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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Donie's Sunday news Ireland BLOG

We cannot continue to provide our services in Ireland anymore free of charge

Says former minister Ray MacSharry

 

All payments from the Exchequer must be means-tested, writes former finance minister Ray MacSharry

IT is going to be a tough Budget but it will have to be humane and protect the most vulnerable. There are, however, areas where we need to give consideration, specifically, to issues that may stimulate the economy.
  In my time we borrowed money through the ACC and the ICC to encourage investment in agriculture, added value projects and small and medium-sized industries.
At that time, it was because interest rates were so high. The problem now is the availability of capital. The banks do not seem to have sufficient resources for the protection of existing jobs and the creation of new ones.
I note where the UK government has set up a special bank with stg£1bn (€1.15bn), to be lent to small and medium-sized industries. We have to do something like this to ensure that the entrepreneurs of this generation can get access to capital for the many great ideas and initiatives they have, whether it be in small industries, tourism, agriculture or the food industry.
We need to do much more in this area and to add value to our own indigenous resources mainly for export. We do not have much growth in Europe or in the world economy, which makes it impossible for us to grow as an exporting country. We have to do more ourselves.
A few areas which we should look at are: the black economy, construction, call centres, an oil excise rebate and a financial transaction tax.
There is no doubt the black economy is growing.
We should consider tax allowances for people who are employing workers on a short-term basis and paying cash.
If a tax allowance was given towards such expenditure, more would be done and people would have to come out of the black economy to participate in this work. This can cover small construction jobs, plumbers, electricians, gardeners, drivers and so on.
In the tourism area, we now earn less from incoming tourists than the amount spent by Irish people on holidays abroad.
We cannot blame them for that due to the kind of weather we have, but for a small additional cost, such as €10 per trip/person, it would not mean much to them — but would mean a lot for the Irish economy.
The rising cost of oil is making it very difficult for industry and is adding to inflation. Consideration must be given for some rebate for the hard-pressed industries of our country.
Another point is consideration be given to a small financial transaction tax, national and international.
The banking debt has to be taken outside the normal budgetary and financial package. We will have to get support for 30-40 year bonds at reasonable interest rates to be paid for by the banks as and when they return to profitability.
Ireland did not cause the world financial crisis. It happened to be first in line when the financial crash came and we had to deal with it ourselves, supported by Europe.
We were not responsible for the recession in the US or the UK, who have printed trillions of dollars and pounds to overcome their difficulties and still they do not have any meaningful growth.
The Irish people have made, and continue to make, their contribution to saving the euro. This has got to be recognised in Europe so that we get support for our banking debt and help to return to the normal markets to secure the finance at reasonable rates to run the country.
Now I will turn to other points. I would say:
In relation to the Government’s strategy of a 2:1 ratio of cuts in expenditure versus increased taxation, I would say that this seems a reasonable approach but cannot be definitive. We must look at all possibilities for savings and improve efficiencies where we can and look at the tax burden on the community.
The Croke Park Agreement can and will have to deliver more, but only through negotiations. The trade unions are responsible people and know better than most that everyone has to make their contribution to overcome the great challenges facing the country. The costs of running government are too high and it is in the interests of all that we only spend what we take in taxes.
Industrial peace is what we all want and it can always be achieved through dialogue, understanding and fairness. The result will always be good for the economy and that is the only gauge.
In relation to the question of allowances and increments for civil servants, I would say that all allowances have to be examined, should be justified and, I am sure through discussion, the necessary savings can be made in the context of the overall review of conditions and practices introduced over the years. Progress will have to be made in this area.
We cannot have a two-tier system of payments for people doing the same job. It will not work because it would not be fair. All must make a contribution, existing and new public servants, because we need the savings urgently.
As to the issue of which is the better option: to cut pay, increments and allowances, or the numbers working in the public sector, I would say that we will have to look at both — and the services they deliver. In future it will have to be what we can afford to deliver.
The Government can decide where the least impact on the services would occur and start there. All job losses should be voluntary and be in the best interests of the necessary services to be provided.
We all know savings have to be made, but the most in need and the most vulnerable must be protected.
The real expenditure is in the areas of health, education, social services, justice — including pay, which means that taxes, social welfare and pay have to be taken into consideration regardless of election promises. The budget deficit has to be reduced.
Also, the tax base has to be widened.
Services can no longer be provided free of charge — except in special cases. Income tax and extra charges, including USC and PRSI and other levies, are too high. That said, I do not think income taxes inhibit growth or affect employment creation.
‘As for calls to introduce a wealth tax, I would say: What wealth?’ I do not believe there is substantial untapped wealth in this country which is untouched by taxation; some maybe…’
All workers are used to paying tax since they began employment. But I do believe that the people who have the most should pay the most and those on salaries and income of €80,000-€100,000-plus could pay more and should pay more.
In principle, I do agree with a property tax based on a fair valuation system, but we must take account of ability to pay for those people who are in negative equity, in mortgage arrears and those who paid very high stamp duty in recent years.
A proper ratable valuation system would be better than a property tax and would be seen to be much more related to the services provided in householders’ own areas such as water, sewage, roads, public lighting, footpaths, parks, playgrounds and environmental matters etc.
As to calls for the introduction of a wealth tax, I would say: What wealth?
I do not believe that there is substantial untapped wealth in this country which is untouched by taxation; some maybe, but not substantial when you take family homes into account or land assets for the farming industry.
But I would agree with those who say that due to the situation the country finds itself in, all payments from the Exchequer must be means- tested. We cannot afford universality at present.
It is not acceptable. At a time when we have robots walking on the moon, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility to introduce a fair means-testing system. Otherwise we will have to tax such payments above a certain income level.

