Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG update

Ireland eyes a gradual reversal of crisis cuts in public sector pay

 

Ireland’s Finance Minister Michael Noonan (R) stands with Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin as they present the budget to waiting media at the Government Buildings in Dublin October 15, 2013.

Ireland’s government will start talks next year with trade unions on the gradual reversal of public sector pay cuts that helped it overcome financial crisis, the spending minister was quoted as saying on Saturday.

Ireland’s coalition government won praise in Europe for meeting all major targets under the 85 billion euro (67.36 billion) EU-IMF aid programme it completed last year, but is under pressure at home to ease austerity measures.

Public spending minister Brendan Howlin said talks would begin next year on reversing some elements of the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts (FEMPI) which included a pension levy averaging 7.5 percent and a pay cut averaging 6.5 percent for public sector workers.

The acts were introduced between 2009 and 2013, after a property crash left the banking sector near collapse and dragged Ireland into the euro debt crisis.

“Next year, we certainly will have to engage with the unions on the orderly winding down of FEMPI and who should benefit first and how that should be done over time,” Howlin was quoted as saying by the Irish Independent newspaper.

“We have to have agreement with the public sector unions that it is not going to be a big bang, because that would undo all the good work we have done over three years. There has to be an orderly wind-down, as opposed to a sudden ending,” he said.

Howlin is a member of the junior coalition Labour party, which suffered a collapse in support in midterm elections in May.

New Labour party leader Joan Burton last week said the fact that the economy was growing faster than expected meant the government would be able to ease austerity measures when it sets its budget for 2015 in October.

The drunken Irish still struggle to beat demon drink

 

ALCOHOL CAUSES HUGE PROBLEMS IN IRISH SOCIETY, YET WE CONTINUE TO REMAIN IN DENIAL ABOUT ITS EFFECTS. DOES ANYBODY CARE?

By definition, a binge means more than six units of alcohol – that’s three pints. It’s a factual medical term, which relates to the fact that more than six units causes adverse physical effects. But when you say three pints is a binge to an Irish person, you almost always get the same response, “That’s not a binge!” Generally followed by description of climbing a crane, langers, in your underwear. In Irish terms, a binge is being legless. Twenty or 30 units can constitute a binge around here. We consider six units drinking in moderation. It’s not.

This latest study talks about our ‘collective denial’ of the issue, and, indeed, that’s the case. 1.3m harmful drinkers. Eight pc of the total health spend going on alcohol-related problems. A&Es ugly, violent places at night. Our major cities family unfriendly on our national saints’ day. Public disorder endemic on our streets after dark.

And yet we baulk at the ‘drunken Irish’ stereotype.

We go nuts when British politicians refer to it, and when we’re lampooned on The Simpsons. Irish doctors in the US campaigned to have a medical text book there changed – it suggested there should be a high suspicion of alcoholism in patients of Irish extraction. Collective denial.

We talk out of both sides of our mouths when it comes to alcohol in this country. On the one hand we say, “It’s a disgrace!” when we see people puking, urinating, fighting and copulating in the streets. And on the other hand, we continue to describe as ‘legend’, the mad nights out we’ve had when we were pissed.

We wonder why our young people drink like fish, while the older generations do the exact same. Only work, babies and age reign us in. And in women over 45 – whose children are no longer babies – we see drinking patterns increase once more.

So I think it’s time for debate. Is it actually worth it? Is all the havoc wreaked, worth the night out, that you cut loose and lived to tell the tale – of stealing a Garda’s hat and throwing up in your handbag? Because that’s the issue. The madder the tale, the funnier the story – the more we frame it as having a good time. The more we perpetuate the drink culture.

The fact is that alcohol is implicated in three quarters of suicides. And it is the single biggest risk factor for death in young men under 30. It is also a factor in countless rapes, assaults and accidents. It sucks up a huge amount of our health budget, while sober patients lying in wait on trolleys continue to be ignored.

So let’s have the debate and please let’s keep the drinks industry out of it. Let’s decide if it’s worth it. Because while we still talk about it like it’s cool – despite other nations thinking we’re basically drunks – it’s never going to change.

Railing against the drunken Irish stereotype while lauding the nights we were most pissed, says we want to continue this pattern of drinking but just don’t want anyone to notice.

If we really do want to change our relationship with drink, drunkenness has to stop being cool and become, in fact – like in many countries – uncool and unacceptable. Drunk tanks might be a good place to start. It’d clean up our streets, and ending up in one might be harder to eulogise.

OTHER NATIONS CAN SEE WE’RE DRUNKS.

SUCK IT UP LIKE YOU’RE IRISH: We baulk at the ‘drunken Irish’ stereotype. We complain when British politicians refer to it, and we went nuts when we were lampooned on ‘The Simpsons’

Isn’t it time we had a grown up debate about alcohol? Recently, yet another study has shown that we Irish drink far in excess of other countries. It says that 1.3m of us have a harmful drinking pattern and that 75% of our episodes of drinking constitute a binge. In other words, we don’t drink to add pleasure to a meal, or oil the social machinery. Ireland drinks to get drunk.

