Enda Kenny aims to reduce taxes to encourage the return of Irish emigrants
Taoiseach greeted by anti-water charge protesters at MacGill summer school
Taoiseach Enda Kenny prior to his address at the MacGill Summer School.
Irish emigrants are not returning to the country because they fear they will get “screwed” for tax, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has claimed.
Speaking at the MacGill summer school, where he was greeted by several dozen anti-water charge protesters on Friday evening, Mr Kenny said the tax rate was “too high a rate and it kicks in too early”.
He reiterated the plan to cut the 7% rate of Universal Social Charge in the forthcoming Budget.
“In doing so, we will bring down the marginal rate of tax paid by people earning less than €70,000 to less than 50%.”
“You have to have a stepped approach to this. That makes it more difficult for our sons and daughters to come home if they want to because they’ll say ‘why should I? Why should I go back if I’m going to get screwed for tax here?’”
He wanted 2016 to be “our own year of family reunification, where our children come home at last from Melbourne or London or New York”.
Addressing the packed room, Mr. Kenny referred to the theme of this week’s summer school, ‘Ireland at the crossroads’, noting there was also a political crossroads.
He said people had two roads to choose from. They could choose the road to strengthened economic recovery, or decide to take another road “that’s maybe unmined or unmapped and certainly untested”, a road that “gambled the recovery”.
The Taoiseach also said he believed the next general election would be “like the Grand National” with “lot of runners and riders”.
“I hope we don’t end up with a Tower of Babel in respect of Independents and nobody can get anything done.”
Mr Kenny took several questions from the floor, including one from a local Fine Gael councillor and one from Michael Gallagher, whose son Aidan was killed in the Omagh bombing.
Mr Gallagher said he had “repeatedly asked” for an opportunity to meet the Taoiseach in relation to a report on the bombing that had been presented to him in 2012.
“I’ve actually had to pay €5 to come into the hall. Will you have a meeting with the Omagh families and listen to what they have to say?”
Mr Kenny said he would fix such a meeting “as soon as I can, but it will probably be September”.
Protest
There was a heavy Garda presence around the village on Friday as a group of protesters gathered outside the Highlands Hotel ahead of Mr Kenny’s address .
Crush barriers were brought in early in the morning and cones were used to restrict parking on the main street. The Garda helicopter also patrolled overhead.
During the afternoon’s session on rural Ireland, protesters could be heard shouting and chanting outside.
Chants from about 50 protesters carrying banners and placards included: “No way, we won’t pay” and “Labour, Blueshirts, Fianna Fáil; jail, jail, jail them all.”
Catherine Murphy TD told the event a “culture of excessive secrecy” pervaded our politics.
“It is only after the event that we get a glimpse of a decision or set of decisions that on too many occasions favour those in the know; those with connections and those with money. It is quite destructive and indeed highly offensive to the vast majority of people.
She said she got a glimpse of some of that when she pursued the issues surrounding Siteserv and IBRC.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told the summer school he was concerned that a poor policy on migration seemed to be “giving rise for the first time in Irish society to a political party focusing on the single issue of immigration”.
Hospitals to face unannounced inspections over patient nutrition
Costs associated with malnutrition add up to more than €1bn of healthcare spending
Older patients, cancer patients, surgical and gastrointestinal patients are more vulnerability to malnutrition and dehydration.
Hospitals will undergo unannounced inspections as the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) attempts to tackle patient malnutrition and dehydration.
Malnutrition affects more than a quarter of patients admitted to Irish hospitals. It affects their recovery and causes illness and death, said Hiqa chief executive Phelim Quinn.
“Evidence shows that malnutrition and dehydration often occur together. Dehydration occurs when more fluid is lost than taken in. It has been reported that patients already malnourished on admission are more likely to lose weight during their hospital stay, and their weight loss is proportionately higher,” Mr Quinn said.
Under the new review guidelines, all public acute hospitals, other than stand-alone maternity and paediatric hospitals, will be expected to complete a self-assessment questionnaire and submit it to the authority. Hiqa will then carry out unannounced inspections in about 13 hospitals to verify results and understand how nutrition and hydration care in the hospital is delivered.
Older patients, cancer patients, surgical and gastrointestinal patients are more vulnerability to malnutrition and dehydration.
Hiqa said in 2007 the annual costs associated with malnourished patients was estimated to be more than €1.4 billion, 10 per cent of the healthcare budget that year. About 140,000 adults are malnourished or at risk of malnutrition at any given time.
Hiqa said it wants to encourage hospitals to follow evidence-based best practice in nutrition and hydration care with a focus on screening and assessment, arrangements at mealtimes and the patient’s own experience.
“We want to ensure that patients are adequately assessed, managed and evaluated to effectively meet their individual nutrition and hydration needs. Initially, hospitals will self-assess their position. The information provided by hospitals in self-assessments will inform the programme of unannounced inspections, which is due to start later this year,” said Mr Quinn.
An overview of the authority’s findings will be published in 2016.
New York bar run by two Irish men named ‘The world’s best bar’
The Dead Rabbit in Manhattan is described as a unique take on the traditional Irish pub
The Dead Rabbit in Downtown Manhattan which has been named as the ‘world’s best bar’.
