September tax returns for Irish exchequer exceed targets
The latest exchequer returns, published by the Department of Finance, show tax receipts were 12.5 per cent higher in September this year compared to the same month last year.
Tax revenues grew strongly last month, possibly signalling the reversal of a trend towards faltering tax returns in evidence since the spring.
The latest exchequer returns, published by the Department of Finance, show tax receipts were 12.5 per cent higher in September this year compared to the same month last year. This followed two consecutive months of shrinking revenues.
For the first nine months of the year total tax revenues stood at €26.1 billion, up €2.02 billion (or 8.4 per cent) on the same period last year. When adjusted for one-off factors, the underlying increase was somewhat smaller, at an estimated 6.2 per cent year-on-year.
Revenues also exceeded department projections for the nine-month period, coming in €385 million (1.5 per cent) ahead of forecasts.
Income tax – the largest source of tax revenue – was €101 million (1.0 per cent) ahead of projections at the end of September, and is up just over 9.5 per cent year-on-year on an adjusted basis.
Value added tax – the second biggest revenue source – was €94 million (1.1 per cent) ahead of target for the first nine months of the year cumulatively, and up €264 million (3.3 per cent) year on year.
On the spending side, total net voted expenditure, at €33.2 billion in September, was €338 million (1.0 per cent) ahead of projections. In year-on-year terms, net voted expenditure is €105 million (0.3 per cent) below the same period in 2011.
Overspends were recorded at the Department of Social Protection (€403 million or 4 per cent) and the Department of Health (€285 million or 3.1 per cent).
In a joint statement, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan and Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin said: “The tax base is growing, the majority of departments are managing expenditure within allocations and where there are overruns action is being taken to bring these under control. All Departments must take the necessary measures to deliver services within their 2012 allocations”.
The ministers said: “Overall, we are on track to meet our budgetary targets for the second consecutive year and September 2012 is the third month this year in which Exchequer revenues exceeded expenditure. This last happened in 2007.”
Ulster Bank said it was encouraging that VAT receipts were stronger last month. “September is among the three most important months in the year for VAT receipts and so, even thought the monthly overshoot was a modest €12m, it certainly helps the overall picture when one of the key revenue sources performs ahead of plan,” it said.
The bank said the overspend on health of 3.1 per cent compared to a 1.5 per cent overrun in August and “points to some further slippage in spending restraint in the department last month”.
Big cuts to Ireland’s child welfare benefit’s on the way despite protests from opposition
Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton has received an expert group’s report on child and family income supports which proposes restructuring the payment during a ‘transition period’.
The Government is set to press ahead with cuts in child benefit rates despite strong protests from Opposition politicians and social justice groups.
Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney said this morning that cuts to child benefit had not yet been discussed at Cabinet, but it was something the Government would have to consider in the run up to the budget.
Mr Coveney said it was his personal view that some families needed the money more than others, and that’s where spending should be concentrated.
“Last year a lot of people rightly raised the issue that is it fair that very high income earners are getting the same supports through child benefit as people who are on low incomes are getting,” he said.
“At a time when you have to try to prioritise spending for families and parents and children who need financial support the most, it is something we need to consider.”
There has been mixed reaction among Labour backbenchers. One TD, Kevin Humphreys, argued that wealthy people with children did not need the same financial supports as poorer families. But his colleague, Joanna Tuffy, voiced concern about the impact of cuts on middle-income families who are under pressure.
Child benefit is a universal welfare payment to all families with children, regardless of their financial circumstances. The monthly payment is €140 for each of the first two children, €148 for the third child and €160 for each subsequent child. It is paid to 600,000 households and costs the State €2 billion a year.
Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton has received an expert group’s report on child and family income supports which proposes restructuring the payment during a “transition period”. The level of core payment has not been decided and the current rate could be reduced over a number of years rather than in one budgetary cycle.
The report from the advisory group on tax and social welfare suggests retaining the payment’s universal nature while introducing an element of “redistribution”. Some savings obtained from not paying more than a flat rate to wealthier families could go towards topping up payments to less well-off families, while other savings would be returned to the exchequer.
The report had been expected to be brought to Cabinet in November but may now go before Government sooner.
Opposition parties and campaigning organisations criticised the proposal, but Labour’s Mr Humphreys said a mechanism to curb the level of payment to high earners must be developed because financial resources were scarce.
“It’s an emotional subject but that doesn’t mean we must stay away from it. We’ve scarce resources and do we really want to see money being paid to wealthy families? The resources we have must be targeted at people who are hardest pressed at the moment,” he said.
Fianna Fáil spokesman on social protection Willie O’Dea described the proposal as unfair at a time when families were facing into a tough budget and were preparing to pay property tax and water charges. “The squeezed middle and lower income groups were never more squeezed. It seems to me outrageous,” he said.
Ms Burton’s spokeswoman said the Minister had set up the advisory group “to harness expert opinion and experience” to make cost-effective proposals for “achieving better poverty outcomes, particularly child poverty outcomes”.
