Record high of 87,000 emigrated from the Irish State this year to April
Emigration from Ireland continued to increase last year, with more than 87,000 people leaving the State, the highest number recorded to date.
Migration statistics published by the Central Statistics Office show 46,500 Irish people moved abroad in the year to April, a rise of 16 per cent on the previous 12 months and a 260 per cent increase on 2007 figures, when just 12,900 Irish people emigrated.
Some 87,100 people of all nationalities left the Republic in the period, up from 80,600 the previous year. Irish nationals accounted for 53 per cent of the total.
The United Kingdom attracted 19,000 people, while 8,600 went to the United States and 35,600 to “rest of the world” destinations, which could reflect the popularity of working holiday visa programmes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The number of Irish women emigrating rose from 17,500 to 20,600, while the number of Irish men leaving rose from 24,500 to 26,000.
Emigration among foreign nationals increased for the third year in a row, to 40,600.
The number of immigrants fell slightly from 53,300 to 52,700 over the same period. This figure includes 20,600 Irish people who came back to live in Ireland, the third annual rise in a row. The number is still much lower than in 2007, when 30,700 Irish emigrants returned.
Just 2,200 people from the UK moved to Ireland, while 17,600 people arrived from EU countries and 12,400 from the rest of the world.
People aged 25-44 accounted for the largest number of emigrants, with 39,500 people in this age group leaving the State. This increased from 31,300 in the previous 12 months.
Some 35,800 in the 15-24 age group emigrated, up from 34,500 the previous year. A total of 900 under-14s left, in addition to 5,600 in the 45-64 age group and 1,200 aged over 65.
The UK was the most popular destination for emigrants, with 19,000 moving there. This marked a reduction of 1,000 on last year. Some 24,000 moved to EU countries.
A total of 52,700 people came to live in the Republic in the 12 months to April, a fall of 65 per cent since 2007, when immigration peaked. Some 25,000 men immigrated last year, compared with 80,000 in 2007.
Responding to the statistics, Piaras Mac Éinrí and Caitriona Ní Laoire of the Department of Geography in University College Cork said that although emigration has been “a consistent feature” of Irish life, the fact that the increase in emigration has coincided with the economic collapse would indicate that it is “not voluntary”.
A research project into recent Irish emigration by UCC beginning next month will investigate factors such as gender, education and class to establish what social factors influence emigration.
Assistant director of the National Youth Council of Ireland James Doorley expressed “serious concern” at the figures, saying they “underline the need for immediate and stronger Government action to stem the flow of young people leaving the country”.
Sinn Féin TD Peadar Tóibín said more people left Ireland than sat the Leaving Cert last year. “A generation is being lost to emigration . . . It is time that the Government reflected on this and changed policies in favour of ones that place our people and employment above bankers and developers.”
The CSO figures also show 74,000 babies were born in the 12 months to April, while 29,200 people died. This brings the natural population growth for the year to 44,900, a fall of 2,600 on the previous year.
However, the rise in emigration has slowed population growth, with the overall population growing by 10,500 to 4.59 million.
The figures include revisions to the population and migration estimates for the 2007-2011 period using data from the Census 2011 published earlier this year.
The male population is estimated to have fallen by 900 in the year ending in April, the first time a reduction has been recorded since 1990. This fall is attributed to the fall of 8,900 non-Irish men.
Ireland’s OAPs fear ‘becoming a burden to their families’
50% of older people in Ireland worry about becoming a burden while 20% would not feel good about having to enter a nursing home,
A new survey has revealed.
A quarter of over-65s also worry that they will not have enough money, according to the index, which tracks health and attitudes annually.
On the plus side, most are optimistic about getting older.
The findings of the index, conducted by the drug firm Pfizer, were launched by former GAA presenter Micheal O Muircheartaigh, who said with so many people now depending on the State for their healthcare, and particularly the elderly, the Government should set aside additional funds for their support.
“It’s a difficult job balancing the budgets, but when times are bad you need real consideration from the people in power,” he said.
The legendary GAA commentator also spoke of how he harboured no regrets about not running for the presidency.
The 82-year-old revealed that “pressure” had been put on him to join the race for the Aras last year, but that in the end he valued his freedom more.
