Irish Alcohol consumption drops by 20% in last 12 years
Consumption of alcohol in Ireland down by 4.4% on last year
The consumption of alcohol in Ireland has fallen by 20% over 12 years, with the idea that all Irish people now drink to excess now believed to be far from the truth.
New figures, from the Revenue Commissioners, show a 4.4% drop in the volume of alcohol consumed in Ireland in the past year, with the consumption of both cider and spirits falling over 13%. Levels of teenagers drinking alcohol has also dropped.
Kathryn D’Arcy, director of The Alcohol Beverage Federation of Ireland, emphasised that Irish levels of alcohol consumption are no longer the aberration, in wider European terms, which they once were.
D’Arcy said: “There is a fall in alcohol consumption and we are fast approaching European norms.
“We have seen recent studies by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and other studies showing that our teens are consuming less alcohol than they were a number of years ago, while other countries are seeing that they are having an increase in the problem of underage drinking.
“So I think we are doing some things right and I think we need to focus.”
Irish Courts to take shorter holidays in effort to cut delays
Waiting times for cases at Supreme Court now running at four years
Chief Justice Mrs Susan Denham (above left) has announced that the Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeal will sit in September this year in an effort to reduce a backlog of cases. Photograph: Cyril Byrne/The Irish Times
The Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeal will sit in September this year in an effort to ease pressure on the system.
Chief Justice Mrs Susan Denham and President of the High Court Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns have made the arrangement in an attempt to reduce waiting times, which are currently running at up to four years at the Supreme Court, and 15 months at the Court of Criminal Appeal.
The move follows an announcement by Minister for Justice Alan Shatter earlier this month that the number of judges at the Supreme Court will be increased from 8 to 10 under a plan to cut the long backlog of cases.
The Supreme Court received 600 new appeals last year, a 20 per cent increase on 2011. Mrs Justice Denham announced earlier this year that the court could not accept any new priority cases, as there were already 70 waiting to be heard.
The Government intends to hold a referendum in September to create a Court of Civil Appeal, but even if it is approved it could take two years to set up.
Mrs Justice Denham said the September sittings would be an “interim measure to lessen delays” before the Court of Civil Appeal is introduced.
The new court would “provide permanent and sensible relief of the current logjam”, she added.
Welcoming the announcement today, Mr Shatter said the move would “alleviate the delays and help to ensure that citizens’ right of access to justice is upheld”.
World hunger ‘could be eradicated’ by agricultural investment
Revenues that developing countries lose through tax dodging could be made available to them to invest in agricultural development
World hunger could be eradicated if the revenues that developing countries lose through tax dodging were available to them to invest in agricultural development, says a report from charity Christian Aid.
Its report Who Pays the Price? Hunger: The Hidden Cost of Tax Injustice, says 50 billion US dollars (£33 billion) plus would be raised every year if governments ended tax haven secrecy and curtailed profit-shifting and tax dodging by multinationals in poor countries.
The report is published in the run-up to next month’s G8 summit inNorthern Ireland with the UK holding the presidency.
Christian Aid want Prime MinisterDavid Cameron to use the summit to make tax justice a major weapon against poverty and hunger.
Report author Alex Prats said: “Malnutrition and related causes lead to the death of 2.3 million children every year. In the developing world it is the underlying cause of the deaths of 35% of all children under the age of five.
“At the Millennium Summit in 2000, and later in 2009 at the World Summit on Food Security, political leaders agreed to halve hunger by the year 2015.
“But despite the promises made, progress has been disappointing. In Africa, the number of hungry people has actually increased by 36% over the period 1990-2012 – from 175 to 239 million people.
“If developing countries were able to increase their tax revenues and make effective use of the financial resources available, poverty and hunger could be eradicated. One of the main reasons they can’t is because of tax dodging.”
The report looks at the impact of tax dodging on three countries in the developing world with economies strong enough to put them in the middle income bracket, but where malnutrition remains rife, says Christian Aid.
A survey of more than 1,500 multinationals in the three countries - India, Ghana and El Salvador – found that those with subsidiaries and/or shareholders in tax havens paid on average 28.9% less tax per unit of profit than those without such links. The findings follow earlier Christian Aid research suggesting that, globally, tax dodging costs poor countries some 160 billion US dollars (£105 billion) every year.
Irish Government are too weak in dealing with its banks
An Irish woman congratulate’s Willie Kealy on his wonderful article regarding John Bruton’s speech, which he made in his capacity as President of the Irish Financial Services Centre. In it he informed the assembled gathering at the insurance industry event that we must embrace the pain of austerity.
I would like to let him know we have been experiencing austerity for the past four years. Mr Bruton has a nerve and hard neck in making outrageous statements considering his multiple pensions, enormous salaries, vast bonuses and various expenses that he is awarded yearly, while thousands of families in Ireland are struggling to live on low incomes.
Is he aware of the many people who have lost their jobs and their homes and are now destitute?
Maybe he should take a moment to ponder the many suicides that are happening throughout our country as a result of austerity and depression. The sadness of mothers and fathers whose children are emigrating in their hundreds in order to seek out a new life for themselves in foreign lands.
The bankers who were instrumental in causing the bank crisis are still in control and are calling the shots. No banker lost their job due to their incompetence. The taxpayers, who bailed them out, are now having to pay an increase in mortgage interest rates. The Government is too weak to challenge them, and their salaries and bonuses are immoral. Mr Bruton is their safe pair of hands and their mouthpiece. Builders and speculators who borrowed billions are still enjoying exotic foreign holidays and are now being paid by Nama to look after their bankrupted interests.