Ireland’s new property (PRSA) price register published today Sunday

   
The publication of the State’s long-awaited residential property price register today will restore “some confidence in the property market,” it has been claimed.
The Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said the Register, compiled by the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PRSA) using Stamp Duty figures from the Revenue Commissioners, was an essential step in bring first-time buyers back into the market and improving transparency.
The Register – accessible at www.propertypriceregister.ie – puts reliable details on exactly how much houses are selling for into the public domain for the first time and includes precise information on residential properties sold in the Republic since January 1st 2010.
Prices for both cash and mortgage sales are included. The information will be updated on a regular basis and the PRSA said it aimed to published price details within a month of the date of sale of the property.
The register includes the date of sale and the address of each residential property sold and can be searched using criteria including sales by county, city or town, individual property addresses and by year.
However the PRSA stressed that it is not intended as a “Property Price Index” as the details are limited to price, address and date of sale .They do not include such details as property size or number of rooms.
The Minister for Justice Alan Shatter expressed the hope that the register would improve the quality of information available on the Irish housing market and restore confidence to the sector.
“In recent years, because of the steep downturn in the property market, it has been difficult to get accurate information on property prices,” he said. “This uncertainty has led to a lack of investor confidence and has contributed to stagnation. . . particularly among first time buyers.
He claimed the Register would help “to remove some of this uncertainty, restore some confidence in the property market and provide transparency in residential property sale prices.”
The PRSA chairwoman Geraldine Clarke said the register would be “of substantial assistance in helping people make decisions in relation to one of the most important purchases of their lives.”

SLIGO MAN CHARGED WITH MURDER OF EUGENE GILLESPIE

AFTER HANDING HIMSELF IN TO GARDAI

      
A 29-year-old man has been charged with the murder of Eugene Gillespie in Sligo Town.
Simon McGinley of Connaughton Road, in Sligo appeared at a special sitting of Carrick-on-Shannon District Court this afternoon, charged with killing 67-year-old Mr Gillespie at Old Market Street in Sligo between September 19 and 21.
Ocean FM’s Niall Delaney, reporting from Carrick-on-Shannon, said the court was told that McGinley had handed himself into gardaĆ­ voluntarily on Friday night, in a distraught state.
 Connaughton Road, in Sligo
Inspector Jim Delaney gave evidence of arresting and charging McGinley with murder at 1.15am this morning, to which McGinley responded: ‘Guilty.’
An application to have the accused placed on suicide watch was made by his legal representative. 
Judge Kevin Kilrane said McGinley should be given a full psychiatric assessment and only then, if required, should he be placed on suicide watch.
There was no application for bail and the accused was remanded in custody to Castlereagh Prison to appear in court again on Thursday next.
McGinley sobbed as he briefly spoke with members of his family at the back of the court, before he was led away.

