West of Ireland
The Communications Minister has said that secondary schools in the West of the country will be the first to get industrial-speed broadband.
The Government announced a €40 million plan to roll out the new 100 megabyte per second system in every second level school before September 2014.
Pat Rabbitte says the service will be up and running in 200 locations by the start of the next school year, this coming September.
Minister Rabbitte – speaking at the Labour Party conference in Galway – says the broadband will be in place in 200 other secondary schools next year with the remaining 250 being connected in 2014:
“In respect of the latest canard about the labour party being anti-rural Ireland I can announce tonight that we have given priority to 13 counties in the west of Ireland where that work will be done before the beginning of the school year”
A Dublin Ex-Tesco executive appears before court on fraud charge’s
Paul Slevin leaving court yesterday. He has been charged with fraudulently taking €116,000.
A former Tesco Ireland executive has been charged with fraudulently taking €116,000 from the supermarket chain.
Paul Slevin (46), of Carpenterstown Road, Castleknock, Co Dublin, left Tesco in 2008, where he had held a position of category director. Yesterday, he was charged by the fraud squad with deception under section 6 of the Theft and Fraud Offences Act.
He is accused of inducing Tesco Ireland into paying an extra €116,470 in relation to travel services provided to the company.
The charge also alleges this was to “make a gain for yourself or another” and happened at the group’s head office in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, on November 1st, 2007.
Det Sgt Martin Griffin of the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation told Judge William Hamill at Dublin District Court the former executive was arrested yesterday morning.
He was brought to the Bridewell Garda station in Dublin and charged and cautioned, after which he replied “No”. Det Sgt Griffin said the Director of Public Prosecutions has directed Mr Slevin is to face trial on indictment and the book of evidence in the case would be completed in four weeks.
The direction means the case will be sent forward for trial to the Circuit Court after a book of evidence has been served on Mr Slevin. Det Sgt Griffin told the court there was no objection to bail as Mr Slevin is a resident in the State. Defence solicitor Aoife Corridon said there was consent to the case being put back for four weeks.
Judge Hamill remanded Mr Slevin on bail in his own bond of €500 to appear again on May 11th next.
Mr Slevin did not address the court during the brief hearing and has not yet indicated how he intends to plead.
A person convicted on indictment for deception is liable to a fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years, or both.
Ireland’s Doctors will ‘not allow’ free care without extra support from the Government
IRISH MEDICAL ORGANISATION CONFERENCE:
THE IRISH Medical Organisation has warned that GPs will not agree to the Government’s plans for free medical care to all patients with long-term illnesses unless increased resources and financial supports are made available.
The provision of GP care to about 56,000 patients who currently receive free medicines and drugs under the long-term illness scheme, planned for this year, is one of the first key steps towards the introduction of universal healthcare.
However in a hard-hitting address to the annual conference yesterday IMO chief executive George McNeice said while there was a compelling case to use the GP service for long-term illness management, “we won’t be party to a solution which forces additional work on to an over-stretched service without proper resources and financial supports being made available to ensure it works properly”.
“Allowing that to happen would be bad for our members . . . but it would also be bad for our patients and we won’t allow it.”
“As a former president of this organisation, I have no doubt that [Minister for Health] James Reilly knows this – and I hope he knows too how determined we are on this and other issues.” The chairwoman of the IMO’s GP committee Dr Mary Gray said last night that the current general medical services contract between doctors and the Government involved eligibility for services being based around means rather than on specific illnesses.
She said there would have to be negotiations with GPs on the Government’s plans to extend free care. She said additional resources would be required to allow for the provision of doctors, nurses, infrastructure and secretarial support. She said at this stage it was unclear as to how the additional resources could be provided, whether it be through higher capitation rates or some performance-related pay elements. She suggested as workloads transferred from other parts of the health service into primary care, budgets could also be moved.
In his address Mr McNeice said the optimism and enthusiasm that had greeted the election of the Government a year ago and the appointment of Dr Reilly as Minister for Health had all but disappeared. He said a year on problems in the health service had not been solved and “there is little confidence that the right progress is being made”.
Mr McNeice said in opposition members of the current Government never tired of speaking about the deterioration in the health service and the need for a radical overhaul.
“Some people, including some who should have known better, held out the prospect of easily implementable reforms transforming the patient experience.”
He said that in Government the promise of these reforms had become bogged down in the carpets of the Department of Health.
Mr McNeice said the Mandarins “who have spent years defending the indefensible and formenting division and tension are winning the key arguments and we are stuck in crisis management when what we need is crisis resolution”.
He said the over-riding impression now was of how little had changed since the new Government had come into power, not how much.
Mr McNeice said that while the IMO supported the concept of universal health insurance, the Dutch model of healthcare which had been heavily promoted by the Government needed “much closer examination before we can truly say whether it is a suitable model to import into Ireland”.
The IMO chief executive said both tiers of the Irish two-tier health service now appeared to be in danger of collapse and he criticised “chaos and mismanagement” seen in the health service over the last 12 months. He said this included “the farce over the administration of the medical card system where tens of thousands of applications got stuck in a jam that is taking months to resolve”.
He said the Department of Health had created a revolving door in relation to non-consultant hospital doctor posts. He said the department was chaotically trying to fill positions in hospitals which had been vacated by Irish graduates who had been forced to emigrate as a result of its policies.
Mr McNeice said the Government was in danger of killing the golden goose that was the GP service.
