Donie's daily Irish news BLOG

Safe driving on Irish roads urged by survivors as traffic dead remembered

  

Family members of some of those killed in traffic crashes on the State’s roads yesterday asked motorists to do all in their power to prevent further deaths and serious injuries in the run-up to Christmas.

  To mark World Remembrance Day, the Road Safety Authority has developed a “Wall of Remembrance” on its Facebook page. The wall invites people to share memories, light a virtual candle and leave a memorial message for a loved one killed or seriously injured on our roads. Since it was set up last year, more than 600 people have posted messages.

At functions across the country, parents and other family members spoke movingly of how deaths and life-changing injuries have affected them.

Cork woman Kathleen Kirby, who lost sons Paul (20) and David (18), said Christmas was one of the “hardest times of the year”, after she attended a memorial Mass in the city.

“My two boys were just a mile and a half away from home. Be really careful. Slow down,” she said, addressing her words in particular to young men whom she said were being “killed by the dozen”.

Speaking earlier in Dublin, Marjorie Flood, who lost her son Mark nearly five years ago, said her family did not get over the sudden loss of their son and brother. Mark was 19 when he was killed after a night out in Dunshaughlin, Co Meath.

“The hardest thing is when people ask you how many children you have,” said Marjorie. “I reply that I have three boys, but the next question is what are they doing now and I don’t know what to say.”

In Dublin on Friday, the group Promoting Awareness, Responsibility and Care on our Roads launched Finding Your Way, a guide for families of those killed or injured.

The RSA said 23,227 people have been killed on the State’s roads since records began – the population of a medium-sized town. The Garda said that this year 149 families have lost a family member on the roads.

Ireland’s Enterprise boards to get €3.78m to fund and create more jobs

 

Enterprise boards to get €3.78m in extra funding to create jobs

The Irish Government is to provide 30 county and city enterprise boards around Ireland with an extra €3.78m funding injection before the end of the year to help create around 500 jobs in small businesses.

The Minister for Small Business John Perry, TD, said today that the €3.78m will be allocated to 30 county and city enterprise boards (CEBs) to fund job creation.

This year, the 35 CEBs had already been given €15m in funding. The additional funding is being provided by the Government in response to specific requests from CEBs for more funding to help fund projects.

“This is the second year in succession that the CEBs have indicated that the demand for their services is so strong that they need additional funding to respond to the needs of micro-enterprises in their area,” said Perry.

He said the funding would be used by the CEBs to provide direct capital assistance to companies, as well as mentoring and training, in order to help create 505 jobs.

Of the 35 CEBs that are to get funding, Dublin City is to get €400,000 to help create 30 jobs, Mayo is to get €105,000 to help create 20 jobs, and Donegal is to get €340,000 to help create 57 jobs.

Ulster Bank receives 2m record fine from Irish Central Bank

    

The Ulster Bank has been fined 1.96m euros (£1.57m) for breaches of rules in how it must run its operations.

The Irish Central Bank fine is a record and is a result of breaches in both capital and liquidity requirements.

Banks must keep certain levels of capital – their investments – and effectively manage liquidity – their cash – to ensure customers are protected in a crisis.

It is the job of the Central Bank to police the strict rules.

It is the first time the Irish regulator has taken action against any bank over its capital requirements and only the third time the bank has acted in relation to liquidity issues.

The chief executive of Ulster Bank Jim Brown acknowledged that the settlement was significant and the contraventions had been unacceptable.

But he said the bank had itself identified the breaches and had put measures in place to ensure no repeat.

The Central Bank said customers had not been at risk but the penalty imposed reflected the importance the bank placed on ensuring rules were followed.

NUI Galway to lead €6m research project into stem cell therapy for diabetes

 

Stem cell research: an NUI Galway project will assess if stem cells can tackle glucose levels and complications of diabetes, including diabetic ulcers and eye, nerve, heart and kidney and bone damage

Could a particular type of adult stem cell offer a useful therapy for diabetes? An EU-funded project being led by NUI Galway hopes to find out.

The €6 million Reddstar project will assess whether the stem cells can tackle glucose levels and various complications of diabetes, including diabetic ulcers and eye, nerve, heart and kidney and bone damage.