Former Tanaiste McDowell gives his pensions to charity

  
The former Tanaiste Michael McDowel & his wife Professor Niamh Brennan.
The former Tanaiste Michael McDowell, has disclosed that he donates his entire State pension to charity, as new figures show that he received what appeared to be an unexpected pension windfall of €143,000 last year.
Due to a mistake by the Department of Finance, Mr McDowell apparently received the biggest political pension of former office holders last year, according to figures that were released on Friday.
Mr McDowell, a former justice minister, received a pension of €173,683 in 2011 due to a back payment.
This included a €142,877 lump sum, which he was owed because the department had underpaid his pension over four years, and a pension of €31,435 for 2010.
Mr McDowell said this weekend that he and his wife, Professor Niamh Brennan, decided to donate his pensions to charity more than a year after he left politics.
“Since 2009, we agreed that everything I got by way of pension we would give to charity,” he said. “Since then, I have been paying everything due to me on foot of these pensions to charity.”
Mr McDowell said he now donates the money on a yearly basis to a number of charities — both Irish and foreign — which he declined to name.
He draws two pensions as a former attorney-general and former minister. In the three years since he decided to donate his pensions, the charities are likely to have shared more than €200,000.
Mr McDowell is one of several former ministers who chose to give their pensions to charity, rather than handing them back to the Exchequer. Michael Noonan, the Minister for Finance, has said he donates his ministerial pension — about €31,000 — to two charities each month.
Other members of the Government who receive ministerial pensions have surrendered them to the State, including Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore.
The State paid out €4.1m in ministerial pensions last year, according to the figures in the Department of Finance accounts. The list showed for the first time which politicians surrendered portions of their pensions. Only 27 chose to do so, collectively giving back €178,600 to the Exchequer.
While Mr McDowell occupied the top slot because of the departmental error, the former President Mary Robinson came in second with her pension of €139,496. She voluntarily surrendered €15,499.
Albert Reynolds received the highest ministerial pension at €99,681, followed by John Bruton, the former Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach, who received €91,446. Bertie Ahern, the former Taoiseach, surrendered €14,600 of his €83,000. Michael Woods, the former environment minister, surrendered €4,100 of his €64,100.
Those who did not surrender their pensions included Brian Cowen, the former Taoiseach, who received a pension of €79,738.
Padraig Flynn, the former minister who featured in the Mahon tribunal on planning corruption, did not surrender any of his €47,800.
The European Commissioner Maura Geoghegan-Quinn surrendered her pension of almost €60,000.
Michael D Higgins, the President, also surrendered €6,600 — which was almost €1,000 more than the pension he actually received.
Junior finance minister Brian Hayes said yesterday that the State pension scheme that saw a total of €15m paid out to all former office-holders last year will be reviewed before the Budget. He added that the scheme needed to be reformed.

Ireland’s problem of suicides is not ‘Somebody’s Else’s Problem’

It is all of our problem?

  

We, and our leaders, cannot continue to ignore the relentless rise in deaths

What is wrong with us? Are we all suffering from what psychologists call a “normalcy bias”? Where we go about our business, eyes turned sideways, refusing to acknowledge what’s happening under our noses? Or perhaps some of us are down with a nasty dose of SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) syndrome?
Even when faced with the facts we say; “Good Lord, that’s only terrible”, and shake our heads as if it were all occurring thousands of miles away, in a place we can only scarcely believe exists.
In case you’re unsure what I’m talking about, it’s the exponential surge in mental distress, chronic mental illness and, particularly, the relentless rise in deaths by suicide, currently taking place, yes, before our eyes.
Last Monday, Terence Casey, coroner for south Kerry, had six inquests for suicides before him. Six. In one day. In tiny south Kerry.
As Mr Casey said: “There was a time when I might have one, or two, suicides out of maybe six inquests on a day, but now it’s becoming rampant. I never before had six in one sitting”. All the deaths by suicide were male — the youngest was 14. Fourteen.
But surely that must be some other Ireland and not the one where mental health budgets continue to be slashed. On Wednesday, on RTE’s Morning Ireland programme, an obviously distressed Des Kavanagh (general secretary of the Psychiatric Nurses Association) discussed the deaths of two patients by suicide in mental health facilities in Dublin and Kerry last week. He said that in mental health “acute beds have been cut and cut and cut”, that there has been a reduction of “a quarter of the total number of nursing posts in psychiatry”, and that “we’ve been the worst hit of any frontline service in this country”.
Consequently, Des Kavan-agh is a fan of the old, paternalistic style of psychiatric
nursing, where patients share large dormitories and staff control their treatment. Because the “libertarian approach”, as Mr Kavanagh put it, is now demanded by patients and advocacy groups alike; as patients reside in single rooms and demand a dignified say in their treatment, the lack of staff and money needed for this type of care is putting some patients — and no doubt staff — at great risk.
Mr Kavanagh’s comments terrified me. When many years ago I ended up in a psychiatric ward — yes, on suicide watch — I shrank from the horror of the communal dorm. The woman in the bed next to me was chain smoking — I was certain she’d set the worn-out curtains between us alight; the old lady opposite was alternating between loud recitals of the rosary and screaming obscenities to attract the attention of the nurse.
Without meaning to sound trite, I knew that to be forced to stay in such an atmosphere would drive me stark raving mad. I was categorised with a stigmatised illness within five minutes of meeting a psychiatrist, never offered talk therapy and made take two types of medication, one of which I felt was unsuitable for me. A case of psychiatric wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
I had hoped that this style of cheap “care” was on the way out, but Mr Kavanagh’s assessment of the clash between the new humane philosophy and the pitiful monies allotted to mental health care shows that our Government — and consequently ourselves, (they represent us) — would prefer to wipe the arses of senior bond-holders, European top brass and powerful union bosses than care for our own distressed people.
Meanwhile on that far-off island called, eh, Ireland, official statistics show that 525 people died from suicide last year, a seven per cent increase on the year before, with men accounting for 84 per cent of deaths. And anyone with half an eye out for the truth knows that these statistics are far lower than the actual, real figures. They don’t take account of coroners, who, because of the stigma involved, prefer to protect the family involved and assign the term ‘accidental death’ to what was indisputably a suicide. Nor do they include the many single vehicle road deaths which are, in some cases, also deliberate suicides masquerading as traffic accidents — again, one must presume, in order to protect family from stigma.
And really, who can blame them?
Results of a survey last week (commissioned by News-talk and the Irish Countrywoman’s Association) on mental health showed that while 84.3 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement “Mental illness is an illness like any other”, 87.4 per cent simultaneously thought that there was “a stigma in Ireland about discussing mental health issues”.
So, the vast majority believe that mental illness is like any other illness, yet the vast majority also believe that there’s a huge stigma involved in talking about it. Which is rather ironic when one considers that the “talking cure” can be very effective for many sufferers.
It would be funny if it weren’t so desperately serious. If people weren’t dying of shame; including the shame that they can’t pay bills, get a job, support their family, cover their mortgage, discuss their problems.
Research director Ella Arensman (National Suicide Research Foundation) said of a recent study on male suicide rates in Cork city that she’d never seen such a strong correlation between economic difficulties and mental health.
In a recent paper called Debt and Depression (Economic Journal) Dr John Gathergood reported that people struggling to pay loans are “three times more likely to have mental health problems”. More severe mental health effects, he said, are found among people who are late with housing or rent payments, particularly those with arrears on their mortgage or those in negative equity.
And commenting on the Newstalk/ICA survey, national president Liz Hall said. “The financial implications of the recession and the levels of emigration have severely impacted the lives and mental health of our members and all Irish families.”
With more than 308,000 people currently out of work in Ireland, with the country losing 1,000 jobs a week; with 107,700 mortgages (and rising) in distress; with between 60 and 65 per cent of mortgages in negative equity; with 1.82 million people left with less than €100 in their pockets when the household bills have been paid, it would seem beyond doubt that many of us, our friends, our neighbours, our loved ones, are at risk.
Strangely, our Government continues along with its normalcy bias, giving the impression that the rise in mental distress and deaths by suicide is clearly Somebody Else’s Problem.

