Construction sector is set to grow in Ireland by 30% for next 4 years
It is hoped that a boost in the Irish construction industry will begin to attract emigrants back home to Ireland.
A new report by the Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland has forecast growth of 30% within the sector over the next four years, with the creation of almost 30,000 jobs.
It is predicted that the upward trend in activity will be driven by the private commercial and residential sectors.
President of the SCSI, Micheál O’Connor, says Dublin is the main driving force behind the positive outlook.
Mr O’Connor also said they have concerns about being able to fill the jobs in the growing sector.
“A lot of construction workers have emigrated and also there’s a lack of school leavers embarking on a career in construction or property,” Mr O’Connor said.
“So that’s going to be a real concern, and it will see a need for potentially emigrants to return home and re-engage in the construction and property sector.”
Irish Government defeated in a Seanad vote on upwards-only rent reviews
Independent Senator Fergal Quinn Bill passes narrowly
Earlier, there had been a tie in an electronic vote and the Bill was defeated on the casting vote of Fine GaelCathaoirleach Paddy Burke. When Mr Quinn’s supporters called for a “walk through’’ vote, Independent Senator Paul Bradford had arrived in the chamber and supported the Bill.
The Bill now goes to the Dáil for consideration.
Mr Quinn said his Bill, the Upward Only (Clauses and Reviews) Bill 2013, was anything but arbitrary or discriminatory.
“The reason this Bill targets upward only clauses in the commercial sector is because of the damage which has been done to that sector by the existence of such clauses,’’ he added.
Mr Quinn said the legislation did not seek to impose any burden on landlords as a class, and it merely sought to allow market rents to prevail.
Sligo capital of the North-West out to resurrect its fortunes
Like so many other places in the Irish State ‘The capital of the northwest Sligo’ lost the run of itself during the boom period.
Sligo rightly sees itself as the “capital of the northwest”, easily outpacing Enniskillen. With a royal charter granted in 1613, it defines itself as a “city” even though the population within the perfect circle that marks the urban boundary is fewer than 20,000 – a far cry from the European threshold of 100,000 for city status.
Designated as a development “gateway” under the 2002 National Spatial Strategy (NSS), Sligo has significant strengths – not least its unrivalled topographical setting, with Ben Bulben on one side and Knocknarea on the other, and the fast-flowing Garavogue river sweeping right through the town centre.
Borough architect Seán Martin notes that Sligo experienced a “dramatic period of change in the 19th century when our port, which could then be considered the equivalent of an international airport, was bringing trade, farming materials, plant, stock, coal and timber to and from Sligo”, generating local prosperity.
Much of this wealth was invested in fine buildings such as Sligo courthouse, the Town Hall, bank branches such as the superb Victorian Italianate Ulster Bank at Hyde Bridge, the Model School that lives on as the Niland Gallery and the former St Columba’s mental asylum, which is now an unusual Clarion Hotel.
Like so many other places in Ireland, though, Sligo lost the run of itself during the boom years. Hugely optimistic population projections were made and large tracts of land on the outskirts were rezoned for residential development.
Crazy prices were paid, even by the local authority, for land in areas such as Bellinode.
In town, river walks were laid out along both sides of the Garavogue, lined by new apartment buildings and old warehouses with cafes and shops at quay level. The old Silver Swan Hotel, at Hyde Bridge, was replaced by an angular glazed prow-like structure, The Glasshouse, Hotel, with a vacant eight-storey apartment block alongside it.
The N4 dual-carriageway was driven through the town centre, isolating Sligo’s cathedral from the railway station, and the envisaged “streetscape” along its length – intended to present a new face of Sligo – never materialised. Neither did the Treasury Holdings plan for a major shopping centre on the Wine Street car park.
The twice-daily scheduled Aer Arann air service to and from Dublin ceased operating three years ago after its PSO (public service obligation) subsidy was withdrawn. Passenger numbers had plummeted to 26,000 a year – and it turned out that the subsidy was costing taxpayers €95 for each passenger.
On the plus side, Strandhill Airport – owned 50% by the Sligo County Council – is still the base for an Irish Coast Guard Search and Rescue helicopter and it is used regularly to fly out fresh shellfish to France.
The Dublin-Sligo rail service has also been improved, with trains now running frequently, and more is promised.
Unlike Limerick, there is no specific new vision or strategy for Sligo once its county and borough councils merge, other than the current Sligo County Development Plan (2011-2017) and the borough’s Sligo and Environs development plan (2010-2016). These will no doubt be reconciled after the councils become a single authority.
Even though the borough did not have an independent corporation, Seán Martin believes that it will “not be so challenging to make transition” because there is not another big urban centre in the county; The new municipality of North Sligo would largely consist of the urban area and satellites from Ballysadare to Rosses Point.
Irish Nurses workload is too much? Results show education is linked to the patients survival rate
Prof Anne Scott (above picture right), of the School of Nursing in Dublin City University, who led the Irish arm of the study, said there was a significant variation in nurse staff ratios between hospitals and even wards here.
Between administering medications (as above) and coordinating care, nurses are some of the busiest health care professionals, often placed as the first point of contact for patients. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that a recent study suggests patients are more likely to die after common surgeries when the nurses who care for them have heavier workloads.
Results of the study are published in The Lancet, where researchers from nine European countries report on data derived from over 420,000 patients in 300 hospitals.