The approach centres on a specific adult stem-cell population owned by Orbsen Therapeutics, a spin-out from the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Regenerative Medicine Institute (Remedi) at NUI Galway.

Initially, the project will develop ways to grow the bone-marrow-derived stem cells in a way that is useful for trials, according to company co-founder and Remedi director Prof Tim O’Brien.

The cells will then be tested in several preclinical models of diabetic complications at centres in Galway, Belfast, Munich, Berlin and Porto.

Then the plan is to select one complication for which the adult stem cells will be assessed in human trials in Denmark.

The three-year EU funding will support nine jobs in Ireland, five of which will be in Orbsen Therapeutics, according to CEO Brian Molloy, who says the project should help to build Ireland’s status as a hub for cell therapy development and commercialisation.

“Whilst wins such as the Reddstar programme are fantastic for us, we need to continue to develop and advance our product,” he says.

“The potential is enormous, but we will only realise that potential if we continue to press on with our RD programme. To that end we are currently raising funds and are looking to raise up to €2 million from private investors.”

Meanwhile healthy Irish news:

New Irish Diabetes care programme to start soon

  

A major new national diabetes care programme is on target to commence in the coming weeks, starting with the recruitment of 17 specialist nurses, according to Health Minister James Reilly.

Job interviews begin this week for the new diabetes nurse specialists, who will support the phased roll-out of the long-awaited diabetes programme.

This initiative, which is the first of several HSE-led chronic disease treatment programmes to be rolled out, will see diabetes patients following a well-defined care pathway based on their type of diabetes and the level of complications.

The central aim of the national programme is to ‘save lives, eyes and limbs of patients with diabetes’. Other disease-group programmes under development include stroke, heart failure, and asthma.

 Diabetes Action recently accused the HSE of failing to care for diabetes patients, citing new statistics that revealed an increase to 781 diabetes-related lower-limb amputations in Ireland in 2010/2011- a 20% increase on the previous two-year period.

The condition of Diabetes is now the single biggest cause of amputation, stroke, blindness and kidney failure in Ireland, according to a spokesperson for Diabetes Action.
Minister Reilly said under the new model of care,  those with uncomplicated type 2 diabetes would be managed in primary care only, while patients with complicated type 2 Diabetes will be managed both by their GPs and in hospitals by specialists.

All patients with type 1 diabetes, genetically-caused diabetes, secondary causes of diabetes, post-transplant diabetes and diabetes in pregnancy will be managed in the hospital setting only.

Minister Reilly was speaking at the recent National Primary Care Conference in Mallow, Co Cork.

It is estimated that there are currently between 3,000 to 4,000 children and young adults under 16 years of age with diabetes in Ireland.  Over 90% have type 1 diabetes but there are an increasing number of young patients developing type 2 diabetes.

The incidence of type 1 diabetes is also increasing by about 2 to 3% per year and experts anticipate that over the next 10 to 15 years the incidence of type 1 diabetes in Ireland will double.

Type 1 diabetes is a particularly complex condition in children and young adults and so it is recommended that their care be delivered in a multidisciplinary setting with access to a consultant paediatric endocrinologist and other diabetes healthcare specialists.

The Irish state must set up an inquiry why our banks collapsed

     

We need an inquiry into the banking collapse so that those responsible are held accountable.

Not all bankers are guilty. The revelations over the past couple of weeks about lavish pay and pensions for senior bankers, both current and retired, has given a new lease of life to the sizeable ‘Bash the Bankers’ movement. Since not every person employed by a bank can be held responsible for the calamity visited on the country by them, it was inevitable that some people should spring to their defence, or at least begin to argue for some modicum of understanding or even forgiveness.

Both former Taoiseach John Bruton and Transport Minister Leo Varadkar have been trying, without much success, to inject a little balance into the coverage.

The Irish banking bust, measured in terms of its cost relative to national income, is one of the largest which has ever occurred anywhere in the world. It was also a peculiarly old-fashioned bank bust, based essentially on lending money to people unable to pay it back.

This is the way banks went bust in the 19th Century. A more modern bust would have involved speculative foreign currency exposures, fancy derivatives, even a spot of fraud and intrigue. But the Irish bust was as dull as ditch water: every bank in the country went under mainly through lending money to Irish people in Ireland, an activity in which, collectively, they have been engaged for centuries.

