Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG 2015

Companies seek credit but Irish consumers focus on repayments

  

Central Bank says home-loan repayments exceeded loan drawdowns by €2.2bn in year.

The Central Bank’s November data shows household loan repayments exceeded loan drawdowns by €335 million during the month, while companies borrowed €139 million more than they repaid.

Companies are back in the market for credit but Irish consumers are still more concerned about paying back old debts than borrowing for fresh spending, according toCentral Bank money and banking statistics .

The November data shows that household loan repayments exceeded loan drawdowns by €335 million during the month, while companies borrowed €139 million more than they repaid.

Companies’ medium-term debt borrowings are the biggest climbers, up a net €205 million in November, suggesting a nascent puck-up in investment. Over the first 11 months of 2014, however, the debt levels of Irish companies fell by 6.4%.

Among consumers, annual repayments had exceeded drawdowns on home loans by €2.2 billion by the end of November, while net repayments on non-housing consumer debts fell by €1.6 billion.

There was €174 billion on deposit at the end of November, with 53% of this accounted for by household savings.

Bank borrowings from the Central Bank, as part of the Eurosystem’s liquidity programme, fell by €1.2 billion, as Irish banks moved back towards more mainstream funding methods.

Irish teens get gastric bands as obesity time-bomb explodes

   

Professor Donal O’Shea

Irish teenagers as young as 15 are being given gastric bands as the numbers needing drastic surgery continue to escalate.

Gastric bands reduce a patient’s stomach size to help prevent them overeating.

Experts say it’s the latest example of Ireland’s spiralling obesity epidemic among the younger age group. One-in-four children are either overweight or obese in Ireland.

“I’ve seen kids who are of such size that they’ve been referred to the UK for consideration of gastric banding,” explained Professor Donal O’Shea (pictured inset).

“The problem is that our treatment services are so underdeveloped that we don’t have the surgery capability for obesity in children in Ireland.

“The scale of the problem in this country is on par with that in Britain.

“And we lag only a little bit behind the US, where 33pc of children are overweight, or obese.

“There has been an absolute explosion in the extreme end of obesity in kids. We have 15-year-olds in this country who weigh 16 and 17 stone.

“We’ve reached a stage where the argument has progressed to what is the best type of operation for children who are obese.

“I’ve referred two patients, aged 15 and 16, to Great Ormond Street for consideration of bariatric surgery.”

Prof O’Shea, who heads the obesity management clinic in St Columcille’s Hospital, Dublin, said the obesity time-bomb was no longer just ticking – it had “exploded”. He said that we were fast heading towards the “nightmare scenario”.

“At current trends we will need obesity surgery for more children in Ireland within the next 10 years. That’s the sad reality.”

Dr Sinead Murphy, consultant paediatrician in Temple Street hospital, said the obesity crisis was affecting children as young as three and four years of age. “A healthy three-year-old should probably weigh about 15 kilos. But we regularly see three-year-olds weigh 25 kilos and upwards – they are clinically obese.”

Dr Murphy said children were presenting with a raft of medical problems as a direct result of their burgeoning waistlines.

“We’re seeing an awful lot of muscular skeletal problems. A lot of children have joint and back pain, and breathing difficulties,” she said.

“Half the kids we’re seeing have high insulin levels, which means they’re on a path to Type-2 diabetes.

“Half of the 10-year-olds we’re seeing have high cholesterol already.”

She said children eligible for bariatric surgery were given “psychological preparation” before going under the knife.

“These children could also be an anesthetic risk because they’re so overweight.”

Ireland’s only dedicated childhood obesity treatment programme, at Dublin’s Temple Street Children’s Hospital, has had a 400pc increase in just one year in referrals of children aged under five.

The long-term effects of being seriously overweight include reduced educational achievement, risk of heart disease and certain cancers, as well as the possibility of developing type 2 diabetes.

“We’re diagnosing diabetes in people in their 20s, and new cancers will double by 2030, driven by the obesity epidemic,” said Prof O’Shea.

“We can’t wait until we have to cope with kidney failure and amputation in people in their 30s and 40s.”

Woman (33) killed in first road fatality of the New Year

  

The woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

A woman was knocked down and killed in the early hours of this morning.

The 33-year-old was the first road traffic victim of the new year when she was hit by a van.

Gardaí are appealing for witnesses to the collision in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, at 1.50am.

The fatality happened as road safety chiefs revealed the number of deaths on our roads was up in 2014 compared to the previous year – with 196 people losing their lives.

The victim was pronounced dead at the scene and her body was removed to the Shiel Hospital, where a post mortem will be held.

“The driver of the van, a male aged in his 50s, was uninjured,” said gardai.

“The scene is preserved to facilitate Garda forensic collision investigators. The road is closed to traffic and diversions are in place.”

