Minister James Reilly announces first phase opening of €284m new Mater adult hospital today
HEALTH Minister, Dr James Reilly today announced the first phase opening of the new €284 million Mater Campus Hospital Development.
The landmark new public hospital will contain state-of-the art facilities including 12 new operating theatres, 120 one-bed en suite rooms, new emergency and out patients departments and a 444-space underground car park. It will be the greenest and most technologically driven hospital in Ireland upon its completion.
Currently the Mater hospital admits approximately 16,500 patients each year. In addition it treats in the region of 40,000 day patients, 47,500 Emergency Department cases and in excess of 220,000 outpatients annually.
Phase One of the hospital, providing for the new outpatients department, catering and technical services, will be fully open in June. The new emergency department, car park, operating theatres, ICU, radiology and single en suite rooms will roll out in Phase Two between July and December 2012. Completion of final works will be in May of 2013.
Speaking at a special preview of the new hospital today, Chairman of Mater Campus Hospital Development, Sr Helena O’Donoghue, said: “I am delighted to see the results of a wonderful, up-to-date, state-of-the-art, hospital building that will provide healthcare for the country with its national and tertiary services as well as serving Dublin’s north inner city, which is the oldest and poorest catchment area in the country.”
Mater Hospital Chief Executive Officer, Mr Brian Conlan, said: “This is a great day for all our patients and staff. We now have state-of-the-art, eco-friendly accommodation and facilities, creating a perfect environment for delivery of top class care to our patients provided by the best professionals in the business.”
He added: “For the 50,000 patients that attend our Emergency Department, or the 220,000 outpatient attendees each year, the new Emergency and Outpatient Departments are now appropriately sized providing privacy, dignity and comfort with sufficient capacity to meet demand.”
Clinical Director, Professor Conor O’Keane, said: “The Mater hospital has a tradition of excellence in patient care for over 150 years. This new facility will allow the Mater to continue to enhance its national reputation for high quality care.
“This new build will also allow us to break free of the shackles of limited space as we will now have appropriately sized departments and waiting areas. This landmark building provides patients and staff with an environment reflective of the quality of care patients get at the Mater into the 21st century and beyond.”
Fr Brian D’Arcy fifth priest censured by the Vatican
One of Ireland’s best known and most popular priest Fr Brian D’Arcy has been censured by the Vatican over four articles he wrote for the Sunday World newspaper in 2010.
Fr D’Arcy is the fifth Irish Catholic priest known to have been censured by the Vatican recently. The others are Redemptorist priests Fr Tony Flannery and Fr Gerard Moloney, Marist priest Fr Sean Fagan and Capuchin priest Fr Owen O’Sullivan.
The four articles by Fr D’Arcy concerned how the Vatican dealt with the issue of women priests; why US Catholics were leaving the church; why the church must take responsibility for clerical child sex abuse; and homosexuality.
The Vatican is also understood to have complained about headlines on some of the articles, which would have been written by editorial staff at the Sunday World.
Fr D’Arcy has been a columnist with the Sunday paper for decades. He is also a contributor to RTÉ programmes, BBC Radio 2’s Pause For Thought, and an author.
Now, in instances where he addresses matters of faith and morals in his writings or broadcasts, he must first submit these to a third party for clearance.
In a statement yesterday Fr Pat Duffy, Irish provincial superior of the Passionist congregation in Ireland, to which Fr D’Arcy belongs, said that “last year concerns were expressed to Fr Ottaviano D’Egidio – the Passionist superior general – by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) about some aspects of Fr Brian D’Arcy’s writings.”
He added: “Since then Fr Brian has been co-operating to ensure he can make a contribution to journalism in Ireland. Fr Brian remains a priest in good standing.”
According to journalist Sarah MacDonald, writing in the current edition of Catholic weekly The Tablet, Fr D’Egidio was summoned by Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the CDF (at the Vatican), 14 months ago.
