Patrick Honohan says the troika deal terms were ‘unsatisfactory’
Outgoing Central Bank governor makes third appearance before inquiry.
Outgoing Central Bank of Ireland Governor Patrick Honohan.
The Central Bank found the terms of the trioka programme “unsatisfactory”, the Governor Patrick Honohan has said.
Prof Honohan told the banking inquiry the deal had “high interest rates and a lack of an insurance mechanism against tail risks in the banks”.
He said the programme was necessary and said without it the cutbacks would have been more severe.
Prof Honohan said: “Nevertheless, having set out these concerns, I advised the Government in writing that it should proceed on the basis of the programme, given that the alternative of struggling forward without access to market finance would have been more economically damaging.
“If the programme proved unable to deliver a sustainable debt path as seemed possible, even likely then it could be renegotiated. The spending and tax adjustments that would have been needed if programme funding was not available would be much more severe.”
The Central Bank Governor said the question of whether the guarantee was the best decision is the least important and yet the most over analysed.
He said: “What if an alternative path had been tried, following prior consultation with EU partners during an interval covered by ELA [emergency liquidity assistance] involving a more limited guarantee, excluding some or all existing senior bonds and subordinated debt, and in conjunction with an attempt to get agreement that Anglo and INBS [Irish Nationwide] bondholders would be bailed-out only on the basis of cost-sharing with EU partners? How much in net national economic terms might have thereby been saved?
“This is not a question susceptible of any precise quantification: could a cost-sharing deal have been successfully negotiated?”
Prof Honohan said the institutions were “very resistant to the losses” the Central Bank were suggesting.
He said officials wrote letters to the “very top” but the bank held its ground.
The governor said: “Rather than knowing something and not wanting to tell they were living in a state of denial.”
Mr Honohan said banks were still living in denial about the state of the losses in the institutions in 2010.
Mr Honohan told the inquiry he received a call out of the blue from the International Monetary Fund in May 2010 offering a precautionary line of credit.
The Governor said Ashoka Mody phoned him and suggested this method but the Department of Finance rejected it.
He said: “I said ‘try it, it might be a good idea. They [the Government] might not like it but try it’. It did not go anywhere.”
Professor Honohan said the European Central Bank would never have withdrawn funding from Ireland.
Asked if the European Central Bank could have, Prof Honohan said it could but it would not have done that.
Fianna Fáil Senator Marc MacSharry asked if that was a big gamble for the then Government to take. Mr Honohan said: “No.”
In his third appearance before the banking inquiry, Prof Honohan this morning said the focus on the night of the guarantee has been “excessive”.
He said nothing had changed his view that emergency liquidity would have bought the Government some time.
Prof Honohan said Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide should have been dealt by nationalisation.
He added: “It should not have included Subordinated debt nor existing senior term debt.”
The morning session focused on the period of Prof Honohan’s tenure from his appointment in September 2009 to October 2010. The afternoon session is focusing on developments in the period from November 2010 to December 2013.
He will be asked to give evidence on the appropriateness of the regulatory regime and other related matters.
Irish households paying twice as much for broadband as the average of the rest of EU
Study shows Ireland failing when it comes to digital skills.
In terms of integration of digital technology by businesses, Ireland came in 3rd place overall, up 1 place compared to 2014
Irish households are paying close to double the EU average for broadband access, according to a new report that shows Ireland is lagging behind its European counterparts when it comes to digital skills.
Ireland ranks 8th out of 28 Member States in the European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index, which was published on Friday. This places Ireland in the ’medium-performance’ category, meaning it performs slightly above the EU average. Last year, Ireland was ranked in 11th place in the index.
Irish businesses are ranked 2nd in the EU for use of social media and for e-commerce turnover and also in addition Irish SMEs rank 5th in the EU for selling online, and for use of E-invoices.
In terms of integration of digital technology by businesses, Ireland came in 3rd place overall, up 1 place compared to 2014. This is above the EU average but the report’s authors added that businesses in Ireland could better exploit the possibilities offered by electronic information sharing and RFID.
In other areas, Ireland underperforms when ranked against its neighbours. In terms of broadband value, for example, the country ranks in 23rd place with households paying significantly more than the EU average for access. Ireland also ranked poorly for digital skills, coming in 20th place with only 53% of people having the required skills to operate effectively online.
At 76%, Ireland exhibits a rate of internet use amongst its population similar to that of the EU average.
With regard to internet connectivity, Ireland ranked 16th among EU countries. According to the index, 96% of Irish households are now covered by fixed broadband – a type of high-speed Internet access where connections to service providers use radio signals rather than cables – and take-up of fixed broadband is at 62%, below the EU average of 70%. This places Ireland in 19th place in terms of fixed- broadband use. Mobile broadband take-up increased from 67% to 82% between 2014 and 2015.
Online news, music, video and games, video calls, social networking, banking and shopping consumption all saw increases over the last year. Music, video and games, rose 20 percentage points from 23% to 43%. Video-on-demand (VOD) declined by 2 percentage points from 70% to 68%. However, VOD use is still very high in Ireland compared to the EU average of 41 per cent, placing Ireland 5th out of 28 countries.
1G bps broadband speeds are coming to Ireland this September
Eircom is to go live with 1Gbps fibre next September, it emerged after Pure Telecom became the first operator to sign up for the wholesale service.