Banks operate the payments system, raise money from depositors and other lenders, buy and sell foreign currency for customers, sell insurance products and undertake a long list of other financial services.

The staff involved in these lines of work must be pretty blameless: they did not make any dud loans, since this was not their responsibility. Nor can the staff engaged in managing premises, IT systems, personnel departments or catering have had much to do with the demise of the banking system.

The people responsible for the debacle, to be clear, were those engaged directly in lending. They constitute a minority, possibly a small minority, of all bank staff and those senior enough to have been making policy cannot number more than a few hundred for the whole of the banking system. It must be galling for the others to listen to the incessant and indiscriminating denunciations of ‘bankers’ as some sort of pariah profession.

Our banks were brought down by poor lending policies, along with poor management of their funding arrangements. The number of people directly involved in these errors, including boards and senior management throughout the bubble, is limited.

Even within these groups there may well have been people urging caution, only to be ignored. People outside the banks made errors too, including small numbers of regulators and external advisers. It is entirely possible that some of the people in all of these groups were misled by colleagues and committed venial rather than mortal sins, or none at all.

But the media and the general public must vent their anger at ‘bankers’ as a class, since they have little alternative. The reason is straightforward: there has been no proper banking inquiry. Until there is, nobody knows where responsibility lies.

Several people at senior level in Anglo Irish, the most costly of the failed banks, are facing civil litigation and criminal inquiries and have been pursued diligently by the media. In the other domestic banks, one of which, AIB, has cost the taxpayers a sum not far behind the catastrophic cost of Anglo, there does not appear to be evidence of legal breaches. These banks just managed to destroy their businesses and helped to bankrupt the State.

Several foreign-owned banks, including Bank of Scotland (Ireland), ACC (Rabobank), Ulster (Royal Bank of Scotland) and National Irish (Danske) have also experienced dreadful loan

losses, with the tab picked up by foreign shareholders rather than by the Irish Exchequer.

Unfortunately, nobody has been held personally responsible in any of these banks, although it is true that numerous senior managers have retired early and boards have been replaced. But a veil of silence has been drawn around what actually happened. Who screwed up, and when?

It is clear that loose lending policies go back a long way. Which individuals in the various banks made the policy decisions that led to the herd following Anglo and Irish Nationwide over the cliff?

Until that question is answered, as it has been in other countries which have had banking collapses, the indiscriminate banker-bashing will continue. The innocent cannot be identified, never mind forgiven, until the guilty put their hands up, or are located by an impartial process of inquiry.

It is lamentable, four long years after the balloon went up, that so little personal responsibility has been taken, or assigned, for the collapse of the Irish banking system. Excessive pay and excessive pensions are legitimate issues for the media to pursue but they are secondary.

While the continuing eurozone failures have made things worse for this country, and while we might have been better off had we chosen not to join the single currency in the first place, it is unarguable that this is largely a ‘made-in-Ireland’ crisis.

The easy-credit virus infected most of the developed world but the Irish version was a stand-out. The first line of defence against a credit bubble is the banking system itself. Prudent banks do not vaporise because of lending errors. Most banks, in most countries, are still standing without taxpayer bailouts.

The second line of defence, the supervision system, failed dismally. Finally the government pressed the wrong button on September 28, 2008, when the blanket guarantee was introduced.

All of these are Irish, not European, mistakes.

It is reasonable to fault the unhelpful responses from European partners, but pointless to pretend that the Irish banking disaster was just collateral damage from external events. There is still no thorough narrative about the credit bubble, and particularly about the behaviour of the individual banks,

The principal issue is accountability. What happened, in each bank? We know quite a lot about what happened in Anglo, will likely learn more about Irish Nationwide, but all because of action in the courts and journalistic diligence, not as a result of a proper public inquiry.

How about Allied Irish, one of the two ‘pillar’ banks and an important Irish institution with nearly 200 years of history, all but 10 of which were marked by caution in lending? Why did AIB embark on a lending competition with the rogue Anglo Irish? Who took the key decisions, and when? Did dissident voices go unheeded?

