Irish householders could be liable for leaking pipes
Irish householders could be liable and have to pay for leaking or damaged water pipes found on their property by the new utility company that the Government is set to establish next year, an Oireachtas committee heard yesterday.
John Mullins, chief executive of Bord Gáis, which has taken responsibility for setting up Irish Water, said yesterday that once supplies to households are metered, it would be possible to identify the source of “serious” leaks.
He explained to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Environment, Transport, Culture and the Gaeltacht that it would be normal industry practice to regard anything “downstream” of the stopcock – where supplies to individual customers intersect with the mains – as the property of the householder. He indicated that this could result in householders having to pay for the repair of any serious leaks in water supply pipes regarded as their property.
The Government is due to introduce the founding legislation for Irish Water next year. The company will be established as a subsidiary of Bord Gáis. It will begin to charge for domestic water supplies from 2014. Initially, it will install meters for 1.05 million homes.
‘Super storm Sandy victim mother’ doors slammed out while looking for help as her sons drown
A priest has condemned New York neighbours and residents who refused to open their doors to a mother in distress of two Irish boys who were swept away by Superstorm Sandy in the US.
Glenda Moore banged on doors in Staten Island seconds after losing her grip on sons Connor, 4, and Brandon, 2, during heavy floods and high winds on Oct 29.
Glenda, who is married to Donegal man Damien Moore, 39, was refused help and told ‘to go away we don’t know you’ after her truck was flipped upside down by the storm. Just seconds later, as she scrambled to get to higher ground, her sons were ripped from her grasp and washed away by rising waters.
She rushed to nearby homes but one person told her to go away and another turned out the lights.
Last night, Fr Philip Daly, in Damien’s home parish of Portnoo, said he couldn’t come to terms with the reaction of people to her desperate pleas for help.
“You can’t put into words what she must have been going through,” said Fr Daly. “That awfulness wasn’t helped by the actions of these so-called neighbours who refused to give support to the poor woman.
“When she went to the first house she was told to clear off and leave them alone… despite her pleas for help. She then went to the next house and got no reaction there. She was all own her own.
“She was hysterical and I’m sure she got her message across but they weren’t interested.
“Whether it was fear or not I don’t know but it was a rather strange reaction to someone in need of support.”
Damien was at work with the city council, battling the storm, when the tragedy occurred.
Glenda decided to take the boys to her mother’s home in the couple’s Ford pick-up truck after the storm hit and the power failed in her own house.
But, during the hour-long journey, her truck was hit by a gust of wind and thrown 30 metres backwards.
She got out of the truck, found herself waist-deep in water and decided to get to higher ground.
Just seconds later, Glenda and her boys were struck by a second gust, which blew the boys away into the rising water.
The boys were discovered just 20 metres apart on Thursday, days after they became separated from their mother.
Fr Daly has been comforting Damien’s parents, Paddy and Fay, who are in their 80s, who retired to live in Loughfad, Co Donegal, after spending a large part of their life in the US.
He said they cannot bring themselves to speak about what has happened to their grandchildren.
But, he said, the entire community rallied behind them once the tragedy of last week’s events came to light.
Since Friday, a steady stream of people have been calling to the couple’s home with Mass cards and other gifts for the family.
A person at their home said yesterday that the retired couple would not give interviews to the media.
One local said: “Pat and Fay are back living here many years now. Pat was in construction in America but took early retirement and they came back here.
“The whole area is just stunned by what has happened, and the manner in which it happened.
“Damien was here a few years back with his wife, but the kids have never been back to Donegal.
“Pat and Fay are in their twilight years and they are finding it difficult to cope with this. It’s just awful for them and people are trying to do as much for them as they can.”
Fr Daly added: “The parishioners here are a very Christian community. People started to talk about it last weekend. Up until that, they felt restrained in the hope that the boys would be found alive.
“People then started to call to the house of Paddy and Fay and the house has been full until 12.30am each morning and they have found that very supportive.
“It is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts and prayers are with the family at this tragic time.”
