Nearly 100,000 20% of Irish mortgages in arrears by over three months or more
Irish Central Bank figures show over 200 homes repossessed by banks in second quarter of year
Mortgage arrears continued to climb in the second quarter of the year, and a more than 200 homes were repossessed by banks, new data from the Central Bank showed today.
The latest figures show more than 97,800 private residential mortgages were in arrears of over 90 days by the end of June, some 12.7 per cent of home loans, compared with 12.3 per cent in the previous quarter, or 95,554 loans.
When it came to longer-term arrears, the number of mortgages that had fallen behind by more than 180 days rose by 3.8 per cent, while quarter on quarter the number of accounts in arrears over 720 days was up by 11.3 per cent.
However, early arrears showed a decline, falling by 3.3 per cent to 45,018 loan accounts.
The Central Bank said a total of 223 properties were repossessed by lenders during the three-month period, with 160 voluntarily surrendered. The banks disposed of 133 properties during the quarter, leaving them in possession of 1,001 properties. Legal proceedings were brought in 270 cases.
More than 79,300 mortgage accounts are now classed as restructured, with 76.5 per cent deemed to be meeting the terms of their current restructure arrangement. The majority of these arrangements are interest only or reduced payments that exceed the interest on the mortgage, with a small number – about 5,400 – paying less than the interest owed.
Some 30,326 buy to let mortgages were in arrears of more than 90 days, rising from 29,369 at the end of the previous quarter.
The Irish Banking Federation said the rise overall arrears was unwelcome, and warned it would likely increase further before hitting a peak, but pointed to the reduction in early arrears as a positive move.
However, financial brokers body PIBA said the current crisis was prolonging the agony for homeowners and was a severe drag on the economy that needs to be tackled urgently.
“The longer that this situation is left to continue the more catastrophic the consequences will be on the wider economy,” chief operations officer Rachel Doyle said.
Potential first Irish abortion carried out under new legislation
NATIONAL MATERNITY HOSPITAL ON HOLLES STREET TERMINATED UNVIABLE PREGNANCY AT 18 WEEKS
The Department of Health has confirmed that the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act, signed into law by the President on July 30th, 2013, has not yet commenced. So therefore, the statements below that a termination was carried out under the provisions of new abortion legislation and that it was performed under section 7 of the Act are not entirely correct.
The first termination of a pregnancy carried out under the provisions of new abortion legislation has taken place at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, Dublin.
The termination of the twin pregnancy was carried out on a patient who was almost 18 weeks’ pregnant in view of the risk to her life and the unviability of her pregnancy, according to sources at the hospital. Foetal heartbeat were present.
The case bears a number of similarities to that of Savita Halappanavar, in that the woman’s membranes had ruptured and she was demonstrating signs of sepsis.
In contrast to Ms Halappanavar, who died in University Hospital Galway last October after she was refused a termination, the National Maternity Hospital patient has made a good recovery after receiving antibiotic treatment and undergoing the termination a number of weeks ago.
The National Maternity Hospital is one of 25 hospitals in the State authorised tocarry out terminations under the provisions of the Act.
THE RISK OF LOSS OF LIFE
It was performed under section 7, which deals with the risk of loss of life of a woman from physical illness. The controversial suicide provision and another provision covering medical emergencies were not invoked.
In accordance with the legislation, the woman’s obstetrician and another medical practitioner certified that there was a real and substantial risk to her life, which could only be averted by carrying out a termination, before the procedure was carried out.
The Act does not provide for the identification of either patients or the doctors involved in the process. In this case, it is understood the master of the hospital Dr Rhona Mahony, former master Dr Peter Boylan, other senior obstetricians at the hospital and a paediatrician were involved in the decision-making process.
“Even before the passage of the legislation, Holles Street would have carried out terminations in cases like this, where the prognosis for the pregnancy was very poor,” a senior hospital source said last night. “What’s changed is that we can do our work in the best interests of patients without fear of a possible Medical Council case.”
Dr Mahony was out of the country yesterday and could not be contacted.
