TDs Shane Ross and Michael Fitzmaurice to form alliance
Independents hope to have candidate in each constituency for General Election
Shane Ross (pictured above left) will join up with Independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice (above right) to form an alliance.
Independent TD for Roscommon South-Leitrim Michael Fitzmaurice has said he will be joining up with Independent TD for Dublin South, Shane Ross to form a new alliance.
Mr Fitzmaurice said Mr Ross was a “very reasonable guy” and said he believes they can work together.
Mr Fitzmaurice said he has been talking to people interested in running for the party from around the country including the west and midlands.
He told RTÉ’s Prime Time they hope to have at least one candidate with a shot at a seat in every constituency in the next General Election. Mr Fitzmaurice was elected in October a by-election for Luke ’Ming’ Flanagan’s vacatedseat .
Mr Ross told RTÉ the issue of who would lead the alliance has not been discussed. He said members of the alliance will be able to vote and speak as they like on key issues and they hope to “change the face of the Dáil and make it relevant.”
Former Reform Alliance member and Independent TD for Roscommon South- Leitrim, Denis Naughten also said he is interested in joining the alliance. “I think we need to agree a programme and be able to put a proper platform to the people but in principle I do think there’s merit in it,” he said.
Several other independent TDs are set to join the alliance.
Mr Fitzmaurice did not say if the alliance would be left or right wing. “I don’t buy into this left and right. I could say something and people would say he’s right wing, I could say something and they would say he’s left wing,” he said.
His priorities include job creation, agriculture, rural Ireland and social housing, he added.
“Ireland like a 3rd World” has to improve its youth fitness says expert
Ireland is a “Third World” nation when it comes to the physical sporting health of its young people, according to a leading expert in the field.
Professor Niall Moyna of the Centre for Preventive Medicine in DCU is involved in a research study of which details were released yesterday and showed that signs of early onset of heart disease in 15-year-olds are linked to poor fitness.
The DCU football manager also stressed that reshaping behaviour in primary school is vital if recent trends are to be reversed.
“The Sports Council have made great strides in the last 20 years, there’s no doubt about that,” Moyna said. “But we’re still a Third World nation. I mean, we talk the talk but we’re couch-potatoes sportspeople.
“We’ve known now for years that, as a nation, our children are less active and they’re becoming heavier. Obviously we know from adults if you’re overweight and inactive it increases the likelihood that you’re going to get heart disease.
“If we’re really serious about this we have to educate kids,” he warned.
“Asking a child to switch on when they get to secondary school aged 12, it’s too late.”
The study involves measuring the fitness of a number of secondary school students and conducting tests to attempt to predict heart disease. The results indicate a worrying trend.
Moyna explained: “What we found was that compared to the moderately active and high-fit kids, if you were low-fit you had a higher body fat — 23 percent versus 10 — significantly higher blood pressure and higher levels of circulating bad cholesterol.
“It basically shows not alone did the 15-year-olds have risk factors for heart disease, they actually had the disease itself.”
Moyna called for an overhaul of how Physical Education is taught at schools and criticised the Department of Education’s inaction in light of evidence of increasing obesity of young people due to poor lifestyles.
“I think the inertia in the Department of Education is mind-boggling. We live in a different world than we did even 10 years ago, but we are not moving with the times at all.
“I don’t like the words ‘PE teacher’. It has the connotation of sport and elite sport and it should be about so much more than that. That’s only 10% who like elite sport.
“The other 90%, we have to find a way of getting them regularly active so it has a positive effect on both their physical and mental health. I would like to see dedicated teachers in primary schools and get kids to change their behaviour. We’ve got to get them to adopt healthy behaviour when they’re at a young age.
Moyna recommends scrapping the biology and PE curriculums and combining them into a life science course.
“We need to contextualise biology, learn about it from the effects of alcohol, stress, tobacco, diet and inactivity so they understand what happens when they do these things.
“Learn how they all affect our organ systems because when you leave secondary school you leave with your body and you forget 95% of the rest of it.
“Most students think, ‘I’m young, I’m healthy’ but we’re showing you’re not young and healthy, you actually have heart disease. You have clinical manifestations of heart disease at 15 years of age because you’re inactive and you’re overweight.”
And he believes making it a Leaving Certificate subject with CAO points on offer is the best way to make a difference and to get parents to heed the warnings contained in the study.
