Irish cabinet may be briefed on how 2 hospital projects were fast-tracked?
Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn has said he expects Health Minister James Reilly to brief the Cabinet tomorrow on the fast-tracking of hospital projects in the constituencies of two colleagues.
Opposition parties have questioned how the two ministers concerned were able to announce the work before it had been formally approved by the Health Service Executive Board.
However, the Government has said the projects were decided by the HSE.
Documents show that Mr Reilly told the HSE to accelerate the projects at Wexford General Hospital and St Luke’s in Kilkenny, and that announcements about the work were made by local ministers Brendan Howlin and Phil Hogan before the HSE Board became aware of the change.
Today, Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan accused Fianna Fáil of “trying to undermine” a new facility at St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny.
Department of Health sources insist the projects were long planned and were progressed on the basis of need, while a spokesperson for Mr Howlin said details for the announcement came from the HSE.
Mr Hogan accused Fianna Fáil of trying to undermine the Kilkenny development, which was going ahead after the HSE identified savings and efficiencies to pay for it.
Ryanair’s third quarter profits better than expected
Ryanair has reported better than expected third quarter after-tax profits of €18.1m, a 21% increase on the same time last year.
The airline also raised its profits outlook for the full year.
The increase in quarterly profits in the three months from October to December came despite an €81m increase in fuel costs as the price of oil jumped by 22% from $84 a barrel to $102.
Ryanair said its revenues rose by 15% to €969m as traffic grew by 3% to 17.3 million passengers.
Its ancillary revenues performed ”strongly” and rose 24% to about €13 per passenger.
Ryanair said its third quarter profits were head of expectations due to strong pre-Christmas bookings at higher yields.
The airline said it has paid a second special dividend of €492m (0.34 cent per share) to shareholders in the third quarter, bringing to €1.53 billion the funds returned to shareholders over the past five years.
Ryanair gives EU ”unique set of remedies’ for AL bid
Ryanair also said today that it remains confident of getting approval from the EU Commission to take over Aer Lingus.
A statement from the airline this morning confirmed reports last week that it has submitted a “radical and unprecedented remedies package to the EU”.
This plan involves two airlines basing aircraft in Ireland and taking over a substantial proportion of Aer Lingus’ short haul routes. Media reports have suggested that those airlines are Flybe and IAG.
”We believe these remedies address every current Ryanair/Aer Lingus crossover route and all other competition issues raised by the Commission in its Statement of Objections,” Michael O’Leary said.
Ryanair is making its latest offer to assuage the EU’s concerns about the impact of a takeover of Aer Lingus on competition for air travel between Ireland and the UK and on the ultimate impact on passengers from such a deal. The European Commission has knocked back Ryanair’s previous takeover bid on those grounds.
”We look forward to completing our offer for Aer Lingus subject to receiving approval from the EU competition authorities in early March,” Mr O’Leary added.
In its results statement, Ryanair said that its new routes and bases performed well in their first winter. Its 51st base at Maastricht opened in December and it will open six new bases from April in Eindhoven, Krakow, Sadar in Croatia, Chania in Greece and Marrakesh and Fez in Morocco.
”Significant capacity cuts by Legacy and other struggling EU carriers continue to offer us substantial growth opportunities across Europe,” Michael O’Leary said. He said he expects further capacity cuts and restructuring in Europe as high fare, low making carriers struggle to compete with Ryanair.
Investor’s confidence rises dramatically with Irish Economy
Irish Economy: Investor confidence has shown a ‘dramatic’ rise according to the Dutch online bank, RaboDirect’s Investor Barometer, which measures sentiment among Irish investors and reached an all time high in January having entered positive territory* for the first time. The overall index now stands at 100.8, up from 86.9 in September 2012. (Zero to 100 signals a negative sentiment and 100 to 200 signals a positive.)
Results show that confidence amongIrish investors in both the national and global economic outlook has increased dramatically with 55% now confident about the outlook for the Irish economy over the next three months compared with 37% in September 2012. Meanwhile, confidence in the global economy has seen an even more marked rebound with 64% of respondents expressing confidence in the global outlook over the next three months (34% were confident in September 2012).
Despite this increased confidence in the economy, however, optimism among investors about their financial situation over the coming three months was down slightly at 74% compared with 76% who were optimistic in September.
Investors are becoming increasingly more favourably disposed to the global stock market with 80% saying they see value to be had in stocks compared with 72 per cent in September. This positive sentiment was reflected in investors’ preferred asset classes with 51 per cent indicating a preference for equities (Sept 2012: 41%) while 25% preferred cash (Sept 2012: 33%), 20% preferred bonds (Sept 2012: 21%) and only 3% preferred property (Sept 2012: 5%).
The emerging markets remain the region where most investors would consider investing (42%), followed by the USA (20%), Europe (19%) and Asia (19%).
The Clinton doctrine of American foreign policy
The partisan political theatre, of course, was top-notch. Sen. Rand Paul’s declaration that he would have fired Hillary Rodham Clinton; her angry rebuttal of Sen. Ron Johnson’s insistence that the Obama administration misled the American people about the Benghazi attack; Sen. John McCain’s continued outrage at the slapdash security the State Department provided its employees.
Beneath the posturing, though, ran larger questions: what strategy does the United States have to counter the militant groups running rampant across North and West Africa? And what kind of secretary of state has Mrs. Clinton been? In her last Congressional hearing in that position, Mrs. Clinton expressed exasperation with Washington’s political trench warfare.
“We’ve got to get our act together,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton has been a very good but very cautious secretary of state, many analysts say — one who, for the most part, kept her distance from Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and other seemingly intractable conflicts.
