The Department of Finance sets aside a spend of €9m on outside consultants?
The Department of Finance has set aside about €9m for outside consultants this year.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan said most consultancy fees go toward legal issues, including fighting cases taken against the department.
Some €700,000 has been pencilled in to pay experts to implement the Medium Term Economic Strategy, unveiled after the state left the bailout programme last year, the Oireachtas Sub Committee on Finance heard yesterday.
However, the estimated money to be spent overall by the department will be down this year on 2013.
Mr Noonan, pictured, told the Sub Committee that no money was being wasted and claimed the department could not be expected to have extensive expertise in-house.
“In a public service which is by its nature generalist, expertise is always required and expertise is brought in by getting consultancy. It’s cost-effective when it’s operated properly,” Mr Noonan said. “I would argue very strongly that there’s no waste of money in this respect in the Department of Finance.”
Sinn Fein’s Pearse Doherty said about €3.8m was actually spent in 2013. About €2m of the €3.3m in legal fees last year was recouped, the committee heard. The estimated spend last year was about €1m less than this year.
Mr Noonan said that having permanent in-house experts would be like running a hotel and “you’d have painters and electricians and plumbers on permanent staff in-house rather than hiring them in”.
A spokesman for the minster said the lion’s share of the money would go on banking services, which also includes legal fees.
United Nations pushes the Vatican to reveal extent of child abuse scandal
POPE FRANCIS TELLS WORSHIPPERS AT VATICAN MORN MASS PAYING DAMAGES WAS ONLY RIGHT
Pope Francis told worshipers at morning Mass in the Vatican that abuse scandals had ‘cost us a lot of money, but (paying damages) is only right’.
United Nations child protection experts pushed Vatican delegates today to reveal the scope of the decades-long sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests that Pope Francis called “the shame of the Church”.
The delegates, answering questions from an international rights panel for the first time since the scandals broke more than two decades ago, denied allegations of a Vatican cover-up and said it had set clear guidelines to protect children from predator priests.
But members of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and abuse victims attending the session in Geneva, demanded far more transparency on crimes that have rocked the Church, from the United States to Europe and Australia.
“The best way to prevent abuses is to reveal old ones – openness instead of sweeping offences under the carpet,”Kirsten Sandberg, chairwoman of the 18-strong UN committee, told the Vatican delegation. “It seems to date your procedures are not very transparent.”
Ms Sandberg repeatedly pressed the officials to open up Vatican archives on cases of sexual abuse and pay compensation to young people raped or sodomised by priests.
“We will take your questions seriously but we are not in a position to answer now,” Vatican delegation head Archbishop Silvano Tomasi told her at the end of the day-long session.
The Vatican angered victim support groups last month by refusing to answer the committee’s written questions in advance, saying its inquiries were confidential and that responsibility for dealing with abusers lay with local bishops. Barbara Blaine, president of the US-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said the Vatican response fell far short of what victims wanted.
“What we want to see is the Vatican punish bishops who covered up sex crimes, and we want them to turn over information they have about crimes to police,” she said. “The Vatican attempted to relegate the issue to the past and claim it is a new era,” said Pam Spees, an attorney for the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
Victims accuse bishops of covering up crimes and switching priests to other parishes to avoid prosecution. Courts have ordered dioceses to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, bankrupting a string of them in the United States. Pope Francis told worshippers at morning Mass in the Vatican today that abuse scandals had “cost us a lot of money, but (paying damages) is only right.” He said bishops, priests and lay people were responsible for this “shame of the Church”.
In December, the pontiff ordered the formation of a team of experts to look into the sexual abuse of minors in the Church, in his first major step to tackle the issue. Vatican officials long played down the abuse scandal as a limited problem, but shocking revelations in the United States,Ireland and then several European countries have turned it into a crisis in recent years.
St Vincent’s Healthcare group claims it will turn dispute around with compliance on pay rules
Group chief executive to be paid exclusively from private funds in future
Noel Whelan, chairman of St Vincent’s Healthcare Group: said the group was now in a process aimed at resolving a dispute with the HSE over whether it actually was in compliance with Government pay policy.
The chairman of the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group Prof Noel Whelan has said the organisation is going to “swing around into compliance” with Government public service pay policy.
The group has come under fire over the payment of additional sums to senior executives over and above HSE-approved salaries for work carried out in its private hospital.
Prof Whelan said the group had received legal advice, including from Michael McDowell SC, which indicated that it was in compliance with pay policy as public money was not being used to make the additional payments to senior executives. However, he said the group was now in a process aimed at resolving a dispute with the HSE over whether it actually was in compliance with Government pay policy.
Prof Whelan told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee that he hoped this process would be completed by March 21st.
He told the committee yesterday that in future, the salary of its group chief executive would be paid entirely from funds generated from the private hospital and that the role of group chief executive and the chief executive of publicly funded St Vincent’s University Hospital would be separated and not occupied by the same person.
Just before Christmas, the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group said that its chief executive, Nicholas Jermyn, was receiving a package of more than €292,000 a year. It said this was made up of €136,282 from the public sector and €136,951 from the private sector, as well as a privately funded car allowance of €19,796.
The group’s director of finance, Cormac Maloney, earned €140,876, including a privately funded payment of €32,544. Director of nursing Mary Duff received €96,405, including a privately funded payment of €14,853.
