Safe driving on Irish roads urged by survivors as traffic dead remembered
Family members of some of those killed in traffic crashes on the State’s roads yesterday asked motorists to do all in their power to prevent further deaths and serious injuries in the run-up to Christmas.
At functions across the country, parents and other family members spoke movingly of how deaths and life-changing injuries have affected them.
Cork woman Kathleen Kirby, who lost sons Paul (20) and David (18), said Christmas was one of the “hardest times of the year”, after she attended a memorial Mass in the city.
“My two boys were just a mile and a half away from home. Be really careful. Slow down,” she said, addressing her words in particular to young men whom she said were being “killed by the dozen”.
Speaking earlier in Dublin, Marjorie Flood, who lost her son Mark nearly five years ago, said her family did not get over the sudden loss of their son and brother. Mark was 19 when he was killed after a night out in Dunshaughlin, Co Meath.
“The hardest thing is when people ask you how many children you have,” said Marjorie. “I reply that I have three boys, but the next question is what are they doing now and I don’t know what to say.”
In Dublin on Friday, the group Promoting Awareness, Responsibility and Care on our Roads launched Finding Your Way, a guide for families of those killed or injured.
The RSA said 23,227 people have been killed on the State’s roads since records began – the population of a medium-sized town. The Garda said that this year 149 families have lost a family member on the roads.
Ireland’s Enterprise boards to get €3.78m to fund and create more jobs
Enterprise boards to get €3.78m in extra funding to create jobs
The Irish Government is to provide 30 county and city enterprise boards around Ireland with an extra €3.78m funding injection before the end of the year to help create around 500 jobs in small businesses.
The Minister for Small Business John Perry, TD, said today that the €3.78m will be allocated to 30 county and city enterprise boards (CEBs) to fund job creation.
This year, the 35 CEBs had already been given €15m in funding. The additional funding is being provided by the Government in response to specific requests from CEBs for more funding to help fund projects.
“This is the second year in succession that the CEBs have indicated that the demand for their services is so strong that they need additional funding to respond to the needs of micro-enterprises in their area,” said Perry.
He said the funding would be used by the CEBs to provide direct capital assistance to companies, as well as mentoring and training, in order to help create 505 jobs.
Of the 35 CEBs that are to get funding, Dublin City is to get €400,000 to help create 30 jobs, Mayo is to get €105,000 to help create 20 jobs, and Donegal is to get €340,000 to help create 57 jobs.
Ulster Bank receives 2m record fine from Irish Central Bank
The Ulster Bank has been fined 1.96m euros (£1.57m) for breaches of rules in how it must run its operations.
The Irish Central Bank fine is a record and is a result of breaches in both capital and liquidity requirements.
Banks must keep certain levels of capital – their investments – and effectively manage liquidity – their cash – to ensure customers are protected in a crisis.
It is the job of the Central Bank to police the strict rules.
It is the first time the Irish regulator has taken action against any bank over its capital requirements and only the third time the bank has acted in relation to liquidity issues.
The chief executive of Ulster Bank Jim Brown acknowledged that the settlement was significant and the contraventions had been unacceptable.
But he said the bank had itself identified the breaches and had put measures in place to ensure no repeat.
The Central Bank said customers had not been at risk but the penalty imposed reflected the importance the bank placed on ensuring rules were followed.
NUI Galway to lead €6m research project into stem cell therapy for diabetes
Stem cell research: an NUI Galway project will assess if stem cells can tackle glucose levels and complications of diabetes, including diabetic ulcers and eye, nerve, heart and kidney and bone damage
Could a particular type of adult stem cell offer a useful therapy for diabetes? An EU-funded project being led by NUI Galway hopes to find out.
The €6 million Reddstar project will assess whether the stem cells can tackle glucose levels and various complications of diabetes, including diabetic ulcers and eye, nerve, heart and kidney and bone damage.
The approach centres on a specific adult stem-cell population owned by Orbsen Therapeutics, a spin-out from the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Regenerative Medicine Institute (Remedi) at NUI Galway.
Initially, the project will develop ways to grow the bone-marrow-derived stem cells in a way that is useful for trials, according to company co-founder and Remedi director Prof Tim O’Brien.
The cells will then be tested in several preclinical models of diabetic complications at centres in Galway, Belfast, Munich, Berlin and Porto.
Then the plan is to select one complication for which the adult stem cells will be assessed in human trials in Denmark.
The three-year EU funding will support nine jobs in Ireland, five of which will be in Orbsen Therapeutics, according to CEO Brian Molloy, who says the project should help to build Ireland’s status as a hub for cell therapy development and commercialisation.
“Whilst wins such as the Reddstar programme are fantastic for us, we need to continue to develop and advance our product,” he says.
“The potential is enormous, but we will only realise that potential if we continue to press on with our RD programme. To that end we are currently raising funds and are looking to raise up to €2 million from private investors.”
