Cork-born founder of Sisters of Charity declared Venerable by Pope Francis
FOUNDED ST VINCENT’S HOSPITAL IN DUBLIN
Mary Aikenhead founded the Sisters of Charity in 1816.
Mother Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Sisters of Charity, has been declared ‘Venerable’ by Pope Francis.
It is the second of the four steps to sainthood in the Catholic tradition. Those include declaration as a Servant of God, followed by the declaration of Venerable, then Blessed and finally canonisation as a saint.
Mary Aikenhead was given the title Servant of God in 1921, meaning she was then being considered as a candidate for canonisation.
She was born in Cork in 1787. Her father Dr David Aikenhead was an apothecary (pharmacist) and member of the Church of Ireland while her mother Mary Stackpole was from a well-off Catholic family. Mary was fostered to a poor Catholic couple John and Mary Rourke until she was six, when the Rourkes came to live with her parents as servants.
In 1802, Mary became a Catholic thanks to the influence of one of her aunts, and she joined a group of women who set up centres for the distribution of food and clothing. She became convinced she had a vocation of service to the poor. She helped set up an orphanage at Dublin’s North William Street in 1815 and sought permission from Rome to establish a new order of nuns with a vow of service to the poor.
This was granted in 1816 when the Religious Sisters of Charity was set up. Its nuns became the first to visit prisoners in Kilmainham jail. She opened her first Catholic school for poor children at Dublin’s Gardiner St in 1830 and founded St Vincent’s Hospital in 1834, the first hospital in Ireland run by women for patients of all creeds and where doctors and nurses could receive training.
Mary Aikenhead died in 1858.
Today, there are more than 400 Sisters of Charity in Ireland, England, Scotland, Zambia, California, Nigeria and Malawi – and 145 in Australia.
Irish Water spends €650,000 explaining how water is made drinkable
‘Cloud to glass’ ad campaign highlights ‘complex’ process of making water safe.
The ad shows the seven steps Irish Water says it takes to make water drinkable.
Seven steps and three days from “cloud to glass”. Irish Water, the utility company responsible for developing and billing for water services, is launching an eight-week advertising campaign designed to persuade consumers that drinkable water doesn’t simply fall from the sky.
The public body is spending €650,000 to highlight the role “much-needed investment” will play in delivering a clean drinking water and wastewater supply.
Designed by Irish Water’s creative agency Rothco, the campaign will run across television, radio, press, out-of-home, cinema and digital media for a period of eight weeks, coinciding with the period in which the first water bills will be sent to households.
Irish Water head of communications Elizabeth Arnett said the campaign was aimed at “everybody”, not just the households that have yet to register.
The point of the campaign, which launches on television tonight, is “to highlight some of the challenges we have” in maintaining the water supply, she said.
One out-of-home poster advertisement in the “Cloud to Glass” campaign states that it takes “up to three days and seven complex stages to make raw water drinkable” followed by the line “we’re here to keep up with demand”.
The television and cinema ads feature animations that show the treatment process from the reservoir to the tap.
“This is very much a public information campaign,” said Irish Water marketing manager Wendy Jennings. “A creative marketing campaign such as this one is very important when we have so many people to communicate with. We think this is the right campaign for now.”
The State-owned company is keen to get across the message that it is engaged in a large-scale capital investment programme to upgrade Ireland’s water infrastructure, with the aim of cutting wastage from leaks and reducing the number of boil water notices, among other things.
“More than 1.2 million households have registered with Irish Water, about 200,000 of which will not be required to pay bills because they have private wells and septic tanks. Registration means the household qualifies for the Government’s €100 water conservation grant.
About 1.5 million households are expected to receive their first water bills in April.
The utility company was dogged by controversy and criticism when it began its first communications campaign last year and the Government’s introduction of water charges remains the subject of regular protests.
HEALTH ISSUES FOR CHILDREN
Heart health decline begins in childhood (US research reveals)?
