120 Sligo jobs saved plus new €10m development at GSK Stiefel Laboratories
The GlaxoSmithKline owned Stiefel Laboratories in Sligo is to stay open.
Around 120 jobs are to be saved at the skincare manufacturing facility, which was supposed to close next year.
The plant will also receive an investment of €10m and the development is being supported by IDA Ireland.
The company said that the “flexibility, productivity and commitment of GSK staff in Sligo have been important factors” in the decision to keep the plant open.
In 2009, just four months after Stiefel was taken over by the pharmaceutical giant GSK, it emerged that the plant would close. The plant employed 250 people at the time.
Staff numbers there have since fallen to 180 and current plans will see that number reduced to 120 as the plant moves from the production of pharmaceutical to skin healthcare products.
GSK said that it had selected the Sligo plant as a dedicated supply site for its Stiefel consumer products and the home of its liquid bottling operation.
The plant will also have a role as a development centre for its consumer products in the future.
Stiefel Laboratories opened in Sligo in 1975.
Pat McLoughlin, site director of the plant in Sligo, acknowledged the significant contribution of the workforce in reaching today’s decision to keep the plant open.
He said: “‘Today’s announcement is the culmination of many years of hard work by the entire team.
“The workforce has shown tremendous effort, commitment and flexibility through a difficult period, increasing productivity by 40% in the last three years. This has been a key factor in the decision to choose Sligo for future development.”
Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton said: “Today GSK is announcing that it has reversed its decision to close the Sligo facility, is investing €10m in the facility, retaining 120 jobs, and will create at least 50 jobs from 2014.
“This very welcome news is a great vote of confidence in the workforce, in Sligo and in Ireland and I commend all involved in securing this decision.”
Taoiseach Kenny heckled by angry cancer service protesters in Sligo
Taoiseach has been met with angry protestors at the opening of a new social welfare and employment service in Sligo.
Almost 100 people gathered outside the event to voice their anger over cuts, particularly to cancer services at Sligo General Hospital.
A large Garda presence surrounded the event and Enda Kenny was heckled as he spoke with a number of protestors.
Tourism Ireland acquires all ireland.com domain name
Tourism Ireland chief executive Niall Gibbons said the domain name ireland.com was ‘a natural fit’
Tourism Ireland has acquired the domain name ireland.com from The Irish Times Ltd as part of plans to unveil a new website for the tourism industry later this year.
Tourism Ireland chief executive Niall Gibbons said the domain name was “a natural fit” for the work the all-island State body does to promote Ireland overseas.
The ease of recognition for the domain name will make the site stand out as a destination for potential visitors when they perform online searches relating to Ireland, he added.
Tourism Ireland has paid a fee of €495,000 to The Irish Times under a digital co-operation agreement.
“We are very pleased that the organisation responsible for promoting the island of Ireland overseas will have the opportunity to leverage the brand and URL that is ireland.com,” said Irish Times managing director Liam Kavanagh.
“From an Irish Times perspective, we will now focus on the continued development of irishtimes.com and to position it at home and internationally as Ireland’s leading quality news and information website,” Mr Kavanagh added.
As a result of the agreement, @ireland.com email addresses will no longer be available – a move that will affect some 15,000 active users.
A notice has been sent to users informing them that the service will be discontinued from November 7th. From this date, users will no longer be able to send or receive messages from their accounts, while from December 7th, they will no longer have access to their inboxes.
Continuing to run the email service would have required significant investment on the part of the company, Mr Kavanagh said.
The Irish Times Ltd acquired the ireland.com domain name in 1997 and for a decade the URL hosted content from the newspaper as well as a breaking news service.
In 2008, irishtimes.com became the URL for all the company’s editorial content.
Tourism Ireland’s new website will support 11 different languages and over 30 individual markets.
“Our new site and new URL will help us to harness more effectively the phenomenal growth in social media and to project an even stronger online presence to attract more visitors here,” Mr Gibbons said.
In 2011, Tourism Ireland sites attracted almost 12 million unique visitors from overseas, while its Facebook audience is the third largest in the world for tourism bodies after Australia and Spain.
A visitor attitude survey conducted by Tourism Ireland last year found that 73 per cent of overseas holidaymakers said the internet was an important information source when planning their holiday here.
Tesco still has the biggest share of the grocery market in Ireland
Tesco continues to hold the biggest share of the grocery market here, new figures show.
Aldi posted market share growth of almost 30% in latest 3 month period
But Aldi posted market share growth of almost 30% in the 12 weeks to the end of September.
