Mini-skirt’s ban by HSE as staff are expected to toe the line on revealing fashions
Short skirts, backless tops and plunging necklines are on the Health Service Executive’s fashion crimes hit list. Health sector staff have been warned that they face disciplinary action if they show too much skin.
And any member of staff with a tattoo has been asked to cover it while at work.
An acceptable dress-code list has been drawn up by the HSE Mid-West. The 10-page document was issued to all staff at the Mid West Regional, the Croom Orthopaedic, Regional Maternity, Nenagh general and Ennis general hospitals.
Garments which reveal excessive cleavage or the midriff are banned. Backless tops and halter-necks are also not permitted in the hospitals.
And skin-tight clothing that is deemed to be too revealing will not be tolerated by the HSE.
Female staff have been warned away from any micro or mini-skirts, low-cut dresses or short tops and T-shirts.
Artificial nails, nail polish and nail jewellery are also on the HSE’s list.
hammer: But the excessive focus of health sector workers clothes has been criticised by unions.
The ‘draft dress code’ is over the top at a time when hospital workers were under severe pressure with health sector cuts, they argue.
Andy Pike, assistant general secretary of Impact, said that the union had consulted its members and has sent a response to the HSE.
He said that no agreement has been reached at this time.
And Mr Pike said that the organisation should have directly consulted any individuals that it believed were dressed inappropriately.
“There may be one or two people with whom the HSE may have a problem with regarding dress,” he said.
“Instead of dealing with these individually to ensure they dress appropriately, a whole new policy has now been drawn up.
“It is a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, at a time when we feel that all the efforts of the HSE should be focused to deal with the €30m deficit in the Mid-West hospitals,” he said.
“There are better things for management to be doing.”
The HSE proposes in the draft to adhere to policy on dress could result in disciplinary proceedings and ultimately dismissal.
New work out appliance to help with Men’s mental health fitness
Launched today 
An online tool for young men aims to promote their mental health and fitness,
A new on-line training tool that is being launched today aims to improve the mental fitness of young Irish men and to encourage this often hard-to-reach group to seek help.
The Work Out app, which is free to access, is based around a series of brief online interventions called missions, using the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
Users are invited to test their mental fitness before carrying out the interventions which target aspects of their thinking such as confidence, practicality, control and their ability to handle pressure.
In order to reach out to young men, Inspire Ireland was recently asked by the Men’s Health Forum Ireland to develop an online intervention to promote mental health and encourage help-seeking.
The result was the Work Out app which has been supported by the HSE’s National Office for Suicide Prevention and the Institute of Public Health as part of an all-island suicide-prevention initiative. The online tool is modelled on an application originally developed by the Inspire Foundation in Australia.
Derek Chambers, director of programmes with the Inspire Foundation, explains: “We were asked to deliver an innovative suicide-prevention initiative targeting young men who, as we know, have the highest suicide rate in Ireland and are very slow to present to the support services.
“The Work Out app is geared at promoting mental health and fitness in a way that’s not off-putting to men and will engage as many as possible without intimidating them.”
The app addresses four areas: Being Practical; Building Confidence; Taking Control; and Team Player. There are two missions for each area which require the user to make relatively minor changes in behaviour and/or thinking with a view to improving the way they feel and the way they respond to challenges or solve problems.
Chambers says: “All of the interventions or missions in Work Out Ireland have been developed with the user-journey in mind, making every effort to keep users online and minimising offline activity. For example, a sleep plan is generated for each user in the Body-clocking mission by selecting proposed sleep and wake times from a drop-down menu.
“Similarly, users can report their actual sleep and wake times on a daily basis online before taking the post-mission test to determine any improvement. Users receive email reminders to re-take the test one week after accepting this mission. Some missions require offline activity, eg Take a Breather requires users to practise breathing exercises.”
The Enjoy Yourself mission asks users to list online the things they actually enjoy doing and try to do as many as possible over the period of a week while the My Strengths mission requires young men to list their strengths and skills with the aim of building their confidence.
Following completion of the overall test and each post-mission test, a range of possible responses are generated for the user, depending on their score.
If the test response shows that a user seems to be under pressure, they may be advised to talk to somebody about how they feel or be directed to a relevant page on the Reachout.com website to help them take the next step and figure out who to talk to.
Run by the Inspire Ireland Foundation, Reachout.comis a site which provides mental health information to young people and inspiring real life stories to help them get through tough times.
