Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG Monday

Irish Revenue to use GPS technology to calculate property tax

 

They will see how far properties are from key amenities

The tax man is to use GPS style technology to help work out how much each Irish household owe on property tax.

The Revenue Commissioners is preparing to send letters to every home in Ireland telling them how much tax is due.

Among the tools being used to help calculate how much is owed Revenue is to use Geo directory which has been developed by An Post and Ordinance Survey.

It identifies how far properties are from key amenities like transport links, health, education, retail and emergency services.

CENSUS RESULTS TO BE INCLUDED

Revenue is also geographically linking its data with publicly available sources such as the the 2011 census results from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

It is also using a Deprivation Index developed by Pobal.

Its estimated the average household in Dublin will face a bill of around €405, while rural households are expected to pay around €249.

Speaking in the Dail last week, Richard Boyd-Barrett challenged the Taoiseach Enda Kenny on amendments to the tax.

The average age of Irish emigrants jumps to 32

  

Thirty two year Old’s are now the most common age bracket applying for visas to places like Australia and Canada.

The average age of people looking to emigrate from Ireland has risen from 29 to 32 years.

The latest data also confirms that significantly more men than women are emigrating.

Migration agent VisaFirst.com said the numbers of people leaving is increasing year on year.

Applications for second year Australian visas rose by 36pc in 2012, showing that emigrants want to stay in the country.

The number of applications for Canadian work permits was 16pc greater last year than in 2011, while permanent residency applications more than doubled.

The ratio of men to women remains at 60:40, while the average age of visa applicants has risen from 29 to 32 years, figures from the company’s Irish database show.

Edwina Shanahan of VisaFirst.com said: “The increase in the average age is interesting as it’s quite a big jump. The difficult work environment in Ireland is a primary driver here.

“It’s not just affecting the young and newly qualified — it’s taking its toll of people of all ages and all levels of expertise.”

She added: “The age jump may also have something to do with the fact that spousal applications are also on the rise.

“The number of spousal applications for Australia doubled last year. More and more families are seeing emigration as a better, if not their only, financially viable option.”

The figures from 2012 highlight the growing level of interest from trades and professions including teachers, welders, solicitors, mechanics and IT workers, according to VisaFirst.com.

There has also been a noted increase in applications from articulated truck drivers because they are now in such high demand in Canada, it added.

Ms Shanahan said: “The interest from people in various occupations often changes depending on the demand for those occupations in certain countries.

“In addition, a fall in interest might simply reflect the fact that a sizeable portion of these people have already left the country — for example, while we saw large numbers of architects leaving in 2011 and 2010 — this figure has dropped almost 80pc in 12 months.

Over 4,000 protest at front-line workers rally in Dublin

  

More than 4,000 front-line workers attended a rally in Tallaght to protest at Government plans to cut an extra €1bn from the State payroll bill over the next three years.

Government negotiators at the talks to extend the Croke Park deal have rejected claims by the 24-7 Frontline Alliance that they have targeted frontline workers disproportionately for cuts in earnings.

The alliance represents 70,000 nurses, prison officers and Gardai,

Seamus Murphy of the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association received a standing ovation, saying “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

He also responded to the possibility of the Government introducing legislation to cut pay by saying: “They need to be careful. Do you remember what happened to the last crowd that cut our pay?”

He told the crowds that “in 1913 we had a lockout, in 2013 we have a sellout”.

Garda Representative Association General Secretary PJ Stone  warned the Enda Kenny that workers will not continue to deliver public services for the “miserable measly wage you think you can negotiate in the Croke Park talks”.Mr Stone accused Mr Kenny of threatening public frontline workers. He said they had never flinched from doing their duty.He warned that the campaign would be resolute and determined.

He said this was the start of a campaign which would only end when the Taoiseach understood that they were not giving any more pay-cuts.

He said they could not be afraid of the consequence of actions when the cause was just and fair.

He received a standing ovation as the crowd chanted “no more cuts”.

John Clinton of the Prison Officers Association warned against punishing those who had already made a massive contribution.

“They’ll be trouble ahead, trouble that can be avoided if a just and equitable solution can be found which will not further punish those who have already made a massive contribution,” he said.

