Irish Water customers set to get first quarterly bills from Wednesday next
Utility expects to raise €70m from first billing quarter
Irish Water has announced a boost in the number of customer service agents at the Cork-based company Abtran, with 750 agents available to take calls from the public as the billing commences.
Irish Water bills will begin arriving at customers’ homes from Wednesday as the utility begins charging for water usage over the past three months.
Customers in Gorey, Navan and north Donegal will be among the first to receive meter-read bills.
Customers with no meters will receive bills based on a fixed charge rate.
The first batch of quarterly bills will be issued to 1.5 million customers, sent via email and post, arriving at homes around the country every day for the next eight weeks.
Irish Water expects to raise €70 million from the first billing quarter (covering the period January 1st to March 31st, 2015) and a total of €271 million for the year.
Deluge of queries
Cork-based call centre Abtran, which deals with Irish Water queries, has hired an additional 350 staff to deal with an expected deluge of customer queries as bills begin to arrive.
The company, which employs 2,200 people at its offices in Mahon and Curraheen, has trained a total of 750 people to deal specifically with Irish Water queries over the next eight weeks.
Two-thirds of customers have registered, amounting to 1.25 million households, according to Irish Water.
“Those who have their own water and waste water services shouldn’t be getting a bill from us, but we have no way of knowing who they are because you might have your own well or septic tank and also have a service from the mains but you don’t use it, so we need to have that information so we know exactly who to bill,” Irish Water head of communications Elizabeth Arnett said.
A conservation grant?
All households are eligible for the €100 Water Conservation Grant, whether they are supplied by Irish Water or not.
In situations where Irish Water cannot distinguish households by their address, the utility will wait for customer engagement on receipt of the bill and then allocate an account number.
For example, a cluster of houses using the same townland address will be issued with individual bills.
When the customer contacts Irish Water and quotes the account number on their bill, that number will become their unique account number.
Some 40% of Irish households have non-unique addresses, but Irish Water says it has “worked through the data” to minimise problems to about 10 per cent of households.
Geospatial database
In these cases, the utility will use An Post’s geospatial database to confirm the correct bill is delivered to the correct house.
To facilitate meter billing, the country has been divided into three geographic regions, with 41 sub regions and 123 “read parcel” areas to issue bills every 13 weeks.
As meter installation continues, the billing cycle will remain consistent as customers move from unmetered to metered tariffs.
The “metering effect” could bring about a reduction in water usage of between 10 per cent and 15%, while the first 1,000 leaks to be fixed under Irish Water’s €51 million “first fix” scheme will save 20 million litres of water.
Leaks identified
Leaks identified in the first 413,000 metered homes last October amounted to 46 million litres of water.
“That’s enough water to supply Limerick city every day, leaking under driveways,” Ms Arnett said.
Irish Water will issue a total of 1.7 million bills, inclusive of households not classed as customers, such as those served by group schemes or private wells.
Bills will be issued quarterly and will be based on the number of days in each quarter. Bills will be metered and unmetered, depending on whether a meter has been installed. A single occupant household can expect a first bill of €40 or less, while a two-adult household can expect a charge of €65 or less.
Customers can apply for the government’s Water Conservation Grant, which will be available through the Department of Social Protection from September.
A leaflet drop
Protesters gathered outside Abtran offices in Mahon on Tuesday said they plan to drop leaflets to every household in Cork calling for continued resistance to Irish Water and demanding its abolition.
Protester Brian Gould said Irish Water’s figures do not add up.
“Irish Water are telling us there is 1.5 million people signed up, do they count the amount of letters that were sent back to them with no consent?
“We are not their customers, we already pay for our water and we have been paying for it for the past 30 years,” he said.
House prices in Mayo six per cent higher than a year ago
House prices in rural counties such as Mayo are on the rise.
House prices in Mayo for the first three months of 2015 were six per cent higher than a year previously, according to the latest House Price Report released by Ireland’s biggest property website, Daft.ie. This compared to a fall of five per cent a year ago.
The average house price is now €127,000 – nine per cent above its lowest point.
Nationally, the average asking price for a house in Ireland grew by 4.6 per cent in the first three months of 2015. This marks a return to price growth following a one per cent fall in the final three months of 2014.