The spokeswoman said the group had prioritised the area of family and child income supports and its report was being considered by Ms Burton.
“It is intended to publish this report in due course. The report is therefore not yet in the public domain,” she added.
Ms Tuffy voiced concern about the impact of the proposal on under-pressure middle-income families.
“It’s not just people on low incomes that need child benefit when they have families. People on middle incomes need assistance. They have mortgages and lots of outgoings,” she said.
Social Justice Ireland said child benefit rates should not be touched in the budget, when the organisation published its budget proposals yesterday. Director Fr Seán Healy said a cut would be “anti-child and anti-family”.
Director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland Orla O’Connor emphasised the cost of childcare and said child benefit had become an essential part of the household budget for many families. In last December’s budget, it was announced that child benefit for third and subsequent children was to be cut to €140 a month over the next two years.
The world faces ageing population time bomb says United Nations
The world needs to take urgent action to cope with the impact of a rapidly ageing population, according to a new report, which forecast that the number of people older than 60 would surpass one billion within a decade.
A major study published by the United Nations has warned that the growing numbers of the elderly presented significant challenges to welfare, pension and health care systems in both developing and developed nations.
And it bemoans the fact that skills and knowledge that older people have acquired are going to waste in societies rather than being used to their full.
“We must commit to ending the widespread mismanagement of ageing,” said Richard Blewitt, chief executive of Help-Age International, which collaborated on the report, Ageing in the 21st Century.
Calling the ageing demographic a “megatrend that is transforming economies and societies around the world”, the report estimated that one in nine people of the world’s population of seven million are over 60.
The size of the elderly population is expected to swell by 200 million within 10 years past the one billion mark and soar to two billion by 2050, it forecast.
The number of centenarians in the world is projected to increase from fewer than 316,600 in 2011 to 3.2 million in 2050.
In Britain there are projected to be half a million centenarians by 2066, with one third of babies born in 2012 expected to celebrate their 100th birthday, according to Government statistics cited.
“The expected growth of the population of older persons should not be an excuse not to act but rather seen as a call to action. A well supported old age is in the interest of all generations,” said the 192-page report, which was released in Tokyo, to coincide with International Older Persons Day.
Japan is the only country with an older population of more than 30 per cent, but by 2050, 64 countries are expected to achieve that proportion including Britain.
The report warned that the skills and knowledge that older people have acquired are going to waste, with many of them underemployed, underactive and more likely to become a drain on a nation’s resources. Britain is among several European countries that have passed laws against employers discriminating against the elderly but progress has been uneven, said Mr Blewitt.
However successive British governments, like many others, tend to indulge in hand-wringing about the cost of caring for the elderly, he said, rather than exploiting what they had to offer.
Many have skills that would be immensely useful to the voluntary sector but have hardly been tapped on a mass scale. The report calls such opportunities the “longevity dividend”.
“Rather than burying our head in the sand and saying old people are going to ruin our economy, we have to see the opportunity in this,” said Mr Blewitt.
Ageing, said the report, “is a triumph of development”.
“Increasing longevity is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. People live longer because of improved nutrition, sanitation, medical advances, health care, education and economic well-being,” it continued.
But it warned that the most serious impact of ageing populations would be in developing countries without safety nets or adequate legal protection in place for older people.
In nations now dominated by young workers, urban migration has eroded traditional care of the elderly in extended families, as young parents have left for the cities. The trend has also tended to leave the elderly acting as primary carers of their grandchildren. In rural China, the study estimated that there are 52 million grandchildren looked after by their grandparents.
China was praised by the report for introducing a national pension of £5 a month, but for every developing country that does have some kind of similar scheme, there are nine that do not.
The report expressed concern “about the multiple discrimination experienced by older persons, particularly older women, including access to jobs and health care, subjection to abuse, denial of the right to own and inherit property and lack of basic minimum income and social security”.
Ireland’s recycling process up a massive 650% over 15 years 
Workers at the green bin area at Thorntons Recycling facility at Park West Business Park, Dublin 12.
There has been a 650 per cent increase in package recycling since 1998, according to a new Repak survey.
This is an increase from 101,000 tonnes of packaging recycled in 1998 to 651,000 tonnes in 2011.
There has also been a 7 per cent increase in both home and work recycling in the last year.
The figures show 65 per cent pf homes recycled in 2012, up from 58 per cent the previous year, while work-based recycling jumped from 56 per cent to 63 per cent.
Despite the increase, there is still more to be done to increase recycling efforts in Ireland, according to Darrell Crowe, head of marketing and sales for Repak.
“We are all doing a reasonable level of recycling at home and at work, but we need to get to the stage where we are recycling all the time,” he said. “It has been a phenomenal success and we compare favourably to the rest of Europe. We have gone from the bottom to near the top.
“There are three main reasons that explain why there is such an increase in recycling. People are better educated, there is better infrastructure and there are greater financial incentives.”
The study conducted by MRBI, which surveyed 1,000 people, shows 70 per cent of respondents are against a visible fee on packaging to support their recycling.