“I suggested five years ago we give you €5,000 if you’re in the top one percent of Europeans for fitness,” Moyna added. “Because if you’re in the top one percent of Europeans for aerobic fitness the likelihood of you being obese is reduced. It has to be a Leaving Cert subject.
“You can say to a parent, ‘Johnny or Mary is overweight or they’re unfit’, but it doesn’t even resonate. You say to a parent, ‘By the way, Johnny has a wee problem here in the artery and that increases risk for a stroke’, they listen then. Hopefully this is a wake-up call not just for parents but for our educational system, our healthcare system.”
Prof Niall Moyna was at the Aviva Stadium to launch the 2015 Schools’ Fitness Challenge to first, second, third and transition year students which aims to highlight the importance of cardiovascular fitness from an early age.
Opposition parties demand a statement on overcrowding from Leo Varadkar in annual Irish Hospital crisis
Opposition parties are demanding a statement from the Minister for Health as hospital overcrowding hits a new record.
601 people are lying on trolleys or sitting in chairs awaiting admission to hospitals across the country today.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation says it fears a ‘major incident’ will occur because of the crisis and its holding ballots for industrial action at ED units.
Leo Varadkar is not in the country at present, with the Dáil not set to resume until next week. However, his political opponents are calling for a statement of intent from the Minister.
Fianna Fail’s Health Spokesperson Billy Kelleher says Leo Varadkar needs to prove his claim that he is a “hands-on” Minister:
“Clearly, the staff are under huge pressure – the HSE have now said themselves that patient safety is compromised … the Government has to respond to that.
“It’s time for the Minister to act, and we would like to hear a statement from him on what he intends to do.”
Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said there were more than 80 people on trolleys in Drogheda’s Our Lady of Lourdes hospital.
“The Minister for Health appears to be AWOL. This is unacceptable. Minister Varadkar needs to surface and to address this developing crisis with urgency,” Adams said.
Meanwhile, a consultant in emergency medicine says the Government has no plan to deal with the current hospital admissions crisis.
There are calls for the Dáil to return from its break to deal with the overcrowding, in addition to a statement from the Health Minister.
A consultant at Sligo Regional Hospital, Dr Fergal Hickey says comments by the Jobs Minister earlier that the coalition was dealing with the issue are a cause for concern:
“The first recorded case of a patient remaining overnight in an emergency department took place on the 8th of October, 1997.
“This is a problem which has got worse and worse and worse – and all we’ve had is politicians and health service managers claiming improvements in the absence of improvement.”
A statement from the Department of Health this evening said the Minister is due back at his desk tomorrow but has kept in close contact, including having regular discussions with senior HSE management.
UPC ups fibre power offering for Ireland to 240Mb/s
UPC has begun offering consumers a 240Mb/s service – the fastest in Ireland to date. The announcement follows the publication of the results on an independent survey by broadband research company SamKnows, which confirms UPC as having the best broadband speed in Ireland.
The study, which measured broadband performance delivered by UPC’s 120Mb/s broadband product to users, found that UPC customers receive speeds of at least 100Mb/s on average.
Campbell Scott, portfolio product manager, UPC Ireland, said: “Our research shows that broadband device usage is doubling every three years in Ireland. The actual Broadband speed performance delivered by providers is therefore becoming increasingly important and there is a real lack of transparency in the market.
With this study, we’ve opened ourselves up to independent scrutiny of our actual speeds with SamKnows, to set a clear benchmark and help consumers draw comparisons of real speed performance between providers.”
The SamKnows report is the first in a series of ongoing studies. It is also the first based on data from measurement hardware and software, in this case, the SamKnows ‘Whitebox’ device whose software conducts automated measurements of broadband performance throughout the year.
Rogue Star said to be on a collision course with the solar system
If a recent research paper is to be believed a rogue star known as HIP 85605 and one of the binary system in the Hercules constellation some 16 light years away is en route to a probable collision course with our solar system, but before you start worrying there are few reassuring caveats that you need to know about.
According to Dr. Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany HIP 85605 will cruise past our Solar System at a distance of 0.04 parsecs – equivalent to 8,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun (8,000 AUs). Further this event is not going to happen for another 240,000 to 470,000 years from now, and if it does happen, it will not affect Earth or any other planet’s orbit around the Sun.
The star is expected to have an effect on the icy planetesimals laden Oort Cloud and could cause serious disruption. The close encounter could blow away planetesimals into the space and some could be sent hurtling towards Earth. This could be a problem to Earthlings – assuming that humanity is still around for another 240,000 years or more.
