Donie's daily Irish news BLOG

John Perry’s Bank problems & debts is indicative of many Irish business people’s difficulties

 

THE TAOISEACH ENDA KENNY SAYS HE HAS SPOKEN WITH JOHN PERRY ABOUT THE JUNIOR MINISTER’S FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES. JOHN PERRY HAS SIX WEEKS TO FIND A MEANS OF PAYING ALMOST €2.5M IN DEBTS.

Speaking on Mid-West Radio in Mayo this morning, Mr Kenny said Mr Perry was committed to continuing his work as Small Business Minister.

“Obviously he has worked exceptionally hard in terms of his ministry. He’s got a court judgment to deal with here now in respect of the next five or six weeks,” he said.

Mr Kenny said Mr Perry’s case was “indicative” of a number of business people across the country who have got into difficulty.

“I don’t really want to say any more about John Perry’s particular problem. I spoke to him on Sunday and obviously they are working on that for the future,” he said.

On Monday, Mr Perry and his wife Marie consented to a judgment of €2.47m against them at the Commercial Court over unpaid loans.

Danske Bank issued the loans in October 2011, to be repaid by by November 2012, to restructure existing loans and an overdraft account and provide €25,000 towards tax affairs.

The loans were secured by first legal mortgages over property including Perry’s Hardware store and the Stone Park restaurant at Main Street, Ballymote, Co Sligo.

The judge entered judgment for €2.47m but granted the couple a stay to September 2 on its execution and registration.

Almost 90% of Irish homeowners have paid the property tax

   

Some 89% OF ELIGIBLE HOMEOWNERS in Ireland HAVE ALREADY PAID THEIR PROPERTY TAX. 

The high compliance rate means that €175m has been collected by Revenue. A further €60m has been committed in phased payments.

Dublin City and Louth have the lowest payment rates for the tax, at 85%.

The figures are based on Revenue’s estimates of 1.96 million properties being eligible for the tax.

Revenue will now begin writing to homeowners who have not paid the tax.

“They have 7 days from the date of the letter to file their return(s) on-line to prevent Revenue issuing instructions to their employer to deduct the LPT estimate from their wages or occupational pension,” it said in a statement.

Food industry calls on government to speed up introduction of grocery code

   

Lobby group Food and Drink Industry Ireland (FDII) is calling on the Government to speed up the introduction of a statutory code of practice for the grocery sector. 

The FDII will meet with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Marine Simon Coveney today and the group hopes to stress the urgent need for the legislation.

The organisation says the code, which aims to bring balance and fairness between suppliers and retailers, has been promised by Government, but the required legislation has not yet been finalised.

“Across Europe, authorities are taking steps to better regulate trading relationships to stop large retailers making unfair demands of suppliers,” FDII director Paul Kelly said.

“The government said legislation to introduce an Irish code would be published in the final quarter of 2012, but we are still waiting.

“The introduction of this code is critical for the sustainability of the Irish agri-food and grocery sectors and its ability to provide high-quality Irish products, choice and convenience to the Irish consumer at fair prices,” he added.

“The code must be properly enforced by an objective adjudicator with powers of investigation.”

It’s time to tell Germans we have had enough of this austerity nonsense

   

The painful job of thinking is what makes the difference between doing the right thing and simply doing the thing that everyone else is doing just because the conventional view concludes that it is right despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

The great American economist JK Galbraith once said summing up why many people refuse to change their views, particularly if they have invested much time, effort and credibility into establishing that view. The following quotation from Galbraith sums up what’s happening in the policy making of the insiders in Ireland: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

The conventional view on the Irish economy is that we must stick with the programme and that we must continue to grind down wages and prices, squeeze demand and raise taxes. This we have been told for the past five years is the only way and if we stick to this approach, the economy will rebound vigorously.

This approach shows that the people who run the country have actually no idea about how a small economy works and also have an entirely invented narrative which has never been evidenced anywhere in the world. The same story is being spun to the people of Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Ultimately, the same will happen in France because it is a creditor’s view of the world imposed by the creditor nations of Europe against the debtor nations.

  The flaw is that for an economy to grow, aggressive budget cuts need to be offset by a simultaneous massive easing of monetary policy – as was seen in Reagan’s America of the early 1980s, Thatcher’s Britain in the mid 1980s or indeed Haughey’s Ireland of the late 1980s. Without massive monetary easing, the economy will seize up in the face of rising taxes, cutting expenditure and an overvalued exchange rate at a time when the banks are not lending.

This is the stuff the average honours student doing economics for theLeaving Cert should know. Not surprisingly, therefore, with broken banks, the Irish economy is not responding positively to the present policy, in fact it is going in the opposite way.