Meanwhile, Minister for Health James Reilly said yesterday it was “unsustainable” for St Vincent’s Healthcare Group to have the same chief executive for both its public and private hospitals.
At an Oireachtas committee, Dr Reilly said the HSE was in the process of addressing issues such as top-up payments for staff and governance issues at the organisation.
“There is only one hospital where the CEO is both the CEO of a public and private hospital,” Dr Reilly told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children. “I believe that to be a conflict of interest and to be unsustainable.”
Mr Jermyn on a number of occasions yesterday declined to answer questions put to him by the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee John McGuinness on whether he would retain a salary of close to €300,000 if he relinquished his existing role in St Vincent’s University Hospital.
Mr Jermyn said the issue of the salary of the group chief executive was one for the board of the organisation. He said in the future he would not receive any remuneration from the public sector.
South & North Irish governments did not step back from Northern talks
SAYS THE TÁNAISTE eamon gilmore
THE ROLE OF the TWO GOVERNMENTS NORTH & SOUTH ON THIS OCCASION WAS TO PROVIDE SUPPORT, SAYS EAMON GILMORE
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore: “I described the failure to reach agreement as a step not taken rather than a step back. I still take that view.”
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has rejected claims that the Irish and British governments stood back from the Haass/O’Sullivan Northern Ireland talks on flags and emblems, parades and the past.
He insisted in the Dáil that “the Irish Government was directly involved in this process”. He told Sinn Féin’s Seán Crowe he had to remember “this process was initiated in Northern Ireland” by the First and Deputy First Ministers.
“It was always intended that these would be talks between the parties in Northern Ireland. The role of the two governments on this occasion was to provide support to that, which we did by keeping in regular contact,” Mr Gilmore said.
Mr Crowe had described the “optics” of the talks as wrong and highlighted suggestions by commentators that the two governments “were stepping back” from the talks.
Mr Gilmore said he had been in the North when the talks closed and was in close contact with Richard Haass and Meghan O’Sullivan.
Continuing support
He said the two governments were co-guarantors of the agreement and one of their responsibilities was to provide continuing support. Mr Gilmore added: “I described the failure to reach agreement as a step not taken rather than a step back. I still take that view.”
He said the two governments were co-guarantors of the agreement and one of their responsibilities was to provide continuing support. Mr Gilmore added: “I described the failure to reach agreement as a step not taken rather than a step back. I still take that view.”
Discussions broke up without agreement on New Year’s Eve. Three of the five parties in the Northern Executive supported the proposals outlined by the two Americans who chaired the talks.
Fianna Fáil foreign affairs spokesman Brendan Smith said there had “never been a breakthrough in Northern Ireland without the direct hands-on involvement of the two sovereign governments”.
He noted the Tánaiste “seems to have given some urgency to this issue when it was concluding. I would have thought that when the Northern Executive decided to set up a panel of parties to address this issue, it would not have been opposed to the two sovereign governments taking a hands-on approach to dealing with the difficult issues.”
Mr Gilmore insisted “it is not true. . . that the Government became involved at the end of this process”. He said he and Ms Villiers met the First and Deputy First Ministers last year when the flags protest was in a very difficult situation.
Expressed concern
Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan expressed concern that release “licences are revoked without reasons being given, people are left on remand for three and four years and draconian conditions are proposed when releases are considered”. Such a situation “does not contribute to the process we are discussing”.
Expressed concern
Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan expressed concern that release “licences are revoked without reasons being given, people are left on remand for three and four years and draconian conditions are proposed when releases are considered”. Such a situation “does not contribute to the process we are discussing”.
Mr Gilmore said the prisoner issue was not directly involved in the talks. He had raised it a number of times, but added “we have seen some very worrying activity in recent months”.
Theory behind V formation of birds flying is revealed
Researchers have found new evidence to support the longstanding theory that birds fly in a V formation to conserve energy during long flights. In accordance with the current theories on aerodynamics, birds use the formation to minimize the consumption of energy during flight.
The current theory implies that birds use the lift provided by the lead birds in a V formation. Lead researcher Dr. Steven Portugal, a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Veterinary College in England, headed the recent study involving the rare and endangered northern bald ibis.
The current theory on birds flying in a V formation was put forward as early as 1989 in a study conducted by researchers from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. The theory was further elaborated in a separate study published in 1994 by scientists from the Department of Zoology of the Aberdeen University in Scotland. Both studies came to a conclusion that birds use the V-formation to reduce the energy needed to traverse long distances in flight.
The most recent study, published in the online journal Nature, used technologies that were unavailable during the earlier studies to confirm the theories. GPS tracking units were attached to a group of northern bald ibises to collect data on their flights. Moreover, a microlight aircraft also followed the birds closely to gather video footage of the flying birds.
The data collected during the flights indicate that the birds have a way of knowing where to position themselves to take advantage of the additional lift provided by birds in the front of the formation.
“They’re seemingly very aware of where the other birds are in the flock and they put themselves in the best position possible,” says Dr. Portugal. “This can give a bit of a free ride for the bird that’s following. So the other bird wants to put its own wingtip in the upwash of the bird in front.”
An upwash is an upward flow of air that is created by a moving airfoil, in this case, a bird’s wing. The up-wash provides the additional lift that birds take advantage of using the V formation.
The new study provides solid proof regarding the veracity of the earlier studies. The data collected by Portugal and his team also provides important insights in ornithology and animal behavior.
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