MEMBRANES WERE RUPTURED.
In this case, after the woman’s membranes were ruptured for almost 24 hours and the risk of infection increased dramatically, she and her partner agreed to the procedure after discussions with doctors at the hospital.The twin foetuses had no chance of survival after being born at under 18 weeks.
Estimates vary as to the number of terminations carried out in Irish hospitals each year to save the life of the mother. During the debate on the legislation, Dr Mahony estimated that between 10 and 20 terminations are performed, while her counterpart at the Rotunda, Dr Sam Coulter-Smith, estimated the number at between 20 and 30.
To comply with the legislation, the hospital is required to provide Minister for Health James Reilly with the Medical Council registration number of the doctor who carried out the procedure and the registration number of the doctor involved in certification. It must also state under which provision of the Act the termination was carried out.
The Minister is required to publish a yearly report on terminations carried out under the terms of the Act.
MEP Marian Harkin hails consumer refund scheme for EU consumers
MARIAN HARKIN MEP SAID THE EUROPEAN CONSUMER CENTRE IN IRELAND WAS CONTACTED BY 3,326 CONSUMERS IN 2012
More than €100,000 was refunded to people who contacted European consumer chiefs last year.
Marian Harkin MEP said the European Consumer Centre in Ireland was contacted by 3,326 consumers in 2012 as on-lines sales and EU cross border shopping rose.
She revealed 60% of inquiries were successfully resolved with €112,058.69 refunded to the complainants, who included a woman whose teenage daughter was refused boarding on a flight in Spain as it was over-booked.
“More and more people are buying online and more and more people are buying cross-border,” said Ms Harkin.
“While there are laws in place to help protect consumer rights, it can often be difficult to vindicate those rights because of language problems, different legal systems and attempted fraudulent trading.”
Claims successfully resolved included an Irish person who found that goods bought from a UK trader were not as described in the purchase order and a Swedish consumer who ordered goods from an Irish trader that were not delivered and who had not received a refund.
Elsewhere a customer whose order was cancelled by a UK web trade without a refund was assisted, along with a holidaymaker who was billed and charged for “special cleaning” of a rental car from a French company. That claim was resolved following the intervention of the French European Consumer Centre and a full refund was made.
Ms Harkin said the data shows not only is there legislation in place that can protect the rights of people buying across EU borders, but that the centre will assist them in vindicating those rights.
“The European Consumer Centre in Ireland will investigate the case and contact the Consumer Centre in the country involved, as well as the company or trader concerned,” she said at the launch of the report in Sligo.
“They will also provide information and advice where needed.
“This is a really good service and should help consumers navigate the sometimes tricky area of cross-border business.”
Most precise clock in the world to watch tiniest ever time dilations
TIME CAN NOW BE DIVIDED INTO SLIVERS HUNDREDS OF TRILLIONS OF TIMES SMALLER THAN A SECOND, THANKS TO A PAIR OF ATOMIC CLOCKS MADE FROM YTTERBIUM THAT HAVE JUST SET A NEW RECORD FOR PRECISION.
This could allow us to detect how an object just 1 centimetre above another might age differently, as prescribed by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It could also set a new standard definition for the second.
“We’ve reached a new level, an order of magnitude improvement over what had been done before,” says Andrew Ludlow of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, who led the work.
The “ticks” of atomic clocks are the hyper-regular switching of a group of atoms between two energy levels. The most accurate definition of a second is currently the amount of time it takes for a group of caesium atoms to swing between two states 9,192,631,770 times.
“If you were to run this clock for around 100 million years, it would only gain or lose about a second,” Ludlow says. These clocks are accurate because we’ve identified their sources of error and eliminated most of them, so physicists can be confident that its ticking is true.
SPEED LIMIT
But the trouble with caesium is that it can’t switch energy states any faster, limiting the clock’s precision – how finely we can divide time.
In the past few years, physicists have been constructing clocks that use elements like strontium, aluminium and ytterbium, whose transitions are thousands or millions of times more frequent.
