Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is seeking answers on Rehab’s accounting affairs?
FLANNERY AND KERINS YET TO INDICATE APPEARANCE BEFORE COMMITTEE
The Public Accounts Committee remains uncertain as to whether former Rehab leaders Frank Flannery and Angela Kerins will attend a key hearing next Thursday on the affairs of the disability organisation.
Mr. Flannery, who resigned his Rehab directorship last month and a political role within Fine Gael, has yet to make his decision.
The intentions of M/s Kerins are equally unclear. She finished her work as chief executive yesterday, having resigned on Wednesday.
PAC members are adamant the resignations change nothing in terms of the questions they wish to put to M/s Kerins and Mr. Flannery, who was also her immediate predecessor as chief executive.
Rehab chairman Brian Kerr has written to each asking if they will attend the PAC meeting next week. It is understood there has been no response from M/s Kerins and none is expected until next week.
While Mr. Flannery said he was still considering his position, he said he was seeking to co-operate with the PAC. “I have not made up my mind but I’m working on finding a way to co-operate with the committee if I can,” he said.
At issue for the PAC, among other questions, are Mr. Flannery’s retirement package and M/s Kerins’s pay and bonuses.
The committee also wishes to query Rehab’s involvement in a failed 2010 coffin-making venture with a firm co-owned by M/s Kerins’s husband, brother and Mr. Flannery.
In a letter to the PAC two days ago, Mr. Kerr said he and four other board and management figures will attend the hearing. Mr. Kerr is understood to have asked the PAC to give Rehab, before the meeting, “any additional information” in relation to the organisation which is available to the committee. Rehab receives annual payments of more than €82 million from the State.
Mr. Kerr said he understood Rehab was invited to the committee for an examination of funding by the HSE, Department of Justice, training agency Solas and other Government departments.
PAC members have complained M/s Kerins gave only partial answers to certain questions at a seven-hour hearing of the committee in February.
Irish people will know the cost of (UHI) Universal Health Insurance by 2015
JAMES REILLY SAYS
People will know the cost of Universal Health Insurance (UHI) by the end of March next year, Health Minister James Reilly has said.
Defending his controversial reform plan, the minister said younger people will be offered the means to reduce their health insurance cover by way of “deductable rates” to allow them tailor their package to their reduced needs compared to elderly patients.
“There will be no lesser package. What we are talking about is offering younger people deductables. What I mean by that, if you are convinced you don’t really need health insurance this year, well then you can a lower premium if you accept you will pay more if you do require a service. You will have to pay the first €100 or first €200 for that service. I don’t think that is a two tier system, but it does give more choice,” he said.
Dr Reilly insisted that average income earners will not pay more than what they pay at present, rather they will pay “just a fraction of that.”
“The current cost, on average, for private health insurance is €920. We have made it absolutely clear that those people who are above the medical card income limit and below the top 30 per cent of earners will be heavily subsidised so their costs will be but a fraction of that,” he said.
“There is no evidence that the costs will be higher, we believe it will be cheaper under Universal Health Insurance (UHI). It has been claimed that the health basket will be determined by insurance companies, it will not. It will be determined by the Government,” he said.
Dr Reilly has said that the Government will decide which services will be included in the basket offered to patients under his UHI model which will determine the costs.
“When the process has been finished in relation to the public consultation on the basket, by the first quarter of next year we will have a decision by Government as to what goes into the basket. Then will allow us to put the costing of it,” he said.
Dr Reilly also committed that those currently in receipt of free medicines will not see any change to their services.
“Those currently entitled to free drugs will continue to have that entitlement,” he said.
Dr Reilly said the new model does not equate to abandoning the community rating system, where a person’s age does not determine the level of premium they pay. “Absolutely no way will we sacrifice community rating,” he said.
Ireland’s non growth in jobs sector
“The recovery confuses the Irish Central Bank”
The rate of jobs growth in Ireland’s post-crash economy is confounding economists, not least because it is coinciding with a contraction in economic growth.
In the aftermath of recession, employment can typically lag a recovery in demand as firms expand operations but remain cautious about hiring new staff.
This can produce a period of jobless growth – a phenomenon which plagued the Irish economy in the early 1990s when multinationals increased output but unemployment remained stubbornly high.
The complete reverse of this, however, is now under way in the Irish economy with employment accelerating at pace while domestic demand, most likely because of a decline in disposable income – remains stagnant.
In fact we’re witnessing a period of no growth in jobs”.
Against all predictions, the Irish economy created 60,000 new jobs last year, a credible performance by any yardstick.
