhere is the difficult work we have to do.”

Fracking ban gains ground after Fianna Fáil opposes delay to legislation

   

Attempts to get the Government to ban fracking look set to pass their first hurdle, it has emerged.

Legislation put forward by Fine Gael backbench TD Tony McLoughlin was due to be put on hold for at least eight months to allow for an independent report on the controversial gas extraction to be completed.

But the proposal may progress more quickly after Fianna Fáil refused to support the delay.

Mr McLoughlin’s legislation had been accepted by Government this week but it attempted to add a clause to stop it from further parliamentary scrutiny until after June 30 next year, potentially delaying an outright ban until 2018.

The TD for Sligo Leitrim, one of the three regions identified for potential shale gas exploration, sought to ban energy companies from using high-pressure water and other additives to extract raw fuels from rocks, sands and coal seams.

The legislation will be brought before the Dáil later today.

It is understood the Government cancelled proposals to stall the legislation until next June after Fianna Fáil warned it would not vote in favour of any delay.

Oisin Coghlan, director of Friends of the Earth Ireland, had expressed concern that the Government was trying to slow the reform.

“I hope that reports Fine Gael will now drop their motion to delay the bill to ban fracking are true,” he said.

“On the day the Dáil voted to ratify the Paris Agreement Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Fine Gael risk being on the wrong side of history.

“All party agreement tonight to progress the bill without delay would be a sign that Ireland is finally getting serious about climate action.”

If the legislation progresses it will be the first step in enforcing a nationwide ban on fracking and it will give the Government 12 weeks before it goes before further parliamentary scrutiny.

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, involves drilling into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is forced into rock to release gas.

Three exploratory licences were granted in Ireland but no extraction has taken place.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) commissioned a report on the impact of the controversial gas extraction on the environment and human health. It is due in the coming months.

Eamon Scanlon, Fianna Fáil TD for Sligo-Leitrim, said the Government was trying to push the legislation back for at least a year.

“It said it wanted to wait for the EPA to report. There are many people I’ve spoken to in relation to fracking who have no confidence in the EPA report,” he said.

“We were supporting the Bill as it was. There was no question about that.

“And I would like to see a ban in the next year.”

New CSO figures reveal the new health state of our nation

  

New CSO census figures have highlighted the new birth rates and the main causes of death in Ireland.

The latest Central Statistic Office (CSO) figures have revealed how the nation’s birth rate has stalled while fewer people are dying.

The new data showed how there were 67,295 children born in Ireland during 2014, down 1,659 from 2013.

The CSO said this is the lowest number of births since 2006 when there were 65,425 births.

The birth rate was 14.6 per 1,000 of the population in 2014 compared to 15.0 in 2013 and 15.3 in 2004.

It also emerged that teen pregnancies are down over 50% compared to 10 years ago while births to mothers over 40 surged by over 70%.

The figures showed just 1,296 births were registered to women under the age of 20 in 2014.

The figure stood at 2,493 in 2004.

In fact, it emerged the average age of mothers is rising with the typical new Irish mothers now aged 30.5 years old compared to 28.5 years old 12 years ago.

Death rates

The “Vital Statistics Annual Report 2014″ by the CSO also revealed that circulatory and respiratory conditions are still some of the biggest killers on the island.

Heart problems accounted for 8,852 deaths while respiratory illness killed 3,492 in 2014.

The CSO said there were 29,252 deaths in Ireland in 2014, of which 14,897 were men and 14,355 were women.

The death rate for 2014 stood at 6.3 deaths per 1,000 total population, slightly lower than the 6.4 recorded in 2013.

Royal College of Surgeons advises doctors to let patients decide on treatment options

   

The Royal College of Surgeons has advised doctors to let patients choose whether or not to undergo medical treatments in new consent guidance.

According to the guidance, doctors must now outline every risk of the procedure that may be significant to the patient along with other treatment options.

The guidance adds that in cases where patients ’choose to refuse treatment and this path is potentially dangerous or fatal, surgeons must respect the patient’s decision.’

Intending to replace the ’paternalistic’ approach to consent with a ’patient-centred perspective’ the RCS guidelines says surgeons are ‘no longer the sole arbiter of determining what risks are material to their patients’.

The RCS warns that if these changes to how doctors obtain consent are not made, NHS trusts could face increasing medical negligence claims.

According to the NHS Litigation Authority, which handles medical negligence claims on behalf of hospitals, trusts in England paid out more than £1.4bn in during 2015/2016.

This warning comes following a judgment given last year in the Supreme Court case of Nadine Montgomery, who son has cerebral palsy.

Ms Montgomery, who is small and a type 1 diabetic, was awarded £5.25m after doctors failed to tell her the risks of her condition and offer her a caesarean section.

The judges in the case said doctors must tell patients the ‘material risks’ that will matter to them.

The new guidelines clarify that doctors must assess a ‘material risk’ as one that ‘a reasonable person in the patient’s position would be likely to attach significance to the risk, or the doctor is or should reasonably be aware that the particular patient would likely attach significance to it.’

Mr Leslie Hamilton, a Royal College of Surgeons council member, said the RCS is ‘very concerned that doctors and hospitals haven’t fully appreciated’ how the judgment changed the understanding of patient consent.

He said: ‘Hospitals and medical staff are leaving themselves very vulnerable to expensive litigation and increased pay-outs by being slow to change the way the consent process happens.

‘We cannot underestimate the psychological impact facing litigation can also have on doctors. It can do serious damage to their confidence in practice and their reputation. Doctors must protect themselves and their patients by ensuring the consent process is carried out properly.’

Dr Keith Grimes, a GP in East Sussex, said on Twitter that shared decision making is something that “GPs have been doing for decades, and I learned about 16 [years ago].’

Dr Martin Brunet, a GP in Guildford, said he agrees with the guidelines but hopes ‘doctors don’t now abandon patients in making decisions’.

The BMA also added that implementing the new guidelines will be “difficult”.

Dr Mark Porter, BMA chair of council, said: ‘Doctors must have the time to fully explain and outline the risks involved in any procedure to their patients before it takes place. In today’s NHS it is becoming increasingly difficult as we face rising demand and staff shortages.’

Wildlife populations drop by almost 60% since 1970

   

‘Wildlife is disappearing within our lifetimes at an unprecedented rate,’ says WWF.

Worldwide populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have plunged by almost 60 per cent since 1970 as human activities overwhelm the environment, the WWF conservation group said on Thursday.

An index compiled with data from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to measure the abundance of biodiversity was down 58% from 1970 to 2012 and would fall 67% by 2020 on current trends, the WWF said in a report.

The decline is yet another sign that people have become the driving force for change on Earth, ushering in the epoch of the Anthropocene, a term derived from “anthropos”, the Greek for “human” and “-cene” denoting a geological period.

Conservation efforts appear to be having scant impact as the index is showing a steeper plunge in wildlife populations than two years ago, when the WWF estimated a 52% decline by 2010.

“Wildlife is disappearing within our lifetimes at an unprecedented rate,” Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, said in a statement of the group’s Living Planet Report, published every two years.

“Biodiversity forms the foundation of healthy forests, rivers and oceans,” he said in a statement.

“We are entering a new era in Earth’s history: the Anthropocene,” he said. WWF is also known as the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The index tracks about 14,200 populations of 3,700 species of vertebrates – creatures that range in size from pea-sized frogs to 100 ft long whales.

The rising human population is threatening wildlife by clearing land for farms and cities, the WWF’s report said.

Other factors include pollution, invasive species, hunting and climate change.

But there were still chances to reverse the trends, it said.

“Importantly … these are declines, they are not yet extinctions,” said Professor Ken Norris, Director of Science at ZSL.

Deon Nel, WWF global conservation director, told Reuters it wasn’t all bad news.

“I don’t speak at all about doom and gloom – we do see a lot of positive signs,” Nel said.

One hopeful sign is a global agreement by almost 200 nations last year to curb climate change could, for instance, help protect tropical forests, slow a spread of deserts and curb an acidification of the seas caused by a build-up of carbon dioxide.

And a 2015 UN plan for sustainable development by 2030, seeking to end poverty with policies that safeguard the environment, would also help if properly implemented.

Also, some species are recovering. Last month, the giant panda was taken off an endangered list after a recovery in China.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Thursday 22nd September 2016

Cash buyers In Ireland pay less for properties than those who need a mortgage?

   

Cash buyers are paying less for properties than those who need to get a mortgage and first-time buyers are being squeezed out of the market.

The findings are contained in the newly revamped property price index from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) which is now based on stamp duty returns and includes cash buyers for the first time.

The CSO data now shows that the collapse in property prices was more pronounced than previously thought, while the recovery has been slightly stronger.

For example, the peak-to-trough fall in residential property prices was 54.4%, not 50.9% as recorded previously.

Similarly, the price increase from the trough to July of this year is 43.2% using the new index, whereas it was previously estimated as 37.4%.

The CSO confirmed that cash buyers — who are estimated to make up around 50% of the market — pay less for property than those who must buy their house by securing a mortgage between 2010 and 2016 and that the differential was most pronounced when the market was at its lowest and outside of Dublin.

Throughout the period 2010 to 2015, former-owner-occupiers have consistently paid the most on average for housing, followed by first-time buyers. Non-occupier households have consistently paid the least.

The CSO also found that first-time buyers have gradually been pushed out of the market between 2010 to 2015.

In 2010, they represented 53.1% of all household market transactions filed. By 2015, first-time buyers’ share fell to just 24.4% of the market. In the first seven months of 2016, first-time buyers accounted for 24.6% of household market purchases.

Across the country, residential property prices rose by 6.7% in the year to July. This compares with an increase of 4.9% in June and a rise of 6.1% recorded in the year to July 2015.

Residential prices increased by 2.5% in the month of July compared with an increase of 1% in June and an increase of 0.8% in July of last year.

Residential property prices are currently 34.7% lower than at their highest level in April 2007.

Prices declined steadily over the years 2010 to 2011, followed by a bottoming-out in 2012 to 2013.