Ireland’s ‘Free’ GP care will come with a fee for every doctor’s visit

  

New health Minister Leo Varadkar is planning a small fee for every visit to the doctor under his free GP care plan – to prevent abuse of the system and clinics being overwhelmed.

The fee has yet to be set, but would act similarly to the prescription charge, which serves as a deterrent to patients getting unneeded medicines.

But the fee would not apply to patients already on a medical card or a GP-only medical card.

The free GP scheme is being rolled out for the under-sixes, followed by the over-70s.

But these categories are also expected to be exempt from any fee. From there, the Government plans to extend the scheme to primary and secondary school children.

Ultimately, the entire population will be covered. But the minister has not put a timescale on everybody having free GP care.

Talks are continuing with the doctor’s unions and the Irish Medical Organisation about the free GP care.

Mr Varadkar’s spokesman said the details had yet to be finalised on the size of the fee.

“No decision at all has been taken on this matter. Talks are continuing with the IMO.

“We want to ensure that anyone with health concerns can access GP services. We are especially aware that the under-sixes and over-70s have particular needs.

BREAKING

“But we do not want services to be overwhelmed and we don’t want people with legitimate concerns to find that GP services are struggling to cope.

“That may require a very modest charge but no final decision has been taken on that matter,” the spokesman said.

Ireland is unusual as three in five of the population do not have access to GP or primary care as part of the 
State’s healthcare system.

Nominal fees have been used in other countries which provide universal GP care.

The possibility of a small fee was first suggested by former Junior Health Minister Alex White and others.

Last week, Mr Varadkar said he was delaying the introduction of the Government’s controversial plan to reform the health insurance system and end the two-tier service.

But the Health Minister said free GP care remains a priority, but he separated the universal health care aspects from Universal Health Insurance.

“Personally, I think we need to get Universal GP and Primary Care right and show people that it works,” he said.

Spar South Africa has entered into an agreement to buy an 80% stake in the BWG group for €55m.

  

BWG owns Spar in Ireland and services more than 1,100 stores with annual revenues of €1.2bn.

Its brands here include Spar, EuroSpar, Mace, ValueCentre and XL and it has 35% of the Irish convenience store market.

Spar South Africa is a wholesaler and distributor to over1,800 independent retailers spread across Southern Africa with annual sales of around €3.5bn and a market capitalisation of approximately €1.5 billion.

Today’s announcement also secures a further reduction in BWG’s borrowings following a buyback of exiting banks’ debts. This further reduction in debt comes on top of that achieved as part of a successful refinancing concluded in November 2013, which also saw BWG agree new five year banking facilities.

These facilities have been reaffirmed by BWG’s lenders as part of this transaction with Bank of Ireland and AIB increasing their commitment, the company said today.

The new partnership will have up to €100m  to invest in the expansion of BWG’s leading wholesale and convenience retailing operations over the next five years.

Zoo animal trainer awarded masters’ degree for research into sea lion’s whiskers 

  

Alyx Milne, 27, combines her work at Blackpool Zoo with her MSc studies at Manchester Metropolitan University

An animal trainer at Blackpool Zoo has become the first person to be awarded a masters’ degree for her research …. into sea lion whisker’s.

Alyx Milne, 27, has been fascinated by the mammals ever since she went on holiday as a five year-old to SeaWorld in Florida.

Now working at Blackpool Zoo, Alyx combined her work as an animal trainer and presenter, with her MSc studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Her dissertation on the motor neuron abilities of sea lions’ whiskers, which she said are so sensitive they pick up vibrations in the water to help them find fish, earned her a distinction from the university.

And because hers is the first masters’ degree research into the subject – her sea lion whisker paper is being featured in the Comparative Physiology Journal.

Today, M/s Milne, from Liverpool, said: “From the moment I was splashed by a killer whale while visiting SeaWorld, Florida, I knew that I was going to be a ‘Shamu’ trainer one way or another.

“Working with the sea lions at Blackpool Zoo has been a major part of my research.

“I’m so pleased I have something so great to show for it.”

It is already widely known that sea lions are tactile mammals. Their whiskers contain nerve fibers, which make them sensitive.

They may use their whiskers to aid in navigation or to detect vibrations from prey in the water.

M/s Milne is now aiming for a PhD relating to marine mammals.

California sea lions belong to the family Otariidae which means “little ears.” In the scientific community, there are many debates concerning the ancestry of eared and true seals.

Some scientists believe that eared seals and walruses may have evolved 30 million years ago from bear-like creatures in the North Pacific, and that seals evolved from otter-like carnivores in the North Atlantic.    

