Donie's Irish daily news BLOG Friday

Garda shot dead in cold blooded Dundalk Credit Union raid

‘Murder inquiry now started’ 

   

Members of the Garda Technical Bureau examine an area near the scene of the fatal shooting of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe right insert picture at Lordship credit union at Bellurgan, Co Louth last night. 

A detective gunned down during a botched bank heist in Ireland was killed less than half a mile from his home.

Detective garda Adrian Donohoe insert picture above, a father of three in his 40s,

Died as he tried to prevent raiders escaping with cash from Lordship credit union at Bellurgan, Jenkinstown about seven miles from the border town of Dundalk, Co Louth.

Gardaí said he was shot without warning and had not drawn his weapon.

Locals in the close-knit rural community said they had been left stunned by the murder of such a well known and popular figure.

It is understood Det Garda Donohoe’s wife, Caroline is also a garda.

Paul Breen, a member of St Patrick’s GAA club, said: “The whole community is shocked – what else could they be? But, for these people, this is just a way of life.”

Mr Donohoe was originally from Co Cavan, but was stationed at Dundalk Garda station. He was one of two members on escort duty when the incident happened.

It is understood four men were waiting outside to rob the credit union which stays open late on Fridays.

The detective approached the men and a number of shots were fired before they fled in a grey Volkswagen Passat. It is understood Det Garda Donohoe was hit in the head without warning and before he had drawn his garda-issue weapon.

He was pronounced dead a short while later. Although traumatised, it is believed his colleague was physically uninjured.

It is not known whether dissident republicans or another criminal gang were responsible for the murder.

A massive cross-border hunt has been launched to catch the killers. Specialist gardaí from the Garda Forensic and Technical Bureau have begun a detailed examination of the scene.

A case conference to collate intelligence and other information also got under way at an incident room set up in Dundalk Garda station. Gardaí will brief the media on the investigation later this afternoon.

Garda commissioner Martin Callinan said he was deeply saddened to hear of his colleague’s death.

“At this time my thoughts and prayers and those of the entire force are with the family, friends and close colleagues of Adrian,” said Mr Callinan.

President Michael D Higgins was also among those leading the tributes. He described the killing as a dreadful crime and said all Irish people would be truly appalled.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the murder was an outrageous and appalling act of cold-blooded violence.

He said: “(It) has left a family without a husband and father and the Garda Siochana without a brave and valued member. On behalf of the Government and of the people I would like to express my condolences to Adrian’s wife and children and to all his extended family at this unbearably sad time.”

Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said no effort would be spared in bringing those responsible for the murder to justice.

“The Irish people rightly have great respect and admiration for members of An Garda Síochána and the work they do in protecting the community.

“They will share my revulsion and horror that a garda has so tragically lost his life in the course of his duties. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family, friends and colleagues of Adrian, who lost his life in carrying out his duty in the best traditions of the brave men and women of An Garda Síochána.”

Sinn Féin councillor Jim Loughran, who knows the Donohoe family, said: “Our whole community is in shock. This garda was admired, trusted and respected by all in the locality. He and his young family are part of the daily life of the area. We want to express our heartfelt sympathy to the garda’s family, friends, colleagues and neighbours at this sad time.”

The Lordship Credit Union, where the killing took place, was described as a hub of the small community.

It is believed staff were locking up when the incident happened. Councillor Declan Breathnach said it was not unusual for it to remain open late into the evening.

“It would be fairly busy on a Friday evening, with some people just getting their week’s pay or wanting to sort out money for the weekend,” Mr Breathnach said.

“This was just such a despicable, heinous act. I still can’t believe it but I utterly condemn it.”

Mr Donohoe is the first garda officer to be killed in 17 years.

Detective garda Jerry McCabe was also on escort duty when he was shot dead outside a post office in Co Limerick in 1996.

His widow Ann said: “I have to sympathise with the family and the shock they are going through.”

Gardaí appealed for witnesses to contact them at Dundalk Garda station at 042-9388400, the Garda Confidential Number 1-800-666-111.

Irish Government under fire for ‘pattern’ of attacks on rural areas

 

Sean Fleming of Fianna Fail.

The Irish government is now coming under fire, for what opposition parties say is a pattern of attacks on rural areas.

It comes after the news that another health centre is to close shortly in Monasterevin in Co. Kildare.

According to Fianna Fail, HSE staff at the centre is shocked by the news, which came without warning.