Bailer-Jones, in his paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, says that such “close encounters” between stars isn’t a common occurrence but on astronomical timescale, they are common and HIP 85605’s close shave is one of several predicted to take place in the coming years.
The researcher has studied as many as 50,000 stars and out of the many said to be coming close to our solar system, HIP 85605 is the only one expected to come within a single parsec. He is 90% confident that this event will occur; however, he added that if astronomy is incorrect, the next closest encounter will happen when a K7 dwarf dubbed GL 710 is predicted to pass our solar system within 0.10 – 0.44 parsecs.
Bailer-Jones added that last time such an encounter happened was some 3.8 million years ago when gamma Microscopii – a G7 giant having mass two and a half times that of our Sun – came within 0.35-1.34 parsec of our system. He is 90% confident that such an event took place.
‘Alien Earth’ is among eight new far-off planets
One of eight new planets spied in distant solar systems has usurped the title of “most Earth-like alien world”, astronomers have said.
All eight were picked out by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope, taking its tally of such “exoplanets” past 1,000.
But only three sit safely within the “habitable zone” of their host star – and one in particular is rocky, like Earth, as well as only slightly warmer.
The find was revealed at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Red sky. The three potentially habitable planets join Kepler’s “hall of fame”, which now boasts eight fascinating planetary prospects.
And researchers say the most Earth-like of the new arrivals, known as Kepler 438b, is probably even more similar to our home than Kepler 186f – which previously looked to be our most likely twin.
At 12% larger than Earth, the new claimant is bigger than 186f but it is closer to our temperature, probably receiving just 40% more heat from its sun than we do from ours.
So if we could stand on the surface of 438b it may well be warmer than here, according to Dr Doug Caldwell from the Seti (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute in California.
“And it’s around a cooler [red dwarf] star… so your sky would look redder than ours does to us,” Dr Caldwell said.
That first-person encounter, however, is unlikely – both because the planet is 475 light-years away and because we still have essentially no idea what it’s made of.
Images from the Kepler telescope, which trails behind the Earth and peers far into the distance as we orbit our own sun, are used to identify far-off planets by observing “transits”.
This refers to the dimming of a star’s light when a planet passes in front of it.
A large team of researchers then uses additional data from Earth-bound telescopes to further explore these unfamiliar solar systems.
They try to calculate how big the planets are, and how closely they orbit their host stars.
Not everything that causes such a dimming eventually turns out to be a planet, however.
At the same time as the eight confirmed new exoplanets were announced by a 26-strong team spanning Nasa and multiple US institutions, the Kepler mission’s own scientists released another tranche of more than 500 “candidate” planets.
“With further observation, some of these candidates may turn out not to be planets,” said Kepler science officer, Fergal Mullally.
“Or as we understand their properties better, they may move around in, or even outside, the habitable zone.”
‘Star Trek’ scenario
Even once scientists have anointed a candidate as a confirmed exoplanet, the question of whether or not it is “Earth-like” is a fraught one, with fuzzy boundaries.
The size of the habitable, or “Goldilocks” zone, where a planet is far enough from its sun to hold water but not so distant that it freezes, depends on how confident scientists want to be with their guess-work.
According to Dr Cardwell, just three of the eight new exoplanets can be confidently placed in that zone – and only two of those are probably rocky like the Earth.
More detailed description is very difficult.
“From the Kepler measurements and the other measurements we made, we don’t know if these planets have oceans with fish and continents with trees,” Dr Caldwell told BBC News.
“All we know is their size and the energy they’re receiving from their star.
“So we can say: Well, they’re of a size that they’re likely to be rocky, and the energy they’re getting is comparable to what the Earth is getting.
“As we fill in these gaps in our solar system that we don’t have, we learn more about what it means to be Earth-like, in some sense.”
Speaking at a related event at the conference, Prof Debra Fischer from Yale University said she remembered a time before the first exoplanet was discovered, more than two decades ago.
“I remember astronomers before that point being very worried,” she said.
“We really had to step back and say: Maybe the Star Trek picture is wrong. That filled me with despair.”
Prof Fischer said that sensitive telescopes like Kepler had ushered in an era of “amazing and impressive work”.
“We’re talking about a planet – and we can only see its star with a powerful telescope.
“And we can draw graphs and sketch its composition and have serious scientific discussions. This is incredible.”
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