The growth represented a claw back of about 18 per cent of the total number of jobs lost during the economic crisis, and returns the labour market to an employment level last seen near the end of 2004.
It was achieved, rather confusingly however, alongside a 0.2 per cent drop in gross domestic product (GDP) and a 1.1 per cent contraction in domestic demand.
In its quarterly economic bulletin, published yesterday, the Central Bank admitted to being perplexed by the issue.
It said the recovery in employment had taken hold “surprisingly quickly and at faster pace than previously envisaged”.
On that basis, it predicted the country’s jobless rate would fall from 13.1 per cent in 2013 to 11.3 per cent this year, and to 10.4 per cent in 2015.
Such strong employment growth would not normally be observed until the labour intensive domestic demand recovered, the bank said.
“It had been expected that recovery in employment would lag that output as firms tend to increase capacity utilisation and hours worked before they begin to hire again.”
One possible explanation might be the volatility of output in the pharmaceutical sector arising from the expiry of a number of patents.
The scale of the problem is perhaps best illustrated by drug giant Pfizer, which saw profits fall $5.5 billion in 2012 largely on the back of a 60 per cent decline in sales of its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor, most of which is produced here.
Such massive profit contractions undoubtedly have a distorting effect on the country’s GDP numbers.
Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has stated on several occasions the underlying trends in the economy were at odds with the GDP numbers.
In its bulletin, the Central Bank said that while the initial surge in jobs growth was confined to part-time positions, the last few quarters had witnessed a steady growth in full-time employment, which was spread over a broad range of sectors.
Nonetheless, the official figures from the Central Statistics Office, suggest some 32,700 of the new jobs – created in the past five quarters – have been in agriculture. This has raised its employment share to 6.1 per cent – above both long-term and international norms.
However, the CSO suggests caution is warranted in interpreting sectoral trends in employment within agriculture due to its sensitivity to sample changes over time.
Another possible explanation for the “growthless jobs” conundrum offered by the Central Bank was the strength of recovery in Ireland’s main trading partners, namely the US, UK and the wider euro area.
While noting that recovery in the GDP growth and in the labour market in both the US and UK had outstripped the euro area, it said previous research indicated Irish employment was more responsive to a given external GDP shock, if the shock was UK based.
In the long-run, its research suggests, both economic growth here and employment increase by around twice as much in response to an increase in UK GDP in contrast to a similar US-based growth stimulus.
“These results could provide some explanation for Ireland’s employment recovery and suggest a positive outlook for employment growth given the short-term prospects for the UK economy,” it said.
As much as 80,000 Irish homes need to be built in the next 5 years
Almost 80,000 homes, half of them in Dublin, will have to be built over the next five years to cater for Ireland’s rising population, a Government advisory body on housing warned.
The Housing Agency estimates that, this year alone, 9,500 units will need to be built around the country. Each year, the figure will rise, peaking at a requirement for 20,900 in 2018.
An assessment of future housing supply requirements in 272 urban settlements was conducted out by Future Analytics Consulting on behalf of the housing agency.
It found out that:
- In the Dublin region, 37,581 homes will be required over the five-year period. There is an “immediate” requirement for 5,663 units this year, rising to 8,970 in 2018. In Balbriggan, 925 units are needed before the end of 2015;
- In Cork City and suburbs, the housing supply requirement will be 268 units in 2015, rising to a per annum requirement of 1,469 units in 2018;
- Galway City, as well as Limerick City, will experience a shortfall in housing requirements in 2015 and require a total of 2,316 and 2,635 units respectively over the four years to 2018;
- Based on projected population growth, Waterford will have a supply requirement from 2017, with 739 units needed before the end of 2018;
- In Kerry, Killarney is the only settlement with an immediate requirement — 64 units per annum between 2014-2018.
Housing agency CEO John O’Connor said more than half of the housing supply was required for one- and two-person households.
“We need to look at all the housing needs in the country across the lifecycle, from student accommodation, people renting at the early stages of their career, family households, and older people,” he said.
Construction Industry Federation director general Tom Parlon said the requirements set out in the agency’s report will not be met until barriers to house-building are tackled.
“In the report they outline that 5,663 new housing units will be required in the Dublin region this yearm” said Mr Parlon. “That simply won’t happen. The maximum number of new units we can expect to see built in Dublin this year is approximately 2,000 units.
“House builders want to build but, unfortunately, the current market conditions are stopping that from happening. The cost of house-building is still at too high a level. That is because the various taxes and levies have barely been altered since the downturn and do not reflect the current market reality.”
Meanwhile, housing minister Jan O’Sullivan said planning permissions granted during the “boom period” could be reviewed, as the Government intends only stimulating construction where necessary.
