Donie's ireland daily news BLOG update

New €10m investment plan for rural Irish towns ‘is not enough & needs to be much bigger’

   

A NEW GOVERNMENT PLAN TO INVEST €10M IN RURAL IRISH TOWNS NEEDS TO BE AT LEAST 20 TIMES BIGGER TO MAKE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE FOR RECESSION-HIT SMALLER COMMUNITIES, AN OPPOSITION TD HAS WARNED, 

Independent TD for Roscommon-Galway East, Michael Fitzmaurice, made the claim after the badly needed ring-fenced funding was announced by Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Minister Heather Humphreys (above pic left).

Under a long-awaited initiative to help rural Ireland recover from a near decade of an economic crash, Ms Humphreys has published plans to invest at least €10m in small towns and villages this year.

The money, which will be provided through the relevant local authorities, will be focussed on 200 specific communities where less than 10,000 people live – with the majority of funding going to villages with populations of less than 5,000 people.

Announcing the plans in Clones, Co Monaghan, yesterday, Ms Humphreys said the renewal scheme is needed “to begin breathing life back into our rural towns and villages”.

While accepting one funding initiative is not “the silver bullet” for tackling longer term economic problems in rural Ireland, the Fine Gael TD said the money available has been “more than doubled” from €4m last year and that up to 200 locations are set to benefit from the Government action.

However, despite the positive comments, Independent TD Mr Fitzmaurice heavily criticised the level of funding, saying it needs to be at least 20 times bigger in order to make any real difference to hard-hit communities.

The Roscommon-Galway East TD said the €10m fund in reality works out at just €380,000 per county, and that the money being made available is “not significant”.

“It’s ticking a box, basically saying, that look it, we have done this trying to get the rural regeneration off. To be quite frank about it you would want 20 times that if you were to make an effort in regenerating parts of rural Ireland,” he said.

While the economic crisis caused havoc to all parts of Ireland, rural communities were among the worst affected due to the linked issues of joblessness and emigration.

Addressing the issue was among the key points raised during the post-election Government negotiations

Dublin Airport now named as one of the fastest growing airports in Europe in 2016

 

TRAFFIC AT THE TRAVEL HUB GREW FASTER THAN AT BARCELONA’S EL-PRAT AIRPORT, ISTANBUL’S SABIHA GOKCEN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT AND SCHIPHOL AIRPORT IN AMSTERDAM

Dublin Airport is one of the fastest growing airports in Europe over the last six months, new research has revealed.

And the booming business led to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce to urge the Government to move forward the construction of a second runway at the popular travel hub.

Passenger numbers climbed by 13.4% in the first half of the year, according to data from the trade associate for European airports (ACI), reports Dublin Live .

In the first six months of this year, traffic at the airport grew faster than at Barcelona’s El-Prat Airport, Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, Copenhagen Airport and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

Aebhric McGibney, Director of Public and International Affairs at Dublin Chamber said: “Growth levels at Dublin Airport continue to surprise on the upside.

“The challenge now is to ensure that Dublin Airport is equipped for further growth in the coming years.

“Dublin Airport’s reaction to faster-than-expected growth has been to prioritise the construction of a much-needed new second runway.

“The Minister for Transport must now show the same sense of ambition to ensure that the Metro North link between Dublin City Centre, Dublin Airport and the rapidly-expanding north County Dublin area is built much quicker than the previously-mooted target of 2027.”

He added: “Dublin Airport is a vital piece of national infrastructure, with four out of every five visitors who arrive to Ireland by air coming through it.

“A new rail link is needed not only to serve Dublin Airport, but also to cater for the additional 40,000+ people who will be commuting into Dublin city centre from north county Dublin by 2023.”

Dublin Airport Managing Director Vincent Harrison said: “Dublin Airport had a very strong performance in the first half of this year, welcoming just over 13 million passengers.

“The growth in passenger numbers at Dublin Airport is having a significant impact on the Irish economy,”

Traffic growth across European airports was 4.9% in the first half of that year, with traffic at non-EU airports within Europe growing by just 0.5%

Why Volunteering is good for your mental health

    

Older people get the most benefit from helping others.

Volunteering is good for your mental health, especially in middle age and beyond, according to a new study.

The report, published in the journal BMJ Open, surveyed people living in 5,000 households in Great Britain over several years. About 20% of the people surveyed said they volunteered.

On a questionnaire that measured mental health and wellbeing—where lower scores were considered healthier—people who volunteered scored about 10.7, compared to the average score of 11.4 among people who didn’t volunteer. Volunteering may “provide a sense of purpose,” the researchers write in the study, while helping maintain social networks that are critical as people age.