“It is understood that Cardinal Levada conveyed his dissatisfaction with four articles of Fr D’Arcy’s over a 38-year output,” wrote Ms MacDonald.
Writing in the Sunday World last week, Fr D’Arcy said there were those in the church who believed that “priests like me, for example, should have ‘the party whip withdrawn from them’ as one prominent Catholic woman so smugly put it on a radio programme recently.
“Sadly in our church now, it has become impossible to be open and honest about what good people are convinced of. It’s as if merely stating unpalatable facts is in itself disloyal. For years I’ve tried to point out the perils of the growing disconnect between church leaders and the ordinary people.”
From Co Fermanagh, Fr D’Arcy was born in 1945 and ordained in 1969.
CSO figures show that Galway pips Dublin as Ireland’s most international city 
Sixty% of Ireland’s population live in urban areas, which take up just 2.4 per cent of the country’s land mass, according to a further breakdown of Census 2011 statistics released yesterday.
The CSO data show population density increased across Ireland from 62 people per square kilometre in 2006 to 67 people per square kilometre in 2011.
However, while there are just 26 people per square kilometre living in rural areas this figure shoots up to 1,736 people per square kilometre in urban areas.
In Dublin city and suburbs the number of people per square kilometre stands at 3,498.
The statistics also reveal that almost one-third of people who were born outside of Ireland but living in the State reside in Co Dublin.
People who were born outside Ireland make up one-fifth of the population of Dublin. However, the capital is not the most international city in Ireland, a distinction held by Galway city, where one in four of the population was born outside Ireland.
County by county, Donegal has the highest percentage of residents born abroad – 22 per cent of residents were born outside Ireland, while Co Kilkenny was lowest at 12.6 per cent.
The title of largest town in Ireland is retained by Drogheda, with a population of 38,578 – the Louth town is still bigger than its neighbour Dundalk, from which it took the title in 2006.
Meanwhile, Ennis remains the largest town in Munster, with a population of 25,360; Letterkenny, with 19,588 residents, is the largest town in the three southern counties of Ulster; and Sligo is the largest town in Connacht, with a population of 19,452.
Saggart in south Co Dublin is Ireland’s fastest growing town, having seen a 150 per cent population jump between 2006, when 868 people were resident, and 2011 when 2,144 people were recorded as living in the town.
Courtown in Co Wexford is the second fastest growing town, more than doubling in population in the past five years.
Longford witnessed the greatest urbanisation growth between censuses: one-third of people now live in urban settings compared to just over one-quarter five years ago.
Co Leitrim is the country’s most rural county, where 90 per cent of the population live in a rural setting. Leitrim people are also the most likely to have set up home in a place other than their county of birth – almost 40 per cent of those Leitrim-born, with one in 10 of them relocating to Dublin.
By contrast Donegal-born people were the least likely to have moved county. Just 13.2 per cent of those born in Donegal and living in Ireland were usually resident in another county.
Meath, not Dublin, had the highest population of residents born outside the county, with 62.9 per cent falling into this category (47.6 per cent were born in another county, while 15.3 per cent were born outside Ireland).
A quarter of those born in Dublin lived outside the county.
Meanwhile, 114,617 households moved in the year leading up to April 2011, a fall of 21 per cent on the same figure in 2006. A large majority of those who moved in this time – 80 per cent – are now renting. By contrast there was a huge slump in the number who moved to a new home which they owned. Just 13 per cent, or 14,707 households, moved to homes they owned.
There are now 102 more towns in Ireland than there were five years ago. This is partly due to a tightening up of the definition of a town as per UN guidelines for this latest census. A “census town” is now defined as “a cluster with a minimum of 50 occupied dwellings, with a maximum distance between any dwelling and the building closest to it of 100 metres, and where there was evidence of an urban centre”.