Sean Fleming of Fianna Fail says the closure is indicative of the government’s attitude towards rural areas:

“Just looking at it right across the country there have been big announcements of cuts in local garda stations quite recently, Bus Éireann is pulling out the rural services in many of the small towns and villages and bypassing them completely”, he said

“Now we are seeing the HSE coming along to possibly removing some health centres and it’s really a pattern of taking all these services out the areas”

Antibiotic resistance now a serious threat to health, warns top Doctor Dame Sally Davies

  

Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, warns that within the next 20 years, people having simple operations may die because there will be no antibiotics left that can deal effectively with routine infections. She says antibiotic resistance is now so serious a threat to public health it should be added to the government’s list of civil emergencies.

Speaking to MPs on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Dame Sally says she will be highlighting the threat in her report on infectious diseases which comes out in March. She will also be listing some possible solutions.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health told the MailOnline Dame Sally’s report will come out at the same as a government strategy to encourage doctors to use antibiotics more responsibly.

While hospital superbugs like MRSA are among the most well-known antibiotic resistant germs, MPs were also warned of other less well publicized infections like gonorrhea and TB that are in the general population.

“It is clear that we might not ever see global warming, the apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20 years I’ll die from a routine infection because we’ve run out of antibiotics.”

She says the situation is “very serious” because all over the world we are not doing enough to ensure we use antibiotics effectively. In the case of gonorrhoea, there is now only one effective antibiotic.

Scientists warn that bacteria are becoming resistant to current drugs and there are currently few antibiotics in the pipeline to replace them.

Dame Sally also touched on the “pipeline” of new drugs which is now “empty”, because of a “broken market model” which has made pharmaceutical companies turn to more profitable new drug developments, such as those to treat chronic diseases.

Hugh Pennington, microbiologist and professor at the University of Aberdeen says we have to realize there are no “wonder drugs” coming along because there “just aren’t any”.

Antibiotic Resistance: The top ten Facts

At the same time, on behalf of the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in the UK, David Livermore, an international expert on antibiotic resistance, put together a list of the top ten facts about antibiotics and resistance to antibiotics. The following is a summary:

1. Antibiotics revolutionized medicine: without them many surgical procedures like transplants and heart bypasses would carry too high a risk of infection.
2. They carry the seeds of their own destruction: they kill sensitive bacteria, allowing resistant ones to survive, storing up problems for future treatments.
3. Some antibiotics now no longer effective: eg staphylococcal wound infections no longer respond to penicillin, urinary tract infections are no longer treatable with ampicillin (a type of penicillin), and gonorrhoea is no longer treatable with the synthetic antibiotic ciprofloxacin.
4. Pipeline for new drugs is running dry: many pharma companies have now turned to more profitable areas of drug development.
5. We need to manage drugs better and prevent resistance: eg not use antibiotics for common colds and other viral infections, and get better at preventing infections in the first place, such as improving hand hygiene and using condoms.
6. Successes have happened: MRSA has fallen by 80% in English hospitals, largely due to better infection control, and new vaccines have reduced numbers of some bacteria, including resistant strains.
7. Although we have won some battles, we could lose the war: resistance is going up in other pathogens, especially gram-negative bacteria in hospitals. The rising rate of antibiotic-resistant E. coli strains is alarming: they cause one third of all bloodstream infections.
8. We are using up our reserves: as first line antibiotics fail, we turn to our reserves like carbapenems for E. coli, the result being that were are seeing increasing resistance to them as well.
9. The backups to the reserve are toxic and less effective: while drugs to treat bacteria can always be found, we are on a slippery slope of reducing effectiveness and increasing risk of toxicity.
10. We have to act by practising: “antibiotic stewardship” to choose only those drugs that are appropriate and known to work for a particular infection; good infection control; and reducing the number of patients who receive antibiotics when they don’t need them. Other solutions include better diagnostics and better targeted use of antibiotics.

Irish nurse staffing levels ‘unsafe’

  

Nurse staffing levels in Irish hospitals are now at ‘a critical and unsafe level’, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has claimed.

The union made its claim at a meeting with the Oireachtas Health Committee, based on the results of a new survey which compared staffing levels in hospitals in Ireland and the UK.

According to the INMO, the survey, which was carried out by independent UK researcher, Dr Keith Hurst, confirmed that staffing levels here are now at an unsafe level.