Doctor criticised for saying that cancer is ‘the best way to die’

 

Doctor Robert Smith’s comments recognised as a romantic view of dying”.

 The doctor left and former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been criticised after saying cancer is ‘the best way to die’.

Writing in the BMJ, Richard Smith said people with the disease have an opportunity to reflect on life before it ends, something not afforded to those who die suddenly.

Smith said dying from dementia or organ failure is a much worse fate.

“The long, slow death from dementia may be the most awful as you are slowly erased, but then again when death comes it may be just a light kiss.

“Death from organ failure—respiratory, cardiac, or kidney—will have you far too much in hospital and in the hands of doctors.

So death from cancer is the best … You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion.

“This is, I recognise, a romantic view of dying, but it is achievable with love, morphine, and whisky. But stay away from overambitious oncologists, and let’s stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer, potentially leaving us to die a much more horrible death.”

In the article, Smith also urged charities and the medical world to “stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer”.

Cancer Research UK were among those to criticise his comments, labelling them “nihilistic”.

Over 96,000 new cars sold in Ireland last year 2014

  

2014 was a BUMPER year for new car sales with over 96,000 new cars sold in Ireland last year

This represents a 30% on the number of new cars sold in 2013 – or more than 22,000 extra vehicles.

The car industry had predicted total sales of approximately 85,000-90,000 units at the start of the year.

More than 21,000 new commercial cars were sold in 2014, up 43% on 2013 figures.

Over 1,000 motorcycles were also sold – representing a 25% annual increase.

Used car sales, which had remained relatively unchanged for the past number of years, increased by almost 50,000 vehicles in 2014. More than 835,000 used vehicles changed hands during the year, an increase of 6.3%.

Used cars imported into Ireland from other jurisdictions such as Great Britain and Northern Ireland were also up by 8.4%, with 54,290 used vehicles registered in 2014.

Michael Rochford, Managing Director of Motorcheck.ie – the site that compiled the figures – said 2014 had been “a really positive year for the motor trade all round”.

Early indications are that the positive trends will continue in 2015 with new car sales predicted to breach the magical 100,000 units. This was last achieved in 2008 when 142,000 units were sold.

The five most popular car models in 2014 were:

1. Volkwagen Golf
2. Nissan Qashqai
3. Ford Focus
4. Ford Fiesta
5. Toyota Corolla

Researchers find that Birds slur their songs when drunk,

Just like humans do

  

A surprising new research suggests that birds have trouble singing and calling after downing a few drinks. Researchers found that birds act similar to humans after ingesting alcohol. According to researchers from Oregon Health and Science University, they offered juice spiked with alcohol to Zebra Finches birds (above right).

According to researchers, the birds’ slurs were similar to how people slur after ingesting alcohol. The researchers found that after drinking alcohol, the birds slurred their songs with a distinct drunken vibe.

The study published in the journal PLOS ONE stated that the zebra finch birds were intoxicated by the researchers for the study. According to the study, the acoustic structures of zebra finches’ songs were slurred at best. The researchers had chosen the bird because it learns a song in a way similar to how people learn speech. It was easy for researchers to identify whether the birds slur their songs after drinking alcohol.

According to the researchers, they have found remarkable similarities in how the bird song and humans speech learned and then produced. Those similarities allowed the researchers to better understand the effect of alcohol on the bird.

For the study, the researchers had given simple white grape juice to a group of birds, while they gave juice spiked with strong ethanol to another group. Second group of birds was not able to maintain their song’s normal structure and tempo.

The researchers said, “We did not detect visible effects on the birds’ general behaviors or health, as indicated by the normal appearance of feathers and the ability to perch, feed, maintain normal posture and fly inside the cage.”  

Donie's news Ireland daily BLOG update

True cost of brand loyalty in Ireland revealed as prices soar at tills

  

Irish families are being forced to dig deeper to pay for their weekly groceries as the prices of branded goods soared far faster than the rate of inflation in the past year.

The cost of some items has shot up by as much as 15% when shrinking packet sizes as well as price hikes are taken into account.

A survey by the Consumers Association of Ireland has found that the cost of a basket of 19 top-selling items, including milk, sliced bread and sugar, rose by over 2% in the last year.

The price hikes for branded groceries came despite general inflation stagnating at just 0.2pc in the year to January.

Customers are increasingly switching to own-brand goods as they are faced with price hikes for their old favourite brands.

The biggest increase in the survey was for Birds Eye frozen garden peas, with the price rising from €2.08 for 450g in 2013 to €2.14 for a smaller 400g pack this year.

This means shoppers would be paying €2.40 for the same quantity of peas as last year, which “means that the real price increase is in fact approximately 15pc”, the CAI said in its ‘Consumer Choice’ magazine.

Some 13 out of 19 items surveyed rose in price between the last survey in January 2013 and the latest one in February 2014.

