TheCity

Author: Ronan Smyth

  • Amnesty Ireland to hold vigil in Dublin tomorrow to show support for Ibrahim Halawa

    Amnesty Ireland to hold vigil in Dublin tomorrow to show support for Ibrahim Halawa

    Amnesty Ireland will be holding a vigil in the city centre tomorrow evening to highlight the case of Ibrahim Halawa, who is currently imprisoned in Egypt.

    In total, Amnesty Ireland are expecting upwards of 100 people to take part in the short vigil, with activists congregating on Fleet Street before making their way to Grafton Street.

    “We will assemble our activists into lines that run up the middle of Grafton Street at intervals, spelling out a message of solidarity,” said Kieran Clifford, campaigns and activism manager for Amnesty International Ireland.

    “The aim of the street action is to raise awareness about Ibrahim’s case to ordinary people here in Ireland,” he said.

    Amnesty Ireland hopes this demonstration will put pressure on the Egyptian authorities before his trial.

    “Our hope is that by getting a lot of attention we will illustrate the support for Ibrahim to the Egyptian government and apply more pressure on them to release him,” said Mr Clifford.

    Ibrahim Halawa, from Firhouse in Dublin, has spent the last two years in prison in Egypt. He was arrested in a mosque after a protest he was at turned violent and 97 people were killed.

    Mr Halawa is currently facing 20 years in prison, if found guilty.

    The vigil has been organised to coincide with the international day for Human Rights.

  • A catch up with Conor Flynn from A Slice of Home

    A catch up with Conor Flynn from A Slice of Home

    A Slice of Home is a new website started by Conor Flynn to deliver Irish products to all the homesick Irish living abroad, specialising in Tayto, Cadbury chocolate, and tea bags.

    The City caught up with Conor to talk about the site and its future.

    Why did you set up A Slice of Home in the first place?

    “To be honest the amount of people I saw on my Facebook and Twitter feed just saying they miss Tayto, they miss Cadbury, they miss Lyons and Barry’s Tea and they couldn’t get it anywhere. A lot of places in Australia and Canada have Irish shops, but because of price gouging it’s really expensive to get anything. You’re looking at upwards of €10 for a packet of tea bags, so I figured, why not take the hassle out of everybody looking for the stuff and then everybody’s mammies and daddies having to go to the shop, pack it up and send it.”

    Do you have many friends abroad?

    “Yeah I have a good few, that’s what spurred me on to do it. For one or two of my friends I said, ‘Sure look send me the cash and I’ll do it for you’, then I had a couple more asking me about it so I ended up putting it online where there seems to be a decent amount of demand for it.”

    How long has the website been going?

    “We’re live coming on two weeks now. We had a lot of publicity in the first week. In the first few days we had a real big uptick in orders but now it’s steadying out at an average amount of orders a day.”

    What’s your most popular order at the moment?

    “Tayto cheese and onion hands down. Second is Cadbury Dairy Milk, we do seven packs of Dairy Milks and a few of them end up filling most of the boxes.”

    What are your future plans for the website?

    “We are kind of small scale at the moment and I just got a bit of a deal from An Post so I can start offering slightly more reasonable postage rates, but the main one would be to scale it up so I can get someone in Canada that I can send everything to in bulk and they can post it out from there for much cheaper to everybody else.”

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    I know its early days but how are you finding people’s reception to the website?

    “People seem to like it… I’ve been flooded with other ideas to put on the site, from vinegar to a Penneys goody bags. Countless women have asked me to put together some kind of Penneys goody bag to send to them in Canada and Australia. People have been fairly positive and they are coming in with more ideas and that is really what I want.”

    What kind of products are you hoping to introduce in the future?

    “It’s really the case of whatever the demand is we are more than happy to get a request for somebody and throw it in the box no hassle. Obviously we can’t send bread and other foods, I mean SuperValu sausages were a huge one people wanted, but it’s a non-runner.”

    Last question, Lyons or Barry’s?

    “Barry’s”

    For more information about A Slice of Home, you can visit their website, Facebook and Twitter.

  • UCD the most expensive college in the country to repeat an exam

    UCD the most expensive college in the country to repeat an exam

    UCD students pay up to €230 to re-sit supplemental exams – higher than any other college in the country.

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    Most of the universities listed above operate a capping system, whereby students are limited in how much they will have to pay.

