Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG Monday

Personal data accessed inappropriately by Irish public servants

 

Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes highlighted the need for additional resources for his office when he published his annual report for 2012 at Government Buildings today.

Data Protection Commissioner criticises State agencies over use of information on welfare databases

There has been a “disturbing failure of governance” in some public bodies in relation to their use of personal information stored on State databases, the Data Protection Commissioner has said.

Publishing his annual report for 2012 today, Billy Hawkes outlined an audit his office undertook of the so-called Infosys system which holds information from a range of social welfare databases. They are also accessible by other agencies on a read-only basis.

The audit followed a major investigation within the department into one employee’s access patterns to personal data. A criminal investigation is also underway into that matter.

Mr Hawkes said a “worrying degree” of inappropriate access to personal data by State employees was detected as a result of his investigation.

In particular, his office uncovered cases of inappropriate access within the HSE that “indicated an unacceptable lack of awareness within the HSE as to what actually constituted inappropriate access”.

The commissioner said sharing of data could bring benefits in terms of efficient delivery of public services.

“But it must be done in a way that respects the rights of individuals to have their personal data treated with care and not accessed or used without good reason. The failures revealed by the Infosys audit need to be addressed on a public-service-wide basis before any other such sharing arrangements are put in place.”

The office also carried out a major audit of the Garda’s Pulse system during the year and uncovered widespread inappropriate access to records by Gardai, including to information on celebrities.

“Whereas there is quite rightly significant pressure on government to improve efficiency through data sharing, you cannot expect the public to support that if in fact they are not satisfied that people working in the public sector will treat personal data sensitively,” Mr Hawkes said.

“ In the case of the Department of Social Protection, it has data on practically everyone in the country and we have a right to expect that that data will only be accessed and used for reasons related to public functions.”

Data protection issues related to the activities of multinational companies continued to absorb an increased amount of resources, the commissioner said.

The office is likely to face a significant additional burden following the introduction of a proposed new European regulation on data protection, currently being debated by MEPs.

Overall running costs for an office of about 30 staff were just under €1.6 million last year.

Data protection issues related to the activities of multinational companies continued to absorb an increased amount of resources, the commissioner said.

Mr Hawkes said he was satisfied “as of now” with the additional resources allocated to it that it could do the job assigned to it.

But it was crucial that the Government had promised it would be given more resources if, as he expected, more companies chose to come under his office’s jurisdiction under the so-called “one-stop shop” arrangement under the new EU law.

Irish Hospital emergency departments turned suicidal people away, study shows

 

Families say Gardaí lacked training to deal with deaths

Hospital emergency departments have turned people away who went on to die by suicide, a report based on interviews with families after the suicide of relatives has shown.

The report, published yesterday, also found others who went on to take their own lives had been arrested by Gardaí to “teach them a lesson”.

Some families said Gardaí they dealt with after a suicide did not seem trained and in one case the family “ended up consoling the young Garda”. Another family described a Garda dealing with them after a suicide as “rude and derogatory” blaming it on “young people and drugs”.

Families also reported problems with the coroners’ courts where they had to listen to other suicide cases before their relative’s death was dealt with. “All six suicides together, it was Dickensian,” one family is quoted as saying in the report which was carried out by Prof Kevin Malone of UCD’s school of medicine and St Vincent’s hospital, and funded by the charity 3Ts (Turn the Tide of Suicide).

The study is based on interviews with families involving 104 suicides between 2003 and 2008. The vast majority of those who died (84) were males, with 14 people taking their lives when they were aged 20 – the highest number of suicides among any one age group.

Prof Malone said the high number of suicides among young people reflected a trend in society, with Ireland having the fourth highest suicide rate in the EU for people between 15 and 24 years.

Two-thirds of families whose relatives had come into contact with health services before a suicide rated the care as negative or very negative. One family said their relative was “stitched up in A&E and given a month’s prescription”.

‘Sorry, not our area’Another said there was a problem over the hospital catchment area, with one emergency department sending an individual to another hospital with a note saying: “Sorry, not our area.”

One individual was sent home from an emergency department the day before they died by suicide, while others complained that they saw different doctors each time they were admitted to hospital.

After a suicide one family was told their relative “would have been hospitalised if she had VHI”, while another was told by a psychiatrist: “I didn’t see it coming.”

“They took out his brain… and gave it back to us five months later in a box. I think maybe it was for research, I don’t know,” another family is quoted as saying.

Some families highlighted problems their relatives had at schools and colleges. One family said their relative was beaten by a teacher and another said they were singled out and humiliated during a tutorial.