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Bundestag committee claims Ireland has no plan for growth

 

GERMAN MPS EMPHASISE a TROUBLING LACK OF CONCERN OVER Ireland's ‘SHADOW BANK’ SECTOR

The Bundestag committee visited Dublin last month and met Ministers Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, officials from the Central Bank, Nama, the IMF, economists and Irish banks.

Germany’s Bundestag finance committee has warned that, beyond tax breaks for multinational concerns, Ireland has no discernible business plan to return the economy to long-term growth.

After a recent visit to Dublin the cross-party committee said there was also a troubling lack of concern about Dublin’s “Schattenbank” or “shadow bank” sector of letterbox finance firms.

The Bundestag committee, headed by Green MP Gerhard Schick, visited Dublin from June 16th to 18th and met Ministers Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, officials from the Central Bank, Nama, the International Monetary Fund, economists and Irish banks.

In their seven-page report, the visitors wondered if Ireland’s financial sector reform had missed the wood for the trees. Regulation of the domestic financial sector has been “strengthened massively, both in quality and quantity”, they noted, “but what of the rest of the financial sector?”

‘Little awareness’

The Germans noted “little awareness” in Dublin of the potential risk in hosting hundreds of brass-plate companies with no staff or premises yet €1.7 trillion in assets – almost 11 times the State’s gross national product.

“The only admission that this could be a difficulty for such a small country came from one of the bigger insurance companies,” noted the MPs.

Other people they met assured the visitors the “shadow” financial sector “has no connection with the Irish economy”.

“That did little to soothe us because the risks could yet turn up elsewhere, for instance in Germany,” said the MPs in their report.

Turning to Ireland’s reputation as a tax haven, the German MPs went home feeling there is a will for change in Ireland but that external vigilance will be required on the follow- through.

“The Irish Minister for Finance Michael Noonan described the debate over Ireland as a tax haven as a great image problem that has to be solved to not damage Ireland,” they wrote.

ESRI economist John Fitzgerald reportedly told the visitors how the current tax regime was a loss-leader for Ireland.

Summarising his remarks, they wrote: “As the Irish State pays into the EU budget based on GDP, into which the value created by international concerns flows without generating any tax revenue for the state, Ireland is losing money every year through the current tax regime.”

Dependency

In the eyes of the German politicians, Ireland’s tax regime “had failed to reach one of the goals of Irish economic promotion, namely to be less dependent on Britain”.

“Instead [Ireland] has moved from de facto full dependency on Britain to a shared dependency on Britain and the US in developing and securing employment.”

When it comes to modifying its tax code, the visitors from Berlin noted a certain reluctance for the Irish to see themselves as masters of their own fiscal fate. “The Irish insist that they have no control when inventive companies put together a Double Irish-Dutch sandwich,” said the German MPs in their report.

Concerns

The cross-party committee appears to have taken on Irish concerns that long-term austerity-oriented policies would not be conducive to sustainable growth. But just as serious, “given the high unemployment, a high level of loans in default and a tax system that encourages avoidance, the Government and their international advisers have no business model” for the Irish economy.

The loudest critics of Ireland’s tax affairs can be found in Germany’s Social Democratic Party and Greens, but the volume diminishes as you head right on Germany’s political spectrum.

Improved energy from Oilseed rape straw now well advanced

  

Researchers at the Institute of Food Research in the UK are looking at how to turn straw from oilseed rape into biofuel. Preliminary findings are pointing at ways the process could be made more efficient, as well as how the straw itself could be improved.

Straw from crops such as wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel production. Currently the UK produces around 12 million tonnes of straw. Although much is used for animal bedding, mushroom compost and energy generation, there still exists a vast surplus.

Straw contains a mix of sugars that could be used as a source of biofuels that do not compete with food production but instead represent a sustainable way of utilising waste. However, the sugars are in a form that makes them inaccessible to the enzymes that release them for conversion into biofuels, so pre-treatments are needed. The pre-treatments make the complex carbohydrates more accessible to enzymes that convert them to glucose, in a process called saccharification. This is then fermented by yeast into ethanol.

Professor Keith Waldron and his team have been looking at the steps needed to unlock the sugars tied up in the tough straw structure. In particular, they have looked at the pre-treatment stage, focusing on steam explosion, which involves ‘pressure-cooking’ the biomass, to drive a number of chemical reactions. A rapid pressure-release then causes the material to be ripped open, to further improve accessibility.

They varied the temperature and duration of steam explosion and then used a variety of physical and biochemical techniques to characterise what effects varying the pre-treatments had on the different types of sugars before and after scarification.

The amount of cellulose converted to glucose increased with the severity of the pretreatment. Scarification efficiency is also associated with the loss of specific sugars, and subsequent formation of sugar breakdown products.