“Since then, prices have risen again. However, the rise in prices has been uneven, with noticeable fluctuations up to the present point in time,” noted the CSO.

In the Dublin residential property market, prices increased by 3.8% in the 12 months to July. This compares with an increase of 2.5% in the year to June and an increase of 4.5% in the year to July 2015.

Dublin residential property prices increased by 1.6% in the month of July compared with an increase of 0.4% in June and an increase of 0.4% in July of last year.

Residential prices in the capital are now 58.2% higher than their lowest level but remain 35.3% below their peak price level in 2006.

The Labour Party made mistakes in office, Brendan Howlin admits

Labour Party think-in told economic implosion would have happened without party

   

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin with Andrew Montague, Rebecca Moynihan, Ged Nash and Kevin Humphreys: “We are rightly proud of the many things we did in office. But we’re also honest enough to recognise that we didn’t get everything right.”

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin has conceded the party made mistakes in office, but said the current Government was interested in power and nothing else.

Speaking to the Parliamentary Labour Party at its think-in yesterday, Mr Howlin said the Government was leading “a do-nothing Dáil”.

“If [it] survives at all, these will be known as the lost years,” said Mr Howlin.

“Politics is about the resolution of differences in a peaceful and civilised manner – not pretending they don’t exist.”

In the 1990s and again in 2011, Labour entered government when the country was in chaos, but twice it left office when the country had returned to economic growth.

“Had Sinn Féin or the anarchists entered government in 2011 Ireland would now have no economy to speak of. We wouldn’t have been talking about health and housing at the election just gone.

“We’d have been talking about our economic implosion, the collapse in foreign direct investment, soaring joblessness and unimaginable hardship. There would have been no debate about the scale of the recovery because things would still be getting worse.”

The liberal society

For 40 years Labour has been the parliamentary vanguard of change which has seen Ireland transformed from a narrow intolerant society to a more pluralist and liberal society.

“There are many in Ireland who only see problems as opportunities for political gain. They will always have a certain advantage over those of us that seek to solve such problems.”

Labour’s election manifesto was principled and progressive and would have helped to build a fair society: “But, frankly, I think many Irish people had stopped listening to Labour.

“Let’s be honest enough to recognise why. By the time the election came around, we faced an enormous challenge in having any of our messages heard.

“I’ve said this before – and I will continue to say it – we recognise that we made plenty of mistakes along the way; that there is a gap between what people heard us say and what they saw us do.” Mr Howlin said this was partly because governing during a crisis was messy and distracting and stopped the party from being clear about some of the things it had achieved.

“But partly also because we made some particularly high-profile promises in areas such as third-level fees. And we didn’t always deliver.

“We are rightly proud of the many things we did in office. But we’re also honest enough to recognise that we didn’t get everything right.”

Yahoo admits information from 200m accounts stolen by hackers

Hacked data may include birth dates, user names and passwords going back to 2012

    

Data breach revelation would confirm reports same hacker who stole data from LinkedIn was now selling information from 200 million Yahoo accounts.

Yahoo announced on Thursday that the account information of at least 500 million users was stolen by hackers two years ago.

In a statement, Yahoo said user information – including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, passwords, and in some cases security questions – was compromised in 2014 by what it believed was a “state-sponsored actor.”

It did not name the country involved. The company said it was working with law enforcement officials. It encouraged users to review their online accounts for suspicious activity and to watch out for suspicious emails.

The announcement comes as Verizon Communications moves forward with its $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo. It is unclear what effect the breach, if any, will have on Yahoo’s sale price.

That will most likely depend on what Verizon learns about Yahoo’s security controls. But security experts say the incident could have far-reaching consequences for users beyond Yahoo’s services.

“The stolen Yahoo data is critical because it not only leads to a single system but to users’ connections to their banks, social media profiles, other financial services and users’ friends and family,” said Alex Holden, the founder of Hold Security, which has been tracking the flow of stolen Yahoo credentials on the underground web.

“This is one of the biggest breaches of people’s privacy and very far reaching.”

The revelation would confirm earlier reports that the same hacker who stole data from LinkedIn was now selling information from Yahoo! accounts on a dark web marketplace.

Hacker named Peace

The data for sale includes user names, scrambled passwords and birth dates and probably dates from 2012, Motherboard reported in August, citing the cyber-attacker, who went by the name Peace.

Yahoo! said at the time it was investigating the claim. Many of the stolen accounts in a sample of data obtained by Motherboard were no longer in use and had been cancelled.

The sale of all of the data for just under $2,000 (€1,781) also suggested that the information itself was of little value, either because most of it was obsolete, made up, or useless because the hackers had already attacked legitimate accounts and exhausted their need for the data.

Whatever the scale of the alleged breach, the incident shows the danger of large datasets spilling into the hacker underground and being used for criminal purposes for years without the breached companies knowing or taking minimal action based on whatever data hackers tell them was taken.

LinkedIn said in May it was investigating whether a breach of more than six million user passwords in 2012 was bigger than originally thought, following a hacker’s attempt to sell what was purported to be login codes for 117 million accounts.

Reset passwords?

The company said it appeared more data was taken in the initial compromise and that the company was just learning about the larger amount through the hacker’s posting. Like many internet companies that have been breached, LinkedIn only reset passwords of everyone it believed was part of the breach at the earlier time, which amounted to 6.5 million users.

It is unclear what steps, if any, Yahoo has taken since learning about the alleged compromise.

Reports of the security breach come just as chief executive Marissa Mayer is about to close a deal that ends the once-dominant internet firm’s independence.

Verizon is acquiring its internet assets for $4.8 billion, bringing the web portal together with long-time rival AOL. The telecommunications company will pick up services that still draw a billion monthly users, including mail, news and sports content and financial tools.

Volkswagen investors seek compensation in emissions cheating scandal,

A court rules

    

Vera Jourova, European Union Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, presents the results of the 2016 Consumer Markets Scoreboard in Brussels, Belgium on September 5. Questions mainly focused on Dieselgate and Volkswagen, due to a scandal involving the manipulated data of emission tests.

Volkswagen (VW) faces 8.2 billion euros ($9.1 billion) in damages claims from investors over its emissions scandal in the legal district where the carmaker is based, a German court said on Wednesday.

About 1,400 lawsuits have been lodged at the regional court in Braunschweig near Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters, the court said.

The Braunschweig court said it received some 750 lawsuits on Monday alone, which marked the first business day after the anniversary of VW’s diesel emissions test-rigging scandal.

It said it brought in extra staff to process suits submitted by shareholders concerned September 18 – the day VW’s manipulations were disclosed a year ago – could be the deadline to file.

Plaintiffs say the German carmaker didn’t inform shareholders quickly enough over its cheating software, which was installed in up to around 11 million vehicles worldwide.

VW, which faces lawsuits and investigations across the world, has consistently said it did not break capital markets regulations in the disclosure of its cheating.

The biggest claim at the Braunschweig court, totaling 3.3 billion euros, was filed by lawyer Andreas Tulip on behalf of institutional investors around half a year ago.

The court detailed additional complaints on Wednesday, saying they included a filing by institutional investors for 30 million euros in damages, two investor groups demanding 1.5 billion and 550 million euros respectively and an investment company that sued the carmaker for 45 million euros.

It would take about four weeks to fully process the additional claims, the court said.

Complaints have also been filed by German state pension funds.

VW has so far set aside about $18 billion to cover the cost of vehicle refits and a settlement with US authorities, but analysts think the bill could rise much further as a result of lawsuits and regulatory penalties.

VW pledged to fix all cars equipped with illicit engine software in Europe by autumn 2017, the European Commission said on Wednesday after talks with the carmaker to ensure it is doing enough for affected customers.

At a meeting with consumer Commissioner Vera Jourova, VW board member Francisco Javier Garcia Sanz committed to a plan to inform customers by year’s end of the need for a technical fix to bring diesel cars into line with EU caps on toxic nitrogen oxide emissions, Jourova’s spokesman said.

The German carmaker also committed “to have all cars repaired by autumn 2017,” spokesman Christian Wigand said, adding the carmarker would offer clients “proof of conformity.”

VW has admitted that it installed improper software that deactivated pollution controls on more than 11 million diesel vehicles that had been sold around the world.

EU officials have called on the German carmaker to do more to compensate European clients since its $15 billion settlement in the US for using the cheat software, saying it is unfair for them to be treated differently.

“Volkswagen committed to an EU-wide action plan today, which is an important step toward a fair treatment of consumers,” Jourova said in a statement.

Volkswagen has rejected suggestions it may have breached EU consumer rules and said that it does not see the need to compensate affected car owners.

Europe’s largest automaker is making slow progress on fixing cars in Europe, having repaired less than 10 percent of the 8.5 million affected models in Europe.

It said the majority of the cars in Europe can be repaired by the end of this year, but an unspecified number will have to wait.

VW group models with 1.2 liter and 2.0 liter engines require only a software update on pollution control systems, but about 3 million 1.6 liter models also require a mesh to be installed near the air filter.

Native (aboriginal) Australian DNA reveals ancient inter-breeding

    

DNA from native Australians has revealed evidence of ancient interbreeding with an unknown branch of humanity their ancestors encountered as they migrated out of Africa.

Genetic traces of the mysterious early humans, whose fossil remains have never been found, are still carried by Australian aboriginal people.

The same study suggests that indigenous tribes from Australia and Papua New Guinea have one of the oldest human pedigrees on the planet.

It also points to a single “exit” from Africa by early modern humans around 72,000 years ago.

Experts disagree on whether present-day non-African people are descended from explorers who left Africa in a single exodus or a series of distinct waves of travelling migrants.

The new research supports the single migration hypothesis. It indicates that Australian aboriginal and Papuan people both originated from the same out-of Africa migration event some 72,000 years ago, along with ancestors of all other non-African populations alive today.

Tracing the Papuan and Australian groups’ progress showed that around 50,000 years ago they reached “Sahul”. This was a prehistoric supercontinent that once united New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania – they were separated by rising sea levels.

Here in “Sahul”, they met and interbred with the unknown race of humans, who may have had links with Siberian Denisovans.