“The Work Out application is built around a series of previously validated psychometric scales so we will be able to tell if the user has improved in terms of his/her sense of control, personal confidence, self-esteem, etc.
“It also has the advantage of being integrated with Reachout.comso if the user is not improving after taking the interventions, they will be directed to information in whatever area they need support,” explains Chambers.
To do the Work Out test or for more information, go to workoutapp.ie
Irish Minister for finance Michael Noonan points to March for Ireland's debt deal
(left) The Minister for Finance Michael Noonan talking with Eurogroup president Jean-Claude Juncker at an ESM meeting in Luxembourg yesterday.
Irish Minister for Finance Michael Noonan downplayed the prospect of any imminent deal to recast Ireland’s banking debt as he stressed that an EU pledge to review the bank rescue still stood.
With hopes of an agreement this month all but gone, Mr Noonan pinpointed dates next year in relation to the Anglo Irish Bank promissory note scheme and the use of the European Stability Mechanism fund to rescue AIB and Bank of Ireland. Arriving in Luxembourg for EU talks, he said he was still pushing for some kind of a breakthrough before the budget in talks with the European Central Bank on Anglo.
The key date was next March, he said, when another €3 billion payment falls due. “The political timeline is to get a new arrangement on the promissory note by March, when the next tranche of money has to be paid, a €3 billion call which is very onerous,” Mr Noonan said.
“But it would help me doing the budgetary arithmetic if something could be arranged – or a statement of intent could be achieved – before the budget.”
Asked if that was feasible, he said that was a question for the ECB. “I’m only at one side of the discussion. I would hope that certainly the March date is feasible.”
Similarly, Mr Noonan suggested that talks on a new euro zone bank supervisor could drag on into next year. The establishment of such a supervisor – operating within the ECB – is a precondition for any direct bank recapitalisations by the ESM. “I think everybody in the group are aiming for the 1st of January,” he said. “At the last meeting I was at there were suggestions it would be some time between the 1st of January and March. They were allowing for some weeks of drift after Christmas but nothing significant.”
While a German-Dutch-Finnish statement two weeks ago cast doubt over the scope of any such interventions, Mr Noonan said the decision by EU leaders in June to break the link between bank and sovereign debt still stood.
“The position is that the policy position as set out by the heads of state and government on the 29th of June is the policy that prevails.
“Anybody commenting on that might be variations on a theme but the policy prevails. We’ve had assurances of that from the commission and from the European authorities.”
Mr Noonan noted that the ESM had set out the pricing of loans for any bank recapitalisations and that that implied this was a policy “which everybody intends to implement”.
Two Irish Banks claim that SME lending is on target 
Despite Credit Review Office criticism
The Bank of Ireland and AIB have said they remain on schedule to meet SME lending targets, despite fresh criticism from the Credit Review Office.
Yesterday’s ninth quarterly lending review from the CRO detailed the overturning of 14 bank loan refusals between July and the end of September, resulting in nearly €1.2m worth of loans being released to credit-hungry firms.
The office claimed the banks weren’t doing enough to assist SME access to funding, adding that lending policy has tightened and that it could be a challenge for the banks to meet their lending targets.
The banks met last year’s Government-imposed SME lending targets of €3bn, but must lend a further €3.5bn to the sector this year and €4bn each next year.
AIB said it expects to exceed this year’s target. “It’s important to address the negative perception that banks are not lending, which in itself is a factor in discouraging potential borrowers from seeking credit,” the bank said.
Likewise, Bank of Ireland yesterday stressed that it will meet this year’s target — saying it is committed to growing its business.
“This growth can only be achieved by continuing to make credit available to sustainable and viable businesses that generate sufficient returns necessary to meet all commitments,” said Mark Cunningham, director of business banking.
Bank of Ireland claims to have approved nearly 30,000 of 37,000 lending applications from SME and agri customers this year.
Meanwhile, Shane McEntee, the junior agriculture minister, has urged small firms to approach the CRO if they are unhappy with their bank’s decision not to lend.
“People have a right to appeal to the CRO and they should not allow any misplaced fear of a local or regional bank manager to stop them doing so,” he said.
Surviving the ‘best years of your life’ in Ireland
Headstrong’s new large-scale study with UCD has found startling levels of depression, self-harm and attempted suicide among young people,
Over four in 10 young people in Ireland have said they felt their lives were “not worth living” at some point, a new study has found. The majority of these 17-25 year olds said they had felt that way in the past year.