“I always wanted to keep clear of politics, and even though they said the presidency is above politics, I never wanted to be attached to any political party,” he said.
The health index findings showed:
- One in four older people are grandparents.
- The vast majority of older people say they are happy to mind their grandchildren, but 15pc are not.
- Four in five suffer from a common condition such as arthritis. One in five have heart disease and 7pc have cancer.
- Around 72pc have a medical card but 37pc continue to pay for private medical insurance.
Mater Hospital geriatrician Dr Dermot Power said: “It is interesting to see that maintaining independence and not wanting to become an encumbrance on others comes out strongly in this research.
“I am fully supportive of older patients being returned to their own home as soon as they are fit and well, if this is a viable option. It is where the majority of older people are happiest.”
Majority of Irish people better off working than on the dole
The vast majority of people are better off working than claiming the dole, according to a new report by the ESRI.
It found that only six per cent would receive more on social welfare.
“You’re better off on the dole” is a perception challenged today by the Economic and Social Research Institute.
Its latest research shows a vast majority of Irish people are better off working.
For many jobseekers, their search is leading abroad.
Engineer Conor McArdle is moving to Melbourne, after giving up waiting for the economic situation here to improve.
According to figures out today from the Central Statistics Office, more than 87,000 people emigrated in the year up to April.
That’s one new emigrant every five minutes, and they’re not necessarily young jobseekers.
The level of emigration from Irish shores is now higher now than at any time since the 1980s.
Diabetes pill from 1958 may be the new Cancer Drug
The next new treatment for breast, colon and prostate cancers, among others, may be a diabetes drug first approved in 1958.
Metformin, the most commonly used medicine to lower blood- sugar, is the subject of about 50 cancer studies globally, according to U.S. government clinical trial information compiled by Bloomberg. The research began after scientists found metformin prevented tumors in mice and that diabetics were less likely to develop a malignancy if they were taking the 5 cents- a-day pill than other diabetes medications.
The medicine is dispensed about 120 million times annually, according to a 2010 report in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. If the latest trials on breast and other tumors are successful, the drug could become a cheap weapon in the fight against a myriad of diseases including pancreatic and ovarian cancers. All told, cancer kills one in eight people and is the second-leading cause of death in most developed nations.
“The hope is that if it does show safety and efficacy, it would be available in a cost-effective way,” said Chandini Portteus, vice president of research, evaluation and scientific programs at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a Dallas-based breast cancer advocacy group. “It would be wonderful for patients if we had something that we knew worked and was safe and low- cost.”
The organization has spent about $10 million investigating metformin for breast cancer, Portteus said. “We have to turn over every single rock to determine what the options are for patients who need them.”
Millions of Deaths
Global cancer deaths will climb to 13.1 million by 2030 from 7.6 million in 2008, the Geneva-based World Health Organization said in February. Cancer costs totaled $124.6 billion in the U.S. alone in 2010, according to the National Cancer Institute. Newer, more targeted drug therapies, such as Dendreon Corp. (DNDN)’s $93,000-a-year Provenge for prostate cancer, may add only a few months of life.
Metformin was the seventh most-dispensed medicine in the U.S. in 2011, according to a list published by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics in April that ranked a group of painkillers that includes Vicodin as the most-prescribed. A pack of 84 500-milligram tablets of the diabetes pill, taken twice daily, costs the U.K.’s National Health Service 1.37 pounds, or the equivalent of about 3 pence (5 U.S. cents) a day.
The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston is studying metformin in at least eight trials, according to a National Institutes of Health online database.
‘Safe and Cheap’
“It is safe and it is cheap,” said Donghui Li, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at the center. “It reduces the risk and has better survival” in studies she’s done in pancreatic cancer patients.
Patients who had taken metformin had a 60 percent lower risk of developing pancreatic cancer, according to a case- control study Li published in 2009 in which she compared cancer patients taking metformin against people not on metformin.
Metformin didn’t benefit patients whose pancreatic cancer had already spread to other tissues, Li reported this year in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. Those patients whose malignancies were confined to the pancreas survived longer if they were on metformin — an average of 15 months, or four months more than patients not taking the drug, she found.
