Irish landlords and local councils give names of 100,000 tenants to Irish Water
Irish Water has been given the names of more than 100,000 tenants, which means they can now be sent water bills in the coming weeks.
IRISH Water has been given the names of more than 100,000 tenants, which means they can now be sent water bills in the coming weeks.
Local authorities and landlord owners of multiple properties were ordered to hand over the details last month, in advance of the utility issuing demands for payment to some 1.5 million households across the State.
The Irish Independent has learned that the company wrote to city and county councils in February, asking them to provide tenants’ names following the conclusion of a national registration campaign.
It also wrote to around 400 landlords who own 50 or more properties, seeking the information. This was because Irish Water held a database of addresses – but did not receive registration details from the occupants of those properties, which included names and the number of people living there.
As the legal owners of the properties, councils and landlords could have been hit with default bills of €65 for the first three months of the year if their tenants refused to register.
Local authorities own more than 125,000 properties, meaning they faced a bill of more than €8m. There are another 300,000 private rental properties according the CSO, which could result in landlords being hit with bills totalling €20m.00 / 04:11
Irish Water sought the information after consulting with the Data Protection Commissioner. Irish Water said it could not provide details on the number of private landlords which had provided tenants’ details. But it said just “one or two” councils had yet to supply the data.
Anger
Opposition parties reacted with anger to the revelations.
Fianna Fáil TD Sean Fleming said: “It is unacceptable that Irish Water is extracting sensitive information from local authorities without the consent of either the individual concerned or elected representatives.”
The party proposes amending the Water Services Act 2013 to ensure that tenant information is not handed over to the council without the consent of the people concerned
And Sinn Féin Westmeath county councillor Sorca Clarke started a petition calling on her local authority to retrieve the details of social housing residents it gave to Irish Water.
Ms Clarke said the party was planning a nationwide campaign on the issue.
However, a spokeswoman for Irish Water said: “We’ve been engaging with all local authorities seeking tenants’ details.
“We’ve been through this with all local authorities, and with the Data Protection Commission in terms of the legal standing to ensure it is appropriate for us to ask for it.”
The move was allowed under Section 26 of the 2013 Water Services Act, which obliges a “relevant person” – which includes local authorities – to provide information to the company.
The company said it had undertaken a national registration campaign from last September which concluded in February.
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner said it considered Irish Water’s proposals to obtain tenant names only from local authorities were “consistent with its statutory obligation to identify tenants in properties”.
Irish Water starts reading meters tomorrow and bills will go out from next week in tranches of 37,000 per day.
That broken Irish government jet has finally been sold off
The Gulfstream IV had been out of action since last summer.
The Government Gulfstream IV jet, one of two aircraft that had been used for official State business, has been sold for $500,000.
The jet was grounded in the US last summer after problems were discovered during routine maintenance and now the aircraft, which is over two decades old, has been sold off.
The sale, to a US-based company, was completed last December for $500,000 or around €460,000 at current exchange rates. The jet has been re-registered to a firm in Florida, TheJournal.ie has learned.
The Department of Defence said the decisions was made based on the number of flying hours, the age of the aircraft and the cost of repairs.
In January, Defence Minister Simon Coveney was quoted on Flying in Ireland as saying he had made the decision that the State was not going to spend any more money on trying to make the ageing jet fit for purpose given it had been grounded since last summer.
Given the budgetary position the country was facing and the Government had to manage in the past four years, we had to ensure we were not spending money on an aeroplane that was really at the end of its life. Accordingly, we stopped spending money.
On 27 July last year the jet was flown to Gulf Aerospace Corporation in the US state of Georgia for routine annual maintenance.
It was here that problems were detected with the undercarriage of the plane during routine maintenance checks and it has been grounded ever since.
The Department of Defence said:
During this inspection, it became apparent that the servicing and repair of the aircraft would have involved a significantly higher level of investment than was anticipated. Given the number of flying hours achieved and the age of the craft it was decided that the aircraft would be withdrawn from service and would not be returned back to Ireland.
Conveney said the government continues to operate on one smaller, shorter aircraft, a Learjet. He said he does not expect the government to purchase a new jet “any time soon” given budget constraints.
Replacing the jet with one of a similar age could cost around €4 million but a newer model would cost up to €40 million. An inter-departmental group is currently examining the future options for the Ministerial Air Transport Service (MATS) with Coveney to bring its final report to government with recommendations.
“We have been managing with one smaller aircraft. I accept that this is not ideal at times, given the number of people who may need to travel with the Taoiseach or the President. However, it has not caused significant problems,” Coveney said.
The Gulfstream, which is 24 years old, was earmarked for abandonment in Brian Lenihan’s Budget in December 2010, having racked up over 13,000 flying hours.
However in 2012, when both jets were still operational, Coveney’s predecessor at the Department of the Defence, Alan Shatter, said he had no intention of getting rid of either of the government jets.
Chocolate accelerates weight loss?
Research claims it lowers cholesterol and aids sleep
Can you indulge your sweet tooth and lose weight? If it’s chocolate that you crave than the answer seems to be yes.
Chocolate can aid weight loss when combined with a low-carb diet, study claims
Confusion reigns in the diet world, with conflicting recommendations for diets that range from high-protein to low-carbohydrate and even high-fat.
According to many nutrition researchers, the problem is that these tools are too blunt.
“What is important is the specific combination of foods in your diet,” says Johannes Bohannon, research director of the nonprofit Institute of Diet and Health.
“Just lowering the proportion of carbohydrates is not a reliable weight loss intervention because it has different physiological effect depending on the bioactive compounds in your diet.”