A New York bar founded and run by Belfast natives Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon has been named the world’s best pub, winning a drinks industry competition.
The Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog, in Downtown Manhattan, won the award from 2,000 entries in the annual Spirited Awards.
McGarry and Muldoon opened the tavern in February 2012 and described it as a unique take on the traditional Irish pub.
The pair, both originally from Belfast, previously worked together in Belfast’s Merchant Hotel cocktail bar.
It was there they met Conor Allen, an Irishman working in New York’s financial sector, who offered to support the two in setting up their own bar.
The Dead Rabbit, which features an extensive selection of Irish whiskeys and cocktails, takes its name from an Irish-American street gang run by the boxerJohn Morrissey in the 1850s.
Located in a 19th century redbrick building, the bar seeks to commemorate the history of the area in its name, vintage decor, and recreations of historic cocktails.
As well as taking the main award, the Dead Rabbit also won the ‘World’s Best Cocktail Menu’ award.
The Spirited Awards are held each year in New Orleans as part of Tales of the Cocktail, an event for global producers of spirits.
A judging panel of 50 industry experts decided the winners.
The seagull hysteria in Ireland shows a complete lack of awareness of nature
Say’s Birdwatch Ireland.
Seagull numbers have declined considerably over the past two decades.
Enthusiasts cautioned against sensationalist media coverage about seagulls, including calls for protected birds to be culled.
Seagulls very rarely harm people, they don’t have claws and their numbers have fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, birdwatchers have pointed out.
Enthusiasts cautioned against sensationalist media coverage, including calls for protected birds to be culled, after a week where gulls have been accused of killing sheep, stealing phones and attacking motorcyclists.
“It’s no coincidence that this news story flares up at this time of year and does so every year,” said Birdwatch Ireland development officer Niall Hatch. Most of the year gulls are quite docile but they become protective in mid to late July when their chicks are about to leave the nest. “They tend to get a little more vocal and tend to swoop a bit more. People might perceive it as a threat”
But he said it’s extraordinarily rare for them to actually harm or hit anybody. “In all the media hysteria over the few days there’s actually been remarkably few reports of anyone being hurt by these gulls.”
He added that gull populations aren’t increasing, in fact the opposite is true with numbers of the smaller herring gull declining substantially in the past two decades.
“Just over 20 years ago there were 60,000 pairs of these nesting around Ireland and that population plummeted to around 6,000,” said Mr Hatch.“They’re now on the red list in Ireland as being endangered.”
Rónán McLaughlin, a birdwatcher and photographer based in Co Cork, said overfishing in Irish waters conrtibuted to the herring gull leaving coastal nesting sites in favour of landfills. When the landfills closed the birds had to find another food source, so they headed for urban areas. “They’re very adaptable and very intgelligent, they’re going to go where the food is.”
The scavenging birds eat discarded food in towns and in some cases keep rodent populations down by eating rats. “It’s not the loss of a habitat, it’s just that the birds have adapted in a different way to feeding and decided: ‘we can go to the beach, we can go to seaside resorts because it’s easy pickings’,” said Mr McLaughlin.
He added that recent headlines about giant gulls using their claws to kill sheep in Kerry amount to media scaremongering. “I mean, a seagull doesn’t have claws. It’s got webbed feet for starters.”
He said the last thing birdwatchers wanted was for someone to “go down to Dingle with a loaf of bread and just lace it with rat poison or something like that”.
An article by Calvin Jones on irelandswildlife.com this week noted an online poll where more than half the respondents supported culling gulls. “I can’t help feeling that’s partly because people are reading and believing all of these horror stories in the media, without any balancing arguments, or a full understanding of the facts,” he wrote.
Niall Hatch from Birdwatch Ireland agrees. He said the coverage has been “extremely frustrating”. But it also highlights a disconnect between Irish people and nature. “There does seem to be a lack of awareness of nature and of wild animals and of how wild animals behave. That’s something we find a lot in Ireland and it’s not necessarily the same in other European countries,” he said.
Either way, the coverage is likely to die down shortly enough. Gulls don’t need to look after their young for too long, said Mr Hatch. “This aggression or what perceived aggression there is will cease in the next week or two. There are actually more gulls in our cities during the winter but we don’t hear any complaints like that, it’s just a late-July phenomenon.”
The end of the world is nigh! Maybe not quite yet?
A doom-laden US study in 1972 predicted that the earth would run out of food and resources, becoming uninhabitable by around 2050.
The end of the world has been put back by at least 50 years by a team of British scientists.
A doom-laden US study in 1972 predicted that the earth would run out of food and resources, becoming uninhabitable by around 2050.
Now scientists at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute have claimed we have a little more grace – until the end of this century, or the year 2100.
To come to their conclusion, the team updated the 1970s computer model used to predict how finite the Earth’s resources are. Aled Jones, co-author of the study in journal Sustainability, said: “They made a good attempt in the 1970s but it might have been too pessimistic.
“The limit is pushed back to the second half of this century.”
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