Mortgage problem home’s repossessions will be fair, says Enda Kenny
The Taoiseach Enda Kenny promised a “patently fair” process for home repossessions with new laws in the pipeline to be used only as a last resort.
Mr Kenny and Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore said the Government will accelerate attempts to tackle the mortgage crisis as banks move to deal with the problem.
Marking the Coalition’s second anniversary in office, the two men pledged to ensure that most families were offered sustainable solutions by next year.
“I want to make it clear that the taking of houses from people is something we do not want to see and the banks themselves would see it only as a last resort,” said the Taoiseach.
“We don’t have direction over this. But what is important is that we put in place a process that is transparent and that is patently fair for people.”
The Taoiseach claimed the plan for economic recovery was working.
Republican dissidents threaten to kill Martin McGuinness
Martin McGuinness said he would not be silenced by the threat to his life
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has revealed that he is under a death threat from dissident republicans in Londonderry.
Mr McGuinness said police officers who came to his home on Wednesday evening told him of the threat.
He said he has been targeted because of his condemnation of the recent attempted mortar attack in the city and remarks he made in support of the PSNI.
“Both myself and the PSNI are taking this threat seriously,” he said.
The deputy first minister said a senior PSNI officer informed him of “a real and active threat against his life from a dissident group in Derry city”.
‘Attack’
“However, there are times when in political leadership staying silent is not an option and I will not be silenced by threats like this.
“I will defend the peace process from attack from whatever quarter, be it these groups or the loyalist flag protesters over recent months.”
Mr McGuinness criticised the “warped logic” of those who believed that threatening republicans could “somehow advance the cause of Irish reunification”.
“I am very sure of the ground I stand on. I am also very sure that it is the path shared by republicans across this island genuinely interested in building a new agreed Ireland, republicans who put Ireland before ego, criminality and self gain,” he said.
Elected representatives from several political parties in Northern Ireland, including the SDLP, Alliance, Sinn Fein and the DUP, were the subject of death threats following a controversial vote over the union flag at the end of last year.
South Belfast SDLP MLA Conall McDevitt received a bullet and sympathy card, through the post on Wednesday.
Ireland could be hit by blindness ‘epidemic’
Health experts have warned of a potential blindness “epidemic” in Ireland unless action is taken to prevent sight loss.
The number of blind or vision-impaired people in Ireland is expected to break through the quarter of a million mark within a few years, an expert group says.
There are already 220,000 people suffering from sight loss here – but the figure is forecast to rise to 272,000 by the year 2020, according to the National Coalition for Vision Health in Ireland.
The group said research has shown that the majority of these cases can be medically managed to prevent sight loss moving to total blindness.
Siobhan Kelly, chief executive officer of the Irish College of Ophthalmologists, who is also a member of the expert group, said people in Ireland were living longer and there was a responsibility to provide the best healthcare available.
“It makes absolute long-term economic and social wellbeing sense to put resources and investment in place to ensure we don’t reach epidemic eye health problems in the future that could have been avoided,” she said.
The expert group report found that 75% of blindness is preventable and that treatment for sight loss in Ireland is expected to cost the taxpayer more than 2.5 billion euro a year by 2020.
People with vision loss are up to eight times more likely to fracture a hip and three times more likely to be depressed, the study says.
The report has called for the setting up of a new national co-ordinating committee to promote eye health along with the appointment of an additional 19 consultant ophthalmologists and 14 community ophthalmologists.
The expert group said the Irish health care system was not well enough resourced to treat the sheer number of vision-impaired patients, despite treatments being available that could help up to four in every ten people with sight loss.
The majority of Ireland’s children are ‘happy’
Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald: study points to the need for a greater focus on vulnerable children and further investment in early-childhood services.
The vast majority of Irish children are happy, though an Irish childhood is a tougher place for Traveller and foreign-national children as well as those with disabilities, the latest State of the Nation’s Children Report shows.
Publishing the report today, Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald said it pointed to the need for a greater focus on vulnerable children and further investment in early-childhood services.
This is the fourth, biennial study tracking the well-being of the State’s 1.1 million 0-17 year-olds across a variety of indicators including physical and emotional health, education and relationships.
Of the total child population 14,245 (1.2 per cent) are Travellers, 93,005 (8.3 per cent) are foreign nationals, 66,437 (5.8 per cent) have a disability, 202,444 (18.3 per cent) live in lone-parents households and 421,568 (36.7 per cent) live in families where the mother has a third level degree or higher.
More children said they found it easy to talk to their parents when something was really bothering them, in this report compared with 1998 figures.
Some 82 per cent said they could talk to their mothers, compared with 74 per cent in 1998, while 67 per cent could talk to their fathers compared with 48 per cent.
However children with disabilities (79 per cent) and older children, aged 15-17 (76.5 per cent) were less likely to find it easy to talk to their mothers.
