Ireland’s property prices fall almost 12% year to August 2012
Property prices continued to fall in Ireland for the year to August 2012, but rose month on month.
Residential property prices throughout Ireland fell by almost 12 per cent over the year to August, but the pace of decline slowed from July, the Central Statistics Office said today.
In comparison, prices fell by 13.6 per cent over the 12 months to the end of July.
Over the month of August, prices rose slightly, gaining 0.5 per cent, outpacing the 0.2 per cent rise the previous month.
The CSO figures are based on mortgages, and do not take into account the cash transactions that are taking place in the market.
In Dublin, prices were 0.5 per cent lower in the month, and had fallen 13.8 per cent compared with a year earlier. House prices were 14.4 per cent lower compared with August 2011, and apartments were down 13.4 per cent. To date, Dublin house prices have lost 56 per cent from their peak reached in early 2007, and apartments have fallen by 63 per cent.
Throughout the rest of the country, the price of homes was down an average of 10.7 per cent year on year, with property prices showing a 1.3 per cent rise in August. Overall, prices have declined 46 per cent since the 2007 peak of the property boom.
Sligo Garda checked the wrong house after 999 call in Gillespie murder case
Gardai investigating the brutal murder of Sligo man Eugene Gillespie have confirmed they received – and acted upon – a 999 call to the local Garda station last Thursday which said there was a man tied up in a house with a brown gate.
Mr Gillespie was not found until the following night, lying on the floor with his hands tied behind his back at his home on Old Market Street, about 100 yards from the Garda station. He died from his injuries at Sligo General Hospital on Saturday.
As detectives carried out a number of raids in Sligo town yesterday as part of the inquiry into the murder, it emerged gardaí had checked out a different house after getting the 999 call last Thursday.
A spokesman said gardaí had acted on the information and a garda had gone to the house “as described”, but was satisfied there was “nothing untoward”. He confirmed Mr Gillespie’s house was not the one checked, but refused to say whether the house actually checked was on the same street.
The Irish Times has confirmed there is a brown wooden gate leading to a yard adjacent to Mr Gillespie’s house. There is also a brown gate up the street closer to the Garda station.
Gardaí had initially believed Mr Gillespie had not been seen since 9pm last Wednesday, September 19th, but it is understood another sighting from Thursday morning has been confirmed.
Mayor of Sligo David Cawley was among those who defended gardaí on the matter yesterday, saying the information given in the 999 call was not exact enough.
“I have never known the gardaí to take a 999 call lightly. Unfortunately it may have been less than exact about where the house was,” he said.
Mr Cawley said he was confident gardaí were “pulling out all the stops” and he believed they would track down the perpetrators of a crime which has shocked the community and frightened many people living alone.
The Sligo Champion newspaper yesterday reported a young man had made a 999 call on Thursday, about a man tied up in a house. Gardaí said they were liaising with phone companies in an effort to establish the identity of the caller.
Gardaí hope footprints from runners found at the scene and blood samples taken at the house will help to track down the killers.
It is understood there was no sign of a break-in at Mr Gillespie’s home. Many local residents have pointed out that the former telephone exchange operator would not hesitate to answer a knock at the door.
Revelations about the 999 call have come as a shock to neighbours already upset Mr Gillespie suffered alone until Friday night, but there was no public criticism of gardaí. Jim Middleton, a friend who was also raised on Old Market Street, said: “How many brown gates are there in Sligo? There must be five gates on that street.”
Mr Cawley yesterday appealed to local people to notify gardaí of anything out of place they noticed in the Old Market Street area, no matter how trivial. “As we are going into the dark days of winter, I think this should remind us to look in on our older neighbours,” he added, stressing that Mr Gillespie was neither very old nor frail.
Fianna Fáil spokeswoman for older people Senator Mary White called for all elderly people to be given personal alarms.
Vitamin D deficiency ups heart disease risk
Vitamin D deficiency ups heart disease risk
Low levels of vitamin D are associated with a markedly higher risk of heart attack and early death, according to a new research.
The study involved more than 10,000 Danes and was conducted by the University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen University Hospital.
Vitamin D deficiency has traditionally been linked with poor bone health. However, the results from several population studies indicate that a low level of this important vitamin may also be linked to a higher risk of ischemic heart disease, a designation that covers heart attack, coronary arteriosclerosis and angina. Other studies show that vitamin D deficiency may increase blood pressure, and it is well known thathigh blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack.