A litre of Avonmore milk rose from €1.14 to €1.24, while Donegal Catch cod rose from €5.40 to €5.54 and a kilo of Siucra rose from €1.45 to €1.55 and a large bar of Cadbury’s chocolate rose from €1.72 to €1.87.

The price of Brennans bread and Kerrygold butter stayed the same, however, while the price of Heinz Ketchup, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Erin soup fell.

And the price of Squeez premium orange juice soared by 13pc, from €1.60 in 2013 to €1.81 in 2014.

The average price of the basket of goods came to €41.95 – which was up 89 cents on last year’s basket, a rise of 2.2pc.

Despite the survey, Central Statistics Office figures show that general food and beverage prices actually fell by 1.1pc during 2013.

However, the CAI survey shows that when it comes to many well-known brands, consumers are paying more at the till.

CASH-STRAPPED

The CAI said that the cost of brand loyalty may now be too high for many cash-strapped consumers – and explains why they are gravitating towards own-brand products and Aldi and Lidl to get lower prices.

CAI policy advisor Dermott Jewell said that the price rises for these everyday items over the past year and in repeated surveys since 2011 highlighted why consumers were changing to own-brand goods.

“With regard to these specific branded goods purchased by the majority of the population, the prices remain determinedly high on average,” he said.

“Therefore we remain of the opinion that savings in this area for the average consumer have necessitated a significant change in purchasing habits, patterns and preferences,” he said.

Many families had gone through the worst financial setback of their lives, yet this had not resulted in significant brand price reductions, he said.

Meanwhile, Kantar Worldpanel figures indicated that own-brand products account for 36pc of all groceries purchased as consumers cut their spending by switching away from branded goods.

Prices were measured in Dunnes Stores, Tesco and SuperValu, with special offers excluded because these are only temporary.

Excluding Siucra, which wasn’t available in the same size everywhere, the basket of goods was cheapest in Dunnes at €39.96, while Tesco charged €40.43 and SuperValu was dearest at €40.92.

Several of the items were on special offer via discounts or as part of multi-buy offers, meaning a consumer could knock between €1 and €4 off the basket price depending on where they shopped.

Routine eye exams/tests essential to detect glaucoma

  

Eye doctors are reminding people that the only way the serious eye disease, glaucoma, can be detected is through routine eye examinations.

An estimated 3% of Irish people over the age of 50 have glaucoma. If caught early enough, the condition can be treated, however it is usually symptomless in its early stages. At a late stage, it becomes irreversible, resulting in vision loss and blindness.

“The importance of having a regular routine eye exam to help prevent avoidable glaucoma-related vision loss cannot be over-emphasised. With early diagnosis and careful regular observation and treatment, damage can usually be kept to a minimum, and good vision can be enjoyed indefinitely,” said Dr Aoife Doyle, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon and glaucoma specialist at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin.

She noted that with glaucoma, vision loss is gradual, so those affected are often unaware they have a problem ‘until their sight has been compromised’.

“It’s crucial that people remember that once vision is lost to glaucoma, it cannot be restored,’ she commented.

The best way to detect glaucoma is through routine eye examinations. The test to detect it is non-invasive and provides a result immediately.

Dr Doyle made her comments to coincide with World Glaucoma Week, which runs until March 15. She noted that those most at risk from the condition are people over the age of 60, those with a family history of the disease and individuals of Hispanic and African descent.

“There are different types of glaucoma and some people are at greater risk and may need to see their eye doctor on a more frequent basis. People of African origin are more at risk of developing glaucoma and of developing it at a younger age. For this reason, regular comprehensive eye exams to catch symptoms early are essential,” she said.

The Irish College of Ophthalmologists recommends that all adults have a ‘baseline, comprehensive dilated eye exam’ by the age of 40, as this is the time when early signs may begin.

For those aged 60 and older, the college recommends having a comprehensive eye exam every one to two years.

Anyone with concerns about their eye health should see an eye doctor. For an appointment, you need to get a referral from your GP, although some eye doctors working in the community will give an appointment directly. For more information, see the Irish College of Ophthalmologist’s website here

HSE publishes childhood obesity surveillance data

  

The Health Service Executive has published the latest Irish results from COSI, the European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative.  COSI monitors childhood obesity levels by measuring children in sample schools all over Europe.

This 2012 data is the third set of results to be published to date, and involved a nationally representative sample of 7, 9 and 11 year old children from a mix of Irish urban, rural and disadvantaged (DEIS) schools.

Dr. Stephanie O’Keeffe, National Director of Health and Wellbeing, HSE, said that:  ‘The 2012 COSI results show that more than 20% of our children remain overweight or obese, but that rates have either decreased or stabilised in some age groups. This is welcome news, but the overall concern about the level of overweight among our children remains.’