Meanwhile healthy Irish news:
New Irish Diabetes care programme to start soon
A major new national diabetes care programme is on target to commence in the coming weeks, starting with the recruitment of 17 specialist nurses, according to Health Minister James Reilly.
Job interviews begin this week for the new diabetes nurse specialists, who will support the phased roll-out of the long-awaited diabetes programme.
This initiative, which is the first of several HSE-led chronic disease treatment programmes to be rolled out, will see diabetes patients following a well-defined care pathway based on their type of diabetes and the level of complications.
The central aim of the national programme is to ‘save lives, eyes and limbs of patients with diabetes’. Other disease-group programmes under development include stroke, heart failure, and asthma.
Diabetes Action recently accused the HSE of failing to care for diabetes patients, citing new statistics that revealed an increase to 781 diabetes-related lower-limb amputations in Ireland in 2010/2011- a 20% increase on the previous two-year period.
The condition of Diabetes is now the single biggest cause of amputation, stroke, blindness and kidney failure in Ireland, according to a spokesperson for Diabetes Action.
Minister Reilly said under the new model of care, those with uncomplicated type 2 diabetes would be managed in primary care only, while patients with complicated type 2 Diabetes will be managed both by their GPs and in hospitals by specialists.
Minister Reilly said under the new model of care, those with uncomplicated type 2 diabetes would be managed in primary care only, while patients with complicated type 2 Diabetes will be managed both by their GPs and in hospitals by specialists.
All patients with type 1 diabetes, genetically-caused diabetes, secondary causes of diabetes, post-transplant diabetes and diabetes in pregnancy will be managed in the hospital setting only.
Minister Reilly was speaking at the recent National Primary Care Conference in Mallow, Co Cork.
It is estimated that there are currently between 3,000 to 4,000 children and young adults under 16 years of age with diabetes in Ireland. Over 90% have type 1 diabetes but there are an increasing number of young patients developing type 2 diabetes.
The incidence of type 1 diabetes is also increasing by about 2 to 3% per year and experts anticipate that over the next 10 to 15 years the incidence of type 1 diabetes in Ireland will double.
Type 1 diabetes is a particularly complex condition in children and young adults and so it is recommended that their care be delivered in a multidisciplinary setting with access to a consultant paediatric endocrinologist and other diabetes healthcare specialists.
The Irish state must set up an inquiry why our banks collapsed
We need an inquiry into the banking collapse so that those responsible are held accountable.
Not all bankers are guilty. The revelations over the past couple of weeks about lavish pay and pensions for senior bankers, both current and retired, has given a new lease of life to the sizeable ‘Bash the Bankers’ movement. Since not every person employed by a bank can be held responsible for the calamity visited on the country by them, it was inevitable that some people should spring to their defence, or at least begin to argue for some modicum of understanding or even forgiveness.
Both former Taoiseach John Bruton and Transport Minister Leo Varadkar have been trying, without much success, to inject a little balance into the coverage.
The Irish banking bust, measured in terms of its cost relative to national income, is one of the largest which has ever occurred anywhere in the world. It was also a peculiarly old-fashioned bank bust, based essentially on lending money to people unable to pay it back.
This is the way banks went bust in the 19th Century. A more modern bust would have involved speculative foreign currency exposures, fancy derivatives, even a spot of fraud and intrigue. But the Irish bust was as dull as ditch water: every bank in the country went under mainly through lending money to Irish people in Ireland, an activity in which, collectively, they have been engaged for centuries.
Banks operate the payments system, raise money from depositors and other lenders, buy and sell foreign currency for customers, sell insurance products and undertake a long list of other financial services.
The staff involved in these lines of work must be pretty blameless: they did not make any dud loans, since this was not their responsibility. Nor can the staff engaged in managing premises, IT systems, personnel departments or catering have had much to do with the demise of the banking system.
The people responsible for the debacle, to be clear, were those engaged directly in lending. They constitute a minority, possibly a small minority, of all bank staff and those senior enough to have been making policy cannot number more than a few hundred for the whole of the banking system. It must be galling for the others to listen to the incessant and indiscriminating denunciations of ‘bankers’ as some sort of pariah profession.
Our banks were brought down by poor lending policies, along with poor management of their funding arrangements. The number of people directly involved in these errors, including boards and senior management throughout the bubble, is limited.
Even within these groups there may well have been people urging caution, only to be ignored. People outside the banks made errors too, including small numbers of regulators and external advisers. It is entirely possible that some of the people in all of these groups were misled by colleagues and committed venial rather than mortal sins, or none at all.
But the media and the general public must vent their anger at ‘bankers’ as a class, since they have little alternative. The reason is straightforward: there has been no proper banking inquiry. Until there is, nobody knows where responsibility lies.
Several people at senior level in Anglo Irish, the most costly of the failed banks, are facing civil litigation and criminal inquiries and have been pursued diligently by the media. In the other domestic banks, one of which, AIB, has cost the taxpayers a sum not far behind the catastrophic cost of Anglo, there does not appear to be evidence of legal breaches. These banks just managed to destroy their businesses and helped to bankrupt the State.
