Thousands of Irish families hit as First Communion grant axed
The Irish Government has axed grants to help needy families with the costs of First Communion.
The Department of Social Protection has confirmed that exceptional needs payments (ENPs) will not be made in 2013 for religious ceremonies.
It said this followed a review that recommended ENPs be paid in response to financial need rather than for occasions.
“For 2013 it is recommended that payment of the allowance specifically in respect of religious ceremonies will cease,” it said. More than €3.4m was paid in communion and confirmation grants in 2011 to over 14,000 families but the average payout was slashed last year, with 12,500 families receiving €1.5m before being axed altogether this year.
The department said that although clothing costs should be met by normal social welfare payments, it still provided funding for children’s and adults’ clothing in “exceptional circumstances”.
So far in 2013 it had paid out €56,000 for child clothing to 570 applicants.
The department said that under its supplementary welfare allowance scheme, payments were made “to help meet essential, once-off and unforeseen expenditure which a person could not reasonably be expected to meet out of their weekly income”.
The principal qualification was that the need to be met must be “exceptional” and unforeseen.
The payments system had been reviewed to ensure that the scheme was responding to financial need and not occasions.
Leah Speight, of Single Parents Acting for Rights of Our Kids, said families already reeling from cuts in child benefits and other payments would be hit hardest.
“I’m not religious myself but many families are and they face a lot of pressure to give their children a special day when they’re already watching every penny, it’s not about going overboard and being outrageous,” she added.
The Society of St Vincent de Paul said some of its regions had seen an increase in calls relating to difficulties paying for First Communions this year.
The Money Advice and Budgeting Service said it was too early to say whether more people would get into financial difficulties as a result of grants being unavailable, but First Communions did often put huge pressure on families.
“People will borrow from Peter to pay Paul, so we usually see them after they’ve paid for the First Communion, but then they turn up a month to six weeks later because they’ve nothing left to pay their energy bills,” said spokesman Michael Culloty.
“Families who say no to everything all year will say yes to First Communions – it’s not just about kitting the child out, often the whole family will get kitted out with new outfits because it’s a family celebration, a cultural thing,” he said.
A recent survey by EBS showed that parents expect to spend €573 on average on First Communions this year.
Judge Judy tours Dublin’s Four Courts
The American TV personality caused a buzz of excitement in the normally formal surroundings of the Four Courts as she was given a whistle stop tour of the country’s main seat of civil justice which houses the High and Circuit Civil courts.
The retired judge, who has become a star with her no-nonsense style of dispensing justice on daytime TV, was shown around the building and paid a courtesy call to Mr Justice Peter Charleton of the High Court.
She caused a flurry of excitement in the Four Courts round hall when she stood for photographs with students of King’s Inns waiting to sit their practical exams, before doing a lightning tour of the building.
The tough-talking TV personality said she and her entourage saw the Four Courts and had to see how the court system here works.
She joked she was in the building to “to make a little trouble” and said she imagined the method of dispensing justice and hearing cases here was lengthy and involved more time.
The judge became a TV personality when she retired from the bench in 1996 and began her daytime TV series, Judge Judy.
Running for 17 years and recently commissioned for four more seasons, the series attracts over 9m viewers in the US alone. It is licensed in over 120 global markets.
The television show features Judge Judy dealing with civil cases in a set mocked up to look like a real courtroom.
It deals with small claims disputes up to $5,000 (€3,800), and prior to proceedings the participants sign contracts agreeing to abide by her judgment.
She has already said Irish courts should adopt a similar approach to the American judiciary and allow the installation of cameras in Irish courtrooms, to protect the system from “bad lawyers and judges”.
Half of small business debt is impaired, says regulator
Progress in resolving problem unacceptable, says Fiona Muldoon of the Central Bank
Half of all lending to small and medium business is in arrears, according to the Central Bank. Fiona Muldoon, the director of credit institution supervision at the bank told a conference in Tralee today that of the €50 billion lent to the sector by the domestic banks, some €25 billion was impaired and that the rate at which banks are facing up to the problem is unacceptable five years into the banking crisis.
Ms Muldoon – who is tipped as possible successor to outgoing deputy governorMatthew Elderfield – said there was a high level of property-related borrowing amongst SMEs. “In effect, in Ireland, literally and figuratively, all roads lead to property,” she said.
A single small business could be struggling by servicing a wide range of tangential debts, she told the Cantillon conference at the Institute of Technology in Tralee.
“In many cases family businesses borrowed to expand the business, invest in their premises and maybe a buy-to-let property for their pension. Some cases include personal guarantees or drawdowns on the family home. That same SME is now the only source of cash flow in servicing both direct and indirect debt,” she said.
The problem was particularly acute for indebted businesses that are “consumer-facing” as demand for their products was shrinking due to rising unemployment, falling consumer confidence and households choosing to pay off existing debt.
