Donie's Ireland daily news Blog Wednesday

Permanent TSB Ireland to cut 16 branches and 250 staff

   

The Permanent TSB, the loss-making mortgage lender, announced today a restructuring geared to make the company a “smaller, profitable” bank by 2016. Permanent TSB to cut 16 branches and 250 staff. Jeremy Masding, CEO, said that the bank wanted to minimise losses and concentrate on the core banking business, while protecting the taxpayer’s investment in the group.

The Unite trade union which represents the majority of workers at Permanent TSB will meet with staff in the coming weeks. The union says between 120 and 150 jobs are to go across the branch network and a further 75 to 100 from a restructuring of head office functions. Staff at each of the banks locations will be briefed by management tomorrow.

No details have yet been released on which branches are to close. “This is a very difficult time for all staff,” said Unite national co-ordinator Walter Cullen. “There is an undertaking that the jobs lost will be so on a voluntary redundancy basis but clearly there may be issues involving redeployment of those staff whose branch may close but who wish to stay within the group,” he added. As part of the restructuring plans, the bank will:

• Reorganise its operations through three discrete business units:Reorganise the bank’s Head Office.
  • permanent tsb
  • Asset Management Unit
  • CHL  [its UK mortgage loan business]

• Reconfigure its branch network as follows: 16 of the current 92 branches will close; 2 additional branches will become self-service locations and we will close a further Dublin City Centre branch but invest significantly in a nearby branch to create a flagship City Centre site.
• Invest in core banking areas including Collections and Open 24.
• Reduce total staff numbers by up to 250 FTEs [Full Time Equivalents].  The bank will launch a Voluntary Severance Scheme based on 3 weeks’ pay per year of service plus statutory entitlements.
• Reduce operating costs by approximately 10% to reflect the smaller business of the new Permanent TSB.

IRELAND’S Grocery Market Sees its 

Biggest Decline In Two Years

These findings are based on Kantar Worldpanel Ireland data for the 12 weeks to 8 July 2012. Kantar Worldpanel Ireland monitors the household grocery purchasing habits of 3,000 demographically representative households in the Republic of Ireland. All data discussed in the above announcement is based on the value of items being bought by these consumers.

Latest supermarket share figures from Kantar Worldpanel in Ireland for the 12 weeks ending 8 July 2012 show the grocery market has fallen by 1.3% compared with the same period last year, the steepest decline since August 2010. .

Mark Thomson, business unit director at Kantar Worldpanel, explained: “The economic situation has been tough in Ireland throughout 2012, and consequently consumers have been looking to control their spend at the weekly shop. Shoppers have spent €26.8m less at the tills than they did during this period last year as household budgets remain squeezed. This has also resulted in a 1.9% rise in sales of own label products as consumers try to control their weekly spend. This trend is bolstered by the strong growth of discount retailers who predominately stock their own range of brands”.

Following a similar trend seen in the UK, the discounters Aldi and Lidl continued to be big winners from austerity shopping with a combined share of 12.2% and respective growth rates of 22.5% and 3.4%. Tesco also performed strongly, extending its market-leading share to 28.7% this quarter, driven largely by good performance across key areas of the store such as fresh and chilled products.

Kantar Worldpanel also noted that despite ongoing pressures on the grocery market and Ireland’s early exit from the Euro 2012 championships, shopper spend on alcohol was up 3.6% over the latest period with discounters seeing the biggest jump in sales.

Meanwhile, grocery inflation (as measured by Kantar Worldpanel) during the period stood at 2.7%, up from 2.6% in the previous period but significantly below the 3.8% seen in July 2011.

Regenerating Bone Tissue Using Gene Therapy:

Researchers at Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) survey

     

NEW METHOD MAY WORK WITH OTHER TISSUES AS WELL

Researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) have developed a new method of repairing bone using synthetic bone graft substitute material, which combined with gene therapy, can mimic real bone tissue and has potential to regenerate bone in patients who have lost large areas of bone from either disease or trauma.

The researchers have developed an innovative scaffold material (made from collagen and nano-sized particles of hydroxyapatite) which acts as a platform to attract the body’s own cells and repair bone in the damaged area using gene therapy. The cells are tricked into overproducing bone producing proteins known as BMPs, encouraging regrowth of healthy bone tissue. This is the first time these in-house synthesised nanoparticles have been used in this way and the method has potential to be applied to regenerate tissues in other parts of the body.