Sean McEniff wants media to stop ‘hounding’ him over Traveller row

     

Donegal County Council’s longest serving elected member, Sean McEniff, has called on the media to stop hounding him about an issue which, he says, is something he firmly believes in.

The Bundoran councillor recently became embroiled in controversy when he stated that Travellers should live in an “isolated community” and be kept together.

He said yesterday that he was fed up being hounded by the media. His comments came after a weekend protest in Dublin outside a hotel of which he is part-owner.

Read the full story, and the reaction of other councillors, in today’s Donegal Democrat and Donegal People’s Press.

Man turns dog’s best friend as heroic first-aider brings Hector back to life

     

A Coast Guard volunteer has been hailed as a hero for saving the life of a dog after performing CPR on it.

Hector, a three-year-old collie, stopped breathing after a ball lodged in its throat. But Gary Creighton carried out CPR on the family pet and brought him back to life.

“If it wasn’t for Gary and the Skerries Coast Guard, there is no doubt that Hector would be dead,” said Colette Connolly, Hector’s owner.

Every morning Colette and her two dogs – Hector (3) and Libby (2) – go for an early-morning run on the south beach at Rush in north county Dublin. “We were playing ball and it bounded high and as he jumped up to catch it he twisted and landed badly on his back legs. The ball went way down the back of his throat.”

The ball is made for dogs and would not usually get stuck in the animal’s throat.

“I could feel it in his throat with my hand and I started trying to push it back up his throat. He was getting short of breath and collapsed on to the sand. I was trying to stay calm and must have spent eight minutes trying to push the ball back up out of his throat.”

Colette was about to give up. “Then I looked up and saw a white jeep. I ran at it like a mad woman waving my arms and it stopped.”

It was a Skerries Coast Guard 4×4 and driver Gary Creighton went straight into life-saving mode.

Gary, who is a fully trained ‘cardiac first responder’ and an officer in the Order of Malta in Balbriggan said: “I just thought okay, what would I do to relieve choking in a person – he was a pretty big dog so I started doing chest compressions.”

As he did them, Colette kept trying to push the ball up the dog’s throat and then they saw it appear at the top of his throat and Gary pulled it out.

“His heart started to beat and he began breathing. I just threw my arms around Gary. He was like an angel coming from heaven to our rescue.”

Vanessa Gaffney, officer in charge with Skerries Coast Guard, said it was the first time in living memory an animal was rescued using advanced first aid.

The Skerries Coast Guard is run by volunteers and covers 30 miles of coastline from Malahide in Co Dublin to Laytown in Co Meath.

Arctic now on thin ice as melting picks up speed

  

The first of a three-part series examines what science is telling us about the weather – it’s not comforting

Nicholas Stern, the author of the influential 2006 review of the economics of climate change, now says he “underestimated the risks”. Had he known how bad things were going to get, “I think I would have been a bit more blunt [and] much more strong about the risks of a four- or five-degree rise” in average global temperatures.

Interviewed by the Observer newspaper at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, where the focus of most participants was on more short-term concerns, Lord Stern said: “This is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one? These risks for many people are existential.”

Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank’s president, issued an equally strong warning about the risk of conflicts over natural resources if global temperatures went up by four degrees Celsius. “There will be water and food fights everywhere,” he said, and then pledged to make tackling climate change a priority of his five-year term.

Extreme weather

This was in the wake of a series of “extreme weather events” over the past year including Superstorm Sandy, which caused billions of dollars in damage to New York City and New Jersey as well as serious drought in the US and Russia, devastating floods in the Philippines and scorching temperatures and fires in Australia.

But the “canary in the coalmine” is summer sea ice in the Arctic, which has been declining each year and hit a record low of 3.4 million sq km last September – 770,000sq km below the previous minimum of 4.17 million sq km in 2007.

This Arctic warming may be at the root of climate change in the northern hemisphere.

Disappearing ice: The rate of sea ice decline is much faster than anticipated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its Fourth Assessment, in 2007, mentioned that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century”. Now, it could be gone by 2020 or 2030.

Columnist George Monbiot blamed governments: “Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the Earth Summit in June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves . . . Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.”

Last month, a draft of the latest US National Climate Assessment, compiled by 240 scientists, warned that 13 US airports could be inundated by rising sea levels and that billions of dollars will be needed to repair roads, pipelines, sewerage systems, buildings and airports in Alaska due to damage caused by melting permafrost.