Hogan says local authorities will be charged with pursuing non-payers of the household tax
Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan runs a gauntlet of protesters on his arrival at the Local Authority Members’ Association conference in Waterford city yesterday.Photograph: Patrick Browne
The minister for the Environment Phil Hogan last night reiterated that the Government was determined to pursue all householders over payment of the €100 household charge and confirmed that local authorities would have a central role in pursuing those who had not paid to date for arrears and penalties.
Mr Hogan said more than 900,000 people had registered for the charge, and thanked those who had signed up to pay.
He added that, over the coming weeks, data protocols would be put in place to allow the Local Government Management Agency to draw up a comprehensive database.
Mr Hogan said the data protocols would allow the agency to contact State utility providers as well as the Land Registry and the Property Management Act to enable a thorough cross-checking to take place of those who had registered and paid to date and those who had failed to register.
The details will then be forwarded to the local authorities and notifications will be sent out to those who have yet to pay, reminding them of their obligation to pay in the same way as people are notified of their requirement to pay the charge for their TV licence, he said.
“Local authorities will become very involved in following up people – we will be writing to people in due course to let them know of their obligation to pay, just like the TV licence.
“It will be brought to their attention that they must pay and that it’s not going away and they are better off paying sooner rather later.”
Mr Hogan was speaking in Waterford prior to addressing the Local Authority Members’ Association annual conference, where he was subjected to protests from about 60 protesters against the household charge who greeted him upon his arrival at the Tower Hotel.
Gardaí had set up crush barriers to keep back the protesters but a group of about 20 Fine Gael councillors attending the conference formed a protective phalanx inside the Garda cordon to shield Mr Hogan from the protesters who waved placards in his face.
Mr Hogan seemed unperturbed by the protest, smiling as he was escorted through the corridor of protesters.
“It wasn’t a typical response for a Kilkenny man coming to Waterford. I know there was a small number of people and they are entitled to protest, but I am a democrat and the people here, the councillors, are democrats – they are trying to provide services for people.
“People know in these financial circumstances they must make a financial contribution for local services, and notwithstanding the fact that people are under pressure, over 900,000 people in this country have prepared to comply with the law – unlike the people outside,” he said.
Addressing 180 delegates, Mr Hogan said it was clear from the experience of the household charge that many public representatives did not want the responsibility of putting in place and securing new local funding for their local authorities.
“We will never have an effective system of local governance without the necessary leadership at local level in order to make the real leap to a true system of local government as opposed to one of local administration,” he said.
Speaking earlier in Kilkenny, Mr Hogan said the Government was considering measures which could see householders who do not register for the €100 household charge being refused tax clearance certificates for 2013.
The Emperor penguins count as much as 600,000 from space
Emperor penguins on the sea ice close to the UK’s Halley Research Station
Nearly twice as many emperor penguins inhabit Antarctica as was thought.
UK, US and Australian scientists used satellite technology to trace and count the iconic birds, finding them to number almost 600,000.
Their census technique relies in the first instance on locating individual colonies, which is done by looking for big brown patches of guano (penguin poo) on the white ice.
High resolution imagery is then used to work out the number of birds present.
It is expected that the satellite mapping approach will provide the means to monitor the long-term health of the emperor population.
Climate modelling has suggested their numbers could fall in the decades ahead if warming around Antarctica erodes the sea ice on which the animals nest and launch their forays for seafood.
“If we want to understand whether emperor penguins are endangered by climate change, we have to know first how many birds there are currently and have a methodology to monitor them year on year,” said Peter Fretwell from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
“This study gives us that baseline population, which is quite surprising because it’s twice as many as we thought, but it also gives us the ability to follow their progress to see if that population is changing over time,” he told BBC News.
The scientists have reported their work in the journal PLoS One.
Their survey identified 44 key penguin colonies on the White Continent, including seven that had not previously been recognised.
Although finding a great splurge of penguin poo on the ice is a fairly straightforward – if laborious – process, counting individual birds in a group huddle is not, even in the highest resolution satellite pictures.
This means the team therefore had to calibrate their analysis of the colonies by using ground counts and aerial photography at some select sites.
Peter Fretwell explains how his team counted penguins
Fretwell and colleagues totted 595,000 penguins, which is almost double the previous estimates of 270,000-350,000 emperors. The count is thought to be the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space.
Co-author Michelle LaRue from the University of Minnesota said the monitoring method provided “an enormous step forward in Antarctic ecology”.
The emperor breeds in the coldest environment of any bird species on Earth
“We can conduct research safely and efficiently with little environmental impact,” she explained.
“The implications for this study are far-reaching. We now have a cost-effective way to apply our methods to other poorly understood species in the Antarctic.”
The extent of sea ice in the Antarctic has been relatively stable in recent years (unlike in the Arctic), although this picture hides some fairly large regional variations.
Nonetheless, computer modelling suggests a warming of the climate around Antarctica could result in the loss of more northern ice floes later this century.
If that happens, it might present problems for some emperor colonies if the seasonal ice starts to break up before fledglings have had a chance to acquire their full adult, waterproof plumage.
And given that the krill (tiny crustaceans) that penguins feed on are also dependent on the ice for their own existence (they feed on algae on the ice) – some colonies affected by eroded floes could face a double-whammy of high fledgling mortality and restricted food resources. But this can all now be tested by the methodology outlined in the PLoS paper.
“The emperor penguin has evolved into a very narrow ecological niche; it’s an animal that breeds in the coldest environment in the world,” explained Peter Fretwell.
“It currently has an advantage in that environment because there are no predators and no competition for its food.
“If Antarctica warms so that predators and competitors can move in, then their ecological niche no longer exists; and that spells bad news for the emperor penguins
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