Donie's Ireland news BLOG Saturday


Irish motorists likely to get four penalty points for using mobile phones

  
Motorists who use mobile phones while driving are likely to be hit with four penalty points after a top-level committee backed the proposal.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications has outlined its recommendations on penalty point increases in a letter to Transport Minister Leo Varadkar.
The Minister had asked the committee to consider proposals on penalty points, following the publication of a report from his Department in June.
dangerous
As part of its deliberations, the committee met representatives of the Automobile Association, the Road Safety Authority and the Irish Insurance Federation.
Fine Gael Deputy Tom Hayes, who chairs the committee, said: “It emerged from our discussions that the use of mobile phones is viewed as particularly dangerous by road users and, accordingly, the committee supports the recommended four penalty points for the offence.”
In relation to speeding, he said: “The committee took the view that the increase in penalty points for speeding was appropriate but considered that it was best not to have graduated penalty points based on speeds in excess of the speed limit until the speed limits had been reviewed.
“For instance, it appears that there is a default speed limit of 80kph on many narrow, winding rural roads, which is often totally inappropriate.”
He said that the committee also believed that, in the case of less serious speeding offences, consideration might be given to lowering the life of the points to two years.
Points for speeding are suggested to go from two to three under the proposals.
Deputy Hayes said: “The members of the committee also agreed that the single most important factor in ensuring continued driver vigilance was visible garda enforcement.
fairness
“Furthermore, there was agreement with the recommendation that penalty points north and south of the border should be aligned.”
He said that the ultimate goal was to ensure that any proposed changes bolster the fairness of the system, ensuring that each penalty is proportionate to the gravity of the offence.
He sent a letter to Minister Varadkar yesterday outlining the committee’s recommendations.
Any changes to the penalty points system will be incorporated into the Road Traffic Bill 2012.

So much for equality!

Couples are more likely to divorce if the husband does half the domestic chores

 

  • Study finds couples who split housework 50/50 are 50 per cent more likely to break up
  • Experts say ‘modern’ couples who share housework have less respect for marriage

Ladies – prepare to be unimpressed. 