Interestingly, people in the 40 and older groups appeared to have the greatest health benefit from the practice. The effect increased as people got older, and it was more robust among people who said they volunteered frequently compared to people who volunteered less often. “One explanation might be that during younger ages, volunteering may be perceived of as yet another obligatory task to fulfill in order to be a good student, parent, worker and so forth, so it does not have beneficial effects on health,” the researchers suggest.

The study is not the first to link volunteering to better health. Otherresearch has suggested that people over age 50 who volunteer regularly are less likely to develop high blood pressure than non-volunteers.

All that foot tapping and fidgeting could be good for your circulation 

  

FOR PEOPLE WHO FIDGET AND THAT NERVOUS HABIT OF TAPPING YOUR FEET MAY ANNOY YOUR FRIENDS, BUT IT COULD BE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH.

For people who fidget and have that nervous habit of tapping your feet that may annoy your friends, but it could be good for your health.

It can keep the blood flow in your legs going when you sit for a long time.

Researchers at the University of Missouri tested young men and women before and after 3 hours of sitting.

They were surprised to find that fidgeting increased blood flow enough to prevent a decline in the function in leg arteries that’s tied to long periods of sitting.

“What we found on an average, people performed 250 taps per minutes that resulted in an increase in blood flow during the actual fidgeting,” says Dr. Jaume Padilla, leader of the study.

“We believe that any type of leg movement will be beneficial to the arteries of the lower limbs,” continued Dr. Padilla.

It’s not a substitute for exercise, but…

“Perhaps in situations where we are stuck in the office or on an airplane, in these situations fidgeting or leg movement may be a good alternative,” said Dr. Padilla.

The study was good news for M-U student Nathan Winn, a confessed “constant fidgeter.”

“So as long as you are not annoying your friends or bothering other people and you can get potential health benefits out of it, then why not do it?” says Winn.

Previous studies found another benefit to fidgeting – is that it helped young people with ADHD learn easier.

So there’s two good excuses if you are someone who fidgets.

Medieval skeletons found under disused Kilkenny car park

FEMALE REMAINS BELIEVED TO BE OF POOR ANGLO-NORMAN COLONISTS WHO DIED YOUNG

   

THE SKELETONS WERE DISCOVERED JUST A FOOT UNDERGROUND DURING THE DIGGING OF SERVICE TRENCHES FOR ELECTRICITY WIRES.

Four medieval skeletons have been discovered under a disused car park in Kilkenny city.

The female skeletons have been dated to between 1250 and 1350 meaning they were likely among the first Anglo-Norman colonists in Co Kilkenny.

They were discovered just a foot underground during the digging of service trenches for electricity wires.

The service trenches were for the €6 million St Mary’s Medieval Mile Museumin Kilkenny which is due to open in the next 12 months.

The area was formerly a car park which had been concreted over in the 1950s before the church and its grounds were bought by the council in 2009.

Archaeologists have determined that the women, aged between eight and 25, were the poor of the town.

They had been buried in the southwest corner of the city’s main graveyard around St Mary’s Parish Church. This area was reserved for the poor.

Tell-tale green stains on the bones of the skeletons suggest they were buried in shrouds rather than in coffins as the better off were at the time. The stains came from copper-alloy pins used to hold the burial shrouds together.

One of the skeletons, that of a teenage girl, showed evidence of hardship. Her spine was damaged from the prolonged lifting of heavy weights and one of her legs appeared to be shorter than the other, meaning she would have walked with a pronounced limp.

Their premature deaths showed how hard life was for the poor at that time. For these unfortunate girls, life was truly nasty, brutish and short.

The skeletons are being carefully recorded and analysed in the ground by the archaeological team and their osteoarchaeologist. Once exhumed they will be brought to a laboratory for further detailed analysis.

They may be reburied in St Mary’s, following consultation with the National Museum of Ireland.

Meteor shower set to light up Irish skies on next Thursday with dazzling display

‘THREE TIMES STRONGER THAN NORMAL’

      

HUNDREDS OF SHOOTING STARS WILL BE VISIBLE FROM ACROSS IRELAND ON THURSDAY EVENING AS THE ANNUAL PERSEID METEOR SHOWER PEAKS

Irish skies are set to sparkle later this week as a spectacular meteor shower is expected to peak this week.

The annual Perseid meteor shower is the strongest of the year, according to David Moore, chairman of Astronomy Ireland.

“This year is expected to be two to three times stronger than normal, because we’re passing through a particularly dense swarm of dust particles,” Mr Moore told RTE Radio One’s Morning Ireland.

He explained that although they look like stars shooting across a sky, they are actually debris from a comet.

“They’re just bits that have fallen off a comet goes around the sun every 120 years. It’s been around so many times that there’s now a huge swarm of particles all throughout its orbit, and we pass closest to that, a particularly dense strand, on Thursday night.