Several foreign-owned banks, including Bank of Scotland (Ireland), ACC (Rabobank), Ulster (Royal Bank of Scotland) and National Irish (Danske) have also experienced dreadful loan
losses, with the tab picked up by foreign shareholders rather than by the Irish Exchequer.
Unfortunately, nobody has been held personally responsible in any of these banks, although it is true that numerous senior managers have retired early and boards have been replaced. But a veil of silence has been drawn around what actually happened. Who screwed up, and when?
It is clear that loose lending policies go back a long way. Which individuals in the various banks made the policy decisions that led to the herd following Anglo and Irish Nationwide over the cliff?
Until that question is answered, as it has been in other countries which have had banking collapses, the indiscriminate banker-bashing will continue. The innocent cannot be identified, never mind forgiven, until the guilty put their hands up, or are located by an impartial process of inquiry.
It is lamentable, four long years after the balloon went up, that so little personal responsibility has been taken, or assigned, for the collapse of the Irish banking system. Excessive pay and excessive pensions are legitimate issues for the media to pursue but they are secondary.
While the continuing eurozone failures have made things worse for this country, and while we might have been better off had we chosen not to join the single currency in the first place, it is unarguable that this is largely a ‘made-in-Ireland’ crisis.
The easy-credit virus infected most of the developed world but the Irish version was a stand-out. The first line of defence against a credit bubble is the banking system itself. Prudent banks do not vaporise because of lending errors. Most banks, in most countries, are still standing without taxpayer bailouts.
The second line of defence, the supervision system, failed dismally. Finally the government pressed the wrong button on September 28, 2008, when the blanket guarantee was introduced.
All of these are Irish, not European, mistakes.
It is reasonable to fault the unhelpful responses from European partners, but pointless to pretend that the Irish banking disaster was just collateral damage from external events. There is still no thorough narrative about the credit bubble, and particularly about the behaviour of the individual banks,
The principal issue is accountability. What happened, in each bank? We know quite a lot about what happened in Anglo, will likely learn more about Irish Nationwide, but all because of action in the courts and journalistic diligence, not as a result of a proper public inquiry.
How about Allied Irish, one of the two ‘pillar’ banks and an important Irish institution with nearly 200 years of history, all but 10 of which were marked by caution in lending? Why did AIB embark on a lending competition with the rogue Anglo Irish? Who took the key decisions, and when? Did dissident voices go unheeded?
The banks themselves have declined the job of explanation, not least to their own shareholders. The shareholders have been wiped out, and rightly so. That’s capitalism.
For publicly quoted companies like AIB and Bank of Ireland to see their share prices drop by 99 per cent without a full accounting to the owners is quite simply breathtaking. If the boards of these companies have undertaken a full internal inquiry into the lending calamities, they should publish these reports promptly. If they have not, they should explain the omission.
Thousands of people around the country owned shares individually in Allied Irish and Bank of Ireland, and every member of a funded pension scheme owned some indirectly. That means hundreds of thousands of citizens.
These people are deserving of no compensation. They must take their losses. But they have been offered no explanation either.
If the banks will not account for what happened, the Government must fill the gap. Economists at the IMF in Washington maintain a databank on banking collapses around the world. The Irish collapse will feature prominently in future editions, for the simple reason that it has been one of the most destructive financial disasters to have ever occurred, anywhere in the world.
The absence of accountability for the banking collapse, given its sheer scale, is quite remarkable. To be fair to the Government, they held a referendum in October 2011 to confer investigative powers on parliament to inquire properly into the banking debacle. They managed to lose it (there seems to be a sizeable No vote on just about any proposition) through complacency and a well-timed lawyers’ ambush.
The referendum should be held again. The lawyers might explain, this time round, why the representatives of the public should not be trusted to inquire into the greatest economic disaster to have befallen the State since its foundation.
Ash die-back confirmed at five Irish locations
A young Common Ash Tree (above left) with wilting leaves shows the symptoms of dieback
The first outbreak of ash dieback has been confirmed in Northern Ireland, agriculture chiefs have revealed.
The tree disease Chalara was identified in imported young saplings at five sites in Co Down and Co Antrim.
Statutory notices have been served on owners of the plantations requiring the destruction of around 5,000 affected ash saplings and associated plant debris.
A number of other sites are also being investigated as part of an ongoing surveillance programme.
The Northern Ireland Minister for Agricultural and Rural Development Michelle O’Neill said agriculture officials in the Irish Republic had been alerted about the outbreak.
Land owned by the National Trust at Runkerry, close to the famous Giant’s Causeway on the North Antrim coast, is believed to be one of the affected areas.
Ms O’Neill added: “Legislation was introduced north and south last month banning the import and movement of ash plants for planting from infected areas.
“However, we must remain vigilant as this disease still poses a very serious threat. I would appeal for a responsible approach over the coming season. I encourage all stakeholders to be alert for signs of this disease and report findings.”
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