In a further study the scientists discovered the key factors that determine the efficiency of scarification. One particular compound, uronic acid, limited the rate at which enzymes worked. The final sugar yield was closely related to the removal of xylan, a common component of plant cell walls. The abundance of lignin, a ‘woody’ cell wall component, was positively related to the amount of available sugars.

These findings will help improve the efficiency by which straw can be converted to biofuels. For example, adding enzymes that more effectively remove xylan should improve yield. Controlling the level of lignin in the material  should also help.

It may even be possible to improve the straw itself, for example to reduce the uronic acid content in the biomass, as suggested by these findings. In the main, oilseed rape has been bred to improve oilseed yield and disease resistance, without paying much attention to the straw.

The IFR is working with colleagues at the University of York and the John Innes Centre to see whether there are ways of breeding more “biofuel-ready” varieties of oilseed rape, with the same yields of oilseed but with more amenable straw. In addition, a full understanding of the polysaccharides and other compounds made available during pretreatment may mean other valuable co-products, like platform chemicals, may be viably produced from the surplus straw.

Irish men fall on hard times for the men’s souped up sheds

   

Nowadays, with the growing popularity of the ‘man shed’, it’s quite likely that prying eyes will never find out exactly what’s inside the shed at the end of their own garden either.

It might not be something nasty but it could be the engine of a 1965 Austin-Healey, a clapped-out wooden boat or an orchid collection – but the garden shed has traditionally been a male retreat from domestic routine which no one is allowed to enter.

But sheds have moved on from the days when men – retired, trainspotting English men in particular – pottered about mysteriously inside. A modern shed is an extension of the house; it’s as likely to have widescreen TV and Wi-Fi as boxes of nails and bags of compost. And a usable outdoor room can add value to your home.

The cult of the ‘sheddie’ has spread from Britain to Ireland. Among the annual entrants for the UK-based Shed of the Year competition, there is always a smattering of Irish sheddies.

One of them is Peter Ellis, whose garden shed near Letterkenny, Co Donegal, is a tribute to the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. It’s made of aluminum framed glass panes between tubular steel posts, and has a tiled roof. Coloured vinyl sheets cover the panes to form the Mondrian-style panels.

Ellis designed and built his own house, and built the shed to use up space in the garden. “I wanted to get rid of a bit of grass because I was fed up of mowing the lawn,” he says. The idea of the Mondrian homage was “a eureka moment”, he adds.

It cost next to nothing to build, being made of mostly recycled materials and whatever Ellis had to hand. The work took about six months in all.

It’s quite a big shed – about four wide by three metres long, and 3.5 metres high. And it’s in Ellis’s front garden. “As you’re driving along past the house, it’s definitely out there!” he says.

Inside is a bench and table, a bog oak sculpture and a water feature, as well as some garden tools. Ellis uses it as a place to unwind.

“I pop up there when I’m doing the gardening and have a little sit-down and a beer and relax. It’s south-facing as well so you get the sun. You can have a little quiet moment.”

The Mondrian shed was first entered in the Shed of the Year competition in 2012, and is an entrant this year again. However, the contest is sponsored by Cuprinol, which makes wood preservatives, so Ellis believes his maintenance-free metal and glass shed is unlikely to win.

Ellis runs a geodesic dome business called Atlantic Domes. Since building the Mondrian shed, he’s also put up a greenhouse and an outdoor barbecue kitchen, and there’s a geodesic dome in the works. But he says he will happily erect a Mondrian shed in other people’s gardens if they ask him to.

Another celebrated Irish sheddie is Conor Keatings in Kilpedder, Co Wicklow, who converted an existing garden shed into a shebeen called the Monkey Bar a couple of years ago. It doubles as a laundry room.

“It’s an old shed that was here when we moved in nine years ago. It was full of junk, but slowly I whittled all the rubbish out to turn it into a man space. But the washing machine was still in there, so I asked my mate who’s a carpenter to build something to hide the washing machine, and he built the bar. It was originally just to be a home for the washing machine and it kind of got out of hand, as two lads over a couple of pints do.”

The shed is 12 feet by eight, with a four-foot verandah at the front. It cost very little to convert, says Keatings – a maximum of €200. While cleaning it out, Keating’s found his old cuddly monkey toy, which gave the bar its name.

The ‘christening’ of the bar was the 2013 New Year’s Eve party, when all the neighbor’s came over. “There were 14 of us in it that night; it was brilliant. It’s still used for a session with all the neighbor’s every couple of months.”

Keatings also goes there to watch sport, and he and his wife Jenny sometimes go out there of an evening, put the fairy lights on and drink wine. “You can get out of the house and do something different without having to get a babysitter in.”

Keatings believes it’s “in the DNA” of men to want a space of their own. “I didn’t necessarily know it would be a bar; it just sort of happened. It can be a private domain for me as well – it does lock from the inside! But I tend not to use it like that – it’s more a social space.”