Most people begin their lives with healthy hearts, however a poor diet and lifestyle means that for many, a decline in heart health begins when they are still children, US researchers have insisted.
They monitored almost 9,000 children aged between two and 11 years between 2003 and 2010. They focused on four of the main components that are associated with heart health – body mass index (BMI), a healthy diet, blood pressure and total cholesterol.
They found that while all children achieved at least one ideal measurement in these four areas, no child achieved all four.
The area that children most commonly fell down on was a healthy diet. In fact, less than 1% achieved four or five of the five components of a healthy diet – namely a high intake of fruit and vegetables, a high intake of fish, a high intake of whole grains, a low intake of sugar-sweetened drinks and a low intake of sodium (salt).
Overall, less than 10% of the children consumed the recommended daily intake of fruit, vegetables or fish. And just 3% of boys and 2.4% of girls managed to eat the recommended daily intake of whole grains.
Over half of the children were found to be consuming too many sugar-sweetened drinks, while 90% were consuming too much sodium.
Around 30% of the children who took part were already found to be overweight or obese. This was more common in the children aged between six and 11 than in the two to five age group.
Meanwhile, around 40% of the children were found to have poor total cholesterol levels.
According to the researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago, while heart health tends to be optimal at birth, unhealthy behaviours during childhood can lead to a substantial decline.
“Our findings indicate that, in general, children start with pretty good blood pressure. But if they have a horrible diet, it will drive a worsening body mass index (BMI) and cholesterol levels.
“The better we can equip our children to make healthy choices, the more cardiovascular health will be preserved into adulthood. And those who preserve their heart health into middle age live much longer and are much healthier while they live,” they said.
€1.2M EU SPEND ON FRUIT FOR IRISH SCHOOL CHILDREN
The EU is to spend over €1.2m on the School Fruit Scheme in Ireland during the next school term.
In total, €150m is being spent on the scheme across the EU.
However, three states have opted out of the programme: Sweden, Finland and the UK.
Ciara Eustace of the EU office in Dublin said the objective of the scheme is to improve the nutrition of Irish children.
This aims to encourage healthy eating habits among young people – starting fruit and vegetable consumption at an early age and hoping that will continue as a good habit throughout their life,” she said.
The School Fruit Scheme was established in 2009, based off the success of the much older School Milk Scheme.
Some 800 of our best scientists spell out how to achieve the right balance for Irish research
WOULD WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE DOUBLE HELIX WITHOUT LONG-TERM SUSTAINING OF EXPLORATORY RESEARCH?
A properly functioning scientific research strategy is an essential for any country seeking to become a world player in this complex and highly competitive sector. Research takes place across widely differing organisations and for widely differing reasons.
Universities use research as a way to educate students but also to build reputation and even create a funding stream through patenting and licensing. A company may conduct research to improve competitiveness, to bring a new product or service to market or to feed services into larger research-driven companies.
An effective science strategy must be relevant to all of this, providing vision and far horizon goals for those participating in research no matter what the ultimate aim. For this reason one of the most important attributes of a good strategy is balance. There must be a balance struck between what is good for business and what is good for the higher education institutions.
There has to be a balance between the provision of a top-quality education for students who want to pursue research for knowledge or near-to-market translational research. Opportunities must be available to them whether it is as a research academic or as a highly trained specialist in a technology company. Would we have discovered the Double Helix without a long-term sustaining of basic science research?
An interdepartmental cabinet committee was formed late last December involving 10 individual government departments along with the Higher Education Authority and Science Foundation Ireland to pull together a new strategy for science. To achieve this it must correct a failure of balance, as perceived by the science community.
More than 800 scientists based here and abroad signed a letter published in this newspaper on Wednesday to declare their view that the current approach to State funding for research is off balance. They also declared that this is eroding their ability to work as researchers but also as teachers.
They have called on the Government to reintroduce balance to the ecosystem before more damage is done to Ireland’s research reputation. The Government ignores the research community at its peril. The science strategy offers a chance to balance the system and bring a step-change to Ireland’s research capacity.