The banks themselves have declined the job of explanation, not least to their own shareholders. The shareholders have been wiped out, and rightly so. That’s capitalism.

For publicly quoted companies like AIB and Bank of Ireland to see their share prices drop by 99 per cent without a full accounting to the owners is quite simply breathtaking. If the boards of these companies have undertaken a full internal inquiry into the lending calamities, they should publish these reports promptly. If they have not, they should explain the omission.

Thousands of people around the country owned shares individually in Allied Irish and Bank of Ireland, and every member of a funded pension scheme owned some indirectly. That means hundreds of thousands of citizens.

These people are deserving of no compensation. They must take their losses. But they have been offered no explanation either.

If the banks will not account for what happened, the Government must fill the gap. Economists at the IMF in Washington maintain a databank on banking collapses around the world. The Irish collapse will feature prominently in future editions, for the simple reason that it has been one of the most destructive financial disasters to have ever occurred, anywhere in the world.

The absence of accountability for the banking collapse, given its sheer scale, is quite remarkable. To be fair to the Government, they held a referendum in October 2011 to confer investigative powers on parliament to inquire properly into the banking debacle. They managed to lose it (there seems to be a sizeable No vote on just about any proposition) through complacency and a well-timed lawyers’ ambush.

The referendum should be held again. The lawyers might explain, this time round, why the representatives of the public should not be trusted to inquire into the greatest economic disaster to have befallen the State since its foundation.

Ash die-back confirmed at five Irish locations

    

A young Common Ash Tree (above left) with wilting leaves shows the symptoms of dieback

The first outbreak of ash dieback has been confirmed in Northern Ireland, agriculture chiefs have revealed.

The tree disease Chalara was identified in imported young saplings at five sites in Co Down and Co Antrim.

Statutory notices have been served on owners of the plantations requiring the destruction of around 5,000 affected ash saplings and associated plant debris.

A number of other sites are also being investigated as part of an ongoing surveillance programme.

The Northern Ireland Minister for Agricultural and Rural Development Michelle O’Neill said agriculture officials in the Irish Republic had been alerted about the outbreak.

Land owned by the National Trust at Runkerry, close to the famous Giant’s Causeway on the North Antrim coast, is believed to be one of the affected areas.

Ms O’Neill added: “Legislation was introduced north and south last month banning the import and movement of ash plants for planting from infected areas.

“However, we must remain vigilant as this disease still poses a very serious threat. I would appeal for a responsible approach over the coming season. I encourage all stakeholders to be alert for signs of this disease and report findings.”

Monday's news Ireland Blog by Donie

Study say’s red meat and butter 

‘could raise Alzheimer’s risk’

        
High levels of saturated fats were linked with poorer memories in new recent studies.

Eating too much red meat, butter and other foods that contain high levels of saturated fats could increase the risk of Alzheimer’s, according to a recent study.

US researchers linked to Harvard University found older women who ate lots of food high in saturated fats had worse memories than others.

By contrast, those who ate more monounsaturated fats – found in olive oil, sunflower oil, seeds, nuts and avocados – had better memories.

Dr Oliva Okereke, from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., which is affiliated to Harvard Medical School, said: “When looking at changes in cognitive function, what we found is that the total amount of fat intake did not really matter, but the type of fat did.”

She and fellow researchers made their conclusions after looking at results from 6,000 women over 65, who carried out a series of mental tests over four years and answered questionnaires about their diet and lifestyle.

Dr Okereke added: “Substituting in the good fat in place of the bad fat is a fairly simple dietary modification that could help prevent decline in memory.”

Having a poor memory can be a harbinger of Alzheimer’s in elderly people, although the former by no means always leads to the latter.

The report is published in the journal Annals of Neurology.

It follows other research showing a link between high cholesterol and a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.

Bullying ‘costs Ireland over €100m every year’

    

The cost of bullying in schools could be over €100m a year, a campaign group believes.

The National Anti-Bullying Coalition, set up last year by parents, teachers, and other concerned people, said its free programme for second-level schools had a 90% success rate in resolving bullying cases.

Founder Monica Monahan said the costs to the justice system of unreformed bullying students were about €30m a year, as 60% have a criminal conviction by age 24 and almost one third have three convictions.