The average asking price nationwide is now €201,000 – the first time since mid-2011 that it has been above €200,000. This compares with a low of €170,000 in mid-2013 and a high of €378,000 in mid-2007.
For the first time in nearly four years, quarterly growth in prices in Dublin was slower than elsewhere in the country. Prices in Dublin are now 2.9 per cent higher than in late 2014, whereas outside Dublin prices rose by 5.9 per cent in the same three-month period.
Commenting on the figures, the author of the Daft.ie report, Ronan Lyons, said: “It is clear that the Central Bank rules have had an impact on the market. Dublin prices are now anchored to real economic conditions, with survey respondents expecting significantly slower house price growth now than a year ago.
“Similarly, compared to a year ago, a far higher proportion of respondents, in the capital and elsewhere, indicated the need to save for a deposit as a key reason for delaying buying a home.”
“Outside Dublin, the Central Bank rules that link mortgages and incomes seem to have had, if anything, a positive impact on prices. The fact that house prices vary across the country by far more than incomes do means demand should reshuffle from Dublin to elsewhere in the country. While this may sound helpful, it does not address the underlying lack of supply in Dublin, which needs to be addressed as a matter of priority.”
Eircom refunds given to over 11,000 Irish customers for loss of service
Telecoms firm agrees out-of-court settlement with industry watchhdog ComReg
Eircom has refunded more than 11,600 customers for loss of service last year.
Eircom has refunded more than 11,600 customers for loss of service last year. The company refunded €700,000 to residential and retail customers who experienced outages exceeding ten working days between the end of December 2013 and April 30th last year.
The outages occurred during a period when the country was hit with severe storm damage.
Eircom agreed an out-of-court settlement with industry watchdog ComReg to refund customers disrupted. The settlement will also include customers affected from October 31 last year until the end of 2015.
As part of the settlement, Eircom withdrew its High Court appeal. The settlement will also see Eircom establish a Performance Improvement Programme for 2015.
Eircom’s revenues fell by 4% to €629 million for the six months to the end of December 2014 on the back of losses in its fixed line business.
Fixed line access net losses for the period were 22,000, the company said, with fixed line revenues down 5% to €474 million.
However, the losses were partially offset by a reduction in operating costs which fell by 18 million or 4% to €403 million.
Is your sex drive abnormal?
Science says you never had one to begin with
The following excerpts are from an interview by New Scientist’s Alison George with Emily Nagoski, director of Wellness Education at Smith College. In her new book on the science of sex, Come As You Are, Nagoski refutes the existence of a “sex drive,” claiming that such a notion misses the bigger picture.
Why is there no such thing as a sex drive?
A drive is a motivational system to deal with life-or-death issues, like hunger or being too cold. You’re not going to die if you don’t have sex.
But biologists might say that if you don’t reproduce, that is a form of death
Yes. That’s the argument that was used when desire was being added to the way sexual dysfunctions were diagnosed in the 1970s, to justify the framing of sexual desire as a drive. But when it comes to sex, there just isn’t any physical evidence of a drive mechanism.
So what’s going on?
If sex is a drive then desire should be spontaneous, like a hunger. When you see a sexy person or have a stray sexy thought, it activates an internal craving or urge for sex. That’s called “spontaneous desire”. It feels like it comes out of the blue. But there is another way of experiencing desire which is also healthy and normal, called “responsive desire”, where your interest only emerges in response to arousal. So, your partner comes over and starts kissing your neck and you’re like, “oh, right, sex, that’s a good idea”.
Could super-bugs kill more people than cancer?
Recent infection incidents add urgency to Obama administration’s recent superbug plan.
Superbugs could kill more people than cancer by 2050 if antibiotic overuse trends continue, according to a recent study that explored the scenario of a world with bacteria unfazed by any drugs.
A $1.2 billion action plan just released by the Obama administration aims to prevent that possibility. It mandates better stewardship of the existing antibiotic arsenal and accelerates efforts to develop new classes of these medications.
The list of dangerous microbes continues to grow as policy makers, health experts and scientists scramble to react. On Thursday, for example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the spread of Shigella sonnei, a drug-resistant bacteria estimated to cause severe gastrointestinal distress in half a million Americans each year.