More research is needed to confirm those benefits in patients as their disease is developing, Li said.
“I got a lot of calls from patients and other clinicians, but I told them I cannot give them a recommendation,” she said.
Insulin Levels
Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, does have a suggestion for doctors who diagnose and treat diabetics: Test patients’ insulin levels in addition to blood sugar.
People whose insulin levels are high should either take metformin or increase their exercise and control their diets by reducing the amount of carbohydrates eaten, Cantley said.
“That will have a huge impact in preventing you from getting cancer,” said Cantley, who trained as a biochemist and biophysicist, in an interview. “It may even slow down the growth of the cancer you already have.”
Mars rover discovers evidence of water stream-beds on the Planet
A rock slab inspected by NASA’s Curiosity rover looks like ancient gravel from a Martian stream-bed.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has now confirmed what scientists have long suspected — that water anywhere from ankle to waist deep once flowed on Mars’ surface.
The conclusion, scientists said at a briefing Thursday, is based on images showing what looks like an ancient gravel stream bed. One of those stream bed slabs, named Hottah, appears to be made of gravel cemented together by water that once ran freely on Mars and settled on the floor of Gale Crater, likely several billion years ago.
Mission scientist WiIliam Dietrich of the University of California-Berkeley said it looks like the water was moving about 3 feet per second, “with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep.”
Dietrich said there have been a lot of hypotheses about the water flows on Mars. “This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars,” he said in a statement on the discovery. “This is a transition from speculation about the size of the streambed material to direct observation of it.”
Curiosity arrived on Mars in August and is now on its 51st Martian day, known as a “sol.” The evidence that a warmer and wetter Mars once enjoyed floods of water inside Gale Crater adds to the $2.5 billion rover’s efforts to find evidence of chemistry hospitable to life now or in the past on Mars.
“The rock formed in the presence of a vigorous flow of water on the surface of Mars,” said mission scientist John Grotzinger of Caltech. The find confirms past observations of orbiting spacecraft of Gale Crater that helped lead to its selection as a landing site for the rover, now on a two-year mission to search for evidence of past habitable conditions on Mars.
Essentially, the rover is travelling over a gully wash’s fan of stones, ones that traveled down from a canyon on the crater wall “several billion years ago,” says Michael Malin of the rover imaging team. Most likely the canyon waters flowed sporadically over thousands to millions of years, depositing gravel in a broad fan of stones covering the floor of the crater. “We had anticipated this was where some water-lain sediments would be,” Malin says.
The rover is equipped with a laser, drill and on-board lab to investigate chemistry of Martian rocks such as Hottah, named after a Canadian geological formation. In coming weeks the rover will steer toward more rock deposits suspected to represent these gravel outcrops, looking to test chemical conditions for past habitability on Mars, Grotzinger says. “This is really just the start of the science mission for the rover.”
The final goal of the rover is to examine layers of clay that underlay the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high mountain in the center of Gale Crater. It is expected to arrive in those foothills in about a year.
Ireland rank 10th on the list of the most educated countries in the world
Our economy might be halfway down the toilet, but if our ranking on the world’s most educated countries list is anything to go by, at least we’re doing something right.
Based on a study carried out by The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD), US website 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 countries with the highest proportion of adults with a college degree and it may surprise you to learn that Ireland features in the top ten alongside the likes of Australia, the UK, the US, Japan and top dogs Canada.
According to the study, 37 per cent of Irish people have a third-level degree and between the years 2000-2010, the percentage of people with a college education in Ireland nearly doubled, rising at an annual average of 7.3 per cent — faster than any country in the study, while graduation from second level education rose from 74 per cent to 94 per cent during the same period.
Canada finished on top of the most educated countries list after it was found that 51 per cent of the population had a college degree, a very impressive figure which indicates that they know something aboot the whole education process, eh?
You can read more about the study and the exact details here, but at a time when there’s little but doom and gloom in the news, it’s nice to hear something positive for once.
Now if we only had enough jobs on these shores for all our college graduates, we’d really be on the right track.
Most educated countries in the world
1. Canada
2. Israel
3. Japan
4. United States
5. New Zealand
6. South Korea
7. United Kingdom
8. Finland
9. Australia
10. Ireland
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