One State Department official, while praising Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, nonetheless looked forward to the arrival of Sen. John Kerry, her designated successor: “I came to admire Clinton as secretary of state, her focus on women and innovation in particular,” the official told me. “But am really happy to have someone in the job who does not retain political ambitions.”
In a recent assessment of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution argued that she had enjoyed some success, including restoring the United States’ image abroad, but she made no historic breakthroughs, he said.
Mr. O’Hanlon argued that Mrs. Clinton’s famed work ethic paid off. She made few mistakes, no major gaffes and did not “needlessly antagonize” friends or enemies. Mr. O’Hanlon called Mrs. Clinton’s role in the administration’s “pivot to Asia” and tough stance toward China arguably “her greatest and most memorable contribution.”
The problem, as last week’s hearing showed, is that the Middle East and the threat of terrorism continue to dominate American foreign policy. Even as the United States becomes more energy independent, terrorist attacks like the kidnappings in a remote oil facility in Algeria will make headlines andinfluence markets. Barring a massive shift in American domestic politics, Israel’s security will continue to be viewed as a vital interest of the United States.
Mrs. Clinton, to her credit, made forty trips to Europe that helped produce crippling new sanctions on Iran. Last fall, she helped broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But she failed to personally engage in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
To be fair, the Obama White House may have limited her options. After promising more open debate than occurred under President George W. Bush, the Obama White House tightly controlled the formulation of American foreign policy. Critics have also accused Mr. Obama of being overly cautious in foreign affairs.
With the exception of the Libya intervention and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama was “coolly calculating and reluctant to engage” in his first-term foreign policy, The Economist magazine recently argued.
Mr. Obama, of course, is trying to avoid the over-reach his predecessor displayed in Iraq. He also faces enormous fiscal pressures at home. But there is a risk that the pendulum is swinging too far toward a smug isolationism in Washington.
As Mrs. Clinton departs, worrying trends are emerging in the way America engages with the world. The new U.S. weapon of choice is the drone strike — a tactic that carries zero political risk at home but spreads anti-Americanism abroad.
Complex foreign policy problems that threaten American security are increasingly seen as “entanglements” best avoided. There is a convenient view that there are no “good guys” in the power struggles now unfolding in the post-Arab-Spring Middle East.
The potential lesson of the bruising political battle over Benghazi is simple: Take few risks, turn embassies into bunkers and avoid political firestorms at home. In her testimony, Mrs. Clinton passionately argued against that approach.
Declaring Somalia and Colombia success stories, she said the United States could counter militancy in Africa and the Middle East by working with regional organizations and training local security forces. U.S. funding and training of an African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, Mrs. Clinton said, had slowly succeeded in driving back al-Shabaab and other Islamist forces. In Colombia, the government has driven back FARC rebels and narco-traffickers.
There have been setbacks and the efforts in both countries are imperfect. But local security forces trained and funded by the international community slowly gained ground in painstaking efforts over many years.
“What we have to do is recognize that we’re in for a long-term struggle here,” Mrs. Clinton said at the hearing. “And that means we’ve got to pay attention to places that historically we have not chosen to or had to.”
During their heated exchange, Mr. McCain criticized Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration for not doing enough to train Libya’s security forces. Secretary Clinton replied that House Republicans had put a hold on the funding the administration requested to train Libyans.
“If this is a priority and we are serious about trying to help this government stand up security forces,” she said, “then we have to work together.”
Mrs. Clinton is right. And so is Mr. McCain. Congressional politicking hinders the State Department. The State Department executed terribly in Benghazi. But Mrs. Clinton, who I have criticized in the past, won the day.
“We are in a new reality,” she said, referring to the change sweeping across the Middle East. “We are trying to makes sense of events that nobody had predicted but that we’re going to have to live with.”
Mrs. Clinton called for the United States to show “humility” abroad and stop making national security issues “political footballs” at home. She said a Cold War style bipartisan agreement should be reached to launch a long-term American effort to strengthen local security forces and promote democracy across Africa and the post-Arab-Spring Middle East.
“Let’s be smart and learn from what we’ve done in the past,” she said. “Put forth a policy that wouldn’t go lurching from administration to administration but would be a steady one.”
“We have more assets than anyone in the world,” Mrs. Clinton added, “but I think we’ve gotten a little bit off track in trying to figure out how best to utilize them.”
A “little bit off track” is a euphemism for partisanship endangering national security. If the U.S. doesn’t get its act together, expect more Benghazis.
Edinburgh experts identify creature resembling ‘dolphin and crocodile hybrid’
Scientists examining fossil remains discovered more than a century ago have discovered a creature resembling a hybrid dolphin and crocodile.
The new species, named Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos, was a marine “super-predator” that lived 163 million years ago.
It belonged to a group of ancient crocodiles with dolphin-like features.
An amateur fossil hunter found the reptile’s partial skeleton in a clay pit near Peterborough in the early 1900s.
Experts have only now been able to confirm the identity of the remains, housed at The Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow.
The animal had pointed, serrated teeth and a large gaping jaw suited to feeding on large-bodied prey.
It represents a missing link between marine crocodiles that fed on small prey and their super-sized relatives.
Dr Mark Young, from the University of Edinburgh, said: “It is satisfying to be able to classify a specimen that has been unexamined for more than 100 years, and doubly so to find that this discovery improves our understanding of the evolution of marine reptiles.”
Dr Neil Clark, palaeontology curator at The Hunterian, Museum, said: “Little research has been done on this specimen since it was first listed in 1919. It is comforting to know that new species can still be found in museums as new research is carried out on old collections.
“It is not just the new species that are important, but an increase in our understanding of how life evolved and the variety of life forms that existed 163 million years ago in the warm Jurassic seas around what is now Britain.”
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