The Central Bank had little choice other than to work with domestic banks as they in turn worked through their problem loans and eventually returned to normal lending, she said.
Since being appointed in 2011 she had only seen one application for a banking licence and it was not from a general lender. “New banks need new money . . . Ireland is not an attractive prospect for a new bank,” she said.
Cleaning up the existing domestic retail banks was the only viable option she said. “It is a slow burn” and was taking longer than is acceptable five years into the crash. “But that is the reality.”
The Central Bank would be focusing this year on ensuring that banks addressed the issue and it was adopting a similar approach to the one developed for mortgage debt. The regulator had brought in external consultants, Blackrock, to assess the ability of the domestic banks to work through their problem SME loans. The study had uncovered many of the same problems that had held the banks back from facing up to their problem mortgage loans. They did not have enough appropriately trained staff or the correct systems or adequate legal back up, she said.
Following on from this study, the banks had to agree a strategy late last year with the regulator to address the problem of SME debt. “We believe that the banks now have credible credit assessment tools. We have overseen that operational skills and resources are improved and that appropriate external help is engaged where necessary,” she said.
As part of the process the banks’ management teams “must now be accountable for the implementation of the strategy and measured in terms of their success in that implementation”.
The strategy requires banks “to adopt appropriate restructuring or re-underwriting where possible on an individual case basis and identify appropriate debt resolution strategies that provide sufficient incentives to viable borrowers to work through the debt overhang,” she said.
Is dairy in your diet a good or bad thing for your health
THOUGH COW’S MILK MAY BE THE PERFECT FOOD FOR BABY COWS, IT’S NOT NECESSARILY THE BEST THING FOR ADULT HUMAN BEINGS.
When even experts can’t agree, it’s no wonder the dairy issue is confusing
For decades, dairy boards have invested millions of euro in marketing and effectively taught every mum in Ireland to be a walking reminder of why you have to drink your milk. But, in recent years, many of us have begun to question whether dairy really is such an ‘essential’ part of a healthy, balanceddiet and so the great big milk debate rages on.
Even health experts and nutritionists like myself continuously argue over the pros and cons of milk consumption, which in turn causes consumers more confusion. In fairness, if we in the health industry can’t even agree, it’s no wonder the average consumer is confused.
So, to help you get a better understanding of the pros and cons of dairy, I’ve broken it down into the 10 most frequently asked questions I receive in relation to dairy, which should provide you with a balanced view:
Is dairy a nutritious food?
Taken in moderation and as part of a balanced diet, dairy products such as milk, cheese and yogurt can provide a wide range of benefits to the body as they contain the goodness of a number of essential nutrients, including protein, calcium, zinc, phosphorus, magnesium, vitamin A, vitamin B2 and vitamin B12.
Do we need dairy for healthy bones?
Yes, as the commercial mantra goes, ‘them bones them bones’ do need calcium. However, the notion that dairy is the only way to ensure adequate calcium intake comes from out-dated food pyramids and guidelines supplied by dairy boards and dairy councils with big commercial agendas.
Are there other food sources of calcium?
Good non-dairy sources of calcium include tinned sardines, nuts, seeds, pulses and green leafy vegetables. However, calcium isn’t the only important nutrient. To keep your bones healthy, it’s important to eat a balanced diet which is rich in vitamin D and magnesium as well as calcium. Maintaining healthy bones also involves doing regular weight-bearing exercise and avoiding the five ‘S’ words: smoking, stimulants, sugar, salt and stress.
What are some of the ill effects of regularly consuming dairy?
Though cow’s milk may be the perfect food for baby cows, it’s not necessarily the best thing for adult human beings. Dairy is pro-inflammatory for many people, and classic symptoms of dairy sensitivity are increased mucus production, sinus congestion, respiratory problems, digestive symptoms (such as gas, bloating, diarrhoea, or constipation) and skin problems.
Does dairy produce contain hormones?
Yes, inorganic dairy produce does contain hormones which could potentially disrupt the balance of reproductive hormones in humans. In fact, it’s estimated there are over 60 hormones in an average glass of inorganic milk. If you’re going to drink milk, then it’s best to drink milk from grass-fed, organic, non-hormone treated cows, especially if you suffer from issues like Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome and/or infertility.
How common is dairy intolerance?
The way our milk is produced and processed makes a big difference. The hormones, antibiotics and pasteurisation/homogenisation processes have made cow’s milk harder to digest for humans. Also, as we age, we produce less of the enzyme lactase which is needed to digest the lactose present in milk. However, lactose-free dairy products are now readily available.
Are dairy products fattening?
Full-fat dairy products do contain a significant amount of saturated fat and so need to be eaten in moderation. However, all dairy products come in low-fat alternatives nowadays, which means they can be enjoyed as part of a balanced diet without leading to weight gain. In fact, dairy is an extremely filling and satisfying food which helps you stay full and satisfied for longer.
