Donie's news Ireland update Blog

Donie's news Ireland update Thursday

Obama’s ancestral home 

in Moneygall now open to visitors from all over the world

   

A year after the  US president Barack Obama’ historic visit to Moneygall and the rural Co Offaly village has opened the home and house to the world.

Moneygall marked the one- year anniversary by officially opening the president’s ancestral home on the Main Street yesterday.

The ceremony was conducted by director of communications at the US embassy, Karen Posner- Mullen, who thanked residents for their “great friendship”.

Canon Stephen Neill told Ms Posner-Mullen the people of Moneygall were very proud to welcome the delegation from the US embassy.

The event was attended by pupils from 10 primary schools, who toured the house, took part in an Obama poster competition and watched The Road to Moneygall in a mobile cinema.

Mr Obama’s eighth cousin Henry Healy said: “It’s been a rollercoaster of a year for Moneygall and for me. To be able to put the final piece of the jigsaw together by opening the ancestral home and letting the people into the final place where the president visited is quite significant; it gives people the full experience of the visit.”

Moneygall’s residents have embraced their new fame. Public interest in the village has not waned over the course of the year, according to local publican Ollie Hayes.

“What a year,” he said. “It’s been an extraordinary year and we’ve had lots of people calling from all over the world. They just love the story and want to see where the president spent his time.”

Irish house prices fell by 16.4% this year to April 2012 
  

In the year to April 2012, Irish houseprices at a national level, fell by 16.4%. This compares with an annual rate of decline of 16.3% in March and a decline of 12.2% recorded in the twelve months to April 2011.

The CSO said that residential property prices fell by 1.1% in the month of April. There was no change in residential property prices recorded in March. A decline of 1.0% was recorded in April of last year.

In Dublin residential property prices rose by 0.5% in April and were 17.3% lower than a year ago. Dublin house prices increased by 0.2% in the month and were 17.9% lower compared to a year earlier. Dublin apartment prices were 15.3% lower when compared with the same month of 2011.

The price of residential properties in the Rest of Ireland (i.e. excluding Dublin) fell by 2.0% in April compared with a decline of 1.3% in April last year. Prices were 16.1% lower than in April 2011.

Overall Decline: House prices in Dublin are 55% lower than at their highest level in early 2007. Apartments in Dublin are 60% lower than they were in February 2007. Residential property prices in Dublin are 57% lower than at their highest level in February 2007. The fall in the price of residential properties in the Rest of Ireland is somewhat lower at 47%. Overall, the national is 50% lower than its highest level in 2007.

NAMA to spend €2bn on construction schemes over a four year period promoting Irish jobs

   

The National Asset Management Agency has said it plans to spend €2bn over the next four years on projects which could create up to 25,000 construction jobs and a further 10,000 non-building jobs.

The mini-stimulus package for the country’s large cities was announced by NAMA chairman Frank Daly during a speech in Galway.

He said NAMA intended to finance schemes aimed at completing partially built commercial and residential projects and to develop some sites from scratch.

Some of the schemes are already up and running. NAMA has already lent €13m to complete the Charlestown Shopping Centre in Finglas, Dublin and €10m that is funding a project to complete an apartment block at the Beacon South in Sandyford, south Dublin.

NAMA does not have to borrow to roll out the new programme. The funds will come from the agency’s cash reserves of €4.3bn — money that comes from property rents, interest on NAMA-held loans and property sales.

It will be advanced as fresh loans to developers, as well as to receivers appointed by NAMA to run some of its properties.

The plan is to focus on developments in the main urban centres of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway.

In particular, NAMA and the IDA have identified shortages or threatened shortages in the kind of large, high-spec, city-centre offices favoured by multinationals such as Google andFacebook.

Deals like this will follow on from the successful €100m sale of Google’s giant headquarters in Dublin’s docklands area last year. That building project was completed with fresh loans from NAMA to developers Treasury Holdings and secured hundreds of jobs for the city.

“Our view is that long-term prospects for much of this property are good,” Mr Daly said. “On that basis, we propose to invest, particularly over the next three years, with a view to ensuring that this property is available to meet commercial and residential demand over the rest of the decade.”

As well as cash for construction, NAMA can help with expertise on planning, sales and lettings and with essential infrastructure activity in various locations, Mr Daly added.

The new initiative is in line with NAMA’s mission and with some previous lending done by the agency. However, spending €2bn over four years is a significant step-up in activity — particularly in Ireland, where to date it has advanced €500m to developers to build out projects.

NAMA says the package could create as many as 35,000 jobs in construction and allied trades. However, in reality the number of jobs filled at any one time is likely to be a fraction of that because the projects will not run simultaneously.

Yesterday in the Dail there was a broad welcome for the scheme. But there was some concern among opposition TDs that highly indebted developers could stand to benefit as NAMA advances new loans for projects that are idle but still owned by the builders.

But a spokesman for the agency said: “After what has happened over the last two years, I find it hard to believe that anyone still thinks NAMA is soft on developers.”

Heart risk for people taking ‘calcium supplements’

       

Calcium supplements may significantly increase the risk of having a heart attack and should be “taken with caution”, according to new research from Germany.

Furthermore, boosting the overall amout of calcium you eat has no significant benefits to heart health and does not stave off heart disease or stroke, the researchers claim.

They studied almost 24,000 people, aged between 35 and 64, as part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study in Heidelberg.

Their normal diets were assessed via food frequency questionnaires and the participants were also quizzed about whether they regularly took vitamin or mineral supplements.

Their health was tracked for an average of 11 years.

The study found that those whose diets included a moderate amount (820 mg daily) of calcium (from all sources, including supplements) had a 31% lower risk of having a heart attack than those in the bottom 25% of calcium intake.

But those with an intake of more than 1100 mg daily did not have a significantly lower risk.

There was no evidence that any level of calcium intake either protected against or increased the risk of stroke.

But when the analysis looked at vitamin/mineral supplements, it found that those who took calcium supplements regularly were 86% more likely to have a heart attack than those who didn’t use any supplements.

This risk increased further in those who used only calcium supplements: They were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack as those who didn’t take any supplements.

The researchers said: “This study suggests that increasing calcium intake from diet might not confer significant cardiovascular benefits, while calcium supplements, which might raise [heart attack] risk, should be taken with caution.”

The researchers also highlighted the link between calcium supplements and kidney stones, and gut and abdominal symptoms.

They also suggest that many women taking calcium supplements to ward off brittle bones are already healthier than those who don’t, and that the overall protective effect is modest – approximately 10%.

The evidence that dietary calcium is helpful while calcium supplements are not can be explained by the fact that dietary calcium is taken in small amounts, spread throughout the day, so is absorbed more slowly.

Supplements, on the other hand, cause calcium levels in the blood to soar above the normal range, and it is this flooding effect which might ultimately be harmful, they suggest.

“Calcium supplements have been widely embraced by doctors and the public, on the grounds that they are a natural and therefore safe way of preventing osteoporotic fractures,” they write.

“It is now becoming clear that taking this micronutrient in one or two daily [doses] is not natural, in that it does not reproduce the same metabolic effects as calcium in food,” said the authors.

Given that it is neither safe nor effective, boosting calcium intake from supplements should be discouraged, they contend.

And they conclude: “We should return to seeing calcium as an important component of a balanced diet, and not as a low cost panacea to the universal problem of postmenopausal bone loss.”

The research was published in the online issue of the journal Heart.