“We hit them at 100,000 miles an hour and they burn up as a fiery streak,” he said.

Stargazers hoping to take in the dazzling view are advised that the meteor shower will be visible from 10pm on Thursday until 4am on Friday morning, but that the spectacle should continue for several nights afterwards.

“Normally you’d expect to see a shooting star every ten minutes in a dark rural sky and less in towns and cities, but we could be seeing two or three if we’re lucky,” Mr Moore said.

He added that although there will be a moon until 12.30am, it won’t make much of a difference to the view, and that conditions are otherwise “perfect” for the shimmering display.     

Donie's news Ireland daily BLOG update

Damaging Election results place huge pressure on Irish coalition Government relations

 

Efforts to remould the programme for government and reshape the Cabinet are likely to take place next week.

The Coalition is well and truly shaken after a stinging result for Labour and a bad day for Fine Gael. Whatever about the fate of Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, efforts to remould the programme for government and reshape the Cabinet are now likely to be hastened. But will it work?

Both Gilmore and Taoiseach Enda Kenny find themselves at something of a crossroads. While setbacks are inevitable in any mid-term election, the force of the rebuke from voters greatly increases the stakes for both parties. Whether they can retrieve their composure and common sense of mission is in question. This will have implications for their capacity to settle another budget this autumn and work together into the final year of their mandate.

Meetings on Wednesday of Fine Gael and Labour TDs will be official forums for internal debate, but the postmortem is already under way. Within a dejected Labour, the sense remains that the result is worse than expected. Within Fine Gael, TDs say assertive action is required to regain the political initiative and arrest the drift seen since the start of the year.

If an immediate move into talks between the parties might smack too much of panic, developments can be expected shortly. Labour’s election wounds are deeper than Fine Gael’s, but a balance will still have to be struck between the needs of both parties when it comes to the reshuffle.

Political revamp The challenge is to freshen the public face of the Coalition and bolster its authority. While that would necessitate radical change, Kenny’s instinct would be conservative. The Taoiseach might have to go further than he would wish. That too is risky, for reshuffles always leave disappointment in their wake.

Whether Gilmore faces an immediate challenge to his leadership remains unclear. It is a given by now, however, that he wants out of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Labour has designs on the jobs and enterprise brief held byRichard Bruton, but Fine Gael has no intention of yielding. Indeed, its guiding principle is that there should be no new division of portfolios with Labour.

While the likely departure for Brussels of Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan frees up one portfolio, there are other strains. Fine Gael has long been unhappy with Joan Burton’s performance in the Department of Social Protection. Similarly, Labour and many in Fine Gael are displeased with Minister for Health James Reilly.

Ditching Reilly poses a challenge, for he is deputy leader of Fine Gael. That said, Kenny was ruthless in disposing ofAlan Shatter and Frank Flannery. Some of his own Ministers believe he should replace Reilly with Leo Varadkar.

Then there is the matter of the programme for government. There is no mystery to the themes for discussion: an increase in disposable income by widening the higher income tax band, a reworking of the medical card review and measures to boost house-building. With Fine Gael in pursuit of tax cuts, the quid pro quo for Labour might be a hike in the minimum wage.

Financial strictures All are fine in principle, but the Coalition’s problems centre on the financial strictures within which it must operate. Any promise of help for the hard- pressed in the Government programme would face an early test in budget 2015, to be agreed by mid-October.

The obvious difficulty remains that the Government is legally bound to achieve a budget deficit below 3 per cent next year. Opinions vary as to whether that requires a €2 billion retrenchment – which now seems like a political impossibility – or €500 million from the water tax. Either way, it will be a huge challenge to deliver an appreciable uplift in take-home income while attaining the deficit cut.

Resolving these tensions is essential if the Government is to turn the narrative in its favour. Voters appeared unmoved by ritualistic complaints about the mess the Coalition inherited from Fianna Fáil in 2011.

These elections serve to alter the relationship between Fine Gael and Labour: the parties could not form a government if the results were repeated in a general election. Thus their inherent codependence is not as it was, even if the argument is made that voters behave differently in second-order elections. There’s no comfort in that for former councillors and MEPs.

Burton indicates possible heave against Gilmore after Labour electorate hammering

  

‘I’m not not going to call anything like that until we have all of the Election results in’

Joan Burton has strongly hinted that she is considering launching a heave against party leader Eamon Gilmore.

The Social Protection Minister has hinted that there needs to be changes at the top of the party, which she says has been given a “shellacking by the electorate”.

“I think in some ways Barack Obama, talking about the mid term elections in the United States, probably put it well when he said: You know, ‘the electorate have given the Labour Party a hammering.’”