The draft’s bluntness “reflects the increasing confidence we have in the science and day-to-day realities of climate change,” one of its authors, Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University, told the Guardian. “This is no longer a future issue. It’s an issue that is staring us in the face today.”

A new study Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of A Hot Planet, published last September, found that nearly 400,000 premature deaths per year could be attributed to climate change, which is already costing more than $1.2 trillion (€887.3 billion) annually, equivalent to 1.6 per cent of global GDP.

By 2030, the combined cost of climate change and air pollution would double, with poorer developing countries – those least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions – likely to suffer most. But richer nations would also be hit, with GDP in the US falling 2 per cent while the cost to China alone would be $1.2 trillion annually.

No benign shift: Any notion the northern hemisphere would benefit from global warming has been undermined by the US and Russian droughts. “Many hazards come with climate change,” said Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It’s not a matter of a benign shift to a longer growing season for northern nations.”

Meanwhile the IPCC is working on its Fifth Assessment, due for publication next year. An early draft was leaked online by an American climate change sceptic called Alec Rawls, who claimed it had conceded that cosmic rays may influence the climate system – an alleged admission that deniers immediately hailed as “game-changing”.

In fact, the draft says it is “virtually certain that [a net energy uptake of the Earth system] is caused by human activities, primarily by the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations”.

Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG Saturday

Ireland to Canada visa access to widen to 6,350 and for two years

   

Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore and Canadian immigration minister Jason Kenney sign a revised memorandum of understanding relating to working holiday visas.

The number of Canadian working holiday visas available to young Irish people is to be doubled and the length of stay extended from one year to two under a new agreement announced today.

A total of 6,350 visas will be available in 2013, up from 5,350 this year. This will rise to 10,700 in 2014.

The agreement was signed by Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore and the Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in Dublin this afternoon.

The quota of International Experience Canada (IEC) visas, which allow people aged 18 to 35 to work legally in the country for up to 12 months, was filled by 30th May this year, three months earlier than the quota of 5,000 was filled in 2011.

The number of Canadian working holiday visas issued to Irish passport holders has increased dramatically in the last two years, up from 4,229 in 2010 and 2,500 in 2009.

Mr Kenney said he hoped the expanded visa programme would help to meet the increasing demand for Canadian visas among Irish people looking to work abroad.

“Canada is facing significant labour shortages,” he said.

“We know young Irish men and women to phenomenonly well. They are welcome by the vibrant Irish community in Canada. There are tremendous economic opportunities, they can come and make very good money, send some of that home, and come back.”

Mr Kenney said the extension of the work permit period to two years would enable Irish people to find better jobs that suited their skill levels, by reassuring employers that workers would be in the country for a longer period of time.

Mr Gilmore said it was the Government’s “primary priority” to create jobs and an economic climate in Ireland that would allow emigrants to return, but that the visa programme was “not just about short-term emigration”.

“Canada is one of the biggest investors in Ireland and Irish companies now employ 60,000 people in Canada,” he said.

“This new generation working holiday programme will continue to facilitate economic ties betweeen Ireland and Canada.”

Mr Kenney will attend the Working Abroad Expo in the RDS this weekend to support a number of Canadian companies who are in Ireland to recruit skilled workers.

The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) will be allowed to buy Irish banks

    

The ESM rescue fund will be allowed to buy Ireland’s banks, allowing the State to recoup some of the money pumped into them.

However, taxpayers will continue to be liable for unforeseen bank debts for a period of years afterwards.

This is according to plans being drawn up to allow the ESM to directly recapitalise banks — the details of which are hotly contested by the German, Dutch, and Finnish governments, and which will be discussed by eurozone finance ministers meeting on Monday.

The Government is waiting to see how Ireland can benefit from the arrangements to reduce debt before it proceeds with arrangements to reduce the impact of the €31bn Anglo Irish Bank promissory notes, according to EU officials.

Intense talks on what the ESM can and cannot do have been under way in Brussels for the past few days between representatives of the finance ministries of the member states, while in Luxembourg 60 staff are ready to transfer to the new ESM institution when it officially launches on Monday.