  The study was carried out for the HSE by the National Nutrition Surveillance Centre, UCD. The large study comprises 12,236 children’s measurements in 163 schools collected on three occasions in 2008, 2010 and again in 2012.

Professor Cecily Kelleher from UCD said: ‘The rates of overweight and obesity have shown decreases at age 7, and stabilisation at age 9, while the overall incidence remains of concern.  Those with responsibility for caring for children and educating the public on health and wellbeing therefore have much to do to continue to tackle this issue.’

‘Critically, the observed reduction or leveling off is not happening in DEIS or disadvantaged schools, and this has implications for all, including health and public service partners, particularly those working on implementation of the Healthy Ireland framework. We must ensure that our efforts are focused on bringing the improvements demonstrated by this data to bear on all our children, particularly children who are disadvantaged by poverty, and education, housing and transport deficits, among others.’

Dr O’Keeffe continued ‘Healthy Ireland, the Government Framework for Improved Health and Wellbeing seeks to proactively improve the health and wellbeing of the population and we know that tackling childhood obesity requires the whole of government and whole of society response that this framework can deliver.’

‘Evidence also tells us that overweight and obesity in childhood tracks into adulthood, and that the earlier we intervene to prevent our children from becoming an unhealthy weight, the better their childhood and adult health, and quality and length of life, will be.  By identifying at an early stage children whose weight is out of line with their growth for their age, we can offer them and their parents the supports they need to get the balance right as they grow up.’

Dr. Cate Hartigan, Head of Health Promotion and Improvement, HSE, outlined a new growth monitoring project being introduced in September of this year: ‘Later in 2014, the health services will introduce a pilot growth monitoring programme in primary schools, as part of the school health check for 5-6 year olds.  This will commence in 4 pilot HSE areas – Mayo, Laois-Offaly, Dublin 15 and Cork City.’

‘Parents will be given feedback on their child’s growth, and if required, advice on steps they can take at home to ensure they rebalance diet and activity levels as their child grows.  Any children whose growth results show signs of clinical obesity will be offered a community based lifestyle intervention programme, based on the successful W82GO programme delivered by the Children’s University Hospital, Temple Street.’

Irish mothers may be allowed share maternity leave with their partners

 

New Irish mums may soon be able to share part of their maternity leave entitlement with their partners under legislation being considered by the Government.

The Department of Justice is working on a scheme to allow fathers to receive two weeks of the statutory 26 weeks’ leave, according to minister of state Kathleen Lynch.

“We intend to have serious proposals prepared before the end of the year,” she said.

“In terms of the bill itself, we would be ensuring the power to decide on the parental leave is always vested in the mother.”

However, she said that there were “a lot of complicating factors need to be worked out”.

“For example, with the idea of allowing both parents to step in and out of leave, the Department of Social Protection says that would be very difficult to manage, in terms of payments,” Ms Lynch explained.

Experts have already recommended to Childrens’ Minister Frances Fitzgerald that the government should allow partners to share leave. But this could only come into play when paid leave is extended to a full year.

PROPOSALS

In Britain a woman is entitled to 52 weeks’ maternity leave, while a father gets up to two weeks when the child is born.

The couple can then transfer up to 26 weeks of the leave to the father if the mum decides to return to work.

Ms Lynch said that the Government is looking at introducing parental leave as part of the current 26-week entitlement – and not in addition to it.

“Before we move to extend maternity leave, we have to deal with the paternity leave issue,” she said.

She added that the bill would need a lot of amendments before it came close to being published.

She said that several interest groups have already identified barriers to paternity leave – such as employers’ representative groups and women’s groups.

They point out the high cost implications and also the knock-on effect it would have on a mothers’ entitlements.

Elephants know how dangerous people are from how we speak

 

Elephants pay attention when we speak, a new study in Kenya shows.

When an elephant killed a Maasai woman collecting firewood near Kenya’s Amboseli National Park in 2007, a group of young Maasai men retaliated by spearing one of the animals.

  A female elephant displays an alert reaction—with ears held open and trunk extended—at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

“It wasn’t the one that had killed the woman, says Graeme Shannon, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. “It was just the first elephant they encountered—a young bull on the edge of a swamp.”

The Maasai spiked him with spears and, their anger spent, returned home. Later, the animal died from his wounds.

Elephants experience those kinds of killings sporadically. Yet the attacks happen often enough that the tuskers have learned that the Maasai—and Maasai men in particular—are dangerous.

The elephants in the Amboseli region are so aware of this that they can even distinguish between Ma, the language of the Maasai, and other languages, says a team of researchers, who report their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Powers of Discrimination

The results add to “our growing knowledge of the discriminatory abilities of the elephant mind, and how elephants make decisions and see their world,” says Joyce Poole, an elephant expert with ElephantVoices in Masai Mara, Kenya.