We trusted Nama to put things right, but it is cloaked in secrecy and yet another quango set up at the taxpayers’ expense.
President Higgins was courageous in speaking out about the injustices of austerity foisted on our people through no fault of their own. There is a certain elitist group of fat cats in this country who are paid massively and have never known austerity. We don’t need to be chastised into austerity by Mr Bruton, a well known and super-rich man who has never experienced austerity, or who has never been in circumstances that would warrant a visit to St Vincent-de-Paul to get alms, or ever know the trauma of losing a job or losing a home.
A British man becomes first in the world to have prostate removed due to a faulty gene
A British businessman at risk of prostate cancer has become the first in the world to have the organ removed.
The 53-year-old, who has not been identified, discovered that he was carrying a “faulty” BRCA2 gene that has been linked to aggressive forms of both breast and prostate cancer.
The pre-emptive action will greatly reduce his chances of developing the disease.
A similar decision was recently taken by Angelina Jolie, the actress, who had a double mastectomy after testing positive for the defective BRCA1 gene which led to the death of her mother from breast cancer.
The British man, who is married with children, said he was keen to avoid the fate of relatives who had suffered from either breast or prostate cancer.
Doctors were initially reluctant to carry out the procedure, according to reports, as removing the prostate can have serious consequences.
As well as leaving the patient infertile, it can also lead to permanent incontinence and sexual dysfunction.
The man’s prostate had appeared healthy and screening tests did not detect any abnormalities.
Doctors were eventually persuaded to operate when a tissue sample showed up microscopic malignant changes.
Experts were said to have been astonished when they examined the prostate after surgery to discover there was a considerable level of undetected cancer.
Surgeon, Roger Kirby, a leading prostate cancer specialist, told The Sunday Times: “The relatively low level of cancerous cells we found in this man’s prostate before the operation would these days not normally prompt immediate surgery to remove the gland, but given what we now know about the nature of BRCA2, it was definitely the right thing to do for this patient.
“A number of these BRCA families have now been identified, and knowing you are a carrier is like having the sword of Damocles hanging over you. You are living in a state of constant fear. I am sure more male BRCA carriers will now follow suit.”
Prostate cancer affects one in eight men in the UK and results in 10,000 deaths a year.
Global warming likely to be slower than predicted, greenhouse gas emissions control crucial
The earth may warm at a slightly slower rate in coming decades than scientists were predicting six years ago, according to a paper published on Sunday by researchers from Oxford university, Nasa and nearly a dozen other institutions.
But the new findings on one of the most contentious topics in climate science – the slowdown in global warming over the last decade – show that, in the long term, temperatures are still likely to rise to potentially dangerous levels of more than 2°C above those of pre-industrial times, unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed.
That means there is no reason to believe sceptics’ claims that the earth has stopped warming or that climate policies are a waste of money, said the report’s lead author, Alexander Otto of Oxford university’sEnvironmental Change Institute.
“Our results indicate nothing of the kind,” he said. “With the current emission trends we are still looking at [temperature rises] significantly higher than 2°C. There is no room for relaxing or for rejoicing or anything like that, unfortunately.”
The rise in global air surface temperatures – evident since a big spurt in greenhouse gas emissions began at the start of the 20th century – has slowed over the last decade even though emissions have continued to soar. This month, the average daily concentration in the atmosphere of the main man-made greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history.
Despite the slowdown, recent temperatures are still much higher than in any year in the previous decade except for the extremely warm year of 1998, say experts such as James Hansen, the recently retired Nasa scientist who began drawing the world’s attention to climate change in the 1980s.
And they have not prevented a series of extreme climate events over the past year, including record melting of Arctic summer sea ice, the hottest 12 months in the US since records started, and the hottest summer in Australia.
But these recent temperatures have raised questions about whether the earth is heating up in response to rising C02 emissions in the way scientists initially thought it would.
The most recent global assessment of scientific understanding on the topic of climate sensitivity was carried out by the UN body charged with producing regular evaluations of the state of climate knowledge, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 2007.
It estimated then that if carbon dioxide concentrations eventually doubled from their pre-industrial levels of around 280 ppm to 560 ppm, the long-term temperature rise, hundreds of years in the future, was likely to be between 2°C and 4.5°C, with a best estimate of about 3°C.
In the short term, over the next 50 to 100 years, it suggested likely rises within a range of 1°C and 3°C.
Dr Otto and his colleagues have come up with similar estimates to the IPCC’s long-term projections, but their short-term figures (for what is technically known as the transient climate response) suggest temperatures might only rise by between 0.9 °C and 2°C in coming decades.
The difference comes about because the researchers have taken account of the most recent decade of flatter temperature rises – which many scientists believe are due to the oceans’ absorption of heat – and other factors.
This is good news up to a point, said a co-author, Myles Allen of Oxford university.
“The fact that we are saying those high-end responses are looking less likely means we are more confident we are not in a world where the 2°C goal is completely unattainable,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we can totally relax because even if the response is at the low end of the range of uncertainty we’ve still got a lot of work to do to meet the 2°C goal.”
The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience and has been submitted for the IPCC’s next assessment report, the first part of which is due to be published in September.
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