Researchers say couples are better off living in a ‘traditional’ household where women do all the domestic chores.
The Norwegian study, which some may fine rather sexist, has dealt equality a slap in the face by suggesting married couples are more likely to divorce if men help out at home.
Experts found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than those where the woman did most of the work, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study, said: ‘What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment.’
The researcher wrote in Equality in the Home that the lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising.
One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,’ he told the Telegraph.
The figures clearly show that ‘the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,’ he added.
Mr Hansen suggested this could be because couples are happier when they have clearly-defined roles in the relationship.
‘Maybe it’s sometimes seen as a good thing to have very clear roles with lots of clarity … where one person is not stepping on the other’s toes,’ he said.
‘There could be less quarrels, since you can easily get into squabbles if both have the same roles and one has the feeling that the other is not pulling his or her own weight.’
But he suggested the deeper reasons behind the higher divorce rate stem from the values of ‘modern’ couples rather than the chores they share.
‘Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage as being less sacred,’ said Mr Hansen.
‘In these modern couples, women also have a high level of education and a well-paid job, which makes them less dependent on their spouse financially.’
‘They can manage much easier if they divorce,’ he said.
Dr Frank Furedi, Sociology professor at the University of Canterbury, told the Telegraph the study made sense because couples who share chores tend to be from from middle class, professional backgrounds where divorce rates are known to be high.
‘These people are extremely sensitive to making sure everything is formal, laid out and contractual. That does make for a fairly fraught relationship,’
‘The more you organise your relationship, the more you work out diaries and schedules, the more it becomes a business relationship than an intimate, loving spontaneous one.
‘That tends to encourage a conflict of interest rather than finding harmonious resolutions.’
He said while the survey applied to Norway, he was confident the results would be the same in the UK.
‘In a good relationship people simply don’t know who does what and don’t particularly care.
‘Unless marriage is a relationship above anything else, then whenever there are tensions or contradictions things come to a head.
You have less capacity to forgive and absorb the bad stuff.’
The survey appears to contradict a study carried out by Cambridge University earlier this year which found that men are happier when sharing the housework.
The research, based on a study covering 30,000 people in 34 countries, found that men benefited the more they contributed to domestic chores.
But experts suggested this could also be because men preferred a quiet life doing housework than having a discontented other half.

Man killed in suspected hit-and-run in Donegal

   

A 47-year-old male pedestrian has been killed in a suspected hit-and-run incident in Co Donegal.

The victim’s body was discovered on the carriageway of the N15 at Parkhill outside Ballyshannon around 12.30am on Saturday morning.
A garda spokesman said a preliminary examination carried out at the scene suggests the man was struck by a passing motorist.
It is understood the local man was walking on the N15 near Ballyshannon town, when he was knocked down in the early hours of this morning.
His body has been taken to Sligo General Hospital, where the State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy is carrying out a post mortem examination..

Ex-primary care boss Roisin Shortall attacks James Reilly

  

A Minister of State whose shock resignation rocked the coalition Government has launched a blistering attack on Health Minister James Reilly.

Roisin Shortall, who had responsibility for primary care, said she has serious doubts about Dr Reilly’s abilities to reform the health service.
She also accused the Fine Gael TD of a lack of commitment to the programme for government, saying he wanted to privatise many of Ireland’s services.
“I had a series of differences with James Reilly and serious concerns about his ability to manage the health service and his ability to implement the reforms,” said Ms Shortall. “I believed he was going down a different direction towards the more privatisation, American-style route and I still believe that.”
The former junior minister left colleagues within the Department of Health reeling following her resignation on Wednesday night. She also quit Labour and has claimed party leader and Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore gave more support to Dr Reilly following a series of bust-ups over health reforms.
Already frosty tensions between Ms Shortall and the Health Minister came to a head after Dr Reilly added two locations within his north Dublin constituency to a priority list for new primary care centres without her knowledge. Ms Shortall met the minister twice to discuss the issue, but he failed to give her a satisfactory explanation for his controversial decision.
Elsewhere, the former junior minister also refused to refer to Dr Reilly personally during a debate in the Dail when Opposition party Fianna Fail tabled a no confidence motion in the Health Minister. In the first official interview following her resignation, she said there had been no personality clash between the pair – but a series of disagreements over the direction of health reforms.
She told RTE Radio: “There was a situation developing over a number of months where it was quite clear that James Reilly and I weren’t on the same page. I don’t believe he really subscribes to the programme for government and there were fundamental differences.”
Opposition party Fianna Fail welcomed Ms Shortall’s criticism of Dr Reilly. Health spokesman Billy Kelleher said her remarks gave an insight into continued dysfunction and malaise in the Department of Health.
Ms Shortall became the fourth Labour TD to resign the party whip since the coalition was formed 18 months ago. She joins former junior minister Willie Penrose, who resigned over the closure of army barracks in Mullingar, and TDs Tommy Broughan and Patrick Nulty on the Labour sidelines. Taoiseach Enda Kenny later insisted relations between Fine Gael and Labour remained stable and played down speculation of a major rift within the coalition.