She said the health-sector costs of 9,600 cases of self-harm due to bullying every year are €16m, based on an average three-night hospital stay in each case.

Adding at least €40m for substitution costs to cover teachers absent because of bullying, increased demand on education and health services because of students absent from school, and the costs for parents through lost time at work or moving schools, Ms Monahan said the total cost to society exceeded €100m a year.

“Bullying is a social plague that is incubating in our schools and leaking out into society and our workplaces. We can no longer be a nation of bystanders while our children or our friends struggle to endure the unendurable,” she said.

The group’s policy is for reform rather than blame and Sean Fallon, who runs its anti-bullying campaign for schools, said it had a 90% success rate in resolving bullying cases. He said when students saw the fairness of reform instead of blame and punishment, they were more likely to reject bullying and to report it.

He said the only cost was initial training for teachers but after that it just required inclusion in school timetables for modules that taught peer meditation, conflict resolution strategies, positive parenting training by schools, and other measures.

The forum heard 140 that second-level schools have undergone a one-day support programme since 2007 for the social, personal, and health education (SPHE) curriculum which covers the problem of bullying. Pat Courtney, the anti-bullying co-ordinator in the Department of Education SPHE support service, said these and other schools which adopted a systemic approach were usually best equipped to deal with bullying.

The working group of officials from the Department of Education and Department of Children and Youth Affairs will focus initially on strategies and guidelines for schools around homophobic bullying. It is also likely to examine racist bullying, cyber bullying, and bullying of students with disabilities.

* Submissions for consideration can be made up to June 29 by the working group, along with the forum inputs yesterday.

NUI Galway Researchers battle against cancer on many fronts

    

In both prostate cancer and breast cancer, researchers at NUI Galway are attempting to develop treatments which will go some way to treating those patients who respond poorly to existing therapies.

Cancer research at NUI Galway:  there are four reasons which are still a matter of conjecture and research, the people in the west of Ireland have significantly higher rates of breast and prostate cancer than the rest of the Irish population.

So many families in the west of Ireland have been affected by these cancers that it has proved to be a catalyst for an ambitious programme of research based at NUI Galway.

NUI Galway identified biomedical science and engineering as a major priority as far back as the 1990s with a view, not to “blue-skies” thinking, but to bringing forward practical applications which will benefit people suffering from cancer and other intractable illnesses.

The National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science (NCBES) set up at the turn of the millennium is the present hub of an endeavour to understand cancer – the most malignant of all foes.

In both prostate cancer and breast cancer, two of the commonest forms of cancer in Ireland, researchers at NUI Galway are attempting to develop treatments which will go some way to treating those patients who respond poorly to existing therapies.

The teams working on cancer at NUI Galway have access to an estimated one million people through UCHG, which is one of the eight centres of excellence for cancer in Ireland and the only one in the west. There is also a well-established bio-banking system which is a valuable source of tissue for testing new therapies.

The scale of the ambition in biomedicine is exemplified in plans for a €11.5 million Clinical Research Facility/Translational Research Facility in a four-storey building on the grounds of UCHG, construction on which is due to start this year.

It will ensure that patients get access to the newest treatments being developed locally.

A sign of NUI Galway’s growing success in the field of cancer research is the recent award given by the Irish Cancer Society to Dr Róisín Dwyer for her work in developing stem cells which carry cancer drugs to the site of breast tumours.

Successful experiments with cancer cells in the laboratory on mice have shown that the stem cells deliver the drugs to the site of the tumour successfully. Such a breakthrough, if repeated on humans, could lead to breast cancer therapies which are less invasive and more successful than current therapies.

Dr Dwyer’s team can see the drug is successful using an imaging system developed in partnership with the University of Arizona.

The approach has been shown to reduce tumours to a fifth of their original size in mice and though a human treatment is a long way off, there have been no side-effects at all.

Galway has long had a tradition in breast-cancer research, stretching back to the foundation of the National Breast Cancer Research Institute (NBCRI) in the city more than 20 years ago.

This was set up by a group of volunteers at a time when breast cancer was a much more deadly disease than it is now, although it is still a major killer.

Like other Irish universities, NUI Galway has developed a tight-knit approach between town and gown, but it is not just the town of Galway but the whole region that is involved.