If you’re wondering exactly who the Denisovans were, they were a distinct sub-species of the human family that has been extinct for many thousands of years, like the Neanderthals.

Study leader Professor Eske Willerslev, from Cambridge University, said: “We don’t know who these people were, but they were a distant relative of Denisovans, and the Papuan/Australian ancestors probably encountered them close to Sahul.”

The research addressed “fundamental questions” about human evolution, he added.

“Technologically and politically, it has not really been possible to answer those questions until now,” said Prof Willerslev.

“We found evidence that there was only really one wave of humans who gave rise to all present-day non-Africans, including Australians.”

The findings have been published in the journal Nature. And they show that aboriginal Australians are descended directly from the first people to inhabit the continent.

Once in Australia, the ancestors of today’s aborigine communities remained almost completely isolated from the rest of the world’s population.

That was until a few thousand years ago, when they came into contact first with some Asian populations followed by European explorers in the 18th century.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 14th August 2016

Ireland’s mortgage rates still the highest in Europe

     

Irish homeowners continue to pay the highest costs in Europe for their loans, while savers here get some of the worst rates, according to official figures.

The latest Central Bank survey showed the average rate Irish banks charge new customers for all types of floating rate mortgages stood at 3.22% in June.

The rate rises to 3.56% when the large amount of so-called renegotiated or restructured home loans are excluded.

The mortgage rate in the Republic compares with an average 1.81% banks charge new business customers across the Eurozone.

In Ireland, mortgage rates for new customers, including renegotiated loans, has fallen by a meagre 9 basis points in the past 12 months. The decline stands at 30 basis points once renegotiated loans are excluded.

Rates for variable rate mortgages fell 53 basis points to an average of 3.60%. Fixed rates for one to three years fell here by 26 basis points.

On deposits, the rates banks pay customers for their savings have shrunk in Ireland and the eurozone. However, banks here pay savers 0.13%, compared with an average rate of 0.58% across the whole of the eurozone.

Most Irish lenders this year have encouraged borrowers to switch to fixed rate mortgages from standard variable rates.

Irish banks also say that around half of all mortgage borrowers here pay tacker mortgage rates of around 1% or less.

Critics, however, say some banks persist in charging existing borrowers higher rates than those offered to new customers.

“The reductions in the ECB rates have been passed onto depositors, but mortgage holders have not benefited to any significant degree,” said Brendan Burgess of the Fair Mortgage Rates Campaign.

Rachel McGovern, chief operations officer at the industry group Professional Insurance Brokers Association, urged banks to offer “good” long-term rates of up to 20 years.

The figures show “two thirds of all new mortgages issued in the year to June were standard variable rate arrangements points to a lack of proper long-term fixed rates in the market and shows how out-of-step Ireland is with its European counterparts, she said.

The Central Bank said that banks sold new mortgage agreements of €417m in June and €4.5bn over the past year.

The new business excludes renegotiated mortgage arrangements struck between customers and banks.

There was €300m worth of home loans renegotiated in June.

The average rate paid by homeowners for their renegotiated mortgages stands at 3.03%, the figures show.

Crimes against small businesses in Ireland cost €1.8bn annually

A wide ranging survey reveals shops most affected, through theft and vandalism

   

Isme is calling for greater CCTV surveillance and more Gardaí.

A survey of small and medium-sized businesses has estimated that crimes against business cost them €1.83 billion annually.

The study by the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme), found that 31% of Ireland’s 245,000 SMEs were affected by crime in the last year, with an average direct cost of €6,570, a total of €499 million.

Each of the 245,000 businesses, it found, spends an average of €5,428 on crime prevention measures, a total of €1.33 billion.

The number of businesses directly affected by crime is down 5% when compared with the previous year’s survey, Isme said. Almost half of businesses in Dublin city reported crime, with 36% in Dublin county and 19% in Munster. Of those affected, 45% experienced more than two crimes.

Retail businesses were most affected, followed by construction and distribution businesses. Almost a third of incidents were theft by outsiders, with 27% of incidents related to vandalism. About 62% of respondents were not covered by insurance, with about a fifth of businesses electing not to report incidents to An Garda Síochána.

The survey indicated a low take-up of services provided by the Crime Prevention Office, with Dublin businesses most likely to use it.

National forum on crime?

Isme has made 11 recommendations for reducing the level of crimes against businesses, including measures to properly categorise and define incidents, so trends can be better measured and analysed. The group also suggested a national forum on crime to propose solutions and share information, comprising members from the Garda, politicians and the business community. The association also called for greater closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance and increased numbers of Gardaí. It also called for changes to data protection rules to allow businesses share CCTV.

“The reduction of business crime is fundamental to business prosperity and is not being prioritised by government,” said Mark Fielding, the chief executive of Isme. He also claimed businesses have a “total lack of faith” in the criminal justice system.

“Crime against business is often seen as victimless but it has a very real impact on SMEs and their employees. SMEs are particularly vulnerable to business crime as they lack scale and therefore they experience greater difficulty in absorbing the direct and indirect costs of crime,” he said.

Allianz Insurer makes premium Advt ‘Dare To’ take a positive step? 

   

A scene from the Allianz ‘dare to’ campaign

With the rising cost of insurance making headlines all this year, Allianz – one of the largest multi-line insurers in the Irish market – has launched its latest brand campaign called ‘Dare To’.

Allianz Ireland has a turnover in excess of €450m and employs 1,450 people and is owned by the German-headquartered Allianz SE Group.

Created by Rapport Marketing Communications and produced by production company Hot Sauce, the campaign aims to convey the positivity of the Irish economy and the people and businesses that ‘dare to’ make it tick over while at the same time demonstrating the peace of mind the company’s customers enjoy, allowing them to live life to the full.

Second Garda denies a Mary Boyle cover-up?

Retired sergeant alleges his comments in a documentary were taken out of context

       

Mary Boyle went missing in 1977.

A second Garda officer who contributed to a documentary about the disappearance of Mary Boyle has denied claims of political interference in the investigation of the case.

Retired detective sergeant Aidan Murray, who featured in Mary Boyle: The Untold Story, has claimed the programme was “selective” and “misleading” in how it presented his interview.

The documentary includes allegations of political interference and a cover-up in the original Garda investigation into the disappearance of the six-year-old child near her grandparents’ home in Ballyshannon in 1977.

In a sworn statement to a solicitor, Mr Murray said that at no stage during his investigation into the disappearance of the little girl in Donegal was he subjected to “interference” or “pressure”.

He said his two senior officers, a superintendent and an inspector, were “honourable and professional men” and “at no point attempted to influence” him in the conduct of the investigation. He alleged that the documentary had “taken a number of my comments out of context and creates the wrong impression”.

Mr Murray’s comments echo those of his former colleague, retired sergeant Martin Collins, who also featured in the documentary, Mary Boyle: The Untold Story.

Speaking to his local newspaper in Donegal, Mr Collins also denied any political interference.

Both retired gardai investigated the disappearance of Mary, who was last seen walking across fields near her grandparents’ home. Both Gardai were interviewed for the documentary on Mary’s disappearance, made by the journalist, Gemma O’Doherty, who campaigned for an inquest and independent inquiry into the child’s disappearance.

Read more: Sean McEniff says he is not politician at the centre of Mary Boyle documentary

In their interviews, both retired gardai referred to a phone call allegedly made to Ballyshannon Garda Station.

Mr Murray told the documentary: “The result of that phone call is that certain people weren’t allowed to be interviewed and it was all hands off. The sting went out of the whole investigation after that.”

He also said he got a “nudge” from the inspector at the time to “ease off” when he was interviewing the chief suspect.

In his interview for the documentary, Mr Collins said: “The gist of it [the phone call] was that none of a particular family should be made suspect for Mary’s disappearance.”

In the statement, which he made last week, Mr Murray said: “I was not aware of any alleged phone call at the time and I subsequently heard the rumour many months later at a garda conference.”

He said: “The reason Inspector Daly asked me to pause the interview was because of his genuine concern for the mental health of the person being interviewed. It was not for any other reason.”

Mr Murray alleged that the Mary Boyle documentary was “selectively edited to suggest that this was because of political interference. This is absolutely incorrect.”

The Mary Boyle documentary has had more than 140,000 views since it was broadcast on YouTube last month.

Two politicians have publicly denied making the phone call to Ballyshannon Garda Station. The Garda Commissioner has now asked the Serious Crime Review Team to re-examine the child’s disappearance.

Documentary-maker Gemma O’Doherty did not provide a comment for publication, when contacted. She has assisted Mary’s twin sister, Ann Doherty, and country singer Margo O’Donnell, who is a distant relative of the family, in their campaign for justice for Mary Boyle. Ann Doherty wants an inquest and is preparing a legal action to take to the European Convention on Human Rights, alleging malpractice by An Garda Siochana and the Government.

The issue of alleged political interference in the case was raised in the European Parliament by Sinn Fein MEP Lynn Boylan and has been the subject of a number of statements by the party in recent months.

Cancer overtakes heart disease as the main cause of death in 12 European countries

     

Although diseases of the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease, CVD) kill more people worldwide than anything else, with 17.3 million deaths globally, cancer has now overtaken CVD as the main cause of death in 12 European countries.

New data on the burden of CVD in Europe for 2016, which are published today (Monday) in the European Heart Journal [1], show that in the European region (defined as the 53 member states of the World Health Organisation) CVD caused more than four million deaths each year, 45% of all deaths. However, success in preventing and treating the disease has led to large decreases in CVD in a number of countries.

Despite cancer accounting for less than half the number of deaths than CVD in Europe as a whole, in nine of the 15 countries which were members of the European Union before 2004 (EU-15) and in another country that was among those that joined the EU afterwards (EU-28), more men now die from cancer than CVD. These countries are: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. This was also the case in Norway and Israel (which are not members of the EU). Among women, more die from cancer than CVD in Denmark and Israel.