Asked specifically if she would consider launching a heave against Mr Gilmore, Ms Burton replied:

“I’M NOT GOING TO CALL ANYTHING LIKE THAT UNTIL WE HAVE ALL OF THE RESULTS IN.”

While she said she has “confidence” in Mr Gilmore, Ms Burton gave a far from ringing endorsement of his leader.

On two occasions during an interview with reporters at the City West count centre, Ms Burton called for an examination of “the way business is done” within the party.

“I think the issues are far wider than simply the issue of one person or personalities, I think the issues go much wider and I think they affect policy and the way business is done,” she added.

Ms Burton was pressed on several occasions on her support for Mr Gilmore with a number of reporters pointing out that she was stopping short of given a full endorsement.

“It’s not about individual personalities within the Labour Party. It’s actually about the purpose, about the content of the policies and the way government works, I think we need to look at all of that,” she said.

She branded Labour’s election result as a “shellacking” as she gave a of party leader Eamon Gilmore.

Ms Burton was flanked by Loraine Mulligan, the party’s by-election candidate who faces being eliminated in seventh place.

Minister Kathleen Lynch said on the Labour result: ‘‘..maybe we haven’t been very good at the message and rebutting the clear lies and distortion that others have levelled at us and maybe we need to get better at that,’’ she told George Hook on Newstalk.

‘‘It wasn’t as if we went into this government blind, we knew the crisis of the country then – it had four months money remaining – …..and we brought the country back from that brink.’’

‘‘The central question for me is this. Is this a protest vote or is it a vote for alternative government?’’

Girl of 6, draws up bucket list of things to see before she goes blind

   

KINSAY 31, WITH HER BRAVE DAUGHTER JESSICA aged 6 & her bucket list.

A six-year-old girl has drawn up a ‘must see’ list before an incurable disease robs her of her sight.

Jessica Smith wants to swim with dolphins, visit a monkey sanctuary and become a Disney princess for a day before she goes blind.

The primary school pupil was diagnosed with rare genetic condition Leber’s Congential Amaurosis, which results in vision loss from little to no light perception.

Her mum Kinsay, 31, said she noticed Jessica’s eyes were ‘extremely wobbly’ when she was just three months old. She was forced to wear glasses from seven months.

Last year she began complaining of headaches and sore legs, and her skin was covered in pink bruises. Further tests revealed the full extent of her condition.

With the help of her family, the youngster from Wallasey, Merseyside, is preparing for life without vision.

She began to learn braille in September and uses a walking cane to play with her four sisters.

Her bucket list also includes a trip to Legoland, a professional photo shoot and a visit to the zoo, and her parents have now launched a website asking for donations in a bid to turn Jessica’s dreams into reality.

Meteor shower can be seen peaking tonight, as long as bad weather keeps away

   

A brand-new meteor shower will peak tonight in skies across the U.S.

A brand-new meteor shower with a name that sounds like a magician’s incantation—Camelopardilids—is predicted to peak late night on May 23 and in early morning hours of May 24. Skywatchers in the United States should be treated to a spectacular display—weather permitting, that is.

The predicted meteor shower consists of bits of dust cast off from the comet 209P/LINEAR, a periodic comet discovered in 2004. Because the meteor shower is new, astronomers are not sure what to expect. Some say it will be a real light show, with hundreds of shooting stars per hour.

Weather watchers say that stargazers in the north-central part of the nation will have the best viewing weather. A large dome of high pressure north of Chicago likely means clear skies over the Great Lakes region and the greater Ohio Valley to the mid-Atlantic coast, according to report in the Christian Science Monitor.

Other regions, however, may not be so lucky. The Deep South, the Central Great Plains, Texas and Oklahoma will see a stationary front that is likely to spawn heavy cloud cover, showers, and scattered thunderstorms, the Monitor reports. People on the North Carolina coast, too, may see cloudiness and scattered showers due to a small wave of low pressure in the region. The northeastern part of the country will probably experience widespread cloud cover along with light rain and drizzle, mostly across central and southern New England.

In Arizona and other parts of the Southwest, a powerful upper level low-pressure system is likely to bring thunderstorms and heavy downpours, the Monitor says.

For the lucky ones able to see the Camelopardilids, however, the burst of meteors is expected to be brief but brilliant. Although the meteor shower appears to originate from the dim constellation Cameloparidalis, the shooting stars will appear all over the sky, according to Sky and Telescope. The name comes from the Latin for ‘camel will spots like a leopard,’ or, as we know it today, a ‘giraffe.’

If bad weather makes it impossible for you to view tonight’s celestial event, several media outlets will be hosting live coverage of the Camelopardilids shower. You can watch webcasts at Slooh.com, the Slooh meteor shower feed on Space.com, and the Virtual Telescope Project.