Recently, the NBCRI handed over a cheque for €1 million for the Clinical Research Facility. Money has been raised from many quarters, ranging from individuals who just want to help out to the Taoiseach, who has participated in many fundraising events.

NBCRI medical director Prof Michael Kerin says the elevated levels of breast cancer in the west of Ireland are a major focus of their studies.

One of the strategies of the research is to be able to assess the risks of breast cancer through the individual genetic profile of the women involved.

“We’ve identified a lot of genetic aberrations specific to the west of Ireland population, which are tiny changes in the chromosomes,” he explained.

He believes such an approach might mean that a “broad brush” breast screening programme could be replaced by something more targeted.

Last year NUI Galway with the support of the Galway University Foundation established a Prostate Cancer Institute directed by Prof Frank Sullivan. Prof Sullivan is at the coal-face of treatment in the field, seeing between 10 and 15 men a week who have been diagnosed with the condition.

Though outcomes are good for men who are diagnosed early, it is often forgotten that some 550 Irish men die from the disease every year. Most of those die from metastasized prostate cancer which has spread from the prostate organ to the bone.

Prof Sullivan and the director of laboratory research Dr Sharon Glynn, who previously worked at the US National Cancer Institute, are engaged in a worldwide effort to find out why cancer metastasizes (spreads) to the bone and on to other organs in the body.

Dr Glynn explains: “If you can understand that interaction, if there is a particular receptor that facilitates that reaction, you can potentially make a drug against it.”

It is, as Prof Sullivan says, “an enormous challenge”. There are already effective treatments for metastasized prostate cancers, but it can always return and there is no cure.

At present, the institute is testing two drugs from a German company called Elara and an American company called Cognosci based in North Carolina.

The researchers are also looking at potential biomarkers as to why certain men are easily cured of prostate cancer and others die from the disease.

Prof Frank Giles, the newly appointed director of the clinical research facility in Galway, says it is a tremendous time to be involved in cancer research. He is currently involved with a two-pill trial for a rare but devastating type of cancer called meleofibrosis (a form of leukemia).

NUI Galway is involved in medical research at a time when therapies are moving from a “one-size-fits-all approach” to approaches based on the genetic make-up of individuals.

“Our role is to deliver therapies that work and are seen to work. It is an exciting time from the patients’ point of view, a more productive time than we have ever seen before,” he said.

“What’s on our list of protocols are beginning to include viruses redirected against cancers, our own stem cells and vaccines which have changed the behaviour of infectious diseases. We have the same ambitions in cancer.”

Prof Kerin believes the work being carried out at NUI Galway is comparable with anywhere in the world.

“We have a process in place where we are trying to bring the whole therapeutic and research strategy around cancer to marry up the clinical services with the science,” he said. “That is really working. It is taking off here better than any place, in my view, in the British Isles.”

Utility bills may rise after a No vote, says Ibec chief Danny McCoy

   

Gas and electricity bills could go up in the aftermath of a No vote for the fiscal treaty, the director general of employers’ group Ibec has warned.

Danny McCoy was speaking at a business briefing on the referendum in Clery’s department store in Dublin yesterday, where the group argued for a resounding Yes vote on May 31st.

He said although the State could not currently borrow on international bond markets, utility companies such as Electric Ireland, Bord Gáis and Bord na Móna could still raise money on the bond markets.

“If there’s a No vote, there will be less confidence in Irish companies, it will be more expensive for them to raise money and we could see our domestic bills going up. It may not happen, but it could.”

He said the economy was showing “real signs of recovery”, and a Yes vote would ensure this continued.

PJ Timmins, chief executive of Clery’s, said consumer confidence remained low, however it would return.

“Re-establishment of confidence is vital. We need people to feel confident about investing in their homes, investing in their wardrobes and to become more generous in their giving.”

6-12 month HSE operations waiting list increases by  25% since July 2011

  

The number of people waiting between six and 12 months for hospital treatment has increased by just over one quarter since last July, when Health Minister James Reilly set up his Special Delivery Unit to cut waiting lists.

Latest figures show that while the number of people waiting over 12 months for treatment has decreased substantially since then, there have been significant increases in the numbers in other waiting time categories.