Sat navigators can ‘blind’ drivers to pedestrians on the road

 

Driving with a sat navigator can make you blind to pedestrians because trying to hold an image of the screen in your mind makes you ignore what is in front of your eyes, according to a new study.

While our eyes continue to see things in their path, the visual messages seem not to reach the brain when we are concentrating on something else because its ability to process information is limited, researchers said
Focusing on the detail of something we have just seen diverts our attention away from things happening around us and results in an effect known as “inattentional blindness”.
While our eyes continue to see things in their path, the visual messages seem not to reach the brain when we are concentrating on something else because its ability to process information is limited, researchers said.
The most famous example of the phenomenon is the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment, where people watching a group of players passing a basketball around do not notice a man in a gorilla suit walking across the screen.
The new study shows that even without the distraction of several moving objects in front of us, we can still become “blinded” simply by trying to remember an image.
Researchers from University College London showed a group of volunteers images containing different coloured squares and asked them to hold them in their mind, and told to expect a flash of light.
The study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, showed that they were less likely to detect the flash when they were concerned with trying to remember the image than when their mind was unoccupied.
Scans of the participants’ brains as they carried out the task revealed a lower level activity in the brain region which processes incoming visual information while the patients were trying to recall the image.
Prof Nilli Lavie, who led the study, said: “An example of where this is relevant in the real world is when people are following directions on a sat nav whilst driving.
“Our research would suggest that focusing on remembering the directions we’ve just seen on the screen means that we’re more likely to fail to observe other hazards around us on the road, for example an approaching motorbike or a pedestrian on a crossing, even though we may be ‘looking’ at where we’re going,”

Friday, September 28, 2012

Donie's Ireland news BLOG by Donie


Record high of 87,000 emigrated from the Irish State this year to April

      

Emigration from Ireland continued to increase last year, with more than 87,000 people leaving the State, the highest number recorded to date.

Migration statistics published by the Central Statistics Office show 46,500 Irish people moved abroad in the year to April, a rise of 16 per cent on the previous 12 months and a 260 per cent increase on 2007 figures, when just 12,900 Irish people emigrated.
Some 87,100 people of all nationalities left the Republic in the period, up from 80,600 the previous year. Irish nationals accounted for 53 per cent of the total.
The United Kingdom attracted 19,000 people, while 8,600 went to the United States and 35,600 to “rest of the world” destinations, which could reflect the popularity of working holiday visa programmes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The number of Irish women emigrating rose from 17,500 to 20,600, while the number of Irish men leaving rose from 24,500 to 26,000.
Emigration among foreign nationals increased for the third year in a row, to 40,600.
The number of immigrants fell slightly from 53,300 to 52,700 over the same period. This figure includes 20,600 Irish people who came back to live in Ireland, the third annual rise in a row. The number is still much lower than in 2007, when 30,700 Irish emigrants returned.
Just 2,200 people from the UK moved to Ireland, while 17,600 people arrived from EU countries and 12,400 from the rest of the world.
People aged 25-44 accounted for the largest number of emigrants, with 39,500 people in this age group leaving the State. This increased from 31,300 in the previous 12 months.
Some 35,800 in the 15-24 age group emigrated, up from 34,500 the previous year. A total of 900 under-14s left, in addition to 5,600 in the 45-64 age group and 1,200 aged over 65.
The UK was the most popular destination for emigrants, with 19,000 moving there. This marked a reduction of 1,000 on last year. Some 24,000 moved to EU countries.
A total of 52,700 people came to live in the Republic in the 12 months to April, a fall of 65 per cent since 2007, when immigration peaked. Some 25,000 men immigrated last year, compared with 80,000 in 2007.
Responding to the statistics, Piaras Mac ƉinrĆ­ and Caitriona NĆ­ Laoire of the Department of Geography in University College Cork said that although emigration has been “a consistent feature” of Irish life, the fact that the increase in emigration has coincided with the economic collapse would indicate that it is “not voluntary”.
A research project into recent Irish emigration by UCC beginning next month will investigate factors such as gender, education and class to establish what social factors influence emigration.
Assistant director of the National Youth Council of Ireland James Doorley expressed “serious concern” at the figures, saying they “underline the need for immediate and stronger Government action to stem the flow of young people leaving the country”.
Sinn FĆ©in TD Peadar TĆ³ibĆ­n said more people left Ireland than sat the Leaving Cert last year. “A generation is being lost to emigration . . . It is time that the Government reflected on this and changed policies in favour of ones that place our people and employment above bankers and developers.”
The CSO figures also show 74,000 babies were born in the 12 months to April, while 29,200 people died. This brings the natural population growth for the year to 44,900, a fall of 2,600 on the previous year.
However, the rise in emigration has slowed population growth, with the overall population growing by 10,500 to 4.59 million.
The figures include revisions to the population and migration estimates for the 2007-2011 period using data from the Census 2011 published earlier this year.
The male population is estimated to have fallen by 900 in the year ending in April, the first time a reduction has been recorded since 1990. This fall is attributed to the fall of 8,900 non-Irish men.