David Leech, from Mount Merrion in Dublin, built a shed to house a clay pizza oven in the winter of 2012-2013. Then he decided the shed was too good for that, so the pizza oven ended up outside.

“It’s a chalet-style shed made of timber, designed on the back of a fag packet. As I was building it, it was still being designed. It was built between December 1 and January 20 under major pressure. Then the shed was too good to be all taken up with a pizza oven, so I started building that outside – in the Irish weather.”

The shed itself – 11 feet by 14 – has a fourth wall at the front that doubles as a drop-down deck. It was built for around €2,000, The pizza oven, meanwhile, cost little or nothing.

“I dug a load of this clay out of a riverbed in Wicklow for it, which was the perfect clay that I found by accident. And the rest of it is made out of recycled materials. It took hundreds and hundreds of hours to build though. There was much pain in the poor soft office-boy hands in the building of it all.”

The oven is insulated at the bottom by 196 beer bottles on their sides. “Those beer bottles were produced in real time, while I was working out there in the middle of winter, telling the wife to drink faster because I was out of materials.”

The shed is in constant use although, as an employee of Microsoft, Leech doesn’t get much time there himself. “I leave for work and my wife and kids go and have breakfast out there. So it’s not working out all that well as a man shed I have to admit. I do have to share it with other people.”

But while the shed was once seen as a bastion of masculinity, more and more sheddies themselves are female. One Irish contender is a woman in Dingle, Co Kerry, who wanted an outside room of her own, as her husband had a garage and workshop. She built a shed with a bookcase, armchairs, and a stoop outside.

Among the multitudes of different types of sheds, there are pub and nightclub sheds, sound recording sheds, sheds on stilts, sheds with vegetable gardens on their roofs, sheds made to look like pagodas, boats, or hobbit holes, and Tardis sheds … yes, Tardis sheds – modelled on Dr Who’s time machine – are a growing subculture, and constitute a category of their own in the Shed of the Year competition.

Researchers can now predict which teenagers are likely to binge drink

  

In a new international study, researchers say it is possible to predict which teens will binge-drink. The findings, published in the journal Nature, show that factors such as life experience, personality, and brain structure are strong factors linked to future alcohol misuse.

For the study, data was pulled from the European IMAGEN cohort, whose purpose is to determine the biological and environmental factors that might have an influence on the mental health of teenagers.

The researchers then developed a model that incorporates 40 different risk factors of teen substance abuse, including personality, history/life events, brain physiology and structure, cognitive ability, genetics, and demographics.

“We aimed to develop a ‘gold standard’ model for predicting teenage behavior which can be used as a benchmark for the development of simpler, widely applicable prediction models,” said Professor Gunter Schumann from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and Coordinator of the IMAGEN project.

For the study, IMAGEN recruited over 2,000 teenagers who were 14 years old from England, Ireland, France, and Germany. Follow-ups at age 16 showed that it was indeed possible to predict future alcohol abuse just two years later.

One interesting finding was that even one-to-two instances of alcohol consumption by age 14 was enough to predict if the teenagers would binge-drink at age 16. Prior research has suggested that the odds of adult alcohol dependence can be reduced by 10 percent for each year that alcohol consumption is delayed in the teen years.

Previous studies have found that early teenage binge drinking and progression to alcohol misuse is genetically influenced and is also consistently linked to later risk for substance use disorders.

It is important to determine, however, whether environmental factors can tip the genetic risk. In this study, negative life experiences were found to be a major influence on binge drinking at age 14.

“Our goal was to better understand the relative roles of brain structure and function, personality, environmental influences, and genetics in the development of adolescent abuse of alcohol. This multidimensional risk profile of genes, brain function, and environmental influences can help in the prediction of binge drinking at age 16 years,” said lead author Dr. Robert Whelan, of University College Dublin.

The scientists would like to continue this work by evaluating the participants again at a later age. The factors used in this study will also be applied to predict other types of risk-taking behaviors, such as using drugs and smoking.

New simplified versions of the tests are being developed so that children who are at risk of alcohol misuse can be identified and given help.

Top Physicist Del Monte says machines will rule the world by 2045

AND IT WILL THREATEN HUMAN SURVIVAL

  

In about 30 year’s time, the top species on Earth will no longer be humans. That is the chilling warning from physicist Louis Del Monte (left picture) who believes that new artificial intelligence (AI) technology will threaten the survival of humankind.

In a world where machines have become part of the way we live, where already artificial limbs replace our own, Del Monte believes we will become cyborgs — part human and part machine.

Our reliance on machines is increasing more than ever as they improve productivity, make breakthroughs in medical technology and improve our quality of life.

But Del Monte is concerned that the future may come down to man versus machine, when machines become more intelligent than humans, and that machines, like robots, may view humans as unpredictable and dangerous.

Speaking to Business Insider , Del Monte said: “Today there’s no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the time frame most experts predict. From that point on you’re going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.”

