Revenue’s Vivienne Dempsey told RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke programme that it expects an increase in calls between now and the deadline.
She said: “As of this morning, I think the waiting time around eight o’clock was only a couple of seconds, but we expect as the day goes on that that will increase.
“I would say bear with us. This is the reason we’ve extended the lines from eight in the morning until eight at night to allow time for people to call. But do call and if you need assistance we’re there to help you.”
Anyone who qualified for a deferral or exemption, chose to pay at source (through pay or pension) or by direct debit last year was not contacted by Revenue because that method of payment will continue throughout 2014.
Ms Dempsey said there should be no confusion between those currently buying and selling homes as to who is liable for the property tax next year.
“The liability date, the first of November, was in the legislation from day one and that legislation was published in December 2012,” she said.
“If you owned the property on the first of November any year from now on you are going to be liable for the tax. So you just factor that in to the buying and selling price that you’ll agree for the house.”
The Government should consider introducing new tax measures to encourage “empty nesters” to trade down to help alleviate the current shortage of family homes in parts of Dublin.
According to Philip O’Sullivan, chief economist with Investec, in the absence of any “meaningful new build activity”, tax incentives could be used to help boost supply which in turn could help moderate the current upswing in Dublin prices.
According to the IBF Housing Market Monitor Q3 2013, published today by the Irish Banking Federation (IBF), most of the indicators of housing market activity are trending upwards but the market overall remains at the stabilisation stage.
According to the survey, there has been a 29.7 per cent increase in the number of properties listed for sale; a 19.2 per cent increase in the number of housing market transactions; and a 14.7 per cent increase in the level of mortgage drawdowns, compared to the same period in the previous year.
While prices are on the rise, Mr O’Sullivan played down concerns about a property price bubble.
“The current double-digit rate of inflation in Dublin property prices has given rise to concern in some quarters that a bubble may be beginning to emerge in the capital. I view such talk as overdone for now,” he said.
Mr O’Sullivan added that based on the CSO’s Residential Property Price Index, this had resulted in the -57 per cent peak-to-trough fall in Dublin prices improving to a “peak-to-current level” of -51 per cent and the low volume of transactions seen at the trough in the cycle may have exaggerated the extent of the fall.
The number of children taking up smoking and women who smoke during pregnancy has declined over the past decade, a new report has found.However while tobacco control measures are proving successful, disadvantaged children remain at particular risk of exposure to second-hand smoke.
The findings are contained within A Tobacco-Free Future, an all-island report on tobacco, inequalities and childhood published today by the Institute of Public Health in Ireland(IPH) and the Tobacco Free Research Institute Ireland.
The World Health Organisation considers that there are three key ‘windows of exposure’ in terms of tobacco-related harm in childhood – in the womb, directly through children taking up smoking and through exposure to second hand smoke in indoor and outdoor environments.
The Tobacco-Free report presents findings on these three windows of exposure based on a range of data sources in the Republic and in Northern Ireland.
It found smoking rates during pregnancy fell by around a third in the Republic of Ireland between 1997/1998 and 2007/2008.
However levels of smoking in pregnancy remain significant with around 17 -18 per cent of all pregnant women smoking in 2007 and 2008 according to data from the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital in Dublin.
Smoking in pregnancy is associated with low birthweight and premature births.
The proportion of children aged 10-17 reporting that they had ever smoked fell from 36 per cent to 27 per cent between 2006 and 2010 in the Republic and from 24 per cent to 19 per cent among 11-16 year olds in Northern Ireland.
Children are still trying their first cigarette at a very young age but there are some signs of improvement
Between 2002 and 2010 there was a significant decline in the proportion of young people in the Republic who reported having their first cigarette aged 13 or younger from 60.6 per cent to 48.9 per cent.
However many children remain exposed to second hand smoke. The report found that 22 per cent of nine year olds live in a home where people smoke in the same room as them.
Disadvantaged children are more likely to live in households with smoking adults and are at greater risk of exposure to second-hand smoke.
According to the report nine-year-old children in the Republic living in the lowest income families are twice more likely to be exposed to smoking than children who are in the highest income families.
Having a mother who smoked was associated with an increased risk of respiratory illnesses and ear infections in the first nine months of life.
Dr Helen McAvoy of the IPH said many trends identified in the report were encouraging.
“The report’s findings demonstrate the return from the introduction of broad-ranging tobacco control measures such as smoke-free workplaces, regulation of vending machines and pack sizes, price increases and removal of point of sale displays in retail outlets,” she said.
“However, the burden of harm associated with smoking falls heavily on the most disadvantaged children.
She said children were uniquely susceptible to tobacco marketing and branding.
The report highlights the importance of continuing efforts to restrict access and appeal of tobacco products to young people and stresses the importance of stop smoking initiatives within maternity, child and family policies and services, particularly in disadvantaged areas.
It draws on a range of data sources in the Republic and from Northern Ireland including Growing Up in Ireland, the national longitudinal study of children; research from the Coombe; and analysis of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Child Survey (HSBC).
The publication was welcomed by the Minister for Health James Reilly and his counterpart in the North Edwin Poots.
Tiny flying robot soars like a bloody jellyfish?
The four-winged robot built at NYU mimics the movements of a jellyfish to efficiently stay aloft.
For centuries, humans looking to tame the skies have tried to mimic the movements of birds and insects. But engineers building flying machines have now found an unlikely muse: the ocean-dwelling jellyfish.
A tiny flying robot built at a lab in New York University mimics the gently puffing movements of the efficient swimmer’s gelatinous bulb — not to paddle through water, but to stay aloft in air.
“Our [robot] is an aerial jellyfish if you will,”Leif Ristroph, assistant professor of mathematics at NYU who designed the tiny machine, told NBC News. The four-winged robot is wire-connected to a power source. Like an umbrella, the robot’s four wings collapse and open, “squirting” the air downward and allowing it to lift off.
“No one’s ever built this, and as far as we know nature never built it either to fly in air,” said Ristroph, who was to present his design at the Fluid Dynamics Conference in Pittsburgh on Sunday. “Maybe that indicates that it’s a bad idea? In any case we got it to work, so maybe not that bad.”
Water and air are both fluids, so the rules governing movement in either media are similar. Buoyancy helps stay afloat in water, but the real difficulty staying up in air is generating a lift to balance the body weight of the craft, Ristroph explained.
Other flying robots, like the tiny robotic bee built at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, or the H2bird flapping-wing drone built at a lab at Berkeley, sense the direction and location and adjust their movements to stay in the air.
But Ristroph’s pint-sized robots are “sort of dumb,” he said. With no fancy sensors, the bots’ physical design ensures that they stay upright just by opening and flapping their wings.
“That’s the beauty of the design,” Ristroph said, “It doesn’t need a ‘smart’ design to help it recover.”
Very tiny flying robots, each just centimeters across like his demo prototype, are best suited to adopt this spare design. And how might they ever be used? “[You'd] make a hundred of them and throw ‘em up into the air and monitor the air quality above NYC — the pollutants or CO2,” Ristroph said, making for a “nice peace-time application.”
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