Income is falling, domestic retail sales are on the floor, unemployment and emigration are rising and now we realise that the debt to income ratio – the one statistic that the Government seems to focus on as a litmus test for the success of the policy – is going the wrong way. Ireland’s debt-to-income ratio has actually risen by 12pc this year to 125pc of national income.

The reason for the deterioration in this ratio is straightforward. If yourdebts are greater than 100pc of your income and the growth in your income is less that the annual rate of interest you have to pay on this debt, the ratio of debt to income has to rise. Either you need to get your growth rate up or your burden of debt down. So what’s it going to be?

Before we answer that question, it is crucial to disentangle cause and effect. At the moment the conventional wisdom is suggesting that if we can only get the budget deficit down to some level, we will be okay. The logical implication of this approach is that the budget deficit is the cause of our problems. Therefore, conventional wisdom indicates that reducing the deficit is the solution to Ireland’s woes.

But what if the budget deficit is the consequence – not the cause – of our distress? A much more persuasive angle is to see the deficit as the democratic consequence of a massive balance sheet recession, where the savings rate of Irish people and companies has risen massively due to the collapse of the property market, negative equity and the general slump in confidence.

As savings rise, demand falls. If the Government doesn’t spend in the economy, the slump in demand will cause unemployment to rise even faster.

Proponents of the present policy don’t dispute this but they claim that foreigners will buy Irish goods in sufficient bulk to make up for the collapse in local demand. The implication of this would be that the Irish current account surplus would have to expand at a rate quicker than the Government is cutting spending just for the economy to stand still.

But this is not happening. In truth, the budget deficit is the consequence not the cause of the present malaise.

Saying the budget deficit is the consequence is not the same as saying that the State should run a deficit into perpetuity. But when a country is suffering from a balance sheet recession, with an overvalued currency and a banking system that is dysfunctional, rapid tax increases and spending cuts will make the situation worse.

It is quite obvious that our policy makers and the EU bosses, who are simply looking to keep the entire EMU project alive though all sorts of monetary tricks and sleights of hand, are falling into the Galbraith trap of avoiding the painful job of thinking.

No one is saying that there is a quick fix, but we must entertain the idea of an alternative involving “parking” huge amounts of domestic debt, dealing with our creditors fairly and leaving this currency union which has brought only disaster to Ireland both in the upswing with far too much credit cascading into the country and in the downturn with far too little credit available to refinance the country.

Either we leave the euro and instill a new, much weaker Irish currency, which reflects the much weaker Irish economy or we seek common cause with the other debtor countries within the euro. A united coalition of debtor countries to say to Germany “enough of this nonsense we must mutualise debts now, you take a large haircut, let’s fix this problem right away and stop pussy footing around waiting for your election results”.

Europe’s economy is seizing up and the rest of the world is moving on. Are we to be sacrificed on the barbarous relic of yesterday’s monetary union and the whims of the German electorate just because we don’t want to involve ourselves in the painful job of thinking?

How much more evidence do we need to at least begin the process of doubting the conventional view?

Prostate cancer probe is world first for Irish Cancer Society

  

A world first in prostate cancer identification and treatment is being launched by the Irish Cancer Society in collaboration with awareness month next N/Movember.

The €1.75m project, which is the brainchild of cancer expert Prof John Fitzpatrick, will collect information about every man diagnosed with prostate cancer in this country, evaluate their treatment and include their opinion on the treatments.

The aim of Irish Prostate Cancer Outcomes Research (IPCOR) is to lead research that will improve the care and survival of patients.

Prostate cancer affects 3,000 new patients here each year and leads to 500 deaths annually. Ireland has the highest rate of 30 European countries.

COLLABORATION

The IPCOR is being run by the Irish Cancer Society in collaboration with the men’s health awareness group Movember and will be funded with €350,000 a year for up to five years.

Prof Fitzpatrick said the collaboration with Movember was particularly important.

  Movember campaigns are where men grow moustaches for the month of November to raise awareness and money for men’s health issues.

“For reasons that are not clear, the incidence of prostate cancer here is quite high”, says Prof Fitzpatrick, of the Irish Cancer Society.

“The beauty of Ireland is that it is small enough to do a countrywide study where everybody treated for prostate cancer in the country will be part of this.

“This is the first time this has been done anywhere in the world for any cancer.”

How to put a man on Mars by Professor Pike

 

Professor Tom Pike from Imperial College London says it is inconceivable that humans will not travel to the red planet in the future.

The Curiosity rover mission’s two-year investigatory mission to explore Mars has fired up interest in space travel and has come as a much-welcome success for a space agency beleaguered by budget cuts and the recent cancellation of its 30-year-old space shuttle programme.

