Rising exports in Ireland for 1st quarter show a strong growth
Ireland’s economy surged in the first quarter of this year on the back of rapidly rising exports, prompting economists to predict the country will easily cope without back up lending programmes from the EU or the International Monetary Fund.
Ireland’s Central Statistics Office said on Thursday that gross domestic product rose 2.7% in the first quarter of 2014, far faster than economists expected.
The surge in output pushed the annual rate of growth up to 5.1%, similar to the boom years in which the country became known as the Celtic tiger, before the banking and economic crisis started in 2008.
The statistics office also revised up the previous quarter from a contraction of 2.3% to a flat reading of -0.1%.
Even if there is no more growth in the whole year, the 2014 annual growth figure would show an expansion of 4.7%, according to Anthony Baert, an economist at ING Bank. “The strong increase in GDP shows that the disappointing fourth quarter was no reason to fear the end of the recovery,” he said.
The rapid rise in GDP was driven primarily by exports and a turnround in inventories, suggesting companies have become more optimistic about the future. But in an indication that the Irish households and companies remained fragile after the wrenching financial crisis, domestic demand – household consumption, investment and government consumption – lagged behind export growth.
Ireland’s GDP figures are sometimes distorted by flows of income abroad, but even adjusting for the income earned by foreigners, gross national income increased 5.4% in the year to the first quarter.
James Howat, European economist at Capital Economics, said that the unexpectedly rapid growth suggested the government was on track to meet its target to reduce the budget deficit from 7.2% of GDP last year to 4.8% this year. “There is mounting evidence that the economy can survive and perhaps even prosper outside of its bailout programme,” he said.
The Irish government was also boosted by the Irish statisticians decision to move the country’s national accounts to the new European System of Accounts 2010, which had little effect on growth rates but boosted the level of GDP by 5%, as research and development, weapons and estimates of illegal activities such as consumption of illicit drugs, are now count towards GDP.
These revisions were backdated throughout the national accounts and all EU countries have agreed to adopt the new standards by the end of the year. The US made similar adjustments last year.
As a result Ireland’s economy is almost €8bn bigger than previously estimated, potentially giving the government room to ease its austerity drive in the forthcoming budget in defiance of advice from the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, the budget watchdog set up after the financial crash.
The rise is equivalent to about 5 per cent of gross domestic product and reduces Ireland’s ratio of debt to GDP from nearly 124% to 116% for last year.
The more positive data on the Irish economy follow figures on Wednesday that showed revenue continuing to rise as the economy picked up after several years of sluggish or non-existent growth. The most recent exchequer returns showed that tax revenue was running €500m ahead of government estimates in the first half of this year.
The government is under intense domestic pressure to bring six years of spending cuts and tax rises to an end. It is committed to achieving a budget deficit of 3 per cent of GDP by 2015, but there is a debate about the amount of fiscal adjustment that will be required to do so. Estimates at the start of 2014 suggested €2bn of further adjustment was required. Now it could be less than that.
Conall MacCoille, an economist at Davy, a stockbroking firm, said the better than expected exchequer returns and the upward revision to GDP meant the budget adjustment “will probably be watered down to well below the €2bn adjustment originally planned.”
ESB and Vodafone to invest €450 million in broadband
A joint venture between the ESB and Vodaphone will propel Ireland into the ranks of the world’s fastest broadband countries.
Subject to European Commission approval, the network will be rolled-out across Ireland in the coming months, with the first customers able to avail of 100% broadband from the start of 2015
The ESB and Vodafone have signed a joint venture agreement to invest € 450 million in building a 100% fibre broadband network across the whole of Ireland.
The network will offer speeds of 200 Mbps to 1000 Mbps propelling Ireland into the ranks of the world’s fastest broadband countries. Ireland will also become the first country in Europe to utilise existing electricity infrastructure to deploy fibre directly to homes and businesses, initially reaching 500,000 premises.
Letterkenny in Co Donegal, Ballina in Co Mayo, Carrigaline in Co Cork and Tralee in Co Kerry will be among the 50 towns targeted in the first phase of the roll-out. The fibre will be deployed on the ESB’s existing overhead and underground infrastructure. ESB chief executive Pat O’Doherty said the network will leapfrog regional towns in Ireland ahead of major cities in terms of access to high speed communications and broadband.