The figures from Kantar Worldpanel shows that Tesco’s market share stood at 28.6% in the 12 weeks to September, up 2.5% on the same time last year.
They show that the discounters continue to make an impact on the grocery market with Aldi seeing a 29.8% gain to stand at 6% while Lidl rose by 1% to stand at 6.6%.
During the period under review, Dunnes saw its market share drop by 7.8% to 21.6% while Supervalu inched 1% higher to 19.7% and Superquinn fell 4.3% to 5.5%.
Kantar Worldpanel said that shoppers are continuing to keep a close eye on their spending – an austerity trend which had led to the value of the Irish grocery market falling by 0.5%.
This trend is further demonstrated by consumers choosing to shop more often for fewer items, rather than doing the big weekly shop.
”While the grocery market as a whole remains subdued, there are still some areas that are performing well,,” commented David Berry, Kantar Worldpanel’s commercial director. He noted that sales of alcohol at the grocers have grown by 8% this quarter.
Maths on-line E-learning software rewards kids with Facebook time control enablement
Aftermath, which has been shortlisted for this year?s Electric Ireland Spark of Genius Award, uses Facebook time as a reward for completing maths challenges online.
An Irish company has developed e-learning software that can be used to limit the amount of time children and teenagers spend on Facebook.
Aftermath, which has been shortlisted for this year’s Electric Ireland Spark of Genius Award, uses Facebook time as a reward for completing maths challenges online.
The software was developed in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, and is an attempt to solve the dual issues of children sacrificing study time to log on to Facebook and improving math literacy.
When the application is enabled, children will be redirected to the Aftermath site when they try to attempt to access sites such as Facebook. By completing maths questions in a game-based learning environment, the children can earn themselves some down-time on Facebook.
The questions, which have been designed by teachers, are aimed at children and teenagers aged between 11 and 16.
The Aftermath software costs $19.99 per year, and parents can choose the sites for limited access. It is designed to be installed on all web-enabled digital device at home.
“We are really excited to have developed a world-first e-learning system that uses online time as a reward,” Aftermath co-founder Ronan Higgins said.
“The combined issue of teenagers being too absorbed in Facebook and the need to boost their math abilities is a world-wide problem and we believe this product will have a major impact globally.”
The software was created by Higgins and his brother Pierce.
“The influence of technology on teenagers’ lives is a daily challenge for parents raising a 21st century family,” Pierce Higgins said. “We want Aftermath to change the way kids think about the time they spend online and that it is seen as a reward, rather than an access all hours activity.”
Water particles in soil found on the surface of the moon, new scientists study
The moon’s surface is covered with glassy grains of soil containing significant amounts of water that could sustain human life, a new study has found.
Researchers analysed samples of soil collected from the Moon by the Apollo missions and found it contained water in the form of compounds called hydroxyls.
The water was most likely formed on the surface of the Moon by the constant stream of charged particles ejected from the Sun known as “solar wind”, the scientists said.
The traditional view that the Moon was entirely dry has been proven incorrect in recent years, with growing evidence that icy drops of water can be found on its surface.
In 2009, a Nasa satellite slammed into a crater and threw up a plume which scientists found contained an unexpectedly high amount of ice, and small amounts of water have also been found in powder and rock in the Moon’s outer layer.
But although the discoveries have proven the existence of water, the problem which has continued to baffle scientists is where it came from.
Now a new paper by researchers from the University of Tennessee suggests the water was produced on the Moon’s surface rather than being delivered there by a comet or other piece of space debris.
Solar wind is a flow of particles continually flowing away from the Sun. The Earth’s magnetic field deflects them away from our planet, but the Moon has no such protection.
Researchers analysed the soil samples and found that they had similar chemical properties to charged hydrogen particles found in the solar wind.
The findings suggest the hydrogen was brought to the surface of the Moon in the solar wind, and then combined with oxygen to form hydroxyls, compounds similar to water which contain one hydrogen and one oxygen atom. These were then stored in the soil.
Youxue Zhang, one of the researchers, said: “Our work shows that the ‘water’ component, the hydroxyl, is widespread in lunar materials, although not in the form of ice or liquid water that can easily be used in a future manned lunar base.”
Lead author Yang Liu added: “This also means that water likely exists on Mercury and on asteroids such as Vesta or Eros further within our solar system. These planetary bodies have very different environments, but all have the potential to produce water.”
In an accompanying comment article in the Nature Geoscience Journal Dr Marc Chaussidon of the Université de Lorraine in France wrote that the findings were “opening the door to another source of water for inner Solar System bodies”.
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