Indeed, previous studies have shown that the Amboseli elephants can tell the cattle-herding, red-robed Maasai apart from their agricultural and more blandly dressed neighbors, the Kamba people, simply by scent and the color of their dress.

The elephants know too that walking through villages on weekends is dangerous, as is crop raiding during the full moon.

They’re equally aware of their other key predator, lions, and from their roars, know how many lions are in a pride and if a male lion (the bigger threat because he can bring down an elephant calf) is present.

And they know exactly how to respond to lions roaring nearby: run them off with a charge.

A group of elephants defensively bunch together, with the matriarch of the family at the front.

Flight or Fight

Intriguingly, when the Amboseli elephants encounter a red cloth, such as those worn by the Maasai, they also react aggressively. But they employ a different tactic when they catch the scent of a Maasai man: They run away. Smelling the scent of a Kamba man, however, troubles them far less.

“They have very clear behavioral responses in all of these situations,” says Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom. “We wondered if they would react differently to different human voices.”

To find out, she and her colleagues played recordings to elephant families of Maasai and Kamba men, as well as Maasai women and boys, speaking a simple phrase in their language: “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming.”

Over a two-year period, they carried out 142 such playbacks with 47 elephant families, each time playing a different human voice through a concealed speaker placed 50 meters (164 feet) from the animals. They video-recorded the elephants’ reactions to the various human voices, including a Maasai man’s voice they altered to sound like a woman’s

As soon as an elephant family heard an adult Maasai man speak, the matriarch didn’t hesitate, the researchers say. “She instantly retreats,” Shannon says. “But it’s a silent retreat. They sometimes make a low rumble, and may smell for him, too, but they’re already leaving, and bunching up into a defensive formation. It’s a very different response to when they hear lions.”

In contrast, the voices of Kamba men didn’t cause nearly as strong a defensive reaction: The elephants didn’t consider the Kamba a serious threat.

“That subtle discrimination is easy for us to do, but then we speak human language,” says Richard Byrne, a cognitive biologist at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. “It’s interesting that elephants can also detect the characteristic differences between the languages.”

Fear Men, Not Boys (or Women)

The Amboseli elephants were also sufficiently tuned in to the Maasai language that they could tell women’s and boys’ voices from men’s, seldom turning tail in response. “Maasai women and boys don’t kill elephants,” Shannon points out. Nor were the elephants tricked by the man’s altered voice; when they heard it, they left at once.

“The elephants’ decision-making is very precise,” McComb says, “and it illustrates how they’ve adapted where they can to coexist with us. They’d rather run away than tangle with a human predator.”

Why, one wonders, don’t elephants retreat when poachers descend on them?

“Unfortunately, there are going to be things they cannot adapt to, things such as humans’ ability to come after them with automatic weapons or mass poisonings,” McComb says. “And in those situations, we have to protect them—or we will lose them, ultimately.”

Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG Monday

The closure of RTÉ’s London bureau betrays the stations vision & public duty values

Says Brian O’Connell

    

After more than 20 years as RTÉ’s London editor, Brian O’Connell above left resigned from the broadcaster last week after it closed its Westminster-based bureau

Just inside the entrance to RTÉ’s bureau in Westminster is a large sign listing the national broadcaster’s vision, mission and values.

Its first line states that the company’s vision is to grow the trust of the people of Ireland as it informs, inspires, reflects and enriches their lives. Last week, in an effort to cut costs, RTÉ closed the bureau and I resigned after more than 20 years as London editor. RTÉ no longer has any editorial staff based in Britain, which will now be covered from Dublin, Belfast or Brussels.

Shortly after RTÉ’s director general, Noel Curran, announced the planned closure last March, the then acting director of news and current affairs, Cillian de Paor, sought to explain the decision in a radio interview.

He referred to the summer 2011 riots in Britain. I had been on holiday at the time and RTÉ had dispatched a reporter from Dublin who covered the unrest comprehensively for a week. Cillian de Paor told RTÉ radio’s The Media Show: “That is, in fact, the model, almost, for how I would like to cover a breaking news story.” What he did not reveal was that the reporter who had been sent from Dublin had the RTÉ London bureau’s technical infrastructure at his disposal, including a radio and television studio, editing facilities and RTÉ’s permanent video link to Dublin. Since the closure of the London bureau those RTÉ facilities are no longer available to visiting reporters.

There is no doubt that changing technology allows for less reliance on such infrastructure and greater mobility when covering stories abroad. In fact, most of RTÉ’s London savings will be infrastructural costs. That is why, when the closure was announced, I argued for the retention of an RTÉ presence in Britain without a bureau. I wanted RTÉ to follow the example of other national broadcasters – particularly those from small countries – that maintain correspondents in London working from home and hiring facilities only when required.