Exciting deal on debts is a boost for start-up firms in Ireland?
Last week’s small business news was all about our debt it’s a subject that continues to snowball after being brought to the nation’s attention by the UCD economist Morgan Kelly.
The latest development is that the country’s biggest banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, have met their targets for restructuring distressed small business loans – but the Central Bank won’t tell us what those targets are, or how they were reached. While the range of options for banks and businesses in arrears includes the selling of assets and loan extensions, it also involves more drastic measures like receiverships and examinerships.
Last year, the Central Bank said that half of the country’s €50m small business loans were non-performing. Morgan Kelly, who called the housing collapse and subsequent recession, said the issue posed a major risk to the country’s nascent economic recovery.
But that wasn’t the only development on the SME debt front. In more positive news, the Irish Independent revealed that a debt-forgiveness scheme for small business is to be examined by a high-level working group being set up by the Government.
Banks will be asked to cancel some company debts in exchange for shares in even the smallest firms, according to sources close to the process.
The idea is one of a number on the agenda for the new working group in the process of being established under the umbrella of the State-led Consultative Committee on SME Funding.
The lack of equity investment for SMEs is emerging as a significant blockage in the economy, particularly as things start to pick up and the demand for capital increases.
The Consultative Committee on SME Funding brings together representatives of agencies including the Department of Finance, Department of Jobs and Enterprise, Enterprise Ireland and the county enterprise boards as well as industry groups such as ISME and the Small Firms’ Associations and the banks.
But another similarly named organisation had much more dire things to say.
The National Council for Competitiveness issued a damning report on Tuesday arguing that business and credit costs are crippling Ireland’s competitiveness.
Irish companies pay around 31 per cent more in interest on bank loans of up to €1m, the council found, and 27 per cent more for loans higher than that.
Even revolving loans and overdrafts also cost more for Irish business than for their counterparts on the continent, taking in 11.5 per cent more in interest, on average, as of November 2013.
These high interest rates are particularly concerning given the dependence of Irish businesses, especially small businesses, on banks for funding.
A recent Central Bank paper found that Irish SMEs are among the most heavily reliant on banks for funding in the EU, although there has been a small move over to trade credit and equity since the crash.
Back to the subject of debt, there were historic scenes in Naas courthouse at Ireland’s first circuit court examinership. Finally, small businesses have access to a low-cost version of the traditionally expensive procedure.
Celbridge Playzone, which has 27 employees, was the first to try and make use of new laws introduced on Christmas Eve that make the restructuring process less costly.
Examinership, the legal mechanism that allows a company to restructure with court approval while enjoying protection from creditors, was until recently confined to the High Court – meaning heavy legal fees and little attractiveness for SMEs.
“This will be an historic occasion and should lead the way for others to follow – giving SMEs an accessible and cost-effective route to restructuring,” said Neil Hughes, managing partner at restructuring specialists Hughes Blake.
Mr Hughes now expects a surge in applications. One of the biggest advantages of examinership is that companies can use it to renege on costly rent agreements.
Data for the January to April 2014 period also indicates that the process, once the sole preserve of big business, is increasingly being used as a recovery tool for family-owned and indigenous companies.
Seven of the eight businesses that have exited the process since the start of the year – including Dublin stalwart Flannery’s Pub – are SMEs. The seven examinerships, which also include shoe chain Carl Scarpa, windowframe company Star Elm Frames, convenience store Tomlo and an operator of a United Colours of Benetton outlet, saved a total of 191 jobs.
Ending the week on a positive note, there was a boost for start-ups asEurope’s biggest angel investor event was confirmed for Dublin.
About 350 of the world’s richest start-up investors will descend on the capital next month when the 14th Eban Congress takes place in Dublin Castle on May 19 and 20.
International investors and business angels, including some of the leading ‘super-angels’, along with venture capital firms and early stage fund managers, will come together to discuss the European business angel landscape and how to support and grow it, and to share their knowledge and experience.
Climate change needs the politics of the impossible to alter our world’s path to disaster
We keep learning more about the catastrophe in front of us, but it is not helping us solve the great problem moaning and groaning & ultimately doing nothing about it.
It’s starting to feel like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could keep issuing its reports from here to eternity. The Fifth Assessment Report, released just in time to avoid April Fool’s Day, continues a steady trend: our knowledge is increasing, just about everything that matters is getting worse, and all we can realistically hope to do is soften the edges of a slow-moving catastrophe.
This pessimism may be the most realistic view of the climate crisis. Politics is the art of the possible, and climate change may be impossible to prevent or even shift. That leaves us trying to blunt its impacts with seawalls and mass re-locations, which more and more look like the realistic way forward.