Dr Nick Townsend, senior researcher at the BHF Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention at the University of Oxford (UK), who led the research, said: “These figures highlight the wide inequalities between European countries in deaths from CVD. The 12 countries in which cancer has overtaken CVD as the main cause of death are all found in Western Europe, with nine of them having been members of the EU before 2004. The highest numbers of deaths from CVD tend to be seen in Eastern European countries.”

In France, where cancer was first seen to overtake CVD as the main cause of death in men, figures from the most recent year available (2011) show that 92,375 men died from cancer and 64,659 died from CVD. In Spain, the next country in which cancer overtook CVD, 67,711 men died from cancer and 53,487 died from CVD in 2013 (the year with the most recent data). In the UK in 2013, 87,511 men died from cancer and 79,935 from CVD.

“Although we have seen progress across Europe in the prevention and treatment of CVD, leading to decreases in mortality from it, it is clear that such progress is not consistent across the continent. With higher mortality from CVD still found in Eastern Europe and non-EU countries, it is clear that the progress that has been made in Western Europe and most EU countries is yet to be achieved equally throughout the region,” said Dr Townsend.

Inequalities between European countries can be seen in the percentage of deaths from CVD and age standardised death rates (ASDR) – where the death rates per 100,000 of the population have been adjusted according to the proportions of people in different age groups in the population. Out of a total of 3.8 million deaths in the EU-15 countries, 33% of these were caused by CVD (1.3 million), compared to 38% of deaths in the EU-28 countries (1.9 million) and 54% of deaths in non-EU member countries (2.1 million).

ASDRs from CVD ranged from 275 per 100,000 men and 174 per 100,000 women in France, to 1,444 per 100,000 men and 1,087 per 100,000 women in Kyrgyzstan. In the UK, the figures were 334 men and 228 women per 100,000.

Similar inequalities exist for premature deaths (deaths in people younger than 75). In the EU-15 countries, 21.4% of premature deaths were from CVD (0.25 million); in the EU-28 countries, 26% were from CVD (0.45 million); and in non-EU countries, 35.8% were from CVD (1.3 million).

For the first time, the researchers also report the number of years of life lost to deaths from CVD or years lived with disability due to the condition, a measurement known as disability-adjusted life years (DALYS). One DALY is equivalent to one year of healthy life lost. These also underlined the inequalities between different parts of Europe.

The number of DALYS lost to CVD in 2012 were highest in Ukraine (194 per 1000 of the population), Russian Federation (181 per 1000), Bulgaria (167 per 1000), Belarus (163 per 1000), and Latvia (153 per 1000). They were lowest in Luxembourg (39 per 1000), Cyprus (37 per 1000), Ireland (35 per 1000), Iceland (32 per 1000), and Israel (26 per 1000).

Dr Townsend said: “There were higher rates of years lost to death or disability due to CVD in Eastern Europe, although some differences may be due to different population distributions between countries as these rates were not standardised for age or sex.”

The authors of the study call for monitoring and surveillance of CVD in order to help countries in Europe work towards reducing the inequalities seen across the continent.

“We need more research into why some countries are showing improved outcomes, while others are not,” said Dr Townsend. “Improved data need to be collected in all countries in order to make comparisons on deaths and suffering from CVD between countries so that health professionals and national governments can target interventions more effectively to reduce inequalities.

“In particular, we need better figures on the numbers of new cases and the numbers of people living with CVD across Europe, as well as better data on the hidden burden of CVD – CVD that has not been identified by health services or included in national statistics. This would be invaluable to people working in public health, to help us identify problem areas and design better prevention and treatment strategies.”

The authors of the study point out that their research cannot explain the reasons for the patterns in CVD seen in Europe, because it is a description of the data on CVD in order to provide an overview of the burden of the disease in Europe.

This study is the authors’ fourth consecutive report on CVD in Europe. Any comparisons with death rates in the reports prior to the one in 2015 should be made with caution as, for the 2015 and 2016 reports, the authors used the new European Standard Population (ESP) based on 2013 population data, which reflect the increase in the elderly population. Previous reports were based on the 1976 ESP.

The most expensive fighter jet in the world was grounded by honey bees

      

Fighter Wing Aircraft Maintainers were bemused when they found a swarm of honey bees hanging from the exhaust nozzle of an F-22 Raptor engine following flight operations at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia on June 11, 2016.

Initially, everyone’s reaction was to run and find someone who could “get rid” of the bees, but Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Baskin, 192nd Maintenance Squadron crew chief, knew that these honey bees were too important to exterminate.

“I was shocked like everyone else because it looked like a cloud of thousands of bees, but I knew they wouldn’t sting anyone and were just looking for a new place to live,” said Baskin. “My neighbour maintains two colonies of honey bees and I knew they were at risk for extinction, I figured we might want to get a honey bee expert out to collect them.”

Maintainers notified Capt. Katie Chiarantona, 192nd Aircraft Maintenance Officer about the honey bee swarm. Since this had never happened on the flight line before, Chiarantona initially called the on-base entomologist to assess the situation. The entomologist immediately knew that he did not have the means to relocate the bees, so he referred Chiarantona to a local honey beekeeper in Hampton, Virginia.

Andy Westrich, U.S. Navy retired and local bee keeper, arrived on base with the needed materials and supplies. According to Chiarantona, Westrich said the swarm was one of the largest he had ever seen. He was escorted to the aircraft and used vacuum hoses to safely corral the honey bees off of the aircraft into large buckets. He then took the bee’s home and found that, as a hive, they weighed eight pounds which calculates to almost 20,000 bees!

“The honey bees most likely came from a much larger bee hive somewhere else on base,” said Chief Master Sergeant Gregg Allen, 192nd Maintenance Group Quality Assurance chief, who also happens to be a beekeeper. “Bee hives are constantly growing and they eventually become overcrowded. Around springtime, the bees will make a new queen, scout for a new location and take half of the hive with them to that location.”

Westrich suspected that the swarm of bees were on their way to a new location to build a hive for their queen. Queen bees typically fly with eggs to lay at the new hive and do not eat for up to 10 days before leaving to start a new colony. As a result, the queen is often malnourished for the journey. Westrich believes she landed on the F-22 to rest. Honey bees do not leave the queen, so they swarmed around the F-22 and eventually landed there.

According to Chiarantona, “[Westrich] said that one out of two things could have happened, the queen would have rested and gained energy and the swarm would’ve left in the morning, or they would have decided that the jet engine would be a great place to build a hive.”

Westrich was able to safely relocate the colony to a local beer producer where they will maintain the honey bee colony and use the honey for their production facility.

“Every bee is important to our food source; lots of things would die without bees,” said Baskin. “Most of our crops depend on bees, and our bees need to pollinate. This is why I knew we needed to save them instead of [exterminate] them.”

News Ireland daily BLOG by donie

Tuesday 14th June 2016

€200m fund will help build 20,000 homes, says Coveney

But the building fund will not be available until 2017 and the scheme will apply over three years.

     

The Minister for Housing Simon Coveney claims the building fund would allow developers “bring forward their plans for timetabling” developments and bring about “real movement” in the construction industry.

A fund established by the Government to help to build small infrastructural projects will speed up the construction of some homes by two years, Minister for Housing Simon Coveney has said.

Mr Coveney and Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe said the new €200 million “local infrastructure fund” would help build between 15,000 and 20,000 new houses or apartments.

Councils will be able to avail of the fund to build small infrastructural projects, such as access roads, bridges, amenities, and surface water management facilities. This would help speed up the development of sites for houses and apartments by removing the financial burden of such projects from developers.

Mr Coveney claimed it would allow developers “bring forward their plans for timetabling” developments and bring about “real movement” in the construction industry.

Not available until next year?

The move was welcomed by organisations including Engineers Ireland and the Construction Industry Federation.

The funding will not come into effect until next year, however, and the scheme will apply over three years. The Ministers said the money available, which will be awarded on a competitive basis, will be frontloaded.

“We are trying to ensure that projects that otherwise would be going ahead in 2019 or 2020, when local authorities find a way of affording infrastructure, that actually those projects can go ahead in 2017 or 2018,” Mr Coveney said.

“When Paschal talks about this fund being spread over three years, the vast majority of it will be spent over the first two years. Only €30 million of the €200 million is earmarked for the third year.”

Mr Donohoe said the fund could be used for infrastructure such as “a road . . . a connection to an ESB station, it could be a connection to a gas mains”.

It will help with urban housing shortages in Dublin and Cork in particular, Mr Coveney said. He said the average cost of building a house in Dublin is €330,000, with €57,000 linked to construction costs.

More than 7,000 Irish jobs could come from solar power “says a new report”

A new study shows huge potential for job creation from renewable energy?

     

Solar power could create up to 7,300 jobs while meeting 7% of electricity demand, according to report published by the industry on Tuesday.

The Irish Solar Energy Association is lobbying the Government for supports similar those given to wind and other renewables, which will cost consumers and businesses €181 million this year.

On Tuesday, the body said that a report it commissioned from accountants KPMG shows that solar has the potential to create 7,300 jobs in building and operating generating plants.

The association added that results from commercial rooftop solar panels installed in the south east over the first two weeks of June indicate that an established industry could meet 7 per cent of Irish electricity demand.

Chairman David Maguire said on Tuesday that solar is the only form of renewable energy that does not receive some form of subsidy to aid its development.

He explained that the group favours an auction system rather the system of guarranteed prices given to wind farms, which are funded through a levy on electricity bills known as the public service obligation.

Using the auction approach, the Single Electricity Market Operator could decide in advance that solar generators should supply a set amount of the country’s total electricity demand.

It would then invite the industry to bid for that and award contracts to the cheapest suppliers. “They would have to have land, planning permission and grid connections to qualify, and they would have to pay a deposit to take part,”Mr Magure said.

He added that any operator who fails to fulfill their contract could be sanctioned. “We believe that this would give the industry and consumers the best value ,” Mr Maguire said.

The Government is to decide on a replacement for the current round of supports, dubbed Renewable Energy Feed in Taruiff (Refit), this year. Householders and businesses pay for this through the public service charge on their bills.

Over the 12 months to next October, they will have paid €181 million to the renewable energy industry, which is largely made up wind generators.