“It is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts and prayers are with the family at this tragic time.”
Fr Daly said Damien regularly visited Donegal, where he has many cousins and other relations.
He left Donegal in his 20s after working in a number of jobs in the fishing and forestry sectors.
It is understood his only sibling, brother Patrick, who lives in England, has flown to the US to support him.
“Damien was born here in Portnoo but emigrated young in life and married Glenda,” said Fr Daly.
“He works for the city council in New York, but over the years always kept up contact with the area and visited his parents here at Loughfad. The news has come as a huge shock to locals in this area.
“The Moores are a long-established family in the Portnoo-Kilclooney area. They have many cousins who reside here, and relations are comforting Paddy and Fay at this difficult time.
“Damien would have attended the local national school at Ballykillduff before he went to make his way in the world.”
Fr Daly revealed that Damien was at work when the hurricane hit.
“Glenda was concerned because there was no electricity in the house and she had two young boys. However, she said to Damien she would stay at home until he got back,” Fr Daly said.
Despite her ordeal, Glenda joined the search for her boys until their bodies were found by officers using heat-seeking equipment to search marshes.
Fr Daly confirmed that the family hope to arrange a remembrance in St Conal’s Church, Kilclooney, on the day of the boys’ funeral in New York, which is still being arranged.
“For various reasons, Paddy and Fay cannot travel to the funeral so the community felt it was important to show our support for them.
“We think the funeral could be Friday but we are not certain at this stage.”
Heart health breakthrough ‘Patients tissues repaired using strangers’ stem cells
Researchers are reporting a key advance in using stem cells to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks. In a study, stem cells donated by strangers proved as safe and effective as patients’ own cells for helping restore heart tissue.
The work involved just 30 patients in Miami and Baltimore, but it proves the concept that anyone’s cells can be used to treat such cases. Doctors are excited because this suggests that stem cells could be banked for off-the-shelf use after heart attacks, just as blood is kept on hand now.
Results were discussed Monday at an American Heart Association conference in California and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study used a specific type of stem cells from bone marrow that researchers believed would not be rejected by recipients.
Unlike other cells, these lack a key feature on their surface that makes the immune system see them as foreign tissue and attack them, explained the study’s leader, Dr. Joshua Hare of the University of Miami.
The patients in the study had suffered heart attacks years earlier, some as long as 30 years ago. All had developed heart failure because the scar tissue from the heart attack had weakened their hearts so much that they grew large and flabby, unable to pump blood effectively.
Researchers advertised for people to supply marrow, which is removed using a needle into a hip bone. The cells were taken from the marrow and amplified for about a month in a lab at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, then returned to Miami to be used for treatment, which did not involve surgery.
The cells were delivered through a tube pushed through a groin artery into the heart near the scarred area. Fifteen patients were given cells from their own marrow and 15 others, cells from strangers.
About a year later, scar tissue had been reduced by about one-third. Both groups had improvements in how far they could walk and in quality of life. There was no significant difference in one measure of how well their hearts were able to pump blood, but doctors hope these patients will continue to improve over time, or that refinements in treatment will lead to better results.
The big attraction is being able to use cells supplied by others, with no blood or tissue matching needed.
“You could have the cells ready to go in the blood bank so when the patient comes in for a therapy — there’s no delay,” Hare said. “It’s also cheaper to make the donor cells,” and a single marrow donor can supply enough cells to treat as many as 10 people.
Dr. Elliott Antman of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who heads the heart conference, praised the work.
“That opens up an entire new avenue for stem cell therapy, like a sophisticated version of a blood bank,” he said. There’s an advantage in not having to create a cell therapy for each patient, and it could spare them the pain and wait of having their own marrow harvested, he said.
The study was sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Hare owns stock in a biotech company working on a treatment using a mixture of cells.
Juan Lopez received his own cells in the study, and said it improved his symptoms so much that at age 70, he was able to return to his job as an engineer and sales manager for a roofing manufacturer and ride an exercise bike.