But this realism is also a hasty and cheery despair. It gives up too much too quickly. Sometimes politics is the art of changing what is possible. That deeper realism is part of the answer that climate change needs.
But first, back to the Report. Once again, deepening paleo-ecology research, ever-more refined computer modeling, and incremental gains in courage led the IPCC to say that “we”—the Global Community of Very Cautious Knowers—are a little more certain about trends in global warming, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification. The Report predicts more floods in temperate places like Europe and most of the U.S., more droughts near the Equator, with overall food production taking a nasty hit.
Everything that is already hard is going to get harder. Ecological zones will be reshuffled. With many species already in danger of extinction and conservation efforts focused on preserving habitat, lots of that hard-won habitat is going to be irrelevant—too warm, too dry, too something—as suitable habitat shifts faster than species can travel. Fisheries, already stressed by pollution and over-harvesting, will now confront warming and acidification. Droughts and food shocks may intensify political and military conflict: more resource wars, more grain-price revolutions.
Being poor, in particular, gets worse as climate changes. Nature has always been hardest on the poor, because infrastructure, transport, medicine, and the rest of our capital-intensive technologies are the key ways we tame her violence. To be poor—for an individual, and even more for a country—is to be vulnerable to the whims of the natural world. Recall the very worst of Hurricane Katrina’s impact on the poorest parts of New Orleans in 2005 and then project those onto Bangladesh, a country of 155 million—almost half as large as the population of the US.
There’s lots of uncertainty about details—as the Report itself painstakingly documents; but most people not in denial have known the broad outlines of this picture for well over a decade. Int was 1989—when the Berlin Wall came down—writer Bill McKibben was already announcing “the end of nature” in the era of climate change.
But with every IPCC report, the optimistic scenario, where “the world” slashes greenhouse gases and stabilizes climate change, feels more like a weak deus ex machina. Meanwhile, the drastic scenario—where everything accelerates.
The Greenland ice cap melts sometime in the next century, sea levels rise 20 feet or more in our grand-children’s lifetimes, and the Gulf Stream and the Amazonian forests both consider giving up the ghost and that scenario feels more and more like a weather forecast:
Unseasonably warm this weekend with a growing chance of apocalypse by Sunday evening?
But “apocalypse” is probably exactly wrong, even though floods, droughts, and storms are just the kind of thing that one might expect would presage an apocalypse. Instead, living in a climate-changed world is becoming a post-normal normal, a chronic crisis.
The IPCC Report reflects this, spending four chapters on “adaptation” to climate change. Already, commentators are celebrating the move to adaptation as a win for gritty practicality over empty idealism, local and private efforts over “grand international declarations.” Of course it’s true that we need adaptation, especially for the poor regions that are the most vulnerable and can’t wait while the waters rise. But pretending that giving up on big climate action means a victory is nothing but rationalizing defeat.
The main reason for this passive accommodation is that This passivity is tempting because political action has done so little one doesn’t seem likely to do much about climate and doesn’t exactly look poised to do more that is more than symbolic. Because climate change is distributed around the world and has a very long lag time, whatever we do about it here and now mostly helps faraway and future people. So it’s very tempting to come up with excuses for doing nothing, or just enough to feel righteous about what you have done.
Sure enough, in international negotiations, the US long refused to do anything meaningful until China and India “did their share,” while those countries answered that the US had added more than its share to the problem and needed to lead in paying for the solution. At all scales, down to the nation and even the individual, the same puffed-up hemming and hawing works out nicely for the living, who enjoy our energy-intensive lives now, and badly for the future.
Ordinary politics, with its self-interested deal-making just barely hidden under high talk, is a terrible lousy tool for global problems that play out over centuries and would require the living generation to do something costly and inconvenient. And there is not much that is more costly and inconvenient than retooling your infrastructure, from energy to transport to manufacturing, when that infrastructure is where we all live.
That leaves us with, basically, two ways out. One is extraordinary technology:: either a silver bullet to produce cheap, renewable energy, or a reliable geo-engineering technique to adjust the global atmosphere-temperature-weather system directly. Either might happen—the first likely will, maybe too late to prevent permanent crisis; but waiting on clean energy is a very big risk, and geo-engineering brings huge risks of its own, from getting only half the problem to ending up making the system even more unstable.
The “simplest” geo-engineering proposal is to bounce a bunch of earth-warming sunlight back into space by launching mirrors or particles into the upper atmosphere; but (1) it’s a half-measure, since the oceans would continue acidifying, stressing and maybe destroying many marine life forms and disrupting other global processes; and (2) if anything ever happened to the mirrors, sunlight would pour in and our carbon-enriched atmosphere would start to warm up like an oven.