Suicide clusters
The report also highlights clusters of suicides, with 15 of the cases examined linked to another suicide and 10 cases linked to three or more suicides. The clusters included three deaths within two weeks in a rural area within a 3km radius, five deaths over 11 months within a 4km radius and 29 deaths over three years in a 6km urban radius.

An early-warning system was needed to stop suicide clusters, said Prof Malone. He called for the setting up of a national suicide authority to tackle the problem in a similar way to that in which the Road Safety Authority had targeted road deaths among young men.

“Whatever is happening now doesn’t seem to be working. If this was happening in any other branch of medicine we’d be sitting around the table and figuring out how we can improve things,” he said.

3Ts chairman Noel Smyth said successive governments had promised to focus on suicide but had failed to. “There are no votes in suicidal people. They don’t care,” he said.

One in seven Irish people drawing the dole has never had a job at all

 

SOME 43,375 PEOPLE – OR ONE IN SEVEN OF THOSE IN RECEIPT OF THE €188-A-WEEK JOBSEEKER’S BENEFIT – HAS NEVER MADE ANY CONTRIBUTION TO THE PRSI SYSTEM, MEANING THAT THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN IN EMPLOYMENT.

Of those, one in three, or 13,222, is 35 or older, which makes them more likely to have children who are growing up with parents who have never contributed to the State.

The new figures show there are 2,677 people aged between 60 and 65 who have never made a PRSI contribution.

The number of people confined to the ‘dole for life’ is highlighted in data released by Social Protection Minister Joan Burton’s department, which strengthen suggestions that to some people, living on welfare has become a lifestyle choice.

PRSI must be paid by all employees, whether full-time or part-time, and self-employed people with a minimum annual income who are 16 or over.

The information was obtained by the chairman of the Labour Party, Colm Keaveney, who has called for a full-scale investigation of “these disturbingly shocking figures”.

The number of people on the Live Register in Ireland stands at 426,900, but according to the real unemployed figures, contained in the CSO Quarterly National Household Survey, the number of unemployed persons is 294,600.

Mr Keaveney said the figures showed the extent to which the black economy in certain counties has been allowed to flourish, which causes those on low incomes to pay the price.

Irish communities told to pay up and fix their potholes

 

Cash strapped Irish communities are being asked by the Government today to share the cost of fixing their potholes and even to carry out the work themselves. 

Already reeling under a raft of new charges, locals will have to put their hand in their pocket or get out their shovels if they want their roads repaired under a radical new scheme. 

Under the plan unveiled today a total of €10.6m is being provided by the Government for road repairs at 377 locations. 

But the catch is that the respective communities must come up with another €4m in cash, manpower or tools. 

They can either come up with the money, provide the labour or supply the machinery. 

The scheme is expected to apply to local roads, including country lanes and boreens. 

The unusual scheme was launched today by Transport Minister of State Alan Kelly. 

The ‘Community Involvement Scheme’ (CIS) announced today is aimed at fixing 240 kms of roads. 

Mr Kelly said today the funding would be available over the next two years. 

This represents a new and innovative reform of our road maintenance system and work with a total value of over €14 million can now be carried out at a cost to the taxpayer of €10.6 million with the balance being contributed by the local community.” 

“Local authorities have asked communities to come up with a portion of the cost of road maintenance either through funding, labour provision, machinery supply or other forms of benefit.” 

“This funding is then being added to my department’s spend to prioritise maintenance in rural isolated areas and will allow communities have a direct input along with their local authority into local road maintenance,” 

Mr Kelly said that in the normal course of a county council’s road works programme, repairs to minor county roads would only be considered towards the end of the programme after more heavily trafficked routes had been dealt with. 

“ The purpose of this pilot community involvement scheme is to permit local participation in the repair of roads,” he added. 

“In this way, if there are particular problems affecting a given stretch of road and if the local community are willing to assist the local authority  in money or kind with the necessary works, then such roads can be improved sooner than would otherwise be the case.” 

“This pilot Community Involvement in Road Works Scheme is purely a voluntary scheme and is available to give local communities the opportunity to have these works completed where they would not normally be considered for funding.” 

The list of schemes involved on a county by county basis and the community contribution is available here  

Depression ups the risk of stroke in mid-age Women

     

MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN ARE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE LIKELY TO SUFFER A STROKE IF THEY ARE DEPRESSED, A NEW STUDY HAS FOUND.

Australian researchers followed the progress of over 10,500 women over a 12-year-period. All were aged between 47 and 52. This marks the first large-scale study to specifically look at the link between stroke and depression in younger middle-aged women.

It found that middle-aged women were 2.4 times more likely to suffer a stroke if they also had depression compared to those without depression. After potentially influencing factors were taken into account, such as age, smoking and high blood pressure, those who were depressed were still almost twice as likely to suffer a stroke.