“This survey also confirmed the INMO’s worst fears that our staff levels
are now compromising patient care and the ability of registered nurses to ensure safe care through safe practice,” the union said.

The INMO presented the survey to the Oireachtas Health Committee and highlighted the pressure that nurses are under as a result of the HSE’s recruitment embargo and increased activity in hospitals.

The union called on the committee to begin the process of introducing a nurse/patient ratio throughout the health service.

Speaking after the meeting, INMO general secretary, Liam Doran, said that the union appreciated the chance to ‘put on record’ the results of the survey and nurses’ ‘genuine fears’ when it comes to delivering safe care.

He said that delivering the highest quality of care is the INMO’s priority. However, the union has come to the conclusion that this ‘cannot be achieved without regulation through the introduction of agreed nurse/patient ratios’.

“There is now no other way to counter balance the current fixation by health service management on meeting budget targets and employment ceilings,” Mr Doran added.

Woman in her 20’s dies following Co Mayo accident

  

Gardaí have closed a part of the N5 and diversions are in place

A woman in her 20s has died in Co Mayo after her car was involved in a collision involving a truck and a mini bus.

The incident occurred on the N5 at the junction with the old Castlebar Road at around 1.10pm. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver of the mini bus was taken to Mayo General Hospital with minor injuries. The driver of the truck was uninjured.

Gardaí in Swinford are investigating the incident and have closed a part of the road as part of their examinations.

They have advised drivers that diversions are in place at Bohola on the Castlebar side and at the Kiltimagh turn on the Swinford side.

They have asked for anyone with information relating to the incident to contact Swinford Garda Station on 094 9252990, the Garda Confidential Telephone Line on 1800 666 111 via any Garda Station. 

Man may still have time to catalog Earth’s species before Mass extinction?

   

A trio of respected biologists and zoologists concludes that Earth’s sixth mass extinction may be unfolding slower than feared, giving time for the valuable work of cataloging the planet’s species.

The analysis, co-authored by Oxford University zoologist Robert May and Nigle Stork at Griffith University in Australia, draws on several recent studies to suggest that cataloging species before they vanish may be more tractable than many believe.

Better scientific housekeeping – settling on one scientific name for an organism, where many creatures often had several – has helped lower the estimate of known species from about 1.9 million to 1.5 million, Costello says. Improvements in the methods for estimating Earth’s biodiversity have narrowed the range of extant nonbacterial species from between 30 and 100 million to perhaps 2 million to 8 million, with the team’s best estimate at 5 million.

Meanwhile, the pace of discovery has been picking up. Over the past 10 years, an average of 17,500 new species has been described each year, a rate that has reached 18,000 a year since 2006.

It has been difficult to determine the overall global extinction rate for non-bacterial organisms. Some vertebrates have been disappearing at rates comparable to previous mass extinctions, the team notes. But conservation efforts, habitats that may be degraded or fragmented, but not destroyed, and the adaptability of some organisms to farmland or human-managed forests, could well be slowing the planet’s overall pace of extinctions, the team suggests.

For all the efforts to improve estimates of the planet’s overall species count, that number remains highly uncertain, cautions Andrew Hamilton, a biologist and executive director of academic innovation at the University of Houston.

“The fact of the matter is we don’t know, even within an order of magnitude, how many species there are on the planet,” he says.

In the end, however, the numbers may be less important than the analysis’s overall message that while formidable, the cataloging task is attainable within a reasonable period of time, given money and creative ways to enlist more hands and eyes to the task, Dr. Hamilton says.

For instance, with the range of technologies available – from vast on-line data bases to smart phones than can take a high-resolution picture, stamp it with date, time, and a GPS location, then upload it to a central repository – the discovery effort can enlist dedicated amateurs for some aspects, researchers say.

One popular approach is known as a BioBlitz – a 24-hour assault on a particular patch of land by professionals and volunteers to record as many organisms as possible in that location.

The American Museum of Natural History’s Novacek recalls a BioBlitz the museum and other groups sponsored in Central Park in 2003. More than 800 species were identified in the trees, on the ground, and in ponds, with participants discovering a new species of centipede, Novacek says.

The effort represents nothing less than planetary exploration, Hamilton suggests.

“If we organize our workforce efficiently and we treat this like a mission to a little-known planet,” it’s possible to assemble the catalog of nonbacterial organisms within a generation, Hamilton says.