Professor Fergal O’Brien, Principal Investigator on the project explained: “Previously, synthetic bone grafts had proven successful in promoting new bone growth by infusing the scaffold material with bone producing proteins. These proteins are already clinically approved for bone repair in humans but concerns exist that the high doses of protein required in clinical treatments may potentially have negative side effects for the patient such as increasing the risk of cancer.

Other existing gene therapies use viral methods which also carry risks.” “By stimulating the body to produce the bone-producing protein itself, using non-viral methods these negative side effects can be avoided and bone tissue growth is promoted efficiently and safely,” Professor O’Brien said.

The research is the result of a collaborative project carried out between the Tissue Engineering Research Group led by Professor Fergal O’Brien and Dr. Garry Duffy in the Department of Anatomy, RCSI; Professor Kazuhisa Bessho, Kyoto University, Japan, and Dr. Glenn Dickson, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland and consists of a multi-disciplinary research effort between cell biologists, clinicians and engineers.

Results of this study were recently published in the journal Advanced Materials with Dr. Caroline Curtin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anatomy, RCSI, as first author. Bone grafts are second only to blood transfusions on the list of transplanted materials worldwide with approximately 2.2 million procedures performed annually ⁽¹⁾ at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion per year ⁽²⁾. At present, the majority of these procedures involve either transplanting bone from another part of the patient’s own body (autograft) or from a donor (allograft).

However, these procedures have a number of risks such as infections or the bone not growing properly at the area of transplantation. Therefore there is a large potential market for bone graft substitute materials such as the innovative scaffolds being developed by the RCSI team and their collaborators.

While the biomaterials developed in this project have undoubted potential for bone repair with the capability to act as a superior alternative to existing bone graft treatments, this gene delivery platform may also have significant potential in the regeneration of other degenerated or diseased tissues in the body when combined with different therapeutic genes.

This is currently a major focus of ongoing research in the Tissue Engineering Research Group which has a particular interest in using the platform to deliver genes that promote the formation of blood vessels (using angiogenic genes) in the regeneration of tissues which suffer from compromised blood supply such as heart wall tissue which has been damaged following a heart attack.

This research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme and a Science Foundation Ireland, President of Ireland Young Researcher Award.

Two pipe-bombs devices found in Sligo near Tobernalt holy well

  

An Army bomb disposal team made safe two pipe bombs in near the holy well in Co Sligo late last night.

It was the 118th callout for the Army’s teams this year, which have made safe 59 improvised explosive devices in 2012. The disposal team was deployed to a forest entrance on the Holy Well Road in Sligo following a request from the Gardaí at about 9.30pm.

One of the devices was made safe at the scene by controlled explosion and the other device was made safe for transportation and brought back to a secure military location for forensic examination.

The scene was declared safe at 11.45pm. The remains of the devices are to be handed over to Gardaí today to assist in their investigations.

Irish (Gaelic) language in peril in its very homeland 'The Gaeltacht'

‘Foreign languages are now more popular’

   

GENERATIONS OF IRISH CHILDREN HAVE GONE THROUGH A SORT OF RITE OF PASSAGE — USUALLY, AND APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, WHEN ON THE THRESHOLD OF ADOLESCENCE — WHICH HAS LEFT THEM WITH HAPPY, LIFELONG MEMORIES.

They remember the other-worldly environment of the Gaeltacht, the unusual sounds and sights and smells, like bread baking; and the strange experience of hearing all around them people speaking a language that most children have heard only in the classroom.

But how many are moved to improve their knowledge of the language, or speak or read it, nobody knows. Now it emerges that the numbers attending Gaeltacht “summer colleges” are falling.

Less than 24,000 are expected to travel this year, down from 28,000 four years ago. At the same time, more and more have registered for courses in European languages.

This points up what might seem a stark choice but is really an irrelevance. There is no conflict between learning Irish and learning French or German. Nor need there be any conflict between the modernisation of Ireland and the preservation of the language, including one of its most charming aspects.

But the Gaeltacht itself is shrinking. Its very existence is in peril. Sceptics question whether the people of the present Gaeltacht areas will still speak Irish in 20 years’ time. Like the loss of childhood, such a loss could never be repaired.