“Since the 1970s we have gone no further than the earth orbit, in the meantime robotic exploration has gone to all regions to corner of the solar system,” said Professor Pike.

“There is a real contest between human exploration which is stuck in a rut and robotic exploration which is flourishing.

We wanted to combine the two, to have robots and humans working together.”

Prof Pike along with his colleagues at Imperial College London have explored the various scientific challenges that a mission to Mars might encounter and drew up plans for the best solutions for a new documentary for the BBC.

They propose sending a robotic team and return vehicle in advance of a manned mission. These robots could mine the Martian surface for water ice in the northern parts of the planet, which could then be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel.

This would mean the manned space flight would only have to carry have the fuel, making it lighter and easier to launch, and would enable the astronauts would have a fully fuelled spacecraft waiting on Mars for the return flight.

Water and food would have to be carried with them on the flight, but water would be constantly recycled and would used to reconstitute dried food.

Gravity is also a problem for any manned space flight since the astronauts would have to spend up to eight months on board the spacecraft as they travelled to Mars, during which time their muscles and bones would deteriorate due to weightlessness.

Prof Pike suggests building a spacecraft that is capable of creating its own artificial gravity through spinning. This would enable the astronauts to become acclimatised to Mars, where the gravity is around 40% of Earth’s.

“We are going to get to Mars at some point. It is inconceivable that we will be sitting looking at that planet in 1000 years having not sent anyone there,” he said.

Donie's news Ireland daily BLOG

FG minister of state John Perry and his wife consent to a €2.47m court judgment

  

MARIE AND JOHN PERRY HAD SOUGHT A THREE-MONTH STAY TO ALLOW FOR RESTRUCTURING PROPOSALS TO BE PUT TO THE BANK

Fine Gael Minister of State John Perry and his wife have consented to judgment for €2.47m being entered against them at the Commercial Court over unpaid loans.

Counsel for Mr Perry and his wife Marie told Mr Justice Peter Kelly today that they contradict several claims in affidavits of Danske Bank.

However, they accepted they had no bona fide defence to judgment and were consenting to judgment in the amount of €2,474,346.

The judge entered judgment in that amount and also granted the couple a stay on execution and registration of the judgment until 2 September.

Counsel for the couple had sought a three-month stay to allow for restructuring proposals to be advanced by them to the bank.

Rossa Fanning, for the bank, opposed a stay of that duration saying there had been ample time for proposals to be advanced.

The judge said he would not grant the three months but would grant a stay to 2 September.

Given the couple’s attitude to the bank’s application, he added he would only award costs at the lowest level against them.

The bank sued the couple, of Carrownanty, Ballymote, Co Sligo, arising from an October 2011 facility for €2.42m provided to restructure existing loans.

It claimed the security for the facility included first legal mortgages over a retail premises, the Stone Park Restaurant and Perry’s Hardware, all located at Main Street, Ballymote, and over 50 acres of agricultural lands at Ballymote.

It claimed the loan was to be repaid in full 12 months after it was drawn down in November 2011, with the effect that the final repayment date was 12 November 2012.

The couple made some repayments but, the bank claims, failed to keep up the level of interim repayments required under the terms of the loan facility.

Last March, it demanded immediate payment of the total sum outstanding, with interest, of about €2.47m.

State agency to report on proposed merger of Bord na Móna and Coillte

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Cold spell helps Bord na Móna return to profit

The commercial semi-State sector, will issue a report to government before “year end” on the proposed merger of Bord na Móna and Coillte.

Gabriel D’Arcy, the chief executive of Bord Na Móna, said the company had been asked by New Era to contribute to the report, whichhe said should be ready “by the back end of the year”.

He said he had “not yet formed a view” as to whether a merger was a good idea, but that there is “merit” in the state exploring the idea. “We will co-operate fully,” he said.

Bord na Móna yesterday reported a 11 per cent increase in turnover to a record €426.1 million for the financial year ended March 2013.

Figures published by the company show a return to profit and an increase in cash flow for the group, which said the results highlight the importance of a balanced business portfolio that includes power generation, resource recovery and retail products.

Operating profits after exceptional items increased to €23.5 million, up from a loss of €3.7 million in 2012, while operating cash flow increased from €42.3 million to €108.5 million during the year.

Overall profits

Overall profits, after exceptional items, for the group were €9.2 million compared to a loss of €16 million in 2012.

The company said the increase in turnover was reflective of the prolonged cold winter weather and the positive impact this had on fuel sales.

Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation for the period were €61.2 million.