What non-dairy alternatives are there to milk?
There are four main nutritious alternatives to dairy milk; they include oat, nut, rice and soy milk. Oat milk is made from oats and has a mild taste. Nut milks, such as almond or coconut milk, tend to have a sweet flavour as does rice milk. Soy milk made from soy beans is probably the most common alternative. It does take a little getting used to. However, improvements have been made to its flavour in the last few years.
How many portions of dairy should we be eating?
Unlike the ‘five a day’ fruit and vegetable guideline, there is no set amount of dairy that you need to consume for optimal health. There’s no question that dairy provides an easy and tasty way to get key nutrients into children and teenagers, so the general consensus is that two to three portions of dairy a day is ideal for them, but this does not necessarily apply to adults, and, it also comes down to individual tolerance levels. A lot of the ill effects associated with dairy consumption relates to over-consumption, so, like anything, it’s about balance, portion control and variety.
Elsa Jones is a qualified nutritionist who offers consultations at various GP clinics around Dublin.
Scientists make new advances in living computers
Using snippets of DNA and DNA-clipping chemicals, researchers have created one key component of a computer’s brain: the transistor, a switch that helps electronics perform logic. The biological switch, dubbed a transcriptor, could be plugged together with other biological devices to boost the power of DNA-based computers, researchers report March 28 in Science.
With these switches, researchers might be able to program probiotic bacteria – the kind found in yogurt – to detect signs of colon cancer and then spit out warning signals, says study coauthor Jerome Bonnet of Stanford University, United States. “The bacteria could actually travel through your gut and make a color in your poop,” he says.
Also, a computer can decode the stuff of dreams. By comparing brain activity during sleep with activity patterns collected while study participants looked at certain objects, a computer learned to identify some contents of people’s unconscious reveries.
“It’s striking work,” says cognitive psychologist Frank Tong of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who was not involved in the research. “It’s a demonstration that brain activity during dreaming is very similar to activity during wakefulness.”
The work, reported April 4 in Science by Japanese researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, adds to somewhat scant knowledge of how the brain constructs dreams, says Tong. The research could lead to a better understanding of what the brain does during different states of consciousness, such as those experienced by some coma patients.
Meanwhile, the United States President, Barack Obama, has unveiled a long-term neuroscience research initiative that will develop new tools and technologies to study human and animal brains on larger scales than currently possible. Announced April 2, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative could ultimately help researchers better understand human behavior and thought and develop new ways to diagnose, treat and cure neurological and psychiatric diseases.
The initiative is slated to begin in October, with $100 million budgeted for the project in fiscal year 2014. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation will lead the effort, which Obama likened to the Human Genome Project in terms of its ambitious aims and the scientific and health benefits the initiative could yield.
The human brain remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries. Researchers can now probe only a small number of neurons simultaneously or get relatively crude looks at specific regions or the entirety of the brain. But scientists believe that understanding the action of circuits containing thousands or millions of coordinated neurons could lead to a better understanding of how the brain works -as well as what goes wrong when it doesn’t.
Inside every smartphone, television and iPod, a computer chip holds circuits loaded with millions of transistors. By flipping on or off, the tiny switches direct electrical current to different parts of the chip. But inside cells, even just a few linked-up switches could be powerful, says synthetic biologist Timothy Lu of MIT. The simple circuits “probably wouldn’t be able to compute square roots,” he says, “but you don’t need to put a MacBook chip inside a cell to get some really interesting functions.” And genetic computers can go places conventional electronics can’t.
Instead of controlling the flow of electrons across metal circuit wires, the biological switches control the flow of a protein along a “wire” of DNA in living bacteria. As the protein chugs along the wire, it sends out messages telling the cell to make specific molecules — molecules that color a person’s poop green, for example.
Bonnet toggled the switch on and off with wire-clipping enzymes that can snip out a section of DNA and flip it backward. Like cars driving over the one-way spike strip out of an airport parking lot, the message-making protein moved forward only when DNA faced the right direction.
By linking together different switches and wire clippers, the researchers were able to program a cell’s behavior. They could make bacteria glow green only when sugar was around, for example, or only when sugar and a drug were nearby.
Even this simple logic – responding to just one or two inputs with different actions – is useful, Bonnet says, because it lets researchers program cells to react to specific chemical cues.
Though genetic computers aren’t going to replace your laptop, he says, his group and others are trying to make the tiny devices even more efficient. In past research, the team has created DNA-based data storage and figured out how to send genetic information between cells. Now, bioengineers are working on scaling up biological devices by plugging together different components and linking individual computers to form a multicellular “Internet.”