In California, Olympus Corporation issued a new set of cleaning guidelines for the specialized medical scopes linked to superbug outbreaks at two hospitals in the state. Medical centers from coast to coast are re-examing their procedures for disinfecting the devices.
Taken together, drug-resistant bacteria infect about 2 million Americans per year and kill about 23,000 of them, according to the CDC.
Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, the microbe known as CRE that recently killed two patients and infected seven more at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, was barely in the public conscience a decade ago.
Today, it is a serious concern.
Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for health care associated infection prevention programs at the CDC, said it has been striking to watch CRE cases emerge across the nation over the years.
“You go back and look at the map in the early 2000s, and only three or four states were lit up. Now, essentially, you have almost all 50 states with reported CRE infections,” Srinivasan said.
As of February, only Idaho and Maine had no confirmed CRE cases.
The scientific and medical communities haven’t ignored the problem. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved six new antibiotics in the past 11 months, expanding the options for physicians treating infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly known as MRSA.
But drug development efforts have not been enough, Srinivasan said.
“Antibiotic resistance is developing faster than we are developing antibiotics,” he said. “We are in a crisis situation with respect to the impact that this threat poses to people in the United States and worldwide. Big threats require big actions.”
SCARY PREDICTION
Last year, the United Kingdom published a study that examined the economic and humanitarian impacts of rising antibiotic resistance rates.
The study found that if drug resistance reached 100 percent within 15 years, the worldwide number of people who die each year would increase from about 700,000 today to 10 million, eclipsing current cancer death rates by nearly 2 million.
A supporting study by the RAND Corporation found that the 100 percent scenario could cause 444 million deaths by 2050, while a 40 percent increase in resistance would mean 104 million deaths during the same time frame and a 5 percent jump would cause 11 million deaths.
The economic impact in the worst-case scenario would exceed $100 trillion over 40 years.
Humans in Europe only recently developed Light Skin
A new study has revealed that humans living in Europe had dark skin for the majority of the time they have inhabited the continent.
The study, presented at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists (AAAS), suggests that many of the characteristics associated with European genetics are a recent development in the broader history of human evolution and migration. Led by Dr. Iain Mathieson from Harvard University, the international team of researchers analysed 83 human gene samples collected as part of the ‘1000 Genomes Project’ (an initiative designed to sequence the genomes of a large number of people and allow public access to the data for scientific research).
Focusing on two genes, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, which are responsible for de-pigmentation and pale skin, the team studied samples taken from a wide range of ancient populations spread across different periods and different locations.
Home sapiens resided solely in Africa up until 700,000 BCE, with the first examples ofAustralopithecus afarensis, the precursor of Homo erectus, appearing there around 3.3 million years ago. Exactly when the ancestors of humans began their migration to other continents is open to debate, but the oldest human fossil ever found in Europe was discovered near Heidelberg in Germany, and dates back to 650,000 BCE.
The study confirms the existing presumption that the first modern humans migrating from Africa to Europe had dark skin, which would have been beneficial in the hot African climate. However, it also found that early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary lacked the genes responsible for pale skin as recently as 8500 years ago.
Migration from the Near East is believed to have been responsible for the arrival of the genes associated with lighter skin pigmentation. As these farmers first came to the continent their interbreeding with the existing inhabitants saw the SLC24A5 gene spread through central and southern Europe, leading to lighter skin pigmentation in those regions. As the AAAS reports: “As they (farmers from the Near East) interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.”
In northern Europe however, the situation seems to have been different. Remains studied from Southern Sweden were found to have the gene variants responsible for lighter skin and blonde hair as far back as 7,700 years ago, indicating the inhabitants of Northern Europe had light skin and eyes before the migration from the Near East.
It is still unclear why the genes related to paler skin spread so quickly and so widely, but the study suggests it was probably connected to a need to absorb Vitamin D. The climate of Europe generally provides shorter days and less sunlight, particularly in the north. Lighter skin pigmentations allow the more efficient absorption and synthesis of Vitamin D (the crucial vitamin that humans can synthesize from sun light).
The focus of the study was the process and rate of natural selection in Europe. By successfully charting the timing and spread of the SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 genes, the study has raised some fascinating questions. Exactly why the change in skin pigmentation occurred when it did is unclear, while the speed at which natural selection took place was much faster than typically expected.