The cash collected from consumers and businesses bridges the gap between the wholesale market price of electricity and prices guaranteed to the wind farm owners under the Refit scheme.

Despite the supports, Mr Maguire warned that the Republic is likely to fall short on renewable energy targets agreed with the EU, which require 40 per cent of all electricity to be generated from green sources by 2020.

This could result in the State paying fines of more than €300 million a-year to Brussels for failing to keep to this committment.

“It is clear the country is facing a real challenge to meet these targets and avoid significant fines,” Mr Maguire said.

“Despite the successful deployment of wind energy in Ireland, which enjoyed considerable state support, wind alone will not ensure that we reach that goal.”

He argued that solar, which contributes significantly to power generation in other European countries, but is still undeveloped here, could aid the Republic in meeting its targets with the right level of support.

He also pointed out that Germany, which is on a similar latitude to Ireland, gets 7% of its power from solar.

Mr Maguire’s association has more than 100 members, including his own company, BNRG.

Confused messages from Ireland’s banks on mortgage rates

Central Bank’s monthly mortgage figures confusingly based on a mix of loan types

     

Amid the persistent heightened attention in recent weeks on mortgage rates that Irish banks are charging their customers, there is one curious anomaly which continues to persist: the Central Bank’s publication of mortgage interest rates.

Last week, the bank indicated the rate on new variable rate mortgages was just 3.08% as of end-April. But how can this be when the lowest rate available to a property purchaser today is actually greater than this, at 3.1% from KBC Bank? And that rate is only available to people who have a deposit of at least 50% of the purchase price.

The reason apparently is that the 3.08% rate mentioned in the Central Bank’s report is drawn from the ECB’s Monetary Financial Institution Interest Rate (MIR) framework. So, despite the name of the data, “Interest Rates on new floating rate loan agreements to households for house purchase”, the figure published in the Central Bank’s monthly statistics is actually based on a mix of fixed and variable contracts – and in addition to mortgages also includes home improvement loans.

It’s a metric that allows the ECB to compare rates on a level footing in the euro zone, which is fair enough. But for those looking for a “fix” on Irish mortgage rates, the data can be confusing. Indeed in April the Central Bank itself published an article which acknowledged the MIR figure “is often mistaken to represent new mortgages with a standard variable rate”.

So why does the Central Bank persist in using this data in its monthly bulletins and not in conjunction with its own data on mortgage rates, which it publishes on a quarterly basis, and which it says itself, are “more suited to domestic analysis”?

The Central Bank says it is bound by an ECB regulation to continue publishing the MIR data, but to avoid confusion it would be useful if it could publish its new business rates each time it publishes the MIR data – or at least explain the difference between the two.

Experts now suggest a diet of whole-grains could be the secret to a longer life

     

A large bowl of porridge every day could protect against cancer and keep the doctor away?

A large bowl of porridge every day could protect against death from cancer, the biggest analysis of the benefits of whole grains has shown.

Oats have long been considered a superfood, staving off illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.

But now a review by Harvard University has found that whole grains also appear to prevent early death and lower the chance of dying from cancer.

A meta-analysis of 12 studies involving nearly 800,000 people found that eating 70 grams of whole grains a day – the equivalent of a large bowl of porridge – lowers the risk of all-cause death by 22pc and death from cancer by 20%. It also reduces the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 20%.

Scientists believe that whole grains help lower cholesterol and help regulate blood sugar, as well as making people feel full for longer, preventing them from snacking on unhealthy foods. The same effect could be gained from eating bran, quinoa, whole-wheat pasta, or a mix of grains.

Whole grains, where the bran and germ remain, contain 25% more protein than refined grains, such as those used to make white flour, pasta and white rice.

Previous studies have shown that whole grains can boost bone mineral density, lower blood pressure, promote healthy gut bacteria and reduce the risk of diabetes.

One particular fibre found only in oats – called beta-glucan – has been found to lower cholesterol which can help to protect against heart disease.

Whole grains are recommended in many dietary guidelines because they contain high levels of nutrients such as zinc, copper, manganese, iron and thiamine. They are also believed to boost levels of antioxidants, which combat free-radicals linked to cancer.

Victoria Taylor, senior dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Eating more whole grains is a simple change we can make to improve our diet and help lower our risk of heart and circulatory disease. Choosing brown rice, whole-wheat pasta, wholemeal or granary bread instead of white and swapping to whole-grain breakfast cereals such as porridge are all simple ways to help us up our fibre and whole-grain intake.”

The researchers said a 16-gram serving of whole grains lowered the risk of total death by 7%, and cancer by 5%.

Jack Conway shows a 2000-year-old edible lump of butter pulled from Irish bog

   

A huge lump of ‘bog’ butter discovered by an Irish turf cutter.

Finding buried treasure is a dream as old as stories themselves. Treasure chests overflowing with gold doubloons, shiny lamps containing genies, gargantuan lumps of thousand-year-old butter.

OK, maybe most don’t dream of unearthing enormous chunks of butter, but that’s exactly what Jack Conway discovered in the Emlagh bog in County Meath, Ireland, at the beginning of June, Atlas Obscura reported.

Conway is a turf cutter, meaning he harvests “turf” or peat – it’s similar to moss – from a bog to later burn for warmth during the cold winter months. He was chopping turf at the bog when he came across a 9.97kg chunk of butter, The Irish Times reported.

Researchers at the Cavan Museum estimated it to be more than 2000 years old.

Bog butter is just that: butter made from cow’s milk that’s been buried in a bog, though, after thousands of years, it often has the consistency of cheese.

It’s actually not that uncommon of a find for turf cutters in Ireland, either. As Smithsonian magazine noted, a 3000-year-old, one-metre wide barrel stuffed with 35kg of bog butter was found in 2009. Even more shocking, turf cutters found a 5000-year-old wooden “keg” containing 45kg of the butter in 2013.

People have actually been stumbling upon bog butter for at least two centuries. In the 1892 edition of The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Reverend James O’Laverty recounts finding a lump “which still retains the marks of the hand and fingers of the ancient dame who pressed it into its present shape,” and which he noted “tastes somewhat like cheese.”

In her article “Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History” in The Journal of Irish Archaeology, Caroline Earwood wrote, “It is usually found as a whitish, solid mass of fatty material with a distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell. It is found either as a lump, or in containers which are most often made of wood but include baskets and skins.”

The earliest discoveries of bog butter date back to the Iron Age, but she wrote that it may have existed earlier.

No one is sure exactly why the butter was buried in bogs – some think it was sometimes an offering to the gods – but evidence strongly suggests it was a method of preservation.

Most bog butter doesn’t contain salt, which was often used as a means of preserving food before modern refrigeration. The bogs, which are essentially cold-water swamps, and their native peat do a fine job keeping food fresh.

A University of Michigan researcher found that meat left in a bog for two years was just as preserved as meat kept in his freezer, the University Record reported in 1995.

Peat is compressed plant matter, which Nature reported is both cool and contains little oxygen while remaining highly acidic, allowing it can act as a sort of refrigerator. It seems to work – Savina Donohoe, Curator of Cavan County Museum who sent Conway’s butter lump to the National Museum of Ireland, said it smelled just like, well, butter.

“It did smell like butter, after I had held it in my hands, my hands really did smell of butter,” Mr Donohoe said recently. “There was even a smell of butter in the room it was in.”

In fact, peat bogs are such wonderful environments for preserving organic matter, they’ve been known to almost perfectly mummify corpses.

Hundreds of “bog bodies” have been found during the past two centuries, according to USA Today. The oldest one ever unearthed is a preserved skeleton that’s been named the Koelbjerg Woman, which dates back more than 10,000 years to around 8000 BC.

Other bodies, though, retain their skin and internal organs. The Tollund Man, for example, still had his leathery skin intact when he was found in the Bjaeldskovdal bog in Denmark and is considered by some to be the most well-preserved body ever found from prehistoric times. He was so well-persevered that the men who found him thought they had stumbled upon a modern murder scene, PBS reported. He was actually about 2400 years old.

Given that level of preservation, most of the butter is actually edible.

Irish celebrity chef Kevin Thornton, who owns the Michelin-starred Thornton’s Restaurant in Dublin, claimed to have tasted a 4000-year-old sample of bog butter.

“I was really excited about it. We tasted it,” he told the Irish Independent in 2014. “There’s fermentation but it’s not fermentation because it’s gone way beyond that. Then you get this taste coming down or right up through your nose.”

Andy Halpin, assistant keeper in the Cavan Museum’s Irish Antiquities Division, said one could probably eat the butter, though he’s not sure why one would.

“Theoretically the stuff is still edible, but we wouldn’t say it’s advisable,” Halpin told the Irish Times.

Curious what it might taste like, Ben Reade, head of Culinary Research and Development at Nordic Food Lab created his own bog butter, albeit one aged for a bit less time than the aforementioned.

Echoing the lines from James Farewell’s 1689 poem The Irish Hudibras – “butter to eat with their hog, was seven years buried in a bog” – they buried one large birch barrel of butter in the ground, where it will remain for seven years. The other only remained in the ground for three months, before it was tasted at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen and the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012 in Oxford, England.

He wrote of the flavours:

“In its time underground the butter did not go rancid, as one would expect butter of the same quality to do in a fridge over the same time. The organoleptic qualities of this product were too many surprising, causing disgust in some and enjoyment in others. The fat absorbs a considerable amount of flavour from its surroundings, gaining flavour notes which were described primarily as “animal” or “gamey,” “moss,” “funky,” “pungent,” and “salami.” These characteristics are certainly far-flung from the creamy acidity of a freshly made cultured butter, but have been found useful in the kitchen especially with strong and pungent dishes, in a similar manner to aged ghee.”

Even so, if you happen to find a lump of butter buried in the back yard, it might be best to forgo it for the store-bought variety.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Wednesday 27th April 2016.

Central Bank of Ireland says it will not lower its mortgage rates

Prof Philip Lane says any legislation to curtail rates could deter potential market entrants?

  

Central Bank governor Philip Lane dismisses notion of statutory limits on mortgage interest rates despite Michael Noonan statement last year that he would introduce legislation to give the Central Bank control of variable mortgage interest rates. 