A statement from the finance ministers of Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland last week caused uproar when they appeared to suggest that the €500bn fund would not deal with legacy assets of troubled banks, but only debts incurred once the ECB takes over supervision of the eurozone’s banks.

While Irish bank debt has been taken over by the State at a cost of about €32bn, much of it from the pension reserve fund, the Government hopes to sell its 95% stake in AIB and its stake in Bank of Ireland. 

However, it is likely to receive only the current value of the shareholding, likely to be no more than €8bn. The ESM’s shares will be senior, making the rest of the shares in the banks less attractive to investors.

The revelation that any unforeseen debt which arises for a specified period after the purchase would have to be picked up by the taxpayer, could make it less attractive to member states.

The plan for the ESM does not in effect break the link between the banks and the sovereign, but this may be the compromise the Germans will insist on for agreeing to the ESM dealing with legacy assets.

Decisions on taking over legacy assets or individual banks will be made on a bank by bank basis, the EU officials said. It could even cover bad banks, but only to the value of its good assets.

While the figures for any specific transaction will be important in reaching a decision on bailing out a bank, for which agreement of all EU states is required, the final decision will be a political one, officials say.

Plans for the ECB to take over the role of banking supervisor are proceeding but will not be ready by January and consequently the ESM will not be in a position to invest directly in banks before that happens.

Spain has not asked for a bailout and if it were to come, it is not imminent, said an official, adding that Spain was a long way away from being a concern. The markets had confidence in the country, he added.

“We need to remember that Spain has a thriving, world-class export sector.”

The measures being put forward by Spain on budget adjustment and implementing recommendations appeared to fulfil the necessary requirements, but given the economic circumstances, the budget target will not be easy to achieve, he said.

Talks were under way to allow the ESM the same flexibility as the EFSF in terms of lending to countries that do not need a bailout but are experiencing turbulence on the markets.

This will include guaranteeing up to 30% of bonds issued by the country — in effect the EU taxpayer would take the first loss for investors if a country found itself in a credit event.

Talks were under way between the troika and Greece about the adjustments they need to make and the next tranche of funding will not be paid out for at least the next few weeks.

It will receive the €900m which it must contribute to the ESM fund by way of a loan which would be added to its debt.

Ireland could make a similar arrangement if it wished for the €1.27bn it must pay in over the next three years, the official confirmed.

What's this all about?

As Taoiseach Enda Kenny makes the cover of Time magazine

    

The Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny has become the first Irish leader since Sean Lemass to make the cover of Time magazine.

Even the colour of the famous “Time” red logo was changed to green on the front cover, which contains the headline “The Celtic Comeback” alongside Mr Kenny’s photo.

He gave an interview to the international weekly news magazine for its European edition in Government Buildings, which said he was “leading Ireland’s fight to recover from the bust”.

And it said that with Ireland’s Gross Domestic Product beginning to sneak upward once again, Mr Kenny may prove himself anything but the “fool” that his predecessor (then taoiseachBrian Cowen) called him in 2010.

Mr Kenny is following the footsteps of former taoiseach Sean Lemass. The late Fianna Failleader was put on the cover of Time Magazinein July 1963 behind an illustration of factory buildings to symbolise the new industrial development in Ireland. The cover also featured an Irish leprechaun.

Mr Kenny was asked by Time magazine why there had been no large-scale demonstrations in Ireland against cutbacks as there had been in other European countries.

“People understand that you have to do difficult things to sort out our own public finances,” he said.

And Mr Kenny was also quizzed about what motivated him in his political career.

“I’ve no interest in looking for credit or thanks. Providing a prosperous future for all our people, that’s what drives me,” he said.

Time’s Europe editor Catherine Mayer was complimentary about Mr Kenny in her article and her own question-and-answer article afterwards. She wrote that “if words were money, Kenny could have easily cleared the national debt since coming to power in February 2011”.

And she said that Mr Kenny was “extremely likable”.

“What I was really trying to see was what was behind that likability. In small groups he is much more fluent and compelling than he would appear to be were you to judge him from his big media set pieces. When cameras train on him he seems to freeze up, which is an interesting problem for somebody in that position. But when he’s relaxed he’s interesting and has a lot to say,” she said.

Time Magazine has a circulation of 3.3m in the USA and has been described as the most influential mainstream magazine for political coverage in the country.