Author of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, Del Monte warns that machines will start to acquire the capabilities to protect themselves and view humans as enemies the way we view harmful insects.

He predicts that between 2040 to 2045 machines will outmatch human intelligence.

“The implication is that they’re also learning self-preservation,” Del Monte told us. “Whether or not they’re conscious is a moot point.”  

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Enda Kenny denies a Cabinet split on property tax in Dail today?

 

FF LEADER martin CHALLENGES enda KENNY ON ruairi QUINN's RESIGNATION.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has denied that the Cabinet is split on the property tax.

He told the Dáil today that there was no basis for the “division’’ among ministers, as claimed by Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin.

He added that the tax was an alternative to increased income taxes and the details involved were still being worked out by the Government.

“The law says that the elected representatives of the people, whatever the shade of opinion on the council, are entitled to reduce the property charges by 15% if they so wish,’’ he added.

“It is a matter for them to make that decision.’’

Mr. Kenny said the Government had already decided that 80% of the charges collected would be kept in each local authority area.

Mr. Martin said media reports had said there was a significant split in the Cabinet on the issue, with Fine Gael wanting to charge local authorities more.

Services devolved from central government would have to be paid for, he added.

Mr. Kenny said he was sorry to see Mr. Martin acting on “the absolute gospel belief of what you read in the papers’’.

Earlier, Mr. Martin asked the Taoiseach to confirm that Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn had resigned from the Cabinet.

Mr Kenny said Mr. Quinn, who at the time was announcing his resignation to journalists at press briefing on the Dail plinth, should be given the courtesy to make a statement.

Mr. Martin said the primacy of parliament was important.

Irish Water to deliver a price plan to energy regulator soon

 

Commission critical pricing plan, including the cost per litre for Irish water, has not been submitted to it in advance of an announcement. 

Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen: TDs and Senators “would have hoped to have been privy to it, and had hoped to ask questions on it”

The exact pricing structure for water charges being proposed by Irish Water will be submitted to the Commission for Energy Regulation today, but is not expected to be published until next week at the earliest.

  The commission appeared before the Oireachtas environment committee yesterday, but said Irish Water’s pricing plan, including the cost per litre, had not been submitted to it in advance.

The deadline for submitting the plan is today, and an Irish Water spokeswoman confirmed it will be provided to the commission.

However, the commission confirmed to the committee that Irish Water had sought to reduce the free allocation of 38,000 litres per child, as had been originally announced by the Government.

While Irish Water said this is “unrealistic” the commission said in its presentation to the committee this will only be granted in the event of more “robust research and consumption analysis”.

Members of the environment committee were severely critical of Irish Water for not providing the submission in advance of their meeting.

Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen, the acting chairman, said TDs and Senators “would have hoped to have been privy to it, and had hoped to ask questions on it”.

“I don’t want to mince my words, we are disappointed, some are angered. We are at a loss today. This is the latest in a series of delays.”

Paul McGowan of the commission said it shared the committee’s disappointment, and it repeated the Government commitment that the average household will pay €240, although some homes will pay more and others will pay less.

Labour Party TD Kevin Humphreys said the meeting yesterday was a waste of time, and said Irish Water was “showing contempt” by failing to provide the requested information.

Irish smoking rates drop as more teenagers quit cigarettes

  

Teenagers are “fighting back” against big tobacco companies, with only about one-in-eight now lighting up, the Irish Cancer Society (ICS) has revealed.

Their remarks came ahead of the X-Hale Film Festival, for which young people produced dozens of short movies about cigarette use.

“We know that the tobacco industry needs to target teenagers to replace the smokers who have already died from their addiction or who have quit,” said Kevin O’Hagan of the ICS.

“The X-Hale Film Festival gives the next generation the opportunity to fight back and they have certainly done that via the 47 films which have been showcased.

DEATH

“Currently, 5,500 smokers a year die from tobacco related illnesses. These youth groups have sent a rallying call to their peers and to Government to ensure that their generation won’t follow this same path of premature death.

“THEY WANT TO SMOKE OUT BIG TOBACCO FIRMS FROM THIS COUNTRY FOR GOOD,” HE ADDED.

In 1998, some 21.2pc of young people were smokers compared to 11.9pc in 2010, data from Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) shows.

There has also been a notable fall in rates of young people who have tried smoking.

In 2002, some 62.1pc of 15 to 17-year-olds had given it a go, compared to 45.7pc in 2010.

In addition, a decline from 60.2pc to 48.9pc was seen between 2002 and 2010 in the percentage of those who had their first cigarette aged 13 or younger.

The ICS said Ireland is on track to have less than 5pc of the population smoking by 2025. X-Hale films highlight the harmful effects of smoking.

Some 43 youth groups showcased their films at Smithfield’s Lighthouse Cinema yesterday.

The works can be viewed online (www.cancer.ie/xhale). To date, they have received more than 21,000 views.