D’Arcy said the results owe a great deal to the diverse strengths of the company and the implementation of cost-reduction measures.

The group’s chairman, John Horgan, said Bord na Móna would be advancing some big projects in the coming year as part of an investment programme in wind and renewable energy sources.

“We will also continue to engage with other stakeholders in relation to the provision of a sustainable water source for the eastern region.

“These significant infrastructural projects, combined with our drive for effective operations across the group, are part of our ongoing sustainable business strategy.”

During the year the group expanded its wind energy portfolio at Oweninny, Co Mayo, as well as at Mount Lucas and Bruckana in the midlands.

During the accounting period exceptional items which affected the company’s profitability included a €23 million impairment charge in relation to the the group’s waste management business.

Exceptional costs of €23.5 million were also incurred as a result of the poor harvest in 2012, which was the lowest in the company’s history, representing just 37 per cent of the harvest target.

The lack of qualified personnel among Irish child-carers sparks anger & concern

 

The Minister for children Francis Fitzgerald plans to make it obligatory for people working in area to be qualified

Concern has been expressed following the publication of data showing most people caring for young children have no childcare qualifications.

A report by the Economic and Social Research Institute shows most nine-month-olds in childcare are looked after by relatives (42 per cent) or child-minders (31 per cent) in the home. But 55 per cent of child-minders and more than 83 per cent of relatives who look after children have no qualifications in the area.

“That is of concern,” said Frances McGinnity, co-author of the report, part of the Growing Up in Ireland project. The study involved interviews with the parents of more than 11,000 nine-month-old babies. The children will be tracked again at three years of age.

Ms McGinnity said there was a link between the qualifications of people who cared for children and the quality of care. In creches and preschool centres just 1.9 per cent of employees are not qualified. More than 67 per cent had Fetac awards, more than 20 per cent had third-level qualifications in the area, almost 4 per cent had qualifications from abroad and more than 6 per cent had done related courses.

Benchmark qualifications
Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald said she planned to make it obligatory for all childcare workers to have qualifications. She added: “Clearly this report points to the critical importance of building childcare supports for families so that they have greater choice.”

Cost was often a factor for parents: only a third of relatives who cared for children in the family home were paid. The most expensive childcare was a child-minder in the family home at an average of €7.35 per hour, though this could involve several children. The average hourly rate in a creche or preschool centre was €5.71.

Nine-month-olds who attended creche-type centres were more likely to develop infections. Almost half of infants attending creches had picked up chest infections, compared with about 30 per cent cared for at home. Nine-month-olds in creches were almost twice as likely to get an ear infection or have severe vomiting.

Creches and other centre-based care were more likely to say nine-month-olds spent no time watching television, at 83 per cent, as opposed to home-based carers, 53.2 per cent of whom said the infants watched no television. Babies in home settings were more likely to have individual interactions with the carer but less access to learning-enhancing activities and books.

Ninety-four per cent of mothers said they were satisfied with their childcare when it was by a relative, 88 per cent were satisfied with care involving a child-minder and 73 per cent when the care involved a creche.

The report shows paid maternity leave influences women’s employment patterns after having children, with few returning to work within six months. Women with higher incomes and education were more likely to take unpaid leave. The report notes 12 per cent of men had taken unpaid leave by the time their child was nine months.

Ms Fitzgerald said Ireland had “a long way to go” on access and affordability to care. The system reflected the “policy choices” where payments to parents were preferred over investing in childcare.

Big fears over medicine shortages in Ireland

   

MEDICINE SHORTAGES ARE POSING A RISK TO THE HEALTH OF PATIENTS IN IRELAND, ACCORDING TO THE IRISH PHARMACY UNION (IPU).

Shortages of certain antidepressants, pain-relief medicines and eye ointments have been highlighted by the group, which has called on the Department of Health to intervene.

An IPU survey of 200 pharmacists revealed that nearly 50pc believe that patients’ health has been adversely affected by medicine shortages.

Why has global warming slowed down?

      

Solar energy is absorbed by the oceans

With Britain’s and Ireland’s heatwave reaching a peak, there could be no better moment to talk about why global warming has slowed to a standstill.

It reminds me of reporting on a drought a few years ago: while filming interviews with people about the impact, the heavens opened and rainwater was soon flowing down my neck.

So as journalists were invited to the Science Media Centre in London to hear how the worldwide rise in temperatures has stalled, the mercury shot up as if on cue to record the hottest day of the year so far.

In many ways, this event was long overdue: climate sceptics have for years pointed out that the world is not warming as rapidly as once forecast.

A lot depends on how you do the measurements, of course.explanations but none of them adds up to a definitive smoking gun.”