Some 70 per cent of people think that producers and retailers should pay towards the recovery and recycling of packaging they supply.
Ireland has completely transformed how it recycles packaging in the last 15 years, according to Repak chief executive Dr Andrew Hetherington.
“The progress Ireland has made through collaboration of all stakeholders, our participating members and the buy in from the consumer, makes it the one of the most successful Producer Responsibility schemes in Ireland and an exemplar within the EU,” he said.
The survey was conducted to launch Repak Recycling Week, which began today.
For more information on Repak Recycling Week, visit repak.ie.
Irish Men remain most at risk from suicide
There were 552 deaths by suicide in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, a rate of 12.4 deaths per 100,000 population.
Men in their early twenties and women in their early fifties are most at risk of suicide in Ireland, according to the annual report of the HSE National Office for Suicide Prevention (Nosp).
There were 552 deaths by suicide in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, a rate of 12.4 deaths per 100,000 population.
Suicide is significantly more likely among men than women. It has increased among men from a rate of 8.4 in 1980 to a peak of 23.5 in 1998 to 20.0 per 100,000 in 2009.
The female suicide rate has remained relatively constant, ranging from 4.3 in 1980 to 4.3 in 1998 to 4.9 per 100,000 in 2009.
By European standards, Ireland has the sixth lowest rate of death by suicide compared with the lowest rate of 3.9 in Greece and the highest of 34 in Lithuania.
Nosp invests and works on a range of measures to prevent suicide in Ireland. It funds 42 programmes in 27 organisations such as Console, Samaritans and Pieta House.
In response to the increase in suicide rates, Nosp received an additional €1 million funding from Government in 2011.
This funding was allocated to 22 new projects including dialectical behavioural therapy traning for frontline HSE mental health staff, intervention services for people who engage in suicidal behaviour and a Samaritans project to interlink national mental health and suicide prevention helplines.
Minister of State for Mental Health Kathleen Lynch welcomed the report today and said the Government was committed to improving mental health services and reducing the number of deaths by suicide.
“An additional €3m is being provided this year out of the special €35m announced in the budget for mental health to advance the implementation of Reach Out, the national strategy for action in this area,” she said.
Anyone who is emotionally distressed can phone the Samaritans on 1850 60 90 90 in confidence or visit www.yourmentalhealth.ie, www.letsomeoneknow.ie and www.nosp.ie
The Great Barrier Reef loses half its coral in 27 years
The Great Barrier Reef has lost half of its coral in less than three decades, according to a new study which blames the killer Crown of Thorns starfish for its demise.
A comprehensive survey monitoring 214 of the individual reefs along the World Heritage site found that coral cover decreased from 28 per cent in 1985 to 13.8 per cent this year.
If replicated across the entire Great Barrier Reef, which runs the length of Queensland’s coast and stretches 155 miles from shore, the figure equates to a loss of coral across almost 19,300 sq miles of reef – more than twice the area of Wales.
Under the right conditions, Crown of Thorns can each produce tens of millions of larvae, triggering mass population booms which have been shown to strip entire reefs of coral.
Outbreaks of the starfish can be sparked by the run-off of fertilisers from the shore into the sea, and coastal development has increased their frequency from a rate of about two per century to one in every 15 years.
The giant predators, which have up to 21 arms covered in poisonous spikes, can each consume up to 107 sq ft of living coral per year and will eat virtually any type that lives on the reef.
Although slow moving, the starfish can devour vast amounts of coral by descending on it and pushing their stomach out through their mouth, allowing them to digest an area equal to their own 17 inch diameter in one swoop.
Other major factors affecting the reef are cyclone damage, which caused around half of all coral death, and bleaching due to rising sea temperatures, which was responsible for 10 per cent.
Although storms were found to have the biggest overall impact, Crown of Thorns outbreaks are the most easily preventable threat, experts said.
At its current rate of decline the Great Barrier Reef could lose another half of its remaining coral in a decade, but without starfish outbreaks coral cover would begin to slowly increase, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal reported.
John Gunn, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, who led the study, said: “We can’t stop the storms, but perhaps we can stop the starfish.
“Our data show that the reefs can regain their coral cover after such disturbances [as Crown of Thorns outbreaks or cyclones], but recovery takes 10-20 years.”
More studies are needed to understand what causes population explosions of starfish and find ways of intervening to protect the reef from the predators, he added.
Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of Queensland University, lead scientist on the Catlin Seaview Survey, a project to survey the deeper levels of the Great Barrier Reef, said the threat of a new outbreak was looming this year after the record flooding of Queensland in 2010.
He said: “When you have a flood along the coastline, or disturb the flow of nutrients into the sea, these starfish tend to outbreak so they go from being a minor player that you can hardly ever find on a reef, to being one or two per square metre.
“Suddenly you have got millions of them. Two years ago Queensland had record flooding along the coast, and two years after that we might have a really large Crown of Thorns outbreak developing across the central Great Barrier Reef.”
No comments:
Post a Comment