   “When treating women, doctors need to recognise the serious nature of poor mental health and what effects it can have in the long-term,” commented study author, Dr Caroline Jackson, of the University of Queensland.

She said that similar results could be expected in European and American women.

She called for more targeted approaches to prevent and treat depression among younger women, ‘because it could have a much stronger impact on stroke for them now rather than later in life’.

“It’s still unclear why depression may be strongly linked to stroke in this age group. The body’s inflammatory and immunological processes and their effects on our blood vessels may be part of the reasons,” Dr Jackson added.

Honeybees trained in Croatia to find land mines

   

Mirjana Filipovic is still haunted by the land mine blast that killed her boyfriend and blew off her left leg while on a fishing trip nearly a decade ago. It happened in a field that was supposedly de-mined.

Now, unlikely heroes may be coming to the rescue to prevent similar tragedies: sugar-craving honeybees. Croatian researchers are training them to find unexploded mines littering their country and the rest of the Balkans.

When Croatia joins the European Union on July 1, in addition to the beauty of its aquamarine Adriatic sea, deep blue mountain lakes and lush green forests, it will also bring numerous un-cleared minefields to the bloc’s territory. About 750 square kilometers (466 square miles) are still suspected to be filled with mines from the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Nikola Kezic, an expert on the behavior of honeybees, sat quietly together with a group of young researchers on a recent day in a large net tent filled with the buzzing insects on a grass field lined with acacia trees. The professor at Zagreb University outlined the idea for the experiment: Bees have a perfect sense of smell that can quickly detect the scent of the explosives. They are being trained to identify their food with the scent of TNT.

“Our basic conclusion is that the bees can clearly detect this target, and we are very satisfied,” said Kezic, who leads a part of a larger multimillion-euro program, called “Tiramisu,” sponsored by the EU to detect land mines on the continent.

Several feeding points were set up on the ground around the tent, but only a few have TNT particles in them. The method of training the bees by authenticating the scent of explosives with the food they eat appears to work: bees gather mainly at the pots containing a sugar solution mixed with TNT, and not the ones that have a different smell.

Kezic said the feeding points containing the TNT traces offer “a sugar solution as a reward, so they can find the food in the middle.”

“It is not a problem for a bee to learn the smell of an explosive, which it can then search,” Kezic said. “You can train a bee, but training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.”

Croatian officials estimate that since the beginning of the Balkan wars in 1991, about 2,500 people have died from land mine explosions. During the four-year war, around 90,000 land mines were placed across the entire country, mostly at random and without any plan or existing maps.

Dijana Plestina, the head of the Croatian government’s de-mining bureau, said the suspected devices represent a large obstacle for the country’s population and industry, including agriculture and tourism. In the nearly two decades since the end of the war, land mines have taken the lives of 316 people, including 66 de-miners, she said.

“While this exists, we are living in a kind of terror, at least for the people who are living in areas suspected to have mines,” she said. “And of course, that is unacceptable. We will not be a country in peace until this problem is solved.”

In 2004, Filipovic and her boyfriend were on a fishing trip that took them to a river between Croatia and Bosnia.

“As we were returning hand-in-hand, my boyfriend stepped on a mine,” the 41-year-old Filipovic said. “It was an awful, deafening explosion … thousands of shrapnel parts went flying, hundreds ending up in my body. He was found dead several meters away, while I remained in a pool of blood sitting on the ground.”

She sued the Croatian government, saying the area wasn’t clearly marked as a former minefield.

“At first I thought I was asleep,” she recalled. “Then I heard the voice of my father. I opened my eyes, and saw nothing. I thought I lost my eyes.”

The government admitted guilt in the case for failing to keep the minefield sign, but the court has yet to determine financial compensation.

It may be a while before the honeybees hit real minefields, Kezic said. First, they will conduct controlled tests, with real mines but which are marked.

Kezic said American researchers have in the past experimented with mine-searching bees, but TNT — the most common explosive used in the Balkan wars — wasn’t part of their experiment because its smell evaporates quickly, and only small traces remain after time. Rats and dogs are also used to detect explosives worldwide, but unlike bees, they could set off blasts on the minefields because of their weight.

Even after the de-miners have done their job in an area, some land mines are missed and remain in the soil, and they are most often the cause of deadly explosions. Once the experiment with bees proves scientifically reliable, the idea is to use them in the areas that have already been de-mined, where their movement would be followed with heat-seeking cameras, Kezic said.

“We are not saying that we will discover all the mines on a minefield, but the fact is that it should be checked if a minefield is really de-mined,” he said. “It has been scientifically proven that there are never zero mines on a de-mined field, and that’s where bees could come in.”