Cillian de Paor admitted in his radio interview that there was “still value in having people on the ground”, but RTÉ has decided not to retain a staff correspondent in London working from home. The broadcaster correctly points to its financial obligation to break even. But RTÉ’s evisceration of its London operation and its removal of any presence “on the ground” betrays its basic public service responsibility to cover the affairs of its closest neighbour and its implications for Ireland. This lack of any nuanced approach to cost-cutting in London has been central in my decision to leave the broadcaster.

RTÉ has many talented and experienced journalists in Dublin, Belfast and Brussels and they will do an excellent job covering planned and diary events in Britain, for example a visit by a president or taoiseach.

However, as any journalism student knows, the job is not simply about what has happened but why it has happened. Much of a correspondent’s job is explaining the unforeseen and the unfamiliar to viewers, listeners and readers back home. The ability to do that comes from living in a country, building contacts and forming impressions.

There have been instances over the past two decades covering Westminster when small (and usually unreported) turns of phrase or actions by one government have delighted or infuriated the other side, leading to unforeseen changes in attitude. It is the kind of journalism I recently described to a class of students as “being there”. The need to “be there” is why news organisations still employ resident correspondents and the Ryanair journalism now proposed by RTÉ is no substitute.

For decades RTÉ has been a member of the Westminster lobby system, RTÉ and The Irish Times being the only two foreign news organisations to hold such membership.

That inclusion in domestic political briefings, often derided as being an old boys’ network for the dissemination of government spin, provides useful access and did so particularly during the years of peace process negotiations of the Major and Blair premierships. RTÉ’s departure has meant the loss of that access. Of course the story has changed since the days when RTÉ’s London team covered Northern Ireland’s political leaders coming and going from Downing Street but, as US Senator George Mitchell remarked earlier this year, the Good Friday agreement was only the end of the beginning.

The UK is Ireland’s biggest trading partner and our most important source of incoming tourism revenue. Earlier this month the Government allocated about €6 million of Irish taxpayers’ money in grants for organisations that support some of our emigrants in Britain. There are more than half a million people from Ireland living in Britain and the numbers are still growing by the day. If you count the second- and third-generation descendants of immigrants, the Irish form the UK’s largest ethnic minority. It is significant that President Michael D Higgins has for the first time appointed a representative of that diaspora to the Council of State. However, RTÉ’s decision to close London has been met with disbelief by members of the Irish community who believe they have lost a voice that should be heard back home.

The closure has also raised concern across the political spectrum both in the Oireachtas and the Westminster parliament. The wording of a House of Commons motion condemning the move, signed by dozens of MPs, stated that “on-the-spot access for Irish-based media and engagement in public life in this jurisdiction is vital to fulfil the vision of future British-Irish relations as set out by the prime minister and the Irish Taoiseach in their historic statement of March 12th, 2012.”

That statement was signed in Downing Street by the Taoiseach and David Cameron. Its opening line declares, “The relationship between our two countries has never been stronger or more settled, as complex or as important, as it is today.”

Just over a fortnight after it was signed RTÉ announced its decision to, in the words of one former editor of this newspaper, “block up the window facing our nearest and most important neighbour”.

In his Media Show interview, Cillian de Paor stressed that the decision was necessary in order to retain RTÉ’s “credibility in terms of running a business”. He was speaking as an experienced senior manager operating in difficult financial circumstances. However, the cost to our national news and current affairs broadcaster will be to forfeit the trust which, according to the sign still hanging in my former office, RTÉ seeks to grow as it informs the people of Ireland.

Eugene Gillespie’s hands were so tightly bound by wire ’if he lived they’d be cut off’

   
A MURDER HUNT HAS BEEN LAUNCHED AFTER A PENSIONER WAS TORTURED, TIED UP AND LEFT TO DIE IN HIS OWN HOUSE.

Eugene Gillespie, 67, was found unconscious in his Sligo home at 9pm on Friday and died less than 12 hours later.

His attacker broke his jaw and tied his hands so tightly that, had he lived, they may have had to be amputated.

Relatives found him unconscious and bleeding when they called to his house after he failed to answer his phone.

One source said: “Word is his hands were bound so tight the blood supply was cut off.

“He was also beaten. It looks like whoever did it was looking for money and battered him around the head when he either couldn’t or didn’t hand it over.

“He was a lovely gentle man and he was left to die alone. When he was found he was unconscious, and no one knows how long his ordeal lasted.”

Probe … gardai sealed off Sligo house

Vintage car enthusiast Mr Gillespie lived alone just 60 metres from a garda station.

He was rushed to hospital on Friday night, but never regained consciousness.

A post mortem was carried out yesterday as forensic experts made a fingertip search of his home.

They will be gathering CCTV evidence from local shops and businesses to track his last movements.

Mr Gillespie, a former shopkeeper and Eircom employee, was known for his love of classic cars.