A €20m deal agreed between Eircom Wholesale and Pure Telecom will see Pure’s customers access 100Mbps broadband and also become the first to access Eircom’s 1Gbps fibre-to-the-home service when it launches in September.
The partnership means Pure Telecom customers can connect to Eircom Wholesale’s high-speed fibre broadband, which offers speeds of up to 100 Mbps to 1.2 million homes and businesses nationwide, a figure which represents approximately 50% of the total premises in Ireland.
This will rise to 70% by 2016, and 80% by 2020, by which time 35% of all premises will have broadband speeds of 1Gbps.
Pure Telecom’s customers will be amongst the first to access Eircom Wholesale’s 1Gbps ‘Fibre to the Home’ (FTTH) service when it launches later this year.
Fibre up the nation?
Paul Connell, director, Pure Telecom, Peter Clarke, director of sales, marketing, international and customer service, Eircom Wholesale and Alan McGonnell, director, Pure Telecom
“With 1,000Mbps (1Gbps) speeds launching in September, Pure’s customers will have access to the fastest broadband speeds available here, ensuring they remain at the cutting edge of broadband developments in Ireland,” Peter Clarke, director of sales, marketing and customer services at Eircom Wholesale said.
Eircom recently announced plans to extend access to high-speed fibre broadband in rural Ireland by extending its fibre network from 1.6 million homes and businesses to 1.9 million nationwide premises.
The additional 300,000 homes and businesses are spread across 1,070 communities in all 26 counties and include 300 communities not currently served with high-speed broadband.
Speeds of up to 1Gbps will be available to these additional 300,000 premises through the use of end-to-end fibre to the home technology.
“Our industry is changing,” said Paul Connell, director of Pure Telecom. “Our business customers need faster broadband so they can compete competitively both domestically and internationally.
“Furthermore, consumer demands are increasing. Smartphones, Netflix and social media are among the tools that are redefining the way people communicate and resetting needs and expectations, and not just for city dwellers.”
Ireland above EU average for gender equality
A new gender equality report out ranks Ireland at eighth in Europe when it comes to gender equality.
The European Institute for Gender Equality places Ireland 17 points behind Scandinavian countries, but 4 points ahead of the EU average.
We come eighth when it comes to gender quality in work; sixth in money; second in health and at 15 in power.
The Gender Equality Index provides a comprehensive measure of gender equality, tailored to fit the EU policy context. Following the importance of cohesion across EU Member States, the Gender Equality Index ensures that higher gender equality scores can only be obtained in societies where there are small gender gaps and high levels of achievement.
The present update includes scores for 2005, 2010 and 2012, for the first time allowing for an assessment of the progress made in the pursuit of gender equality in the European Union and individual Member States over time.
Moreover, the present update makes a first attempt at populating the satellite domain of violence by providing a composite indicator of direct violence against women, based on the data on violence against women collected by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights through the EU-wide Survey on Violence against Women.
The results of the Gender Equality Index show that there have been visible, albeit marginal, improvements between 2005 and 2012 in the domains covered by the Gender Equality Index. With an overall score of 52.9 out of 100 in 2012, the EU remains only halfway towards equality, having risen from 51.3 in 2005. Progress needs to increase its pace if the EU is to fulfil its ambitions and meet the Europe 2020 targets.
Lovebirds can rotate their heads at lightning fast speeds
The rosy-faced lovebird (Agapornis roseicollis).
High-speed flight recordings of lovebirds making quick in flight turns reveal how these birds improve sight and shorten blur by rotating their head at speeds of up to 2,700 degrees per second, as fast as insects, enabled by fast neck muscles.
Lovebirds are any of the nine species of the parrot genus Agapornis (family Psittaculidae).
One species, the grey-headed lovebird (Agapornis canus), is native to Madagascar, and eight species are native to the African continent.
These birds were called lovebirds because of their monogamous pair bonding.
They are small, compact parrots around 5 – 6 inches (12.5 – 15 cm) in length 40 – 60 grams in weight.
According to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE, during flight, turning lovebirds rotate their head at up to 2,700 degrees per second, faster than any other vertebrate recorded to date.
The authors of the study – Dr Daniel Kress and his colleagues from Stanford University discovered this super-fast behavior by filming the maneuver at 2,000 frames per second during a goal-directed task.
For flight recordings, they trained five rosy-faced lovebirds (Agapornis roseicollis) to turn on a dime in a custom-built flight arena.
“The first step was to train the birds to fly between two perches. In the second step, one perch was removed and birds were trained to fly away, turn and return to the remaining perch. During the third step, the width of the perch was decreased to about 21 cm, after which the birds were ready for the experiment,” the scientists wrote in the paper.
Analysis of high-speed recordings revealed that rapidly turning lovebirds execute extremely fast head turns during turning maneuvers.
The birds time these head turns precisely when their wings are covering their eyes, this minimizes the time of obscured sight.
Consequently, they shorten phases of blurry and obscured sight into a fraction of the actual turning time, resulting in stable and clear vision during the rest of the maneuver.
“The lovebird’s rapid head turn probably enables them to make split second decisions during rapid turns,” the scientists said.
They also hope that the accuracy and speed of these visually guided flight-maneuvers may inspire camera rotation design in drone to improve imaging.
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