A study by German researchers, published in the International Archives of Medicine, looked at the effect chocolate has on our diets.
Chocolate is a rich source of bioactive compounds, particularly a group of molecules called flavonoids, plant compounds associated with several positive health impacts.
But teasing out the possible effects of such compounds in your diet, and how it may interact with various diet interventions, is rarely studied.
It could be that simply consuming chocolate in combination with dietary interventions has no effect, or it could make such diets even more effective in the right dose.
To test the idea, researchers divided volunteers aged 19 to 67 into three groups.
Surprisingly, the low-carb plus chocolate group lost 10% more weight
One group followed a strict low-carbohydrate diet, another group followed the low-carbohydrate diet and also consumed 42 grams of dark (81%) chocolate per day, and a control group followed their normal diet.
Besides tracking their body weight and measuring blood chemistry before, during and after, participants filled out questionnaires to assess sleep quality and well-being.
As predicted, the low-carb group lost weight compared to the control.
But surprisingly, the low-carb plus chocolate group lost 10% more weight.
Not only that, but the weight loss persisted, compared to the low-carb group which saw a return of the weight after 3 weeks — a classic problem in dietary interventions known as the “yo-yo effect”.
The chocolate group also reported better sleep and well-being, and their blood cholesterol levels were significantly reduced.
“To our surprise, the effect of chocolate is real,” says Bohannon.
“It is not enough to just consume chocolate, but in combination with exercise and reduction in carbohydrates, our data indicate that chocolate can be a weight loss accelerator.
”The researchers suggest that high-cocoa chocolate has the potential to enhance other diets as well.
“The best part about this discovery,” says Bohannon, “is that you can buy chocolate everywhere, cheaply and without having to believe diet gurus or purchase expensive nutrition products over the Internet.”
New rules on country of origin labeling of meats come into force this Wednesday
New rules on country of origin labeling come into effect from Wednesday (April 1) and will apply to sheepmeat, pigmeat and poultry.
The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Simon Coveney will sign into law new rules to provide for country of origin labeling on packaged meat products.
The regulation introduces requirements on food business operators including processors, retailers and butcher shops to ensure that country of origin labelling information is available to their customers who purchase packaged meat products.
The rules will cover poultry, pigmeat, sheepmeat and goatmeat and will add to the existing rules in place for beef.
The Minister said this regulation is yet another step in providing even clearer and more detailed information to consumers with regards to the food that they purchase.
“Origin labelling has been in place for beef for many years now and has benefited the consumer in being able to identify the origin of the products they purchase. This additional requirement to provide information on the origin of other meats to consumers is broadly consistent with the rules on beef and adds transparency for consumers.”
The EU Regulation underpinning these rules covers pre-packed non-processed meat but does not cover ‘loose’ product, or non pre-packaged meat.
However the EU Regulations provide that mandatory origin labelling may be extended to loose product by National rules, and the Minister indicated that is Department is working with the Department of Health to determine whether this can be done on the basis of existing primary legislation.
The Minister said his Department is working closely with the FSAI, the HSE, Local Authority Veterinary Services and other relevant state agencies to ensure that consumers here can have full confidence that these rules will be implemented to the highest standards.
“I would encourage members of the public to bring any queries that they may have on labelled products to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland who will follow up on the matter with the relevant businesses and state bodies.”
“Ireland has long been a supporter at EU level for practical information to be made available to the consumer when it comes to their choice of food purchases and the implementation of these rules is another positive step in that direction. “
Researchers create square ice in a graphene sandwich
Material science researchers have been exploring the myriad properties of graphene since its discovery more than a decade ago. It’s strong, highly conductive, and it turns out two sheets of graphene can squeeze molecules trapped between them like a microscopic vice.
That last point comes from a new study led by Andre Geim, one of the original discoverers of graphene. In an experiment conducted at the University of Manchester, Geim used sheets of graphene to force water to form unnatural square crystals.
This new study has its roots in work done by Geim’s team back in 2012. That’s when they discovered that water vapor could diffuse through laminated sheets of graphene oxide, which was surprising — not even helium gas can do that. Then last year Geim proved liquid water could do the same thing. As for the cause, computer simulations indicated the water was forming layers of ice between the graphene sheets, which then pushed other water molecules through the webbing of carbon atoms. It also predicted that the water would arrange itself into square crystals, which have been seen only rarely in the past.
Simulations are all well and good, but the team wanted to confirm it with a real experiment. To test the computer model, one microliter of water was placed on a tiny graphene wafer. Another layer of graphene was then placed on top of the water, and the water was allowed to evaporate. The graphene layers pressed closer together as the water seeped out, eventually coming within a nanometer of each other. When the researchers looked at the water molecules under an electron microscope, they were indeed in the form of square ice.
Square ice has been observed before, but never in any substantial quantity. Water molecules form weak connections called hydrogen bonds in their liquid state (hydrogen atoms attracted to oxygen). This usually happens in a tetrahedral conformation, which leads to ice crystals that have six sides. To end up with square ice, the oxygen atoms in adjacent water molecules must be sitting right on top of each other, which they don’t like to do. It’s like pushing magnets of matching polarity together.
It takes a lot of force from the graphene sheets to make this happen. This likely comes from the Van der Waals interaction of the carbon atoms in the graphene. This attractive force is small for each atom, but becomes formidable across the full surface area. Geim’s team calculated that the water was subjected to 10,000 atmospheres of pressure being sandwiched between the graphene wafers.
A better understanding of how water interacts with graphene could lead to the development of less expensive, more effective filter technology. This same technique could be integrated with carbon nanotubes and in other similarly tight spaces where the capillary action of water can be exploited.