SHIFT

“The trend in Ireland around smoking is changing. We are seeing a huge cultural shift into how smoking is treated and how it is perceived,” said John McCormack, chief executive of the ICS.

MEANWHILE-

Early alcohol tippling at 14 years ‘A binge drinking risk’

  

Early alcohol drinking experience is one of a wide range of factors that can be used to identify future binge drinkers, research now suggests.

A single glass of wine or beer at the age of 14 can help a young teenager along the path to binge drinking, say scientists.

Early alcohol experience is one of a wide range of factors that can be used to identify future binge drinkers, new research has shown.

Others include personality traits such as risk and sensation seeking, family history, genetics and brain structure.

Combined together, they were able to predict who from a large group of 14-year-olds would be binge drinking by the age of 16 with 70% accuracy.

Having even a single alcoholic drink at the age of 14 was shown to be a “powerful” predictor of binge drinking, possibly because of its association with risk-taking and impulsivity.

Dr Hugh Garavan, from the University of Vermont in Canada, who co-led the study, said the vulnerable period between the ages of 14 and 16 was “critical” to a young person’s future drinking behaviour.

“Just delaying people drinking by six months or a year is actually a very, very substantial intervention that would have vast beneficial consequences,” he added.

A computer was used to analyse a wealth of data on more than 2,000 14-year-olds from England, Ireland, France and Germany. All were participants in IMAGEN, a major ongoing study of adolescent development.

The software looked for patterns that singled out those youngsters who went on to become binge drinkers by the age of 16 – defined as having got drunk on at least three separate occasions.

Results were confirmed by predicting binge drinking with the same accuracy in a separate group of teenagers. The findings appear in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

“Notably, it’s not the case that there’s a single one or two or three variables that are critical,” said Dr Garavan. “The final model was very broad – it suggests that a wide mixture of reasons underlie teenage drinking.”

One surprising discovery was that bigger brains in 14-year-olds are associated with future binge drinking.

Adolescents undergo significant rewiring in their developing brains, so that it is normal for their brains to reduce to a more efficient size. Bigger brains in adolescents are therefore a sign of immaturity.

“There’s refining and sculpting of the brain, and most of the grey matter – the neurons and the connections between them – is getting smaller and the white matter (made from nerve fibres) is getting larger,” said Dr Garavan. “Kids with more immature brains – those that are still larger – are more likely to drink.”

Co-author and IMAGEN leader Professor Gunter Schumann, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “We aimed to develop a ‘gold standard’ model for predicting teenage behaviour, which can be used as a benchmark for the development of simpler, widely applicable prediction models.

“This work will inform the development of specific early interventions in carriers of the risk profile to reduce the incidence of adolescent substance abuse. We now propose to extend analysis of the IMAGEN data in order to investigate the development of substance use patterns in the context of moderating environmental factors, such as exposure to nicotine or drugs as well as psychosocial stress.”

Research suggests culling badger’s not an effective to stop the spread of bovine TB?

  

AN ANTI-CULL PROTESTER OUTSIDE THE BRITISH HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT IN LONDON.

New research has suggested that culling badgers is not an effective way of reducing tuberculosis in cattle.

A study which models the way in which TB spreads across Britain using data on cattle dating back to the 1990′s found that few options could reverse annual increases in the disease.

The research, published in the journal Nature, found that only culling the whole herd when infection was found, vaccination of cattle, or additional national testing for infection would be effective in stemming the rise of the disease.

However, researchers said whole-herd culling would initially involve a 20-fold increase in the number of cattle slaughtered and the measure was a “draconian” one, which they did not advocate.

The latest analysis was seized on by anti-cull campaigners as further evidence that culling badgers to control TB in cattle did not work, but the British government rejected the findings, saying badger culling was necessary as part of measures to prevent the disease.

The model looked at transmission of bovine TB within farms, between nearby farms, and between more distant farms due to cattle movement. It also modelled the effects of control strategies on the potential spread of TB.

It assessed whether new TB cases, or breakdowns, in herds were caused by movement of cattle between farms, infection being missed during testing as the test is only around 70% effective, or by infection from the farm environment, and found 40% of new cases were due to a combination of all three.

The study was unable to separate out transmission from badgers and from other routes in the environment such as pasture where the disease lingered.

However the farm environment seemed to play a “relatively minor role” in onward transmission of TB, Professor Matt Keeling, of the University of Warwick and one of the study’s authors, said.

“Only 15% of breakdowns are solely due to the environment and although the majority do feature the environment in there somewhere, if you get rid of all the environmental transmissions you’d only expect to stop around 15% of new breakdowns,” he said.

Cutting environmental transmission between farms by half, which could represent the impact of a large scale badger cull, has “relatively little effect”, the researchers found, and predicted that controlling badger populations would have a limited effect on TB.

Halving environmental transmission could cut the rise in TB from 10% annually to 6%, they suggested.