“It has been a life-changing experience,” said Lopez, who lives in Miami. “I can feel day by day, week by week, month by month, my improvement. I don’t have any shortness of breath and my energy level is way up there. I don’t have any fluid in my lungs.”
And, he said happily, “My sex drive has improved!”
‘We need to talk more about suicide’ but not as a social-media conversation
What could have driven Erin Gallagher to take her own life? Asking this question in the aftermath of a suicide is almost always futile – the only person really qualified to answer it is, tragically, dead. But in the Facebook tribute pages that appeared online following the 13-year-old’s death at her Donegal home 10 days ago, there is little hesitation.
“Bullied by cowards, by heartless monsters,” the profile on one reads.
“RIP Erin in bully FREE heaven,” writes a commenter on another.
“There’s no bullies in heaven, sleep tight beautiful,” says another.
In many of the posts on the six different pages dedicated to her memory, her alleged tormentors are characterised as “evil”, “murderers”, “scum” and “terrorists”. Some of the media coverage of her death has also drawn a direct correlation between claims that Erin had been the victim of relentless “cyberbullying”, and her suicide.
Online bullying can do serious psychological damage. It may be a factor in suicides, and in some cases it may be a key cause.
But if all other evidence has died with the person, the media can fall into the trap of overinterpreting the role of online conversations. Because the taunts often take the form of a public message, they may be the only insight we have into a person’s mental state at the time of their death.
We rarely have a complete picture of the factors that lead to a suicide.
But there are some things we do know. It can be dangerous to oversimplify the causes. Tackling the stigma surrounding the issue is good; indulging in the blame game is not, especially when those on the receiving end are just children themselves.
Talking about suicide does not lead to more deaths, but framing it in melodramatic terms can. And romanticising suicide – any suicide, but especially one involving a young person – is dangerous.
The internet has a tendency to act as a bellows for collective outrage – instead of allowing that anger to dissipate quietly away, it fans it into a frenzy of finger-pointing and anguish. It can reduce the complexities of human suffering to a series of status updates and “likes”, distorting the fact that suicide is rarely a straightforward case of cause and effect.
Erin Gallagher’s death was the second by an Irish teenager to make headlines in the space of two months. In September, Ciara Pugsley, a 15-year-old from Dromahair in Co Leitrim, also took her own life. Like Erin, she had been bullied anonymously on the Ask.fmwebsite.
In another case that was reported around the world, 15-year-old Canadian Amanda Todd killed herself, five weeks after posting a nine-minute video on YouTube detailing the bullying and blackmail she had suffered at the hands of a man she met on the internet, and a group of girls at her school.
So far, the discussion has focused on the part social media played in their deaths. There has been very little thought given to its role in the aftermath – but it is in the wake of high-profile suicides like these that social media is arguably at its most potent.
In addition to the six Facebook pages dedicated to the memory of Erin Gallagher, there are six for Ciara Pugsley and more than 100 dedicated to Amanda Todd, with 1.5 million likes on one alone.
It’s understandable that family and friends want to commemorate a lost loved one in the forum where so much of their life was played out. The motives behind creating a Facebook tribute page are usually good, but they can have serious negative consequences.
I don’t think this kind of online eulogising of teenagers who took their own lives – and demonising of their alleged tormentors – is healthy.
For a start, there are obvious implications for the physical and mental wellbeing of those accused of bullying.
Less apparent, but no less serious, is the risk of what the Samaritans calls “social contagion” – the phenomenon whereby one highly visible suicide is seen to “give permission” to others, sometimes leading to what it terms a “clustering effect”. To combat this, the organisation has issued guidelines for the media in reporting on suicides. These include: avoid simplistic explanations; don’t give details; and don’t overstate the “positive” results of a suicide.
Journalists who write about this issue are aware they walk a tightrope. On the one hand, sensitive coverage that follows these guidelines can help tackle the stigma that surrounds suicide. On the other, a few ill-chosen words or details can have a profoundly negative impact on vulnerable readers.