Australia launches colossal radio telescope to study the origins of our universe

   

In the remote Australian outback, scientists launch the world’s fastest radio telescope which will exponentially increase astronomers’ ability to survey the universe, mapping black holes and shedding new light on the origins of galaxies.

The Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (Askap), with an array of 36 antennas each 40 feet across, started peering into the universe on Friday from a far-flung cattle station in Western Australia state.

The A$152 million (£96m) telescope will “listen” to radio waves from the cosmos that might give astronomers insights into the beginnings of the universe.

The Askap telescope is located in the Shire of Murchison, an area of 19,300 square miles, or the size of Costa Rica, with barely 120 people. The location is ideal because it is “radio quiet”, or lacks man-made radio signals that would interfere with the antennas picking up astronomical radio signals.

Using new “radio cameras” called phased array feeds, the telescope will be able scan the sky much more rapidly than existing radio telescopes and will give the telescope a field of view about 150 times the area of the full Moon.

Askap is also the first building block in the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which will be based in both Australia and South Africa.

Construction of the SKA will begin in 2016 and Australia will add another 60 antennas to its current 36 as part of the project.

The ability of the Askap telescope to scan so much of the universe will generate immense amounts of data.

On its first day in full operation, Askap will collect more data than is currently contained in all current radio astronomy archives or the US Library of Congress.

Using existing radio telescopes, an image of Centaurus A, the closest galaxy to earth with a black hole, would have required some 400 images, two years of observation, and 10,000 hours of computer time. The Askap will take a mere two images and five minutes of observation and computer time.

“The thing that is most telling for me is we have not yet built a computer that can cope with the data we will generate. We are going to have to design and build a super computer way beyond the super computers we have now, way beyond that capability to deal with the amount of data,” said Australia’s Science Minister Chris Evans at the official switch on ceremony.

Askap is already fully booked for the next five years with scientists from all over the world using it for research.

Some of the first areas of enquiry will include a census of all galaxies within two billion light years, which may shed light on how the Milky Way was formed.

Another research project will look for black holes, which astronomers think may be the seeds of galaxies.

New DNA study on Viking legacy in Galway to be examined

 

Vikings may be more commonly associated with the “rape and pillage” reputation they have acquired over the years but a new DNA study is set to examine their long term impact on Galway.

A team of scientists from the Mary Immaculate College in Limerick and the University of Leiceister are looking for specific Galway families to undergo DNA tests in order to discover the genetic and social legacy of the Vikings in the area. The project is looking for volunteers aged 18 or over from a list of established Galway surnames to undergo DNA testing in Kelly’s Bar in Galway on October 21.

The study will reveal whether Galway’s medieval families are genetically linked to Normans or to Vikings, and it will investigate the extent to which the Vikings intermarried with the native population. One of the reasons for choosing people with traditional Galway surnames for the test is the extent to which internal migration has affected the Irish population in recent centuries.

Dr Catherine Swift of Mary Immaculate College revealed that they chose a selection of roughly 80 Galway families using medieval records and documents to try and find people with long term links to the city.

“If they have a surname like Fahey, Kelly or Broderick – these are all Galway names and so if they have been there for three generations or more you are pretty sure that they are from Galway.”

The DNA testing involves a simple cheek swab and volunteers will subsequently receive a free sample of their Y Chromosome results, which are normally quite expensive to obtain. Y Chromosomes are transferred through the male side, as is the familial name, which is why the volunteers must be male.

“Surnames are generally passed down from father to son and so is the Y Chromosome. The hope is that in the Irish context you can do the DNA and the historical investigation. The Irish records from the medieval period are far better than they are in other parts of Europe and the Irish had a particular interest in genealogy as well. That makes Ireland ideal for this project.

“A lot of archaeologists are saying that there were Vikings up and down the west coast. So there is a big question. Just because we don’t have a record of Vikings in Galway doesn’t mean they weren’t here.”

The information gathered in the study will be treated with the strictest confidence and any published information will remain anonymous.

Among the surnames eligible for the test are Broderick, Browne, Burke, Carr, Casey, Clancy, Collins, Donnellan, Lally, Lee, Moran, Morris, Murray, Naughton,, O’Flaherty, Regan, Tighe, Tully and Walsh.