The numbers waiting between six and 12 months for procedures has increased by 26%, from 9,529 to 12,001, between July of last year and the end of March this year.

The number of patients waiting between six and nine months for treatment has incresed by a massive 39% to 8,318 in the same period, while the total waiting between nine and 12 months has gone up 4% to 3,683.

In the three to six months waiting time category, there has been a 10% increase to 17,111, while the numbers wasiting between zero and three months for procedures has gone up by 6% to 29,969.

Overall, the numbers waiting over three months in all waiting time categories for treatment has increased by 7% since July 2011, to 29,668.

Including those waiting under three months for treatment, total waiting lists have jumped by 6% between July 2011 and March 2012, to 59,637.

However, the numbers waiting over 12 months for procedures has been reduced by 80%, and at the end of March stood at 556.

The numbers waiting over 12 months was supposed to have been reduced to zero by the end of last year, under SDU targets. Hospitals now face fines of they continue to have patients waiting over 12 months for procedures on their lists.

Minister Reilly has set a new maximum waiting time target of nine months to be achieved by hospitals by September of this year.

A spokesman for the Minister told irishhealth.com that the emphasis with the waiting list policy to date has been to reduce the number of longest waiters.

This, as anticipated, had led to more people waiting for shorter periods of time, but waiting times would be progressively reduced.

The spokesman told irishhealth.com that €40 million would be spent this year on reducing treatment waiting lists, while a further €10.5 million would be spent on reducing ED trolley waits.

A further €5.5 million is to be spent on improving outpatient performance while €6 million was being spent on reducing GI endoscopy, including colonoscopy, waiting times.

The SDU is working with the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) under Minister Reilly’s waiting list and ED initiative, and has NTPF funding at its disposalto reduce waiting times.

Under the new arrangements, the NTPF no longer, as before, routinely offers treatments to patients on waiting lists for over three months.

Under the new policy, fewer procedures to clear lists are being carried out in the private hospital sector.

According to the spokesman, current policy to reduce lists includes using any spare capacity in public hospitals, getting patients treated in other public hospitals or moving patients from one consultant list to another within hospitals.

The Minister’s SDU has had some success in reducing emergency department trolley waits, although trolley numbers remain high in a number of major hospitals.

Minister Reilly recently came in for criticism on the amount being spent by his Department on outside experts to help clear waiting lists and trolley waits.

The contracts of UK experts Martin Connor and Lis Nixon alone will cost the taxpayer €972,000 over the next three years.

BWG acquires retail and grocery rival Morris Brothers of Convoy

  

IRISH WHOLESALE and retail grocery group BWG has acquired Donegal-based rival Morris Brothers for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 1952, Morris Brothers is a family-run wholesale and retail grocery company based in Convoy, Co Donegal.

It has annual revenues of about €30 million, is profitable and employs 30 staff.

The company’s owners, Fintan Morris and Joseph Morris, and its employees are remaining with the business.

Morris Brothers services more than 450 retail businesses across the northwest of Ireland.

BWG said the deal would strengthen its wholesale operations, especially in the Donegal, Sligo, Cavan, Mayo and Roscommon regions.

It will also provide the enlarged group with increased buying power.

Commenting on the deal yesterday, Leo Crawford, group chief executive of BWG, said: “It’s a statement of intent that we are growing our business.”

Mr Crawford said trading “remains challenging” in the Irish grocery market as Government-imposed austerity continues to dampen consumer confidence here.

“We’re reasonably pleased with how the business is trading but the grocery sector is not a market showing growth.

“The question is, have we reached the bottom or not? I wouldn’t say with 100 per cent certainty that there will be a recovery next year.”

Mr Crawford said BWG wholesale revenues in the Republic declined by 3 per cent last year to about €1 billion.

“We were happy with that, given the tough market and given the price deflation,” he said.

BWG supplies goods to a large network of Spar and Mace convenience stores.

It also now operates 23 cash-and-carry outlets around the country following the Morris deal.

It directly employs 900 people and more than 20,000 staff through its network of shops.

In a statement, Fintan Morris, a director of Morris Brothers, said he was “delighted” to be part of BWG and that he looked forward to working with the company to “sustain continued growth in our business”