The BRAIN Initiative would seek to develop tools and technologies to measure and manipulate the firing patterns of all neurons in a circuit. Other new tools – hardware, software and databases – would store the data, make it public and analyze it. The initiative takes its inspiration from a research vision known as the Brain Activity Map, which originated from a group of neuroscientists, nanoscientists and research groups.
Eventually, researchers could apply the tools and findings to medicine. For example, DARPA – motivated by mental issues and brain and limb injuries in soldiers – is interested in developing better prosthetics and new ways to diagnose and treat brain diseases, says Arati Prabhakar, the agency’s director.
Dreams are a bit of a black box and difficult to study. Experiments with mice have revealed aspects of sleep and dreaming, such as how the experiences contribute to forming memories. But a mouse can’t tell you what it dreamed about. And the sleep stage that’s richest in dreams — REM sleep — typically kicks in about 90 minutes after a person conks out, making it time consuming to gather data on dreams. The noisy fMRI brain scanning machine doesn’t help.
To skirt these experimental issues, the researchers recorded brain activity in three adult male volunteers during the early stages of sleep. After the subjects had dozed off, they were repeatedly awakened and asked for detailed reports on what they had seen while sleeping. In an example, one participant stated: “Well, there were persons, about three persons, inside some sort of hall. There was a male, a female and maybe like a child. Ah, it was like a boy, a girl and a mother. I don’t think that there was any color.”
After gathering at least 200 such reports from the three men, the researchers used a lexical database to group the dreamed objects in coarse categories, such as street, furniture and girl. Then the study participants looked at images of things in those categories, while their brains were again scanned. Computer algorithms sorted through these patterns of brain activity, linking particular patterns with objects.
When the computer went back to the brain scans taken during dreaming, it did a pretty good job of distinguishing some of the signals, such as whether a dream contained a book or a girl. On average, the computer could pick which of two objects had appeared in a dream 70 percent of the time, a rate that is much better than would be expected by chance.
“To be able to get enough data to do this kind of analysis is really impressive,” says Russell Poldrack, a neuroimaging expert at the University of Texas at Austin.
The study bolsters the notion that the vivid imagery of dreams, no matter how fantastic, is as real as waking life, Kamitani says, at least from the brain’s perspective. Further research may reveal if the same is true about other dreamed senses, such as experienced sounds or emotions.
Galway National School teacher wins North Pole marathon
Novice runner Gary Thornton wins Arctic race in minus 30 degree temperatures
A Galway-based runner has won a marathon at the North Pole.
Gary Thornton (33), a national school teacher who runs with the Galway City Harriers, beat 50 other international competitors to win the race on Tuesday.
He faced brutal conditions of minus 30 degrees though luckily no wind chill factor.
The race took place at Camp Barneo, an annual Russian military camp, which is close to the geographical North Pole at 90 degrees north. Mr Thornton said the North Pole was “like a different planet”.
He completed the marathon in 3 hours 49 minutes and 29 seconds, well outside his marathon best of 2 hours 17 minutes during a qualifier race in Rotterdam last April for the London Olympics.
He completed it after only four days of cold weather training on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the high north.
Thornton said the conditions were frequently treacherous with energy sapping hills and pressure ridges from the sea moving and he had to wear a face mask and special gear.
“This is so far from a city marathon. It’s quite refreshing to be doing something that is a lifetime experience, but it was energy sapping. You’ll never do it again. It was a really enjoyable and a worthwhile experience,” he said.
The 33-year-old’s teacher wife Elaine Barrett (30), joined him on the floating Arctic ice after two days earlier deciding to take part in a half marathon on the same 4.69km course.
“She might normally run 20 minutes once a week so this was a bit last minute. And she wouldn’t be a woman who likes the cold, she likes being beside the stove,” Mr Thornton said.
The camp is set up by Russian paratroopers dropped on to the ice who also guard the route with rifles for fear of polar bear attacks.
Richard Donovan, North Pole Marathon organiser and the first man to complete the adventure 11 years ago, said Mr Thornton’s training regime on the west coast of Ireland stood him in good stead. “Coming from the west of Ireland means you are kind of used to robust weather conditions,” he said. “I know this is extreme but you go out running in the west of Ireland, wet and near constant windy conditions, it’s going to toughen you up.”
Mr Thornton explained the impact the Arctic conditions have on the body. “On the last lap I could only really see partially out of my right eye and fully out of the left. I had to keep using my frozen mitten to break ice off the face mask,” he said.
Mr Donovan said this year’s conditions were the most difficult to date. “It’s unpredictable from one year to the next what the course might be like,” he said. “We had some solid ice but then we had competitors running over what I call ice hillocks, pressure ridges from the sea moving, but as the race went on the soft sections became worse. This is energy-sapping soft snow.”
The fastest woman on the course was Briton Fiona Oakes, a 2:38 marathon runner in normal conditions who took close to five hours to complete the race.
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