Central Bank governor Philip Lane dismissed the notion of statutory limits on mortgage interest rates as he said a “high evidence threshold” will be set to justify any move to loosen mortgage loan caps.

Asked about high home-loan rates, Prof Lane said any legislation to curtail interest rates could deter potential market entrants and change the nature of the market as banks would focus on “super-safe” customers .

“It’s a very crude instrument which has many downsides, and is really treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause,” he told reporters in Dame Street at the publication of the bank’s 2015 annual report.

A Bank surplus.

The bank reported a €2.24 billion profit or surplus for the year, €1.79 billion of which was transferred as a dividend to the exchequer.

The “overwhelming contributory factor” was income from sovereign bonds held after the 2013 deal to scrap the Anglo Irish Bank promissory note scheme, said Prof Lane.

Much of this money originated with the State via interest payments on retained bonds and capital gains realised on €2 billion in bonds sold to the National Treasury Management Agency.

The bank is selling the bonds at a faster rate than the minimum schedule agreed with the European Central Bank, but Prof Lane would not be drawn on the speed of future disposals, saying that depended on market conditions.

The bank has already indicated that the first review of mortgage caps will be published in November, but Prof Lane said that the general framework of the regime was intended to be permanent.

Mortgage caps?

He was asked whether housing supply constraints could be attributed in part to the mortgage caps.

Prof Lane said multiple, often conflicting forces, were at work in respect of supply and demand. “Anything that boosts housing demand – where the supply response is not forthcoming – is going to not be helpful.”

He called for “discipline” in addressing remaining vulnerabilities from the crash, saying this embraced fiscal discipline as well as discipline at the level of individual and corporate borrowers. “Yes, we have very good expected growth numbers this year and next year. But there are a lot of downside risks out there.”

Irish Revenue vows to pursue offshore account holders that are avoiding tax payments?

Annual report says Revenue collected some €60m from offshore investigations

  V   

Revenue has promised to step up its focus on the use of offshore locations by those seeking to avoid tax from Ireland.

Those who attempt to avoid tax with offshore accounts have been warned by the Revenue Commissioners that greater cross-border co-operation, along with better access to international financial data, will put them under an increasingly harsh spotlight over the next two years.

In its annual report, Revenue has promised to step up its focus on the use of offshore locations by those seeking to avoid tax. It said it had raised more than €60 million from such investigations in 2015.

All told, Revenue collected as much as €45.79 billion for the exchequer in 2015, up 10.6% on the previous year.

The increase was the fifth successive jump in exchequer returns and the second highest figure for net receipts in the history of the State. Only 2007 was higher at €47.5 billion.

Almost all taxes and duties recorded increases, with corporation tax up 49%, capital gains tax up 28% and Vat up 7%.

According to the report, total tax receipts were 7.8% ahead of target as exchequer returns were boosted by a strong trading performance and increased domestic consumption and investment.

Referring to white collar tax evasion, Revenue said the next two years would see developments in the automatic exchange of information with tax authorities abroad, such as the US Internal Revenue Service.

Off shore structures?

Revenue said it would be “carefully considering” how to make the maximum use of information sources to “identify possible cases of tax evasion using offshore structures”.

“If I had an offshore account and I had not declared it, I’d be thinking about it now,” said Revenue chairman Niall Cody. “We are much nicer when you knock on our door than when we knock on yours.”

Revenue conducted more than 460,000 compliance interventions in 2015, yielding more €640 million in tax, interest and penalties, Mr Cody said.

He referred to the success of Revenue’s compliance projects targeted at specific business sectors, including construction and hospital consultants.

Revenue carried out 6,612 audits, which yielded €327.9 million for the exchequer last year, as the overall return from audits and compliance interventions rose by 5.3 per cent to €642.5 million.

Revenue said it collected €63.6 million from 68 cases associated with major legacy investigations last year, including action against holders of offshore accounts.

Mr Cody referred to recent media coverage of the Panama Papers and said Revenue was “examining the implications of the developments in Automatic Exchange of Offshore Financial Information for the Audit Code of Practice.

“While we have had major successes in investigating tax evasion, the new information sources that are coming on stream will shine a light on individuals and businesses that have used offshore facilities.

Real activity?

On corporation tax, Revenue said it would continue to work to ensure that “the profits of multinational corporations are taxed where the real business activity taxes place.”

While attention was placed on the taxes paid in this jurisdiction by multinationals, Mr Cody said the corporation tax base was considerably broader than just large multinationals.

According to the annual report, 97 per cent of property owners paid the local property tax last year. There were 324,000 reminder letters to late payers and mandatory reductions taken from the salaries and pensions of 65,000 people.

Is this for real? Did only 10 TDs really show up to debate mental health issues last night?

A Fact Check does a double take on some claims that went viral last night.

  

The Dail heard statements from TDs on the issue of mental health last night, amid increasing anger at the government’s decision to divert part of this year’s budget for mental health to other areas. Throughout the evening, there was a negative reaction to the turnout for the debate, with many tweeting screenshots of an apparently close-to-empty Dáil chamber.

Some placed the number of TDs who showed up at 10, others at 40, while mental health awareness activists and artists the Rubberbandits posted a screenshot on Facebook which featured just seven deputies in the chamber, accompanied by the caption:

Above is a photo of how many politicians turned up to speak about mental health in the Dáil today?

Is that accurate, though?

Béibhinn O’Connor in Dublin emailed us to ask whether it was actually the case that only 10 TDs showed up, so we consulted the official record of the Dáil, and combed through video of the debate to find out the truth.

Remember, if you see a claim you want tested, email factcheck@thejournal.ie.

Claim: Only 10 TDs showed up for a Dáil debate on mental health

Verdict: FALSE by a very wide margin.

66 TDs took part in some way. 33 spoke, 30 were present, and four presided over the debate. One TD presided and listened (Marcella Corcoran-Kennedy), and one TD presided, spoke and listened (Bernard Durkan).

The Facts?

A quick note to start. The purpose of this article is just to present the facts. It’s entirely up to you whether the turnout for Tuesday’s debate was acceptable or not.

The debate lasted three hours and 16 minutes, starting at around 3.19 pm, and ending at 6.35 pm.

There were 33 speakers. Here they are, grouped by party with the figures in brackets showing the number who spoke and that party’s total number of TDs:

• Fine Gael (9/50): Leo Varadkar, Helen McEntee, Peter Fitzpatrick, Tom Neville, Pat Deering, Peter Burke, Mary Mitchell-O’Connor, Bernard Durkan, Andrew Doyle

• Fianna Fáil (5/43): Billy Kelleher, Lisa Chambers, Micheál Martin, Robert Troy, Jack Chambers

• Sinn Féin (6/23): Caoimhghín Ó’Caoláin, Louise O’Reilly, Pat Buckley, Brian Stanley, Carol Nolan, Maurice Quinlivan

• Independents (5/19): Thomas Pringle, Seamus Healy, Danny Healy-Rae, Mattie McGrath, Michael Healy-Rae

• Independents 4 Change (1/4): Tommy Broughan

• AAA/PBP (3/6): Gino Kenny, Mick Barry, Richard Boyd-Barrett

• Social Democrats (2/3): Róisín Shortall, Catherine Murphy

• Green Party (1/2): Catherine Martin

• Labour (1/7): Brendan Ryan

Four TDs acted as chairperson over the course of the debate. They were:

• Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó’Fearghaíl (FF), Alan Farrell (FG), Marcella Corcoran-Kennedy (FG), Bernard Durkan (FG)

In addition to the speakers, 30 TDs were present for at least some portion of the debate, based on our close analysis of the videos.

It is possible, of course, that other deputies may have entered and exited quickly enough that their presence wasn’t caught by cameras in the chamber. In which case, we will expand this list.

The TDs who attended, but didn’t speak, were (grouped by party as above):

• Fine Gael (7/50): Hildegarde Naughton, Maria Bailey, Simon Harris, Kate O’Connell, Noel Rock, Richard Bruton, John Paul Phelan

• Fianna Fáil (9/43): Anne Rabbitte, Fiona O’Loughlin, John Lahart, John McGuinness, Frank O’Rourke, Aindrias Moynihan, Declan Breathnach, Eugene Murphy, Pat Casey

• Sinn Féin (6/23): Imelda Munster, Peadar Tóibín, Donnchadh Ó’Laoighaire, Kathleen Funchion, Denise Mitchell, Jonathan O’Brien

• Independents (4/19): Catherine Connolly, Katherine Zappone, Noel Grealish, Dr Michael Harty

• Independents 4 Change (2/4): Mick Wallace, Joan Collins

• Green Party (1/2): Eamon Ryan

• AAA/PBP (1/6): Bríd Smith

• Marcella Corcoran-Kennedy and Bernard Durkan were also at their seats for speeches, as well as presiding over parts of the debate from the chair.

So between speaking, presiding and listening to speeches, this is the breakdown of each party and grouping’s participation in the debate on mental health.

• Fine Gael: 18 out of 50 TDs (36%)

• Fianna Fáil: 15 out of 44 TDs (34%)

• Sinn Féin: 12 out of 23 TDs (52.2%)

• Independents: 9 out of 19 TDs (47.4%)

• Independents 4 Change: 3 out of 4 TDs (75%)

• AAA/PBP: 4 out of 6 TDs (66.7%)

• Social Democrats: 2 out of 3 TDs (66.7%)

• Green Party: 2 out of 2 TDs (100%)

• Labour: 1 out of 7 TDs (14.3%)

That’s 66 out of 158 TDs (41.7%)

A conclusion?

It is quite rare for a large number of TDs to remain in the Dáil chamber over the full duration of a long debate without a vote, such as last night’s.

Typically, deputies drift in and out, delivering their remarks, supporting colleagues and opposing those on the other side of the house, and then leaving again.

The actual number of TDs in the house ebbs and flows over the course of a long debate.