Subject to European Commission approval, the network will be rolled-out across Ireland in the coming months, with the first customers able to avail of 100 per cent broadband from the start of 2015
Vodafone chief executive Anne O’Leary said the fibre broadband network will allow people working from home to send very large files to their workplace in seconds. They will also be able to hold video calls to China without disruption.
While the ESB and Vodafone joint venture will build and manage the network, open access will be offered to all telecoms operators in Ireland. This means that other operators can resell the fibre product to their customers.
Combining super-foods for super-health benefits
Good health and nutrition are just as much about being strategic with the foods that you consume as much as it is about choosing the right ones.
By combining certain super-foods — those foods with numerous nutritional benefits — your body profits even more than healthy eating alone. Those health benefits range from an extra boost to the immune system or lowering your risk of cancer, to giving you better skin.
We’ve rounded up a bunch of superfoods that, when consumed together, pack a mighty punch:
For more energy: Combine iron and Vitamin C: Iron helps oxygen circulate throughout your body, while Vitamin C, which is known as a fighter of diseases, makes it easier for your cells to absorb iron, according to Woman’s Day. We suggest pairing a glass or orange juice with a fortified cereal or an omelet with salsa for breakfast, or a spinach salad with orange or strawberry slices for lunch and pasta with fresh tomatoes for dinner.
For better heart protection: Combine fish and garlic: Oily fish, such as salmon or sardines, contain good fats that lower risk of heart disease. Partner a filet with some garlic, which lowers total cholesterol and prevents an increase in bad cholesterol.
For boosting one’s mood: Combine magnesium and B6: Magnesium is a mineral that is linked to lowered anxiety and happiness, while B6 helps the body better absorb magnesium, says Rodale News. We suggest combining beet greens and chickpeas, which contain magnesium and B6, respectively, to turn your frown upside down.
Eigg the Scottish isle is first place on earth to achieve Energy self-sufficiency with re-newables
When life throws lemons your way, just make some lemonade — or, heck, start growing your own lemon trees and produce all the lemons you could ever want!
This is what the residents of the small isle of Eigg, off Scotland’s northwestern coast, did when the big energy conglomerates refused to service their remote locale. And now, Eigg stands above the rest as the world’s first completely self-sustaining place on Earth, a prototype for sustainable living with renewable energy.
It all began back around 2008 when the European Union and various national bodies decided to fund the development of an energy infrastructure on Eigg, which previously had no steady source of electric power. Nearly all of the island’s roughly 100 residents relied upon noisy diesel generators that were not only expensive to fuel but highly polluting — the antithesis of renewable energy, as diesel for these many generators had to be shipped in from the mainland at high cost.
But a $2.4 million investment has since allowed Eigg to become almost entirely energy-independent, replacing its generators with a diverse landscape marked by solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric stations that take advantage of the area’s vast ecological resources. And the best part is that these technologies are creating virtually zero pollution in the process.
“It varies from year to year depending on weather conditions, but we are getting between 85 and 90 percent of our energy from renewables,” stated Maggie Fyffe, who runs the financial office for “Eigg Electric” from her small bungalow, to Al Jazeera. “There are miles and miles of underground cable connecting every house to the grid.”
The modest island, which measures a mere 12-square-miles in size, boasts somewhat crazy weather conditions that make obtaining renewable energy using existing technologies rather simple. Heavy winds and rain, balanced by plenty of days of intense sunlight, make capturing energy a breeze, which has greatly simplified the lives of those who live on Eigg.
Internalising the threat of climate change? the world will never be the same again
BY ERIC KRASNAUSKAS
These days I tend to beat myself up for screwing around; my biggest time sinks are video games (I never did quite kick my Civilization 5 habit) and television (my beloved Boston Celtics are kind of out in the wilderness).
The reason, I think, is that I’ve internalized the threat of climate change. I feel it in my guts, hanging over me, demanding a response…so naturally any leisure time I afford myself ends up feels like a betrayal.
It’s not healthy of course. We all need time to decompress and set our minds right, and often enough the best ideas and breakthroughs come when we’re doing something else entirely. Yet it’s still hard to rationalise taking the time to pilot Napoleon through the Industrial Age or scream obscenities at LeBron James when you see a hard stop to human civilization looming. Time now feels precious.
By “internalising the threat” of climate change, I’m basically talking about acceptance. Acceptance is one of the five stages of grief, and unsurprisingly dealing with climate change tends to mirror the grief process.
- Denial — Koch Brothers, Heartland Institute…too easy.