Each of the last few decades has been warmer than the last. But start your graph in 1998 – which happened to be an exceptionally warm year – and there hasn’t been much global warming at all.

Gradually the words ‘pause’ and ‘hiatus’ which first featured in the blogs have crossed to the media and then to the scientists professionally engaged in researching the global climate.

The headline – which the scientists will not thank me for – is that no one is really sure why the rate of warming has stumbled.

Industrialisation may lead to a drop in global temperatures in the 1940s

Professor Piers Forster of Leeds University has tried to quantify the different factors involved – what’s known as their “radiative forcing”.

Between 1998-2012, he reckons, manmade greenhouse gases were still the biggest influence, causing warming of 0.48 of a Watt per square metre (a key measure of energy flows to and from the planet).

At the same, he estimates, two other natural influences might have led to some cooling: a relatively quiet Sun might have been responsible for a reduction of 0.16 of a Watt/sq m and volcanic eruptions another 0.06 Watt/sq m.

A big unknown is the effect of aerosols – tiny particles released by industrial pollution which could cause a further cooling effect.

It is thought that the world’s massive industrialisation after World War Two contributed to a slight drop in global temperatures in the late 1940s.

But the key factor – according to all the speakers at the briefing – is that whatever solar energy is making it through to the surface, much is being absorbed by the hidden depths of the oceans.

The Argo network of automated monitors has been deployed since 2005 to measure the waters as deep as 1,800m. This isn’t a very long period but the data are apparently showing some warming – even in this short time frame.

And readings from satellites since 2000 show how much energy is arriving at the planet, and how much is leaving, so if the energy left behind is not manifesting itself in rising surface temperatures, then it must be going somewhere – and the deep ocean is the most plausible explanation.

Pauses expected: On top of that, the scientists say, pauses in warming were always to be expected. This is new – at least to me.

It is common sense that climate change would not happen in a neat, linear away but instead in fits and starts.

But I’ve never heard leading researchers mention the possibility before.

Professor Rowan Sutton, of Reading University, said computer simulations or models of possible future climate scenarios often show periods of ten years with no warming trend – some even show pauses of 20-25 years.

And Professor Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said observations and models showed that on average there were – or would be – two pauses in warming every century.

I asked why this had not come up in earlier presentations. No one really had an answer, except to say that this “message” about pauses had not been communicated widely.

So where does this leave us, as greenhouse gases emissions keep rising but the temperature does not?

Dr Peter Stott, of the Met Office, pointed out that 12 of the 14 warmest years have occurred since the year 2000 and says that other indicators – like the decline in Arctic sea ice of 12.9% per decade and losses of snow cover and glaciers – still point to a process of manmade warming.

Bad maths: But what about another possibility – that the calculations are wrong?

What if the climate models – which are the very basis for all discussions of what to do about global warming – exaggerate the sensitivity of the climate to rising carbon dioxide?

Dr Stott conceded that the projections showing the most rapid warming now look less likely, given recent observations, but that others remain largely unchanged.

A Met Office briefing document, released at the briefing, says that, even allowing for the temperatures of the last decade, the most likely warming scenario is only reduced by 10% – so “the warming that we might have expected by 2050 would be delayed by only a few years”.

Overall, it concludes, the pause “does not materially alter the risks of substantial warming of the Earth by the end of this century.”

In other words, global warming is still on.

But until the pause can be properly explained, many people will take a lot of convincing – especially if the pause lasts longer than expected.

Cassini spacecraft photographs Earth from 900 million miles away

     

If you waved at Saturn last Friday, some of the photons that bounced off your arm could be in this image.

Seen from about 1.4 billion kilometres away, Earth is the bright white dot hovering below Saturn’s famous rings. The snap comes from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which on 19 July was taking pictures of the giant planet backlit by the sun. Cassini’s goal is to stitch together a portrait of the entire planet in this lighting, which allows the team to see details in the fainter, more diffuse rings. The full mosaic won’t be ready for another six weeks, but Argentinian astronomy blogger Guillermo Abramson has already colourised this raw Cassini picture – posted over the weekend on a NASA website – of Earth photobombing Saturn.

People all over the planet were looking up at Saturn at 9.27 pm GMT on 19 July, as Cassini was taking a photo of the rings with Earth in the frame. Cassini’s telescopic camera also zoomed in for a closer look at Earth and caught a glimpse of the moon as well.

Of course, the odds that the spacecraft caught a photon bouncing off a waving arm are about one in a million, according to back-of-the-envelope calculations by Sky & Telescope magazine. But the event probably marks the first time people on Earth have been smiling for the camera when a spacecraft took our picture.