“We have now examined the association between a low level of vitamin D and ischemic heart disease and death in the largest study to date. We observed that low levels of vitamin D compared to optimal levels are linked to 40 percent higher risk of ischemic heart disease, 64 per cent higher risk of heart attack, 57 percent higher risk of early death, and to no less than 81 percent higher risk of death from heart disease,” said Dr. Peter Brondum-Jacobsen, Clinical Biochemical Department, Copenhagen University Hospital.
The higher risks are visible, even after adjustment for several factors that can influence the level of vitamin D and the risk of disease and death. This is one of the methods scientists use to avoid bias.
The population study that forms the basis for this scientific investigation is the Copenhagen City Heart Study, where levels of vitamin D were measured in blood samples from 1981-1983. Participants were then followed in the nationwide Danish registries up to the present.
“With this type of population study, we are unable to say anything definitive about a possible causal relationship. But we can ascertain that there is a strong statistical correlation between a low level of vitamin D and high risk of heart disease and early death,” said Borge Nordestgaard, clinical professor at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen and senior physician at Copenhagen University Hospital..
The explanation may be that a low level of vitamin D directly leads to heart disease and death. However, it is also possible that vitamin deficiency is a marker for poor health generally,” he added.
The scientists are now working to determine whether the connection between a low level of vitamin D and the risk of heart disease is a genuine causal relationship.
Irish people have genetic predisposition towards macular degeneration
‘New research reveals’
Irish people have a genetic predisposition to a condition that is the most common cause of registered blindness in this country, according to new research released this week.
Genetic abnormalities associated with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which have been identified among white populations elsewhere in the world, have now been shown to be very common among Irish AMD patients too.
The retina in the eye sits on pigmented cells that look like brown velvet, explains eye surgeon Mark Cahill of the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. That pigment becomes thinner in everybody with age.
“What we are trying to figure out worldwide is why some people’s pigment gets thinner than others,” says Cahill, who was co-director of the new research with Dr Marian Humphries in the department of genetics, Trinity College Dublin.
The study, conducted by Sorcha Ní Dhubhghaill, looked at more than 200 patients with AMD and compared them with a group of more than 100 volunteers of the same age without the condition. Along with known lifestyle risk factors, it found that family history was also significant among those with the disease.
Blood samples from all the study’s participants were examined – specifically looking at single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced “snips”), which Cahill describes as “little nicks in your genetic map”, three of which are associated with macular degeneration.
Sure enough, if the people studied had this change in the SNPs, they were more likely to be in the group with macular degeneration.
John Butler (77) gave little thought to the fact that his father and grandfather before him had vision loss until the first signs of AMD were detected in him during a routine eye test about five years ago. He only went for the test because he needed glasses; his arms, he says, had got too short to hold a book far enough away to read. He was referred to a leading consultant ophthalmologist, Prof Stephen Beatty in Waterford.
Then this time last year, when Butler, a retired commercial diver and boat-builder who lives in Dunmore East, Co Waterford, was on holidays in the Canaries, he noticed words starting to run into each other as he read.
“I thought I was going to go blind,” he says and he rang Beatty, who started treatment as soon as Butler returned to Ireland. He has been getting a monthly injection of medication in the one affected eye since.
“Now I can read without my glasses. It is really fantastic,” he says.
His father, who had the same problem in the 1960s, was not so lucky. He had an operation, for which he was given a 50/50 chance of success, but unfortunately it didn’t work and he became blind.
Hugh O’Brien (72), who is registered blind due to AMD, started having problems with his vision about 12 years ago. But as he had a more serious health issue, ulcerative colitis – a type of inflammatory bowel disease – at the time, he did not regard getting treatment for the eye as a priority. “It was only in the left eye and it didn’t seem that urgent.”
However, after having major surgery for the colitis in 2002, his vision began to deteriorate and the other eye became affected.
Despite laser treatment and injections into the eyes, he has lost all vision in his right eye and now has only peripheral vision in his left eye.
A retired secondary school teacher living in Cootehill, Co Cavan, O’Brien thought this was the end of his plans for various writing projects on local history. But, thanks to the “fantastic” work of the National Council for the Blind (NCBI), he now uses a computer fitted with a screen reader that speaks everything that appears on the screen.