“The caesium clocks, compared to most other technology, are wonderful,” Ludlow says. “But compared to these next-generation clocks they are significantly worse in terms of the stability, or the time precision that they can achieve.”
As well as the speed of its tick, a clock’s precision depends on its regularity. If the pendulum in a grandfather clock takes one second to complete one swing, two seconds to complete the next, and a second and a half to complete a third swing, you wouldn’t trust it to time a race. So a clock’s ticking rate must also be consistent. “The same is true for these atomic clocks,” Ludlow says. “You need to make sure that each tick is the same as the one before it.”
MAGIC FREQUENCY
Now, Ludlow and his colleagues have created ytterbium clocks that are stable to one part in a quintillion (1018): it would take a quintillion ticks to find one that is different from its neighbours.
To create each clock, the team cooled 10,000 ytterbium atoms to 10 millikelvin, or 10 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, and used a series of lasers to trap them in a sort of egg carton of light. Another laser, called the “clock” laser, provoked a transition between two of the atoms’ energy levels.
The magic frequency for ytterbium is about 518 trillion oscillations per second, about 100,000 per second faster than caesium.
The team used an extremely steady laser to reduce jitter in the atoms, and thousands of atoms to average out any disturbances that could have knocked individual atoms off their cycles. To put a figure on the precision, they compared two nearly identical ytterbium clocks against each other.
“It’s an outstanding paper. This is really a breakthrough,” says Christoph Salomon of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, who was not involved in the new work.
Although the clock is more precise than the caesium gold standard, it still not as accurate.
You might think of these properties of equivalent, but there is a distinction. Precision describes how finely you can divide something, and accuracy is the extent to which you can be sure the measurement is correct or erase systematic errors. And the researchers are more certain that the caesium clock does not contain a systematic error than they are for ytterbium.
Einstein test
If they beat down the clock’s uncertainties, it could eventually become more accurate than the caesium clock too, potentially unseating the world standard for timekeeping.
The milestone opens new frontiers in ultra-precise measurements of gravity and fundamental constants.
It could also help find holes in general relativity. The theory predicts that time runs slower in a gravitational field, meaning clocks on the ground are slower than clocks in space, or even clocks on a step-ladder.
Using the ytterbium clock’s precision, you could sense these time differences at the level of a single centimetre. That would allow physicists to test general relativity’s predictions to 10 parts per billion, well beyond what has been done so far.
Relativity, although hugely successful, doesn’t sit well with quantum mechanics, so physicists expect it to break down at some point, revealing a new, more fundamental theory.
“We know that general relativity is not the ultimate theory,” Salomon says. “People are searching for violations of general relativity that would indicate new forces or new particles or new physics, and that would be really exciting. These [atomic clocks] are exquisite tools for doing that work.”
Volunteering could lengthen peoples life & improve your health
Volunteering may improve your health, according to a new study which found that those who do it live longer and are more satisfied with their lives.
People who volunteer report having lower levels of depression and higher levels of well-being than average, while some research suggests it promotes a longer and healthier life.
A review of 40 academic papers on the subject by University of Exeter researchers found that volunteers are a fifth less likely to die within thenext four to seven years than average.
Across the studies volunteers had lower self-rated levels of depression and higher levels of well-being and life satisfaction, although this has not been confirmed in trials.
It is thought that volunteering can be good for the physical health of older people in particular, by encouraging them to stay active and spend more time out of the house.
Volunteers often explain their motives in terms of wanting to “give something back” to their community, but without receiving anything in return the reported improvements in quality of life are harder to explain, experts said.
An estimated 22.5 per cent of people in Europe devote part of their spare time to volunteering, compared with 27 per cent in America and 36 per cent in Australia.
Dr Suzanne Richards, who published her systematic review in the BMC Public Health journal, said: “Our systematic review shows that volunteering is associated with improvements in mental health, but more work is needed to establish whether volunteering is actually the cause.
“It is still unclear whether biological and cultural factors and social resources that are often associated with better health and survival are also associated with a willingness to volunteer in the first place.”
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