The My World survey by youth mental health organisation Headstrong and UCD’s School of Psychology provides a startling insight into the minds of Ireland’s young.
Talking to 8,000 young adults whose average age was just 20, it found that more than one in five of them had self-harmed, two-thirds doing so in the past year.
Some 500 of the young people interviewed had made a suicide attempt, 180 of them in the past year.
The findings show that the experience of depression among our young, their levels of self-esteem, whether their parents are still together and their sexual orientation all prove significant factors in their likelihood to harm themselves or attempt suicide.
“For us, the key thing is that there are a lot of young people engaging in very serious behaviours that may be going unnoticed by their families or professionals,” said Barbara Dooley.
The UCD psychology lecturer and Headstrong’s director of research wrote the study with UCD research fellow, Amanda Fitzgerald.
One of their strongest findings is the link between increased levels of depression and the likelihood of self-harm or attempted suicide.
To categorise the severity of their depression, young people were asked to respond to an internationally recognised set of statements like
“I couldn’t seem to experience any positive feelings at all” or “I was worried about situations in which I might panic,” explained Dr Dooley.
“If you are at a normal level of depression, you have a 14 per cent rate of self-harm. That rises to 47 per cent among young people who have very severe depression,” she said.
Nearly 1,000 (14 per cent) of those surveyed fell into the categories of “severe” or “very severe” depression. Among those who were most depressed, there was an attempted suicide rate of 27 per cent.
Describing the findings, director of Headstrong Tony Bates said: “We look at young people and their lives may appear to be buzzing along but what we are seeing is that in reality for many, this is not the case.
“Many of our young are experiencing . . . periods of despair, which they may come through, but it’s significant that things can feel so bad that they think their life is not worth living.”
The My World survey shows that simply talking can have a life-saving effect. The attempted suicide rate among both young men and women who talk about their problems is 6 per cent, rising to 10 per cent for those who don’t talk.
A quarter of young people talk to no one when they have a problem with depression, the study found.
“I think stigma is definitely an issue here,” said Dr Dooley. “But I also think sometimes young people don’t have the language to articulate what they are feeling.”
Measured on their responses as to whether they felt they had good qualities, had much to be proud of, or were a person of worth, levels of self-esteem too were greatly linked both to self-harm and past suicide attempts.
Almost 69 per cent of young people indicated high levels of self-esteem, and the buffer effect of this meant their rate of suicide attempts was 4 per cent.
The rate among those whose self-esteem was low was 24 per cent. The self-harm rate of those with high self-esteem was 14 per cent; it was 50 per cent for those whose esteem was low.
Although the average age of those surveyed was 20, the nature of their parents’ relationship seems to play a massive role in a young person’s mental health.
For those whose parents were separated, divorced, single, remarried or deceased, at 12 per cent, their risk of suicide behaviour was twice that of those whose parents were married or cohabiting.
However, Dr Bates stressed that this finding had to be viewed in context.
“It’s not getting divorced in itself that made that person suicidal, but it may mean that it was not talked about, was hidden or caused a great deal of confusion.”
Dr Dooley said the finding highlighted the “loss” a young person could feel when things changed and the challenges of managing relationships with parents who had separated.
“We don’t want to demonise parents or say that the only thing is that parents should be together: that’s not necessarily the case,” she said.
Another striking finding was the link between sexual orientation and self-harm.
Self-harm rates among those who indicated they were gay or lesbian was 34 per cent, and those who were unsure of their orientation had a self-harm rate of 43 per cent.
Those who reported their orientation as bisexual had a self-harm rate of 56 per cent. Meanwhile, the rate for those who were heterosexual was 19 per cent.
Staggeringly, one in four bisexual young people in the study had at some point made an attempt to take their life.
Echoing recent comments by former president Mary McAleese, Dr Bates said: “It’s not their sexual orientation that’s making them feel suicidal, it’s what comes with that: the challenges it poses to fitting in, the threat it poses to being bullied, discriminated against and being rejected.”
The study also found over 40 per cent of Ireland’s 17-25 year olds fell within the World Health Organisation’s “problem drinking” range and 10 per cent in the “hazardous” range, with a further 10 per cent having “possible alcohol dependency”.
The effect of alcohol on mental health is clear to see.
“For young people who engage in harmful levels of drinking behaviour, self-harm rates were as high as 34 per cent, compared with 19 per cent for those young people with low risk alcohol problems,” said Dr Dooley.
Bullying and financial pressures have a striking effect on mental health too. The risk of self-harm and attempted suicide is almost twice as high among those who have been bullied at some point than among those never bullied.