They say that for every extra patient added to a nurse’s average workload, the chance of surgical patients dying within 30 days of admission increases by 7%.
However, they also found that a 10% increase in the ratio of nurses who hold a bachelor degree is linked to a 7% decrease in the risk of death.
To conduct their study, the team evaluated responses from more than 26,500 nurses and reviewed medical records for the hundreds of thousands of patients aged 50 years or older who were discharged after common surgeries, such as hip/knee replacements, appendectomy, gall bladder surgery and vascular procedures.
Their investigation took into account each patient’s risk of death and included age, sex, type of surgery, type of admission and the presence of certain chronic conditions. In addition, the team considered hospital characteristics, such as bed size, teaching status and technology.
Lead researcher Prof. Linda Aiken, from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the US, says:
“Our findings emphasize the risk to patients that could emerge in response to nurse staffing cuts under recent austerity measures, and suggest that an increased emphasis on bachelor’s education for nurses could reduce hospital deaths.”
‘EVIDENCE MAY BE DEEMED TOO EXPENSIVE TO ACT UPON’
In detail, the report shows that the overall percentage of patients who died in the hospital within 30 days of admission was low, between an average of 1.0-1.5%.
But this percentage varied from hospital to hospital and ranged from less than 1% to more than 7%, the researchers say.
Additionally, nurse workload and education levels differ among countries. For example, the average patient-to-nurse ratio in Spain was 12:7, whereas in Norway this was 5:2.
In terms of education, all nurses in Spain and Norway had a bachelor’s degree, compared with an average of only 10% in Switzerland. In England, 28% of nurses had bachelor’s degrees.
The authors write about their findings in detail:
“These associations imply that patients in hospitals in which 60% of nurses had bachelor’s degrees and nurses cared for an average of six patients would have almost 30% lower mortality than patients in hospitals in which only 30% of nurses had bachelor’s degrees and nurses cared for an average of eight patients.”
Prof. Aiken says the European findings mirror data from the US suggesting “that a safe level of hospital nursing staff might help to reduce surgical mortality, and challenge the widely held view that nurses’ experience is more important than their education.”
The team says their findings back a European Union (EU) decision last year to approve education for nurses within higher education institutions starting after 12 years of general education.
In a linked comment to the study, Alvisa Palese, from the University of Udine in Italy, and Roger Watson, from the University of Hull in the UK, write that this latest research provides support for appropriate patient-to-nurse ratios.
“Whether these findings are used to inform health care policy or how they are implemented in practice will be interesting to see,” they say.
Kepler telescope bags huge haul of planets
The science team sifting data from the US space agency’s (Nasa) Kepler telescope says it has identified 715 new planets beyond our Solar System.
In the nearly two decades since the first so-called exoplanet was discovered, researchers had claimed the detection of just over 1,000 new worlds.
Kepler’s latest bounty orbit only 305 stars, meaning they are all in multi-planet systems.
The vast majority, 95%, are smaller than our Neptune, which is four times the radius of the Earth.
Four of the new planets are less than 2.5 times the radius of Earth, and they orbit their host suns in the “habitable zone” – the region around a star where water can keep a liquid state.
Whether that is the case on these planets cannot be known for sure – Kepler’s targets are hundreds of light-years in the distance, and this is too far away for very detailed investigation.
The Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009 on a $600m (£360m) mission to assess the likely population of Earth-sized planets in our Milky Way Galaxy.
Faulty pointing mechanisms eventually blunted its abilities last year, but not before it had identified thousands of possible, or “candidate”, worlds in a small patch of sky in the Constellation Lyra.
It did this by looking for transits – the periodic dips in light that occur when planets move across the faces of stars.
Of something like 3,600 candidates recorded, just over 20% have now been moved up to the status of confirmed detections by the Kepler team.
“This is the largest windfall of planets that’s ever been announced at one time,” said Douglas Hudgins from Nasa’s astrophysics division.
“Second, these results establish that planetary systems with multiple planets around one star, like our own Solar System, are in fact common.
“Third, we know that small planets – planets ranging from the size of Neptune down to the size of the Earth – make up the majority of planets in our galaxy.”
When Kepler first started its work, the number of confirmed planets came at a trickle.
Scientists had to be sure that the variations in brightness being observed were indeed caused by transiting planets and not by a couple of stars orbiting and eclipsing each other.
The follow-up work required to make this distinction – between candidate and confirmation – was laborious.
But the sudden dump of new planets announced on Wednesday has exploited a new statistical approach referred to as “verification by multiplicity”.
This rests on the recognition that if a star displays multiple dips in light, it must be planets that are responsible because it is very difficult for several stars to orbit each other in a similar way and maintain a stable configuration.
“This technique that we’ve introduced for wholesale planet validation will be productive in the future. These results are based on the first two years of Kepler observations and with each additional year, we’ll be able to bring in a few hundred more planets,” explained Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at Nasa’s Ames Research Center.
Sara Seager is a professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but is not involved in the Kepler mission.
She commented: “With hundreds of new validated planets, Kepler reinforces its major finding that small planets are extremely common in our galaxy. And I’m super-excited about this, being one of the people working on the next generation of space telescopes – we hope to put up direct imaging missions, and we need to be reassured that small planets are common.”
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