Indeed, O’Brien says one of the positives of his condition has been this introduction to computers, which he believes he would have avoided for the rest of his life otherwise.
Now that the genetic change associated with AMD has been identified in Irish people, it should help to target more effective treatment, says Cahill, at a time when the number of people with AMD is bound to rise as Ireland’s population gets older and lives longer.
Although screening everybody for this genetic change is impractical, it would be very useful for people diagnosed with the first signs of AMD. If it was shown that they had this genetic marker, they could be watched more carefully because their vision is more likely to deteriorate faster.
Currently, the first thing newly diagnosed patients are asked to do is look after blood pressure and try to stop smoking. There are also oral pigment supplements (see panel) that can be taken, which have been shown to prevent progression to more serious forms of AMD in 25-30 per cent of people who have one eye affected.
But once you have signs of the more serious form of AMD, known as wet AMD, medicines need to be injected into the eye, which reduce the chance of progression by up to 90 per cent – and even bring about significant vision improvement in some cases.
“The earlier we get it and the better your vision is, the better chance you have that it won’t get worse,” adds Cahill, which is why one of the aims of the current AMD Awareness Week, running until this Sunday, is to spread the message that if people see any distortion – straight lines bent out of shape – they need to have an eye test immediately.
Milky Way galaxy surrounded by massive hot gas halo
Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to find evidence our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded in an enormous halo of hot gas that extends for hundreds of thousands of light years. The estimated mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of all the stars in the galaxy.
If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it also could be an explanation for what is known as the “missing baryon” problem for the galaxy.
Measurements of extremely distant gas halos and galaxies indicate the baryonic matter present when the universe was only a few billion years old represented about one-sixth the mass and density of the existing unobservable, or dark, matter.
In the current epoch, about 10 billion years later, a census of the baryons present in stars and gas in our galaxy and nearby galaxies shows at least half the baryons are unaccounted for.
In a recent study, a team of five astronomers used data from Chandra, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory and Japan’s Suzaku satellite to set limits on the temperature, extent and mass of the hot gas halo. Chandra observed eight bright X-ray sources located far beyond the galaxy at distances of hundreds of millions of light-years.
The data revealed X-rays from these distant sources are absorbed selectively by oxygen ions in the vicinity of the galaxy. The scientists determined the temperature of the absorbing halo is between 1 million and 2.5 million kelvins, or a few hundred times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Other studies have shown that the Milky Way and other galaxies are embedded in warm gas with temperatures between 100,000 and 1 million kelvins. Studies have indicated the presence of a hotter gas with a temperature greater than 1 million kelvins. This new research provides evidence the hot gas halo enveloping the Milky Way is much more massive than the warm gas halo.
“We know the gas is around the galaxy, and we know how hot it is,” said Anjali Gupta, lead author of The Astrophysical Journal paper describing the research. “The big question is, how large is the halo, and how massive is it?”
To begin to answer this question, the authors supplemented Chandra data on the amount of absorption produced by the oxygen ions with XMM-Newton and Suzaku data on the X-rays emitted by the gas halo. They concluded that the mass of the gas is equivalent to the mass in more than 10 billion suns, perhaps as large as 60 billion suns.
“Our work shows that, for reasonable values of parameters and with reasonable assumptions, the Chandra observations imply a huge reservoir of hot gas around the Milky Way,” said co-author Smita Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus. “It may extend for a few hundred thousand light-years around the Milky Way or it may extend farther into the surrounding local group of galaxies. Either way, its mass appears to be very large.”
The estimated mass depends on factors such as the amount of oxygen relative to hydrogen, which is the dominant element in the gas. Nevertheless, the estimation represents an important step in solving the case of the missing baryons, a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade.
Although there are uncertainties, the work by Gupta and colleagues provides the best evidence yet that the galaxy’s missing baryons have been hiding in a halo of million-kelvin gas that envelopes the galaxy. The estimated density of this halo is so low that similar halos around other galaxies would have escaped detection.
The paper describing these results was published in the Sept. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Other co-authors were Yair Krongold of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City; Fabrizio Nicastro of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.; and Massimiliano Galeazzi of University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra’s science and flight operations from Cambridge.
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