Those “highly stressed” by their financial situation were twice as likely to self-harm and almost four times as likely to attempt suicide as those with no financial stress.
While the survey shows that, of those young people who received help, 37 per cent found it difficult to get the support they needed. Some 66 per cent of those who used Ireland’s mental health services found them beneficial.
Dr Bates said the research was about “prompting conversations”. He said the finding that “one good adult” in a young person’s life could make a difference was significant.
“Very many people are playing that role for a young person today and they don’t even know it,” he said.
“Even if you are the lollipop woman – that you look at them, give them a sense that you have noticed them on the planet or say something kind . . . many young people need more down the road, but this is something every one of us can do.”
UK Ministers seek to bypass objectors with wind farms in Ireland
UK Ministers are investigating a proposal to outsource the production of wind power to Ireland.
Faced with fervent and growing opposition to onshore wind farms in the UK, Tory MPs are backing a plan to site those facilities in Ireland – and then export the renewable energy generated back to Britain using cables running under the Irish Sea, to Wales.
A company has already sourced land to build more than 700 turbines in countryside to the west of Dublin. They would have the capacity to supply power for more than three million homes by the end of the decade – the equivalent of 10 per cent of the UK’s renewable energy targets.
More importantly, such a development could take the pressure off the need for many more wind farms in the British countryside and save David Cameron from the wrath of his backbenchers who are in revolt at the Government’s current plans. The scheme, called Greenwire, is the brainchild of an American company called Element Power.
It says it has already got the backing of the Irish government for its scheme, which could be up and running by 2018.
It says the Irish have a less reactionary attitude to onshore wind turbine developments than the British and points out that it would provide significant economic developments to the republic, while solving the UK Government’s political conundrum. “From the Tory side, this is something that addresses their concerns about further onshore wind farm development, while at the same time bringing them closer to green growth,” said Mike O’Neill, the president of Element Power. “And in Ireland people appear to be less concerned about the construction of wind farms and place greater emphasis on the economic growth they can bring.”
So far the sticking point appears to be the need for British ministers to agree with their Irish counterparts that renewable energy generated in Ireland can count towards the UK’s renewable energy targets.
Earlier this year the Irish Energy Minister, Pat Rabbitte, and his UK counterpart, Charles Hendry, agreed a formal Memorandum of Understanding on renewable energy trading between the two countries to be in place by the end of the year. Such an agreement would need to be written into the Energy Bill currently going through Parliament.
The company has met Ed Davey, the Climate Change Secretary, and this week will meet a series of Tory ministers and MPs to press its case.
Coalition tensions over green issues have increased since last month’s reshuffle. Owen Patterson, who has campaigned against wind farms in his own constituency, is believed to have clashed with Mr Davey on Coalition policy.
It comes after more than 100 Conservative backbenchers wrote to the Prime Minister earlier this year demanding he “dramatically cut” the £400m in annual subsidies paid to onshore wind developers.
But what is yet untested is the reaction of the Irish people to the plan. Wind may be an unlimited resource but the countryside is not and some experts predict resentment of what could be perceived as a fresh British land-grab.
Institute of Physics (IOP) awards in London recognise Galway and Belfast physicists
IOP awards in London recognise Galway and Belfast physicists Prof Colin O’Dowd (right) receives his award from Sir Peter Knight, president of the Institute of Physics
Prof Colin O’Dowd from NUI Galway and Prof Colin Latimer from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) have both been presented with prizes at the Institute of Physics (IOP) annual awards in London.
At the awards ceremony last Wednesday, O’Dowd, from the School of Physics at NUI Galway, received the 2012 Appleton medal and prize for his contributions to research in atmospheric aerosol-cloud-climate interactions.
O’Dowd, who is director of the Centre for Climate & Air Pollution Studies at the university, received the award from the IOP for his contributions to research, particularly in the formation and transformation of aerosols from natural systems. According to the IOP, his research is used extensively to improve climate and air pollution-prediction models.
Latimer, from QUB, received the Phillips award in recognition of his service to the IOP.
Latimer has been professor of physics at QUB since 1997, while he has also taught at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and at Tokyo Metropolitan University in Japan.
His research interests are in the areas of atomic and molecular processes and interactions.
Latimer has served in many roles with the IOP, including acting as treasurer of the institute and chair of the Atomic and Molecular Interaction group and the Institute of Physics in Ireland (1980-89).
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