He was a member of the Connaught Veteran & Vintage Car Club and was a well known face on the circuit.

One pal said: “He was the heart of the club. We will miss him.”

Another heartbroken friend said: “Eugene was a nice guy, a very quiet man. He never had a bad word to say about anyone.”

‘Women cheat more than men’

    

Pink above pic. has revealed that she thinks that women cheat more than men, but are more capable at not getting caught.

The popstar believes that females are better at covering their infidelities than guys, explaining: “Everyone’s always like, ‘Ah the man cheats,’ but I think women cheat more than men, we just don’t get caught.”

The 33-year-old singer has been married to motocross racer Carey Hart since 2006. The couple broke up between 2008 and 2009, however they are back together and have a 15-month-old daughter Willow Sage.

Pink added that she is not tempted to cheat on her husband, saying: “I have been in a relationship with this man for 10 years and I have figured out that no one can push your buttons like your mother or your partner.

“I have a tattoo on my wrist that says ‘True Love’ with Carey’s name under it”.

However, the star does understand how people could be tempted to cheat, which she wrote about in her new song Where Did the Beat Go.

She told music streaming service Spotify: “It’s about affairs. It’s just about how easy it is to fantasise when not being loved, for I think, both sides.”

Studies show that sugary drinks are the main culprits in childhood obesity
 

New research powerfully strengthens the case against soda and other sugary drinks as culprits in the obesity epidemic.

A huge, decades-long study involving more than 33,000 Americans has yielded the first clear proof that drinking sugary beverages interacts with genes that affect weight, amplifying a person’s risk of obesity beyond what it would be from heredity alone.

This means that such drinks are especially harmful to people with genes that predispose them to weight gain. And most of us have at least some of these genes.

In addition, two other major experiments have found that giving children and teens calorie-free alternatives to the sugary drinks they usually consume leads to less weight gain.

Collectively, the results strongly suggest that sugary drinks cause people to pack on the pounds, independent of other unhealthy behaviour such as overeating and getting too little exercise, scientists say.

That adds weight to the push for taxes, portion limits like the one just adopted in New York City, and other policies to curb consumption of soda, juice drinks and sports beverages sweetened with sugar.

Soda lovers do get some good news: Sugar-free drinks did not raise the risk of obesity in these studies.

“You may be able to fool the taste” and satisfy a sweet tooth without paying a price in weight, said an obesity researcher with no role in the studies, Rudy Leibel of Columbia University.

The studies were being presented Friday at an obesity conference in San Antonio and were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The gene research in particular fills a major gap in what we know about obesity. It was a huge undertaking, involving three long-running studies that separately and collectively reached the same conclusions. It shows how behaviour combines with heredity to affect how fat we become.

Having many of these genes does not guarantee people will become obese, but if they drink a lot of sugary beverages, “they fulfil that fate,” said an expert with no role in the research, Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University in New York. “The sweet drinking and the fatness are going together, and it’s more evident in the genetic predisposition people.”

Sugary drinks are the single biggest source of calories in the American diet, and they are increasingly blamed for the fact that a third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

Consumption of sugary drinks and obesity rates have risen in tandem — both have more than doubled since the 1970s in the U.S.

But that doesn’t prove that these drinks cause obesity. Genes, inactivity and eating fatty foods or just too much food also play a role. Also, diet research on children is especially tough because kids are growing and naturally gaining weight.

Until now, high-quality experiments have not conclusively shown that reducing sugary beverages would lower weight or body fat, said David Allison, a biostatistician who has done beverage research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, some of it with industry support.

He said the new studies on children changed his mind and convinced him that limiting sweet drinks can make a difference.

In one study, researchers randomly assigned 224 overweight or obese high schoolers in the Boston area to receive shipments every two weeks of either the sugary drinks they usually consumed or sugar-free alternatives, including bottled water. No efforts were made to change the youngsters’ exercise habits or give nutrition advice, and the kids knew what type of beverages they were getting.

After one year, the sugar-free group weighed more than 4 pounds less on average than those who kept drinking sugary beverages.

“I know of no other single food product whose elimination can produce this degree of weight change,” said the study’s leader, Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The weight difference between the two groups narrowed to 2 pounds in the second year of the study, when drinks were no longer being provided. That showed at least some lasting beneficial effect on kids’ habits. The study was funded mostly by government grants.

A second study involved 641 normal-weight children ages 4 to 12 in the Netherlands who regularly drank sugar-sweetened beverages. They were randomly assigned to get either a sugary drink or a sugar-free one during morning break at their schools, and were not told what kind they were given.

After 18 months, the sugary-drink group weighed 2 pounds more on average than the other group.

The studies “provide strong impetus” for policies urged by the Institute of Medicine, the American Heart Association and others to limit sugary drink consumption, Dr. Sonia Caprino of the Yale School of Medicine wrote in an editorial in the journal.