Amazon absorbs less carbon dioxide as trees die off, A new study says
Scientists say life cycle of trees has sped up, contributing to higher mortality rate
A member of a research team measures tree growth in the Peruvian Amazon.
The Amazon rain forest has long absorbed more carbon than it releases and acted as a vital brake on climate change. An extensive study now suggests that it is losing its ability to suck up the excess carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere by human activities.
The main reason: the large-scale death of trees in the rain forest, according to the study.
Mortality rates of trees in the region have increased by more than a third since the mid-1980s. As a result, the amount of new carbon stored each year—in the form of growing tree stems, new leaves, roots and organic matter in the soil—is diminishing, the study says.
Carbon dioxide is a key ingredient necessary for photosynthesis, the complex process by which plants convert light into energy.
Carbon sinks such as the Amazon “have been a big subsidy from nature for a long time now, because they take up a significant amount of our carbon-dioxide emissions. This is a first indication that the process is saturating” as trees die off, said Oliver Phillips,professor of tropical ecology at the University of Leeds in England and a co-author of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Flying buttresses of an Amazon rain forest tree in Colombia. Researchers say more trees like this are dying.
Each year, human activity releases about 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. For the past few decades, about a quarter of those emissions have been absorbed by the oceans, while another quarter is taken up by trees and other terrestrial sources. The other half stays in the atmosphere and is believed to be the main driver of man-made climate change.
Plants have thrived in that excess CO2. Partly because of the increased availability of the gas, the global land carbon sink has grown since the mid-1990s.
About half of the carbon sink on land consists of intact tropical forests. The Amazon, which is 15 times the size of California, is at least half of the global tropical forest. Its 300 hundred billion trees store one fifth of all carbon in the earth’s biomass.
While increasing CO2 emissions fueled a growth spurt for the Amazon’s trees, that growth rate of new trees has leveled off since 2000. At the same time, the trees’ death rate has gone up.
The exact reasons for the death rate haven’t been pinned down, but several factors may be at play. The Amazon climate is now more variable. Intense droughts in 2005 and 2010 killed millions of trees. Paradoxically, the availability of extra CO2 over the long term has had unexpected consequences, likely contributing to an increase in the death rate, according to the study.
“The whole life cycle of the trees has been sped up,” said Prof. Phillips. “They are growing faster, maturing faster, aging faster and dying faster.” This may explain why the tree death rate is outstripping the growth rate.
In the 1990s, the Amazon absorbed an estimated two billion tons of CO2 each year. Compared with that peak level, the net carbon uptake has now halved, according to the study. For the first time, the Amazon absorbs less carbon than the one billion tons of CO2 emitted annually by the countries of South America.
To measure the shift in carbon storage, the scientists studied 200,000 trees in 321 forest plots scattered across eight countries in the Amazon. They tracked tree births and deaths, as well as the changes in diameter, height and density of different species.
This allowed them to estimate changes to the trees’ carbon volume, or biomass. By extrapolating that data, some of which goes back 30 years, they arrived at an estimate for the larger Amazon, said Roel Brienen, a co-author and ecologist at Leeds.
The study has limitations. It only relates to primary, undisturbed forests, which makes up about 80% of the Amazon. Thus, it doesn’t account for changes in carbon uptake in the remaining areas, as a result of agriculture, forest regrowth or deforestation.
Nor is it clear whether the reduced carbon uptake in the Amazon is also occurring in other tropical forests or, indeed, whether it will ever occur in temperate or boreal forests.
Lars Hedin, a professor of ecology at Princeton University and who wasn’t involved in the research but wrote a commentary on the study, suggests that the latest analysis provides a good springboard for assessing planet-wide changes. He writes: “The CO2 component of climate change may become substantially more difficult to manage and abate in the future if the findings from the Amazon basin apply more generally to the land carbon sink.”