THESE ARE IRELAND’S: KEY NUMBERS
1 in 4
The number of people living in Galway city who were born outside the State, making it the most international of Ireland’s five cities
14,739
The number of people over the age of one who moved out of Co Dublin in the year leading up to Census 2011 – Kildare was the most common destination
38,578
The population of Drogheda, Ireland’s largest town. Ennis (25,360) remains the largest town in Munster.
The largest town in Connacht is Sligo (19,452), while Letterkenny is the largest in the southern part of Ulster with 19,588 persons
Higgs boson – the so-called God particle discovery due within a few months
A west Belfast-born engineer who is director of accelerators and technology at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva has predicted that one of the key secrets of the universe will be discovered in a matter of months.
Dr Stephen Myers told an engineers’ conference in Belfast yesterday that evidence for the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson – the so-called God particle – could be discovered as early as August and by October at the latest.
The Higgs boson was the remaining “big building block” to be discovered in terms of how to explain mass, said Dr Myers, during the course of his keynote lecture to the Engineers Ireland conference at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, and in an interview with The Irish Times. “It completes the standard model for mass,” he said.
During the course of his lecture on the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Dr Myers told the engineers that ongoing experiments at the collider should provide the answer as to whether the Higgs boson does or does not exist. He believed evidence would be found for its existence and this in turn would provide further important insights into the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, that scientists say happened about 13.7 billion years ago.
“If it does not exist there will be enough data to show that the Higgs is excluded and that there must be another mechanism for mass. I am confident that we will find the Higgs by August or September of this year,” he said.
Dr Myers said a very high standard of proof was required. “You only declare a discovery when you can say there is only a one in a million chance that you are wrong,” he said.
He believed that Cern would establish proof for the Higgs boson to a standard of a “one in two million chance of being wrong”.
DNA analysis study reveals Stone Age migration
A DNA analysis of four Stone Age humans in Europe published today reveals how farmers likely migrated northward from the Mediterranean and eventually bred with hunter-gathers.
The research, by a Swedish-Danish team and published in the US journal Science, sheds light on an oft-debated chapter of human history – how did agriculture spread from the Middle East to Europe?
Scientists believe that farming originated in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago, and had reached most of continental Europe by about 5000 years ago.
The latest findings suggest that farming techniques were introduced by southern populations who lived in the Mediterranean region and brought their know-how northward to hunter-gatherers.
Researchers came to this conclusion after using advanced DNA analysis on four sets of Stone Age remains in Sweden – one farmer and three hunter-gatherers – dating back about 5000 years.
They could tell the difference in part by the way the remains had been buried – the farmer in an elevated megalith stone tomb and the hunter-gatherers in flat bed grave sites.
“We analyzed genetic data from two different cultures – one of hunter-gatherers and one of farmers – that existed around the same time, less than 400km away from each other,” said lead author Pontus Skoglund.
“After comparing our data to modern human populations in Europe, we found that the Stone Age hunter-gatherers were outside the genetic variation of modern populations but most similar to Finnish individuals, and that the farmer we analyzed closely matched Mediterranean populations.”
The data paints a picture of a migration of farming cultures that brought their planting and sowing expertise and eventually mixed with locals, teaching them how to grow their own food.
“The Stone Age farmer’s genetic profile matched that of people currently living in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, on Cyprus, for example,” said Skoglund, a graduate student at Uppsala University in Sweden.
“The results suggest that agriculture spread across Europe in concert with a migration of people,” added Skoglund.
“If farming had spread solely as a cultural process, we would not expect to see a farmer in the north with such genetic affinity to southern populations.”
Co-author Mattias Jakobsson, also of Uppsala University, said the two groups “had entirely different genetic backgrounds and lived side by side for more than a thousand years, to finally interbreed.”
The result is a modern-day European population that shows strong genetic influences from Stone Age immigrant farmers, though some hunter-gatherer genes live on, the researchers said.
The study was funded by the Danish National Research Council, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and the Swedish Research Council, as well as by private foundations.
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