- Anger — Reform our energy system? You can’t be serious, you expect us to pay how much to avoid human extinction??!!
- Bargaining — Well maybe if buy a Prius I can just ride out the storm without making any other serious changes.
- Depression — How did we fuck this up so badly?
- Acceptance — The world you grew up with is gone, and it’s not coming back. There is pain and hardship on the horizon, but with it comes opportunity for a better world.
Acceptance is the hardest step of all, which is why I think most of the world is still stuck in bargaining. World nations certainly understand the threat of climate change, yet continue to make only the most limp-wristed attempts to address it. With notable exceptions like Tuvalu or the Maldives which face complete annihilation in the near term, every single one is still wearing rose-tinted glasses.
Leaders persistently ignore worst-case scenarios and instead assume the best case scenarios…even as best case scenarios gets downgraded with each passing year. None are reacting to real data and real timelines; we’re all stuck in a fairy tale that stubbornly refuses to match what’s happening all around us. Collectively we think of climate change as a political agenda, instead of a fact of the physical world.
But nature doesn’t play politics, and it doesn’t care about human timelines. We can bargain with it no more than we can bargain our way out of a sunrise or sunset.
Difficult though it may be, acceptance is actually an amazing place to be. I admit, it’s not fun thinking about the suffering the world is now certain to endure. But once you accept that it’s all going to be different, you become motivated to dictate that different. You become eager to shape the world to come, to minimise suffering, and to build a sustainable economic model to underpin it all. Acceptance gives you the perspective of one standing on a mountaintop: even as you tremble for fear of falling, the breath is snatched from you by the beauty of the landscape ahead.
Yet from this mountaintop we must now retreat. It will not be easy, certainly…but the treacherous path before us remains far better than the alternative, and we have many wonderful activists and thinkers like Bill McKibben, Paul Gilding, and Charles Eisenstein to help guide and brace us in our descent. They too bear the scars of grief, but from that mountaintop they see what we see: a way forward.
So plants can hear after all? Yes they can hear those hungry caterpillars coming
SAY STUDY SCIENTISTS
Plants can ‘hear’ caterpillars coming and react by bolstering defenses, Vibrations of munching predators serves as alarm. A new study finds.
Scientists have known for a long time that plants are able respond to sound, and new research suggests the ability may help a plant defend itself when threatened by predators.
Researchers at the University of Missouri, using audio and chemical analysis, have found plants can respond to sounds that feeding caterpillars make and respond by creating more defenses.
“We found that feeding vibrations signal changes in the plant cells’ metabolism, creating more defensive chemicals that can repel attacks from caterpillars,” MU plant scientist Heidi Appel says.
Appel and her collaborator, Rex Cocroft, placed caterpillars on Arabidopsis, a flowering plant related to mustard and cabbage, and used lasers to measure the vibrations of leaves being consumed by the caterpillar.
Then they played back the recordings of the vibrations caused by the munching caterpillar to one group of plants, but not to another.
When caterpillars were later placed on both groups, the plants that had been exposed to the feeding vibration recordings were found to have produced higher amounts of mustard oils, a natural caterpillar repellent, the researchers reported in the journal Oecologia.
“What is remarkable is that the plants exposed to different vibrations, including those made by a gentle wind or different insect sounds that share some acoustic features with caterpillar feeding vibrations, did not increase their chemical defenses,” Cocroft said. “This indicates that the plants are able to distinguish feeding vibrations from other common sources of environmental vibration.”
And those vibrations do not have to be very strong for the plant to sense them, he said.
“There were feeding vibrations that got a strong response from plants that vibrated the leaf up and down by less than one ten-thousandth of an inch,” he said.
While the precise mechanism employed by plants to detect such vibrations hasn’t been determined, the researchers say they suspect it is accomplished using mechanoreceptors, kinds of proteins found in both plant and animal cells that provide a response to distortion or pressure.
Although plants have evolved a number of defense strategies against pests that allows them to generate appropriate protective responses, the ability to sense sounds may be one of the most effective, the researchers said.
“Plants have many ways to detect insect attack, but feeding vibrations are likely the fastest way for distant parts of the plant to perceive the attack and begin to increase their defenses,” Cocroft said.
The findings could have practical applications, the researchers said.
“Caterpillars react to [a plant's] chemical defense by crawling away, so using vibrations to enhance plant defenses could be useful to agriculture,
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