The American Beverage Association disagreed.

“Obesity is not uniquely caused by any single food or beverage,” it said in a statement. “Studies and opinion pieces that focus solely on sugar-sweetened beverages, or any other single source of calories, do nothing meaningful to help address this serious issue.”

The genetic research was part of a much larger set of health studies that have gone on for decades across the U.S., led by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Researchers checked for 32 gene variants that have previously been tied to weight. Because we inherit two copies of each gene, everyone has 64 opportunities for these risk genes. The study participants had 29 on average.

Every four years, these people answered detailed surveys about their eating and drinking habits as well as things like smoking and exercise. Researchers analyzed these over several decades.

A clear pattern emerged: The more sugary drinks someone consumed, the greater the impact of the genes on the person’s weight and risk of becoming obese.

For every 10 risk genes someone had, the risk of obesity rose in proportion to how many sweet drinks the person regularly consumed. Overall calorie intake and lifestyle factors such as exercise did not account for the differences researchers saw.

This means that people with genes that predispose them to be obese are more susceptible to the harmful effects of sugary drinks on their weight, said one of the study leaders, Harvard’s Dr. Frank Hu. The opposite also was true — avoiding these drinks can minimize the effect of obesity genes.

“Two bad things can act together and their combined effects are even greater than either effect alone,” Hu said. “The flip side of this is everyone has some genetic risk of obesity, but the genetic effects can be offset by healthier beverage choices. It’s certainly not our destiny” to be fat, even if we carry genes that raise this risk.

The study was funded mostly by federal grants, with support from two drug companies for the genetic analysis.

What Arctic Foxes Know About Global Warming

  

This week probably saw the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice reach its minimum extent for the year and begin to expand again, as it usually does in mid-September. Given that the retreat of Arctic ice has become a key piece of evidence for those who take a more alarmed view of global warming, it’s newsworthy that 2012′s melt was the greatest since records began in 1979, with sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere shrinking to about 1.3 million square miles, or about half the 1979-2008 average.

As this column has sometimes pointed out ways in which the effects of global warming are happening more slowly than predicted, it is fair to record that this rate of decline in Arctic sea ice is faster than many predicted. Although an entirely ice-free Arctic Ocean during at least one week a year is still several decades away at this rate, we are halfway there after just three decades.

   Arctic melts on this scale have happened before, however. Svend Funder of the Danish Museum of Natural History and his colleagues recently studied the northern coast of Greenland, where the land-fast sea ice never breaks up, even in a year like this. Yet evidence of wave action in the past (indicating open waters) and waterlogged driftwood show that for 2,500 years in the “Holocene Optimum” period, when Arctic summer temperatures were two to four degrees Celsius warmer than today, the summer melt of the Arctic Ocean routinely left half as much ice as this year.

Another study, by Jørgen Berge and colleagues from the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway, and other institutions, discovered a downward migration of egg-carrying amphipod crustaceans that enables them to recolonize Arctic ice from ice-free areas using deep currents. They say this implies that some animals are well adapted to the seasonal loss of ice.

In the Holocene Optimum there was no collapse of the polar-bear population or “point of no return.” The extent of Arctic summer sea ice then increased steadily, reaching a maximum during the very recent so-called Little Ice Age of 1500-1850. Potential confirmation that this was an unusually icy epoch comes from a newly published study by Durham University (in Britain) of the genetics of Arctic foxes on Iceland.

Greger Larson and his colleagues found that the remains of 17 Arctic foxes in Iceland from the ninth to the 12th centuries shared a single genetic signature, while the modern Icelandic fox population has five different genetic types. During the cold centuries, they infer, genetically diverse Arctic foxes from the Eurasian continent apparently reached Iceland via sea ice.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the extent of summer Arctic sea ice then shrank after 1850, before expanding in the 1960s. Clearly, the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice is both more variable and more vulnerable to warming than expected. But is the current rapid retreat caused only by warming? At least some of it might be caused by soot from dirty, coal-fired power stations. Some scientists have noticed that the decline in Arctic sea ice correlates better with the rapid growth of coal consumption in China than it does with global temperature. As the argument goes: Soot falling on white ice darkens it, which results in faster melting in summer sun.

Correlation does not always mean causation, but if soot is contributing to sea-ice melt, then it is moderately good news, because cleaning up soot emissions from power stations could be both cheaper and quicker than cutting carbon-dioxide emissions.

There’s also the puzzling fact that Antarctic sea ice shows no sign of summer retreat, and the current winter’s peak extent is well above average. The sea-dominated Southern Hemisphere is certainly warming more slowly than the land-dominated Northern Hemisphere, but it has still been warming. If warming is supposed to be “global,” shouldn’t sea ice retreat at both ends of the world?