Ireland’s OAPs fear ‘becoming a burden to their families’

   
50% of older people in Ireland worry about becoming a burden while 20% would not feel good about having to enter a nursing home,
A new survey has revealed.
A quarter of over-65s also worry that they will not have enough money, according to the index, which tracks health and attitudes annually.
On the plus side, most are optimistic about getting older.
The findings of the index, conducted by the drug firm Pfizer, were launched by former GAA presenter Micheal O Muircheartaigh, who said with so many people now depending on the State for their healthcare, and particularly the elderly, the Government should set aside additional funds for their support.
“It’s a difficult job balancing the budgets, but when times are bad you need real consideration from the people in power,” he said.
The legendary GAA commentator also spoke of how he harboured no regrets about not running for the presidency.
The 82-year-old revealed that “pressure” had been put on him to join the race for the Aras last year, but that in the end he valued his freedom more.
“I always wanted to keep clear of politics, and even though they said the presidency is above politics, I never wanted to be attached to any political party,” he said.
The health index findings showed:
  • One in four older people are grandparents.
  • The vast majority of older people say they are happy to mind their grandchildren, but 15pc are not.
  • Four in five suffer from a common condition such as arthritis. One in five have heart disease and 7pc have cancer.
  • Around 72pc have a medical card but 37pc continue to pay for private medical insurance.
Mater Hospital geriatrician Dr Dermot Power said: “It is interesting to see that maintaining independence and not wanting to become an encumbrance on others comes out strongly in this research.
“I am fully supportive of older patients being returned to their own home as soon as they are fit and well, if this is a viable option. It is where the majority of older people are happiest.”

Majority of Irish people better off working than on the dole

   
The vast majority of people are better off working than claiming the dole, according to a new report by the ESRI. 
It found that only six per cent would receive more on social welfare. 
“You’re better off on the dole” is a perception challenged today by the Economic and Social Research Institute. 
Its latest research shows a vast majority of Irish people are better off working. 
For many jobseekers, their search is leading abroad. 
Engineer Conor McArdle is moving to Melbourne, after giving up waiting for the economic situation here to improve. 
According to figures out today from the Central Statistics Office, more than 87,000 people emigrated in the year up to April. 
That’s one new emigrant every five minutes, and they’re not necessarily young jobseekers. 
The level of emigration from Irish shores is now higher now than at any time since the 1980s.

Diabetes pill from 1958 may be the new Cancer Drug

 

The next new treatment for breast, colon and prostate cancers, among others, may be a diabetes drug first approved in 1958.

Metformin, the most commonly used medicine to lower blood- sugar, is the subject of about 50 cancer studies globally, according to U.S. government clinical trial information compiled by Bloomberg. The research began after scientists found metformin prevented tumors in mice and that diabetics were less likely to develop a malignancy if they were taking the 5 cents- a-day pill than other diabetes medications.
The medicine is dispensed about 120 million times annually, according to a 2010 report in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. If the latest trials on breast and other tumors are successful, the drug could become a cheap weapon in the fight against a myriad of diseases including pancreatic and ovarian cancers. All told, cancer kills one in eight people and is the second-leading cause of death in most developed nations.
“The hope is that if it does show safety and efficacy, it would be available in a cost-effective way,” said Chandini Portteus, vice president of research, evaluation and scientific programs at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a Dallas-based breast cancer advocacy group. “It would be wonderful for patients if we had something that we knew worked and was safe and low- cost.”
The organization has spent about $10 million investigating metformin for breast cancer, Portteus said. “We have to turn over every single rock to determine what the options are for patients who need them.”

Millions of Deaths

Global cancer deaths will climb to 13.1 million by 2030 from 7.6 million in 2008, the Geneva-based World Health Organization said in February. Cancer costs totaled $124.6 billion in the U.S. alone in 2010, according to the National Cancer Institute. Newer, more targeted drug therapies, such as Dendreon Corp. (DNDN)’s $93,000-a-year Provenge for prostate cancer, may add only a few months of life.
Metformin was the seventh most-dispensed medicine in the U.S. in 2011, according to a list published by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics in April that ranked a group of painkillers that includes Vicodin as the most-prescribed. A pack of 84 500-milligram tablets of the diabetes pill, taken twice daily, costs the U.K.’s National Health Service 1.37 pounds, or the equivalent of about 3 pence (5 U.S. cents) a day.
The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston is studying metformin in at least eight trials, according to a National Institutes of Health online database.