This screenshot, taken during Minister Varadkar’s opening speech on mental health last night, shows at least 29 TDs in the chamber:

This one, taken at a similar stage of a similar debate – Minister Alan Kelly’s opening speech during “Statements on Housing” two weeks ago, shows only 12.

This is not to endorse standard Dáil practices, or make any claim about the relative importance of two different issues.

It is simply to point out that the distribution of attendance seen last night is far from unprecedented in Dáil Éireann.

For better or for worse, debates culminating in a vote, and formal set pieces such as leaders’ questions are often more densely packed than “statements” on a particular issue, however important.

Whatever your view on the importance of mental health, and the appropriate level of attendance and participation in last night’s debate, the facts are clear.

The claim that only seven, or 10, or even only 40 TDs showed up to debate mental health last night, is FALSE.

Some 40% of women ‘don’t feel fit enough’ to go to the gym

     

Most of us will have put off going to the gym at some point in our lives (let’s be honest, probably on more than one occasion).

But a poll has found two in five British women postpone their gym workout because they do not feel fit enough.

A new survey also found that 33% of women do not want to go to the gym because they feel intimidated by other fitter or more competitive people.

The survey found women feel intimidated and embarrassed at the gym which puts them off going.

A third are embarrassed what people will think of them when they exercise and 27% said they felt put off because they do not know how to use gym machines, according to the British Heart Foundation survey.

The charity polled 2,000 adults from across the UK as part of its new MyMarathon challenge. Over the month of May, people are being encouraged to run 26.2 miles – yep, that’s what London Marathon runners did in a day – while helping to raise money for heart research.

The My Marathon challenge involves running the same distance over a month that these lot ran in a day.

Lucy Wilkinson, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Keeping active is vital to help improve your heart health, so it is concerning that what’s putting so many women off exercise is a fear of being judged about how they look and their level of fitness, and feeling self-conscious around others when exercising. Women should feel proud to exercise knowing they are helping to keep their hearts strong.

“And now with the MyMarathon challenge you don’t have to be a slave to the gym. You decide the pace and you decide the place, so it’s a great way to get active without feeling intimidated, and help us beat heart disease.”

Scientists may have just learned how to read your mind

The University of California Berkeley team maps out how our brain responds to individual words

     

An image (left) showing a view of one person’s right brain hemisphere. The overlaid words, when heard in context, are predicted to evoke strong responses near the corresponding location in the brain. The colour of each word indicates its semantic category.

For example, green words are mostly visual and tactile concepts, while red words are mostly social concepts. White lines show the outlines of known functional brain regions. 

Scientists in the US have raised the possibility of reading a person’s mind aftermapping where the brain responds to individual words.

A team at the University of California Berkeley have built a “semantic atlas” that shows how the human brain organises language.

Brain experts have already defined areas that process information about the meanings of words, known as the semantic system.

This work goes far beyond that however, showing in remarkable detail exactly where in the brain the meaning of individual words is processed.

Prof Jack Gallant and colleagues from Berkeley had seven people listen to hours of stories from a radio programme.

During this time, the scientists used functional MRI scanners to “watch” what was happening in their brains and what areas responded to particular words.

This allowed them to make the connections between a given word and its meaning and where in the brain this connection took place.

They published their findings on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Brain triggers

Words often have more than one meaning and the map shows this in beautiful detail. The word “top” triggers several parts of the brain, one associated with clothing, another with shapes and measurements and a third with buildings.

In the same way they found that associated words can group together into a single region depending on meaning.

One area dealt with the meaning of words such as wife, mother, pregnant and family, the researchers said. An adjacent area also responded to wife and family but also house and owner.

Each person has a unique semantic map but the researchers were surprised at the similarity between subjects in terms of the areas of the brain involved.

The research was not about developing a mind-reading device, yet being able to localise where a word is interpreted may open the way to such a development.

It could help patients who have difficulty communicating express what they want to say without speaking, the researchers said.

The research also serves efforts to understand how the brain organises language.

The team produced a video that helps explain how the brain responds to words.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Monday 5th. October 2015

New corporation tax plan could yield a bigger take for Ireland

OECD director says double-Irish is over but that does not mean Ireland will lose business

   

Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The new global template for taxing multinationals could lead to more corporation tax being collected by Ireland, according to the head of the team behind the new plan.

Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, was speaking as the OECD said that up to $240 billion (€213 billion) is being lost annually to exchequers around the world because of aggressive tax planning by multinationals.

The final report of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (Beps) project has been published in Paris and looks set to be approved by the G20 heads of state later this year.

“This document sends out an extremely strong message to tax planners,” Mr Saint Amans toldThe Irish Times. “The process is now moving on to the implementation phase.”

He described the report as the “soft law” for global business taxation for the coming decades. The plan is the biggest development in global tax rules in a century.

From the point of view of Ireland’s interests, Mr Saint Amans said, the fact that the Beps plan seeks to create stronger links between where a multinational has its business substance, and where its profits are taxed, means that it should not be seen as a threat to Ireland’s crucial foreign direct investment sector.

A number of major multinationals, such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have substantial operations here that book their turnover from across Europe and further afield. However much of the related profits are booked in offshore locations such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The Government has said it is to close down this structure, the so-called “double Irish”, by 2020, in part in response to the global controversy about restoring fairness to global tax planning.

The double-Irish is over, Mr Saint Amans said. “But that does not mean Ireland will lose business. In fact I think quite the opposite. This should increase the taxation [collected in Ireland].”

The Beps project was commissioned by the G20 and is a response to concern at the way multinationals have been able to use mismatches between national laws and other aspects of the global tax system, to create aggressive tax planning structures.

“The stakes are high,” the final report says, with the amounts involved estimated as being “between 4 per cent and ten per cent of global corporation tax revenues, ie $100 billion to $240 billion, annually.”

The research indicates that multinational subsidiaries in low tax countries report almost twice the profits, relative to assets, of their global group, and the report is an effort to counter this.

The final report covers such areas as so-called hybrid financial products that facilitate aggressive tax strategies, treaty measures aimed at preventing double taxation that have led to double non-taxation, and the introduction of confidential country-by-country reports that will see revenue authorities get a clearer picture of how multinationals are structured.

The report is an agreed one at a technical level but some measures are more accepted than others, with the position to be taken by the Republican Party in the US among the major issues complicating the drive towards a new global regime.

While the Beps document says there is an urgent need to restore the trust of ordinary people in the tax system, many organisations campaigning for developing countries say the Beps plan does not go far enough in helping poorer countries get their fair share of tax from multinationals.

Among the forces driving the Beps process are fears that governments, in response to public concern about how little tax huge and profitable multinationals are paying, will introduce unilateral measures that will complicate the global market. Also, multinationals are becoming more and more concerned about the reputational damage they suffer by way of controversy over the amount of tax they pay.

On the other hand, the world’s largest economies want to ensure that the redrawing of the global rules on the taxation of multinationals, does not run contrary to their interests.

Peter Reilly, the Beps Policy Leader with PwC in Ireland, said the report has been produced within a tight timeframe and while it did not achieve all it set out to achieve, “it is still the biggest change in one hundred years in the area of international taxation.”

On balance, he said, he believed the report was positive from the perspective of “Ireland Inc”.

However, he said Ireland will need to ensure the Beps plan does not create disadvantages for smaller economies, especially by way of changes to the international tax treaty network.

Squeezed middle to pay less than 50% tax for first time in six years

  

This week, a series of key meetings will take place between Mr Noonan and Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin and their Cabinet colleagues

Middle-income earners will pay less than 50pc tax on their salaries for the first time in six years, the Irish Independent can reveal.

With just over a week to go to the last Budget before the General Election, the Government will lower the effective higher rate of tax to at least 49.5%, several senior sources confirmed last night.

Those sources also said there was a “strong desire” to reduce the tax burden on middle-income earners to as low as 49%, if this proves achievable.

“The desire is there, it is now just seeing what is achievable in the final shake-up of the numbers,” one senior source said last night.

Finance officials have concluded the bulk of their work on the Budget, with the discussions now “firmly in the political realm”. The deeply unpopular Universal Social Charge is set to be the focus.

While the Budget is not yet finalised, there is a strong desire within both Fine Gael and Labour to deliver a 2% tax cut, should the numbers allow it.

“We would love to do it, but certainly at this stage we are looking at a 1.5% cut,” said one well-informed Government source.

Were the Government to achieve a 2pc reduction through cuts in the USC, those earning €70,000 would be more than €1,000 better off, those on €50,000 would be €650 better off and those on €35,000 would be €350 better off.

This week, a series of key meetings will take place between Mr Noonan and Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin and their Cabinet colleagues.

Once those face-to-face meetings are concluded, Mr Noonan and Mr Howlin will bring a draft Budget document to the Economic Management Council, on which they sit with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tánaiste Joan Burton.

The overwhelming focus of the tax cuts is on the penal burden of the USC, particularly for those earning €70,000 or less.

Mr Noonan is looking at a cut to the 7pc rate and examining raising the entry point at which people start paying the USC.

“The net effect when both measures are combined will be 2pc,” said a senior Government source.

Coalition sources have confirmed that the USC cut will be used as their ‘big bang’ give-away to workers.

It is understood that the entry point at which people begin paying the current 7% rate will be raised to bring more than 500,000 people out of the USC net. But it is also known that the 7% rate will be reduced by up to 1.5%.

Pensions?

Mr Noonan is also believed to be looking at reducing the gap between self-employed people and PAYE workers on incomes above €100,000.

Meanwhile, Lucinda Creighton’s Renua is proposing to introduce a levy on all public-sector pensions over €60,000 to claw back some of the pensions paid to former Taoisigh Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern and former top officials, some of whom have pensions in excess of €100,000.

“When they imposed a levy on private pensions during the financial crisis, they defined the limit as being €60,000 per annum,” the party said.

“Renua Ireland believes that no public servant should be in receipt of a gross pension exceeding this sum.”

Noonan says customers need to ‘shop around’ for good mortgage rate deals

     

Finance Minister Michael Noonan says homeowners on variable-rate mortgages need to ‘shop around’ to get the best deals on offer.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan says homeowners on variable-rate mortgages need to “shop around” to get the best deals on offer.