The other way out is extraordinary politics: politics that goes beyond the usual interest-swapping and sets new commitments for the country and the world. This, admittedly, is a desperate measure. It is the last thing you want to rely on—other than, possibly, launching mirrors into space to adjust the planet’s atmosphere. These, however, are desperate times, at least where the global climate is concerned.
One reason for hopefulness, even for measured optimism, is something our hyper-knowing, reflexively cynical political culture trains us to forget: extraordinary politics is a real thing, not just an idle wish.
Consider the end of slavery—not in the US, but in the British Empire, which abolished the practice thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation, by an act of Parliament, with compensation to slaveholders. The economic cost was huge. For decades, historians assumed it must have been a subterfuge for someone’s economic benefit—otherwise, how would such a thing be possible? But the historians’ view these days is that British emancipation was, in fact, a wildly expensive and disruptive moral commitment, executed through extraordinary politics.
The powerful thing about this example is its scale: the global economy of the British Empire was nearly as entwined with slavery as ours is with the fossil-fuel economy. The change wasn’t just costly: it pulled some institutions up by their roots. If that never happened, we’d really be out of reasons for hope on climate change. But sometimes it does.
We should learn to look at climate change simultaneously through two very different lenses. Keep one eye on the scientists’ reports, with their steady accumulation of reasons to worry, and the Silicon Valley technologists’ innovations, with their promise of landing on an extraordinary technology.
But cast the other on the activist kids who don’t know enough to realize they can’t win—the ones getting arrested outside the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and pressing universities and pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, as if Exxon were R.J. Reynolds, or Apartheid South Africa. And don’t forget the people who are experimenting with low-carbon living in their “transition town” projects, trying to recast energy sources and other infrastructure in a less carbon-intensive form.
It’s easy—ridiculously easy—to show that the activists shouldn’t expect to win, and that whatever they did succeed in doing wouldn’t be enough to stop this massive global problem. But that is true at the beginning of every episode of extraordinary politics. That why histories of abolition, the civil rights movement, even environmentalism, don’t begin with people who are powerful, realistic, or even normal. They begin with people who don’t know better, and who find the world they are born into intolerable.
That is a key, because if we end up tolerating a climate-changed world as the new normal, then it probably will last forever—or as long as anyone is around to care about it.
Our current normal is built out of principles that used to be considered impossible—gender equality, racial equality, democracy—and became common sense long after some people were too unrealistic to give up on them. Once they win, these principles get absorbed into common sense—and, of course, get betrayed left and right, like any civic piety. But a world where they are elements of common sense is still vastly different from one where most people accept that they are impossible.
We sort of know this about human freedom and equality, even if we tend to forget it in practice. But environmental issues tend to get cast as technical problems for scientists and bureaucrats, or as hopelessly politically divided between liberal greens and conservative climate-skeptics. But that is only half the picture. Historically, environmental attitudes have changed almost as dramatically as attitudes around gender and sexuality: Americans used to hate wilderness, love to see a forest burn, and wage war on wolves and other large predators.
Even more basically, they had no conception of the global web of life that we call ecology, or just “the environment,.” A series of political movements and cultural revolutions changed this, beginning as far back as the nineteenth century. Today’s climate activists are aiming at the same kind of change: to help see, and feel, a disrupted and dangerous world as their problem, their responsibility, something they love enough not to give up on it.
So the age of climate change doesn’t just need climate scientists, or even technologists, and adaptation engineers. They are essential, but if we just rely on them, we’re likely to drift further into passivity and pessimism. We also need, in incremental and experimental ways, to keep building up a real politics of climate change. That politics will be both environmentalist and human-oriented, because there’s no separating the two in the age of climate change.
It will have to ask how the peoples of the world are going to live together and share its benefits and dangers, and also how we are going to use, preserve, and transform the world itself. Braiding together human rights and distributive justice with environmental ethics and the human relation to the natural world isn’t just a nice-sounding, if daunting idea. It’s quite simply the only way forward.
Any answers that we succeed in giving these questions will transform us, as earlier extraordinary politics changed people: those who ask the question are no longer the same once they give each an answer. That transformation, to a culture and economy that could change the trajectory of climate change, is exactly what seems impossible now. And that is why everyone should be paying respectful attention to the activists who refuse to believe in impossibility, and even more to the parts of ourselves that also refuse..e to believe in the impossible, This is not idealism. It’s a higher realism.and should be scheming a little impossibility of our own.
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