There has been a “significant decrease” in the percentage of 15 year-olds who eat a main meal with their parents, at a table, several times a week, down from 77 per cent in 2000 to 72 per cent in 2009.
Traveller (62 per cent) and poorer (66.9 per cent) children were less likely to eat a meal with parents several times a week.
Almost 90 per cent of 10-17 year-olds reported having three or more friends, though this was less likely among Traveller and immigrant (both 84 per cent) children.
These two groups as well as children with disabilities are “significantly more likely to report being bullied at school”. While 24 per cent of all 10-17 year-olds reported being bullied in the last two months 32 per cent of Traveller children did and 29 per cent of both immigrant and disabled children did.
There was also more bullying reported by younger children – 38 per cent of nine year-olds said they had been bullied in the last two months, 30 per cent of 10-11 year-olds; 25 per cent of 12-14 and 21 per cent of 15-17 year olds.
Almost 12 per cent of primary school and 18 per cent of secondary school children missed more than 20 days of school in the 2009/10 school year.
Absenteeism at primary level was twice as high (15 per cent) in urban areas as rural (eight per cent), and in both primary and secondary it was up to twice as high in the most deprived areas, where it was up to 24 per cent in Deis (targeted for extra financial supports) primary schools.
Describing the school absenteeism figures as “very serious” Ms Fitzgerald said non-attendance was often a first indicator that a child was “in trouble” and in need of “intervention”.
“The figures here do strengthen the need for a sharper focus in Ireland on early intervention and early year services with a view to improving future outcomes and future prospects.
“It does allow a greater focus on more vulnerable groups of children, including Traveller children, immigrant children and children with a disability and chronic illness.
“There is a real social and economic imperative to focus on this research and take action,” she said.
Bid to ban commercial trade in polar bears fails
An unusual coalition between the U.S. and Russia to win an international ban on commercial trade of polar bear parts failed Thursday.
Meeting in Bangkok, delegates to the 176-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted down a U.S. proposal to elevate the polar bears’ status and effectively prohibit the lucrative trade in skins, teeth and claws from the animals, which are actively hunted in Canada.
The U.S. was joined in its campaign by Russia, which has battled widespread poaching of polar bears in recent years. But the effort met with opposition from Canada and Denmark, and was further sidetracked when the European Union attempted a compromise that would have allowed further study before an outright ban.
“The result was very disappointing, not just for us, but obviously for the fate of the world’s polar bears,” Andrew Wetzler, who spoke at the meeting on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council and two other conservation organizations, said in a telephone interview.
A total of 38 countries voted in favor of the U.S. proposal, with 42 against it, and 46 abstentions.
“It’s an unfortunate result after an ugly process,” added Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Countries and organizations that wanted to keep the international trade in polar bear skins going for political reasons had to distort or downplay the science showing polar bears are well on their way to extinction.”
About 25,000 polar bears exist around the world, two-thirds of them in Canada. The U.S. in its report to the convention said an average of 3,200 items made from polar bears were exported every year from Arctic countries, mainly Canada, representing about 400 to 500 polar bears.
The trade has become increasingly valuable, adding to the growing number of dangers to an animal already threatened by climate change. Two pelts sold at an auction last June in Ontario fetched a record $16,500 each.
“The current level of trade may have a detrimental impact on the status of the species because trade, particularly commercial trade, compounds the threat to the species posed by habitat loss,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
The Inuit population of northern Canada has fiercely defended rights to hunt the animals they have targeted throughout history and also to sell those they don’t need for subsistence use. Income from foreign trophy hunters and sales of pelts is crucial for many of the remote, impoverished villages of the far north.
“For the world to suggest that we’ll save the polar bears and forget the people, that’s a little backwards,” Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents about 55,000 Inuit across Canada, told the Los Angeles Times in an interview last year. Audla also spoke at Thursday’s meeting in Bangkok.
In the U.S., polar bears are protected by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Non-subsistence hunting and commercial trade in polar bear pelts is prohibited.
Canadian officials say they have carefully tailored regional hunting quotas designed to maintain healthy polar bear populations. Only about 2% of the Canadian polar bear population — about 300 bears a year — enters international trade, they said.
“Harvest quotas are based on principles of conservation and aboriginal subsistence, and are not market driven,” the Canadian government said in a report on the CITES issue. “International trade is not a threat to polar bears.”
But conservationists pointed out that the Canadian territory of Nunavut tripled its harvest quota for the most imperiled population of polar bears in 2011 and raised it again last year.
They are hoping to persuade the Obama administration to impose trade sanctions against Canada under international agreements, and are also challenging Canada’s commercial polar bear trade under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Polar bears are struggling for survival already,” said polar bear scientist Nikita Ovsyanikov, who was Russia’s delegate to the convention, according to the Guardian newspaper. “Exposing them to hunting will drive them to extinction.”
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