But unfortunately, no such guidelines apply online. A study carried out in 2006 in New Zealand, which has the second-highest youth suicide rate in the OECD, found that Bebo and text messaging contributed to a spate of eight teen suicides in an 18-month period.
It would be wrong to imply that an otherwise healthy teenager might be compelled to suicide just by reading about it. But there is evidence to suggest that, against a backdrop of other issues, the act itself can sometimes be highly impulsive.
In the 1990s, researchers in Houston, Texas asked 153 people, aged 13 to 34, who had survived a serious suicide attempt, to estimate the amount of time between making the decision that they wanted to die, and actually attempting it. Seventy per cent of the time, the gap was less than an hour. In one in four cases, it was barely five minutes.
There is an urgent need for more openness about teenage suicide – but it needs to happen in a context that doesn’t glamorise it, or suggest that a suicide is necessarily the outcome of bullying.
It really needs to happen away from the emotionally-charged atmosphere of Facebook, where susceptible teenagers can be influenced by one another.
Soft soap treatment for Children’s Referendum
Just when you thought Irish referendum campaigns couldn’t get any more Pythonesque, a minor surge in late opposition to the Children’s Referendum has come from an unlikely quarter: Albert Square.
Hats off to the scriptwriters at EastEnders for keeping yes campaigners on their toes, with a plot about the battle between a young mother and a social worker over the forced adoption of her child. According to Fianna Fáil TD Robert Troy, the soap’s “Lola” plotline has been exercising voters, and he has been asked about it quite a few times. No doubt it beats some of the other stuff he gets asked on the doorstep.
The soap even made it on to the front page of the Catholic newspaper Alive, as a warning about what can happen when the State is given too much power. What – we’ll all be forced to sit en masse and watch EastEnders?
The Enid Blyton guide to parenting
Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books are being revived for television by a British company. I suspect it’s not just the children who are behind this renewed interest in midnight feasts with lashings of ginger beer.
We could learn a thing or two from the Enid Blyton guide to parenting. Yes, yes – I know, she was the mother from hell. And yes, the children in her books are undeniably awful: they are rude to foreigners, and insulting about gypsies. (I’d still take tomboy George as a role model for my daughter any day over Barbie, though.)
But what I love is that the books hark back to a time when parents weren’t scheduling every free second of their children’s lives with violin tuition. On the contrary, they barely seemed to notice where their children were from one end of the summer to the other.
As a parent, part of the job is to give your children the tools to cope with adversity – even toughening them up so they can cope with the disappointments life throws at them. I’m not sure the modern compulsion to wrap our children in cotton wool does them any favours – especially some of the practices espoused by schools, such as giving everyone a medal at sports day, so no one feels inadequate, or not allowing the distribution of party invitations unless the whole class is invited. Is this really the best preparation for life? By gum, I know Enid wouldn’t have had any of it.
Is It a bird, is it a plane, no it’s the NASA space station
You get sales alerts, Twitter alerts, sports alerts and Facebook alerts. Now you can also get an alert when the International Space Station is visible overhead thanks to NASA’s new web app Spot the Station.
The International Space Station’s orbit 200 miles (322 kilometres) above Earth makes it visible to more than 90 per cent of the Earth’s population, NASA said. The trick is knowing when to look for it.
NASA’s Johnson Space Centre already calculates the sighting information several times a week for more than 4600 locations worldwide. With its new web app, it shares that information with the space-obsessed public.
As long as you know where to look, the International Space Station is pretty easy to see, NASA said. It is the third-brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon, and it looks like a fast moving point of light about the size and brightness of the planet Venus.
If you sign up for the newly released web app, you’ll get an alert via email a few hours before the International Space Station will be visible from your neighbourhood. NASA said it will only alert users of the app when conditions are right for good viewing — such as when the Space Station is more than 40 degrees high in the sky and when the viewing will last long enough that you’ll be sure to catch it.
The Space Station is typically visible at dawn and dusk, and you can tell the alert system to tell you about morning viewings, evening viewings, or both.
The International Space Station just celebrated 12 years of manned orbit 200 miles above the Earth.
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