The minister is ruling out direct intervention to force banks to cut their rates on the basis that it would damage the choice available to homeowners.

Last week, Belgian-owned bank KBC announced it would cut its variable mortgage rate for new and existing customers.

In an interview with the Irish Independent, Mr Noonan insisted that there was better value to be obtained.

“People should shop around. I don’t understand the reluctance of people to change lenders or to go for fixed rate for a year or two because there are real gains to be made now and yet there’s a reluctance to change.”

Mr Noonan said there were dangers attached to him directly forcing banks to cut their variable interest rates.

“If you force them, what will happen is – the risk you’ll be taking – is that mortgages for new borrowers would dry up and no new mortgagees, no new financial institutions offering mortgages, would come into the market.”

The minister said his efforts to date had delivered results.

“We’ve done a lot of work on that. We’ve got them down. AIB are down. They have three movements downwards. You can get money now from AIB at 3.65pc.

“Every bank that I spoke to has made a positive offer to their lenders, which reduces the cost of their mortgage.

“The Central Bank wouldn’t agree ever that the margin was as big as is being recited by the Opposition. They are of the view that the excessive margin was somewhere around 1pc – maybe a little less. But there’s movement now.”

KBC’s reduction is the first since six banks had meetings with Mr Noonan about high mortgage charges.

AIB and its subsidiary EBS responded to previous calls for lower variable rates.

Others, such as Bank of Ireland, have reduced their fixed rates but left variable rates unchanged. Some customers of Permanent TSB, and Ulster Bank can also benefit from lower interest rates.

Credit-card size passport for European travel available today

      

Who can apply, how to apply, where can the card be used?

A new credit-card style passport card that can fit in wallets and purses, and which is valid for travelling to 30 European countries, is available from today.

Applications for the new passport card can be processed online or through a smartphone and tablet app, and are open to adults who already have a valid passport book.

It can be used for travelling within the European Union member states, as well as countries within the European Economic Area – Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

The card costs €35 and those applying from outside Ireland will have to pay an additional €5.

“It is, in effect, a passport and it carries all the attributes and entitlements of a passport and should be treated with great care, as you would a passport,” Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan said at an event to launch the card this morning.

However, Department of Foreign Affairs officials said the passport card does not have to be cancelled if someone loses their passport book, and vice versa.

Mr Flanagan also said he is concerned about the current strike affecting postal services but said it is “not clear” that many passports are currently stuck in the postal system.

Passport applications can made in person in the passport offices in Dublin and Cork, as well the Irish Aid office in Limerick. Passports can be collected from the offices in Dublin and Cork.

A list of frequently asked questions has been compiled by the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Who can apply for the Irish passport card?

The Irish passport card is available only to Irish Citizens who are in possession of a valid passport book (with a minimum of 30 days validity remaining) and who are aged 18 or over.

Where can I travel on the passport card?

The card is valid for travel within the EU/EEA (European Economic Area).

Do I need a passport book before I apply for a passport card?

Yes, you must be in possession of your valid passport book in order to apply for a passport card. (Note: if your passport book is lost or stolen you must apply for a new passport book before you can apply for a passport card).

How much will the passport card cost?

The fee for a passport card is €35. There will be an additional €5 postal fee if you reside outside Ireland.

How do I pay for my passport card?

Payment can be made using a credit card or a debit card. (currently Visa, MasterCard and American Express cards are accepted).

How long is the passport card valid for?

The passport card has a maximum validity of 5 years or the remaining validity of your current passport book i.e. the passport card expiry date cannot exceed that of your passport book.

What if I lose my passport card or it is stolen?

The details of all lost or stolen passports are reported by the Passport Service to Interpol which means they are no longer valid for travel. When reapplying for your new card you should indicate the lost, theft or damage of your passport card on the relevant section of the online application form. If you are not applying for a new card you should notify the passport service by completing the contact form.

When travelling on my passport card what number do I use to check in online?

When checking in online use the card number located at the upper right hand corner on the face of the card (for example C12345678).

I have a passport photo at home, can I use it for my passport card application?

Yes, if the photo has been taken in the last six months. You can use this photo by scanning it at a high resolution (minimum 300dpi) at full size.

Sligo-based Orreco partners with IBM for Watson sports appliance

 

Elite sports firm will develop ‘Coach Watson’ app to help teams and players avoid injury

Irish elite sports firm Orreco is to partner with IBM on its billion-dollar super computer Watson to build an app that will help sports teams to make decisions on training and treatment for their star athlete to avoid injury and maximise performance.

The Sligo-based firm, which is backed by golfers Padraig Harrington and Graeme McDowell, will use data covering 15 years of sport and more than 1,700 elite athletes in the app, called Coach Watson. The company has developed methods to analyse blood, identifying biomarkers that can help monitor performance.

Using the data from Coach Watson, coaches and teams will be able to find detailed information on medical research, and quickly answer questions on games schedules, player sleep, nutrition data, recovery, injury and fatigue.

IBM Watson has been dubbed a computer with a human brain. It can process large amounts of data quickly, can understand questions in natural language and provide evidence-based answers.

“Orreco is committed to providing holistic solutions to athletes as quickly as possible in order to help them excel while protecting them from potential illness and injury,” said Orreco CEO Dr Brian Moore.

“Through IBM Watson’s ability to put real-time sports science in the hands of performance teams, this partnership greatly enhances the speed at which our insights can be delivered to our clients, thereby improving the power, potential and competitive edge of the whole athlete.”

Orreco was founded in 2010 by Dr Moore and Dr Andrew Hodgson, and works with sports stars from Harrington and McDowell to Premier League football team Newcastle United. It also works with Formula One teams, and NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball teams in the US.

Among its early backers are Enterprise Ireland, Harrington and McDowell, former VP of Technology at Amazon.com Tom Killalea, Pa Nolan of Fexco and former group MD of Glanbia,John Moloney, who is chairman of the board.

“In professional sport there is absolutely no shortage of data. It’s everywhere. The challenge always is in making the data collected actionable,” said Harrington. “Combining Orreco’s insights and IBM cognitive computing will make for a very powerful tool and I can see Coach Watson becoming an invaluable resource for coaches and athletes alike. “

US-based Nike Oregon Track Club Elite will be the first club to work with Orreco and Coach Watson, using the app to help devise individual training and plan for competitions and recovery.

Ancient Tsunami was nearly as tall as The Eiffel Tower,

Scientists Say.

The sudden collapse of a volcano likely triggered the monstrous tsunami more than 70,000 years ago.

    

Scientists think that the volcano Fogo’s eastern slope crashed into the sea, leaving behind the giant scar pictured here and triggering a mega-tsunami.

When surfers have taken on nearly 100-foot-tall waves, they’ve faced the challenge of a lifetime. But those waves are pipsqueaks compared to an ancient mega-tsunami that scientists say was almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

An international team of scientists has found evidence that an approximately 800-foot-tall tsunami was generated when the eastern slope of the Cape Verde islands’ Fogo volcano, off the coast of West Africa, collapsed into the sea some 73,000 years ago.

The colossal wave traveled more than 30 miles from Fogo to the nearby island of Santiago, where it pushed around huge boulders like pebbles, according to research published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

And, theoretically, such an event could happen again.

“This is something that may happen in any volcano that is tall, steep, unstable and active enough to be prone to a collapse,” Dr. Ricardo Ramalho, an adjunct scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and lead author of the research, told The Huffington Post in an email.

“Volcanic flank collapses and their ensuing mega-tsunamis — like the one of Fogo — are what we scientists call ‘very low frequency, very high impact events,'” he said. “Due to their very low frequency, we estimate that the probability for them to happen again is very small, but they may and will happen nevertheless.”

The wave generated by Fogo’s collapse may have swept boulders like this one up from the shoreline into Santiago Island’s highlands. Here, a researcher chisels out a sample of rock to establish the date of the tsunami wave.

The researchers found evidence for the ancient mega-tsunami when they noticed delivery truck-sized boulders of basalt and limestone sitting in Santiago Island’s highlands. The boulders were as much as 2,000 feet inland but showed signs of having originated from cliff faces below where they were discovered, suggesting they had been moved by a tsunami.

The researchers calculated the energy it would take to move the boulders in order to estimate the size of the tsunami, and they examined the surface of the boulders to determine when the bizarre boulders were deposited on Santiago Island.

“First, they all came out about the same age, indicating that they all were deposited as part of the same event and secondly, the date (when they got stranded) matches the timing of the flank collapse,” Dr. Gisela Winckler, a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author of the research, wrote in an email. “When we got the dates, it became clear that we can link volcano collapse to the mega-tsunamis deposits. I was intrigued by that match.”

The researchers concluded that a mega-tsunami must have ripped the rocks from the cliff faces and pushed them up to their present location.

RICARDO RAMALHOWhen the 800-foot-tall tsunami reached Santiago Island, boulders and other debris likely were ripped from the shoreline and hurled upward hundreds of feet.

Scientists have long known that landslides coming off of volcanoes can generate tsunamis in nearby waters. But some argue that such landslides occur in stages, which would create several smaller tsunamis, rather than all at once, which would result in one gargantuan mega-tsunami as the study suggests.

“This research is important because it confirms that volcanic flank collapses may happen catastrophically and trigger massive tsunamis with devastating near-source effects,” Ramalho said. “This study reinforces the idea that we need to take this into account when we assess the hazard potential of oceanic volcanoes.”

Some scientists think more research is needed to determine the behavior of giant waves that may be generated by a volcanic collapse, as well as how to adequately monitor the chances that such a tsunami-causing collapse might happen.

“Since we’ve never seen such an event happen on an ocean island, we don’t have practical experience with how the collapse will manifest itself,” Dr. Michael Poland, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Vancouver, Washington, who was not involved in the study, told Nature.

Winckler agrees there is more work to be done.

“More generally, better understanding events such as the Fogo mega-tsunami is a step towards understanding how the Earth works and potential risks,” she wrote. “There is still many things we don’t understand well, for example, the mechanics and physics of the flank collapse itself.”

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.