‘Safe and Cheap’

“It is safe and it is cheap,” said Donghui Li, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at the center. “It reduces the risk and has better survival” in studies she’s done in pancreatic cancer patients.
Patients who had taken metformin had a 60 percent lower risk of developing pancreatic cancer, according to a case- control study Li published in 2009 in which she compared cancer patients taking metformin against people not on metformin.
Metformin didn’t benefit patients whose pancreatic cancer had already spread to other tissues, Li reported this year in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. Those patients whose malignancies were confined to the pancreas survived longer if they were on metformin — an average of 15 months, or four months more than patients not taking the drug, she found.
More research is needed to confirm those benefits in patients as their disease is developing, Li said.
“I got a lot of calls from patients and other clinicians, but I told them I cannot give them a recommendation,” she said.

Insulin Levels

Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, does have a suggestion for doctors who diagnose and treat diabetics: Test patients’ insulin levels in addition to blood sugar.
People whose insulin levels are high should either take metformin or increase their exercise and control their diets by reducing the amount of carbohydrates eaten, Cantley said.
“That will have a huge impact in preventing you from getting cancer,” said Cantley, who trained as a biochemist and biophysicist, in an interview. “It may even slow down the growth of the cancer you already have.”

Mars rover discovers evidence of water stream-beds on the Planet

A rock slab inspected by NASA’s Curiosity rover looks like ancient gravel from a Martian stream-bed.

   

NASA’s Curiosity rover has now confirmed what scientists have long suspected — that water anywhere from ankle to waist deep once flowed on Mars’ surface.

The conclusion, scientists said at a briefing Thursday, is based on images showing what looks like an ancient gravel stream bed. One of those stream bed slabs, named Hottah, appears to be made of gravel cemented together by water that once ran freely on Mars and settled on the floor of Gale Crater, likely several billion years ago.
Mission scientist WiIliam Dietrich of the University of California-Berkeley said it looks like the water was moving about 3 feet per second, “with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep.”
Dietrich said there have been a lot of hypotheses about the water flows on Mars. “This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars,” he said in a statement on the discovery. “This is a transition from speculation about the size of the streambed material to direct observation of it.”
Curiosity arrived on Mars in August and is now on its 51st Martian day, known as a “sol.” The evidence that a warmer and wetter Mars once enjoyed floods of water inside Gale Crater adds to the $2.5 billion rover’s efforts to find evidence of chemistry hospitable to life now or in the past on Mars.
“The rock formed in the presence of a vigorous flow of water on the surface of Mars,” said mission scientist John Grotzinger of Caltech. The find confirms past observations of orbiting spacecraft of Gale Crater that helped lead to its selection as a landing site for the rover, now on a two-year mission to search for evidence of past habitable conditions on Mars.
Essentially, the rover is travelling over a gully wash’s fan of stones, ones that traveled down from a canyon on the crater wall “several billion years ago,” says Michael Malin of the rover imaging team. Most likely the canyon waters flowed sporadically over thousands to millions of years, depositing gravel in a broad fan of stones covering the floor of the crater. “We had anticipated this was where some water-lain sediments would be,” Malin says.
The rover is equipped with a laser, drill and on-board lab to investigate chemistry of Martian rocks such as Hottah, named after a Canadian geological formation. In coming weeks the rover will steer toward more rock deposits suspected to represent these gravel outcrops, looking to test chemical conditions for past habitability on Mars, Grotzinger says. “This is really just the start of the science mission for the rover.”
The final goal of the rover is to examine layers of clay that underlay the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high mountain in the center of Gale Crater. It is expected to arrive in those foothills in about a year.

Ireland rank 10th on the list of the most educated countries in the world

   

Our economy might be halfway down the toilet, but if our ranking on the world’s most educated countries list is anything to go by, at least we’re doing something right.

Based on a study carried out by The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD), US website 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 countries with the highest proportion of adults with a college degree and it may surprise you to learn that Ireland features in the top ten alongside the likes of Australia, the UK, the US, Japan and top dogs Canada.
According to the study, 37 per cent of Irish people have a third-level degree and between the years 2000-2010, the percentage of people with a college education in Ireland nearly doubled, rising at an annual average of 7.3 per cent — faster than any country in the study, while graduation from second level education rose from 74 per cent to 94 per cent during the same period.
Canada finished on top of the most educated countries list after it was found that 51 per cent of the population had a college degree, a very impressive figure which indicates that they know something aboot the whole education process, eh?
You can read more about the study and the exact details here, but at a time when there’s little but doom and gloom in the news, it’s nice to hear something positive for once.
Now if we only had enough jobs on these shores for all our college graduates, we’d really be on the right track.
Most educated countries in the world
1. Canada
2. Israel
3. Japan
4. United States
5. New Zealand
6. South Korea
7. United Kingdom
8. Finland
9. Australia
10. Ireland