Prof Keeling said: “If we reduce transmission from the environment to other farms by a factor of about 50% this has a limited impact on what we see in the future, it would slow the increase in cases but not completely eliminate it.”

The research found that culling the entire herd if an animal tests positive had by far the greatest effect, reducing infected cattle, numbers slaughtered and affected farms by 80% compared to standard measures after six years.

But it also had a huge cost, requiring the slaughter of 20 times the number of cattle than would otherwise be killed as part of TB control measures, although in the long run fewer animals would be slaughtered.

Vaccination had a marked effect in reducing the disease, although the vaccine offers cattle only limited protection.

Increased testing leads initially to more cattle slaughtered and farms placed under restrictions for being infected, but does reduce the disease in later years.

Prof Keeling said Transmission is complicated, it’s multifaceted. This means you’ve got cattle to cattle transmission, you’ve got movement of infected animals and you’ve got infection from the environment and all of these play a role.

“This means there’s no easy strategy that’s ever going to rapidly eradicate infection, and what we’ve predicted is without substantial changes in policy we’re probably going to see this historical 10% rise in cases year on year to continue.

“And we only really found three strategies that stop this rise, and that’s either improved or additional testing, vaccination of cattle that slows disease progression and culling all animals on a farm which obviously is a quite draconian measure.”

He and fellow researcher Dr Ellen Brooks-Pollock were not criticising existing control measures, did not advocate any one policy and that whole-herd culling was never put forward as a viable policy, they said.

The model presented a “dispassionate analysis” of the information available, the researchers said.

British farming minister George Eustice said: “We cannot accept the paper’s findings because it does not investigate the full range of ways in which TB could spread. What this paper proposes would finish off the cattle and dairy industry in this country.

“TB is devastating for our dairy and cattle farmers and, along with blanket testing and removal of infected cattle, biosecurity measures, vaccination and cattle movement controls, culls will help get this disease under control.”

The British environment department’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Ian Boyd, said:  “Based on our current understanding of the disease cycle, the more severe control measures suggested by the paper would probably result in a rapid decline in the cattle industry in areas where TB occurs.

“However, the study reinforces the basis of the current TB control strategy which is designed to cope with complex and diverse routes of infection.”

The British government introduced a TB control strategy which includes more cattle movement controls, testing, development of vaccinations for cattle and badgers, and two pilot badger culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire.

But Dominic Dyer, of the Badger Trust and Care for the Wild, said: “The government and the farming industry have focused far too much on badgers and nowhere near enough on the gaping holes in cattle management policy, which have been letting this disease through.

“This research confirms that the vast majority of new bTB outbreaks are due to poor TB testing, biosecurity and cattle control movements, so maybe farmers will now be convinced to give badgers a break and start focusing on methods that will actually work.”

Over-fishing and pollution means Caribbean coral reefs may disappear in 20 years

  

Caribbean coral reefs are on course to disappear “in the next 20 years” because overfishing and pollution is killing off grazers such as parrot fish and sea urchins which are vital for their survival, a new environmental report claims.

“Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs would continue their decline,” said Jeremy Jackson, lead author of the report and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s senior adviser on coral reefs. “We must immediately address the grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climate shifts.”

The report – deemed “the most detailed and comprehensive study of its kind published to date,” was formed from more than 35,000 studies spanning 90 Caribbean locations – since 1970, reported the ICUN on its website.

ICUN collaborated with Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in conducting the study.

Coral reefs in the region have deteriorated by more than 50 percent over the past 40 years. However, the report’s authors insist that further deterioration over the upcoming 20 years is avoidable.

“The rate at which the Caribbean corals have been declining is truly alarming,” says Carl Gustaf Lundin, Director of IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Program. “But this study brings some very encouraging news: the fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover.”ll / flickr.com

Protection from overfishing, restoring the parrotfish populations and cracking down on coastal pollution could all contribute to the ongoing survival of the reefs.

Grazers are essential and their removal breaks the equilibrium of the ecosystem, letting algae smother reefs, and the spike in bulk shipping in the 1960s and 1970s has contributed to the introduction of pathogens and “invasive species”.

“Barbuda is about to ban all catches of parrotfish and grazing sea urchins, and set aside one-third of its coastal waters as marine reserves,” said Ayana Johnson of the Waitt Institute’s Blue Halo Initiative.

The institute is working alongside Barbuda in the development of its new management plan. “This is the kind of aggressive management that needs to be replicated regionally if we are going to increase the resilience of Caribbean reefs,” she said.

However, the need for reef preservation stretches far beyond the Caribbean. In May, UNESCO condemned the Australian government’s approval of dumping dredged sand and mud in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

UNESCO has noted a “serious decline in the condition of the Great Barrier Reef, including in coral recruitment and reef-building across extensive parts of the property,” saying that the Reef’s World Heritage status could even be downgraded.