    NUI Galway, even though they are the second most expensive, charge a flat fee so students will only have to pay €195 to repeat, regardless of the number of exams they need to take.

    University of Limerick caps their charge at the cost of four re-sits. NUI Maynooth, DCU and UCC all cap their charges at €280, €277 and €245 respectively, and Trinity do not charge for the first set of supplemental exams.

    UCD however has no upward cap, so students will be liable for a charge of €230 per module repeat.

    According to Danii Curtis, the education officer for UCD, the fee is calculated on average across the whole college. “It’s because we have a lot of practical courses so UCD averages the cost across the university and across the students,” she said.

    “The practical subjects such as veterinary would be the most expensive, all the equipment and lab time means they would be on the higher end of what each repeat would cost,” she explained.

    She added: “I think if you work it [out] on a per program basis you’ll have more students who can’t afford to repeat, the €230 is a fair average across the campus.”

    How repeat and re-sits are conducted in UCD depends on the individual school, but UCD does allow students to carry onto the next year of their degree with 50 credits instead of the full 60 credits. However, they will need to make up those missing credits somewhere down the line.

    As it stands, students who fail a module in UCD will be expected to re-sit an exam or project over the winter or summer exam periods, with no supplemental exam period set aside in the autumn unlike the majority of other colleges in Ireland.

    “I would be in favour of a summer repeat period so students do not have to carry on subjects [into the next semester],” said Ms Curtis. “I’ve also started looking into a cap, and I would be in favour of a cap on three to four subjects per student.”

    UCD allows students that owe the college money to repay it over the course of the semester, with students owing less than €600 allowed to receive their provisional results. However, students over that amount cannot.

    In comparison to the universities, costs for taking supplemental re-sits are simplified at the Irish Institutes of Technology.

    Most of the Institutes of Technology operate on a flat fee basis, so regardless of the number of repeat exams a student needs to take; they will only need to pay a set amount.

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    As the chart above shows, Tralee IT is the most expensive with a flat fee of €120. All the other institutes, with the exception of Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) charge €50 to €100.

    Cork IT offers repeats during the December or May exam periods at a cost of €50. However, if a student needs to repeat in the autumn the cost rises to €100.

    IADT is the only IT to charge on a per subject or project basis at a cost of €25. They also do not offer a cap on the amount to pay, so for a student who has to repeat multiple classes, IADT could add up to be the most expensive IT to repeat in.

    To see more from Ronan, visit his Twitter at @RowSmyth.

  • Leading homeless charity slams Budget

    Leading homeless charity slams Budget

    A leading homeless charity has hit out at the Government’s budget which they say fails to address the escalating homelessness crisis.

    In an attempt to address the housing crisis, €414 million will be made available for social housing along with an additional €17 million being earmarked for emergency accommodation.

    Finance Minister Michael Noonan also announced that NAMA, in conjunction with developers, has set a target of delivering up to 20,000 residential units before the end of 2020, the majority of which will be in the Dublin area.

    However, Focus Ireland has strongly criticised the measures enacted in the budget saying that the budget “failed to deliver a meaningful package to stem the deepening homeless crisis”.

    Ahead of the budget, the charity had called on the Government to provide €500 million in funding to address the problem.

    “Focus Ireland said it had been hoping for measures which would help the charity to tackle the ever rising tide of new families and individuals becoming homeless,” Focus Ireland Director of Advocacy Mike Allen said.

    “We had worried that decisions would be ‘too little too late’, but we never expected that the Government would fail to take any significant measures to tackle homelessness.”

    Other measures included in the 2016 budget are a reduction in the rates of the Universal Social Charge (USC), as well as a 50 cent increase in the minimum wage and a €5 increase in child benefit.

    The 50 cent increase was forecast earlier in the year following the recommendations of the Low Pay Commission and will come into effect at the start of next year, bringing the minimum wage up to €9.15 per hour.

    Meanwhile the 9% VAT rate on tourism implemented in previous budgets will remain in place with Minister Noonan calling it a major benefit to the tourism sector.

    The USC will also be cut from 1.5% to 1% on the first €12,012, 3.5% to 3% on the medium threshold of up to €18,668 and the rate for the top tier threshold of between €18,668 to €70,044 has been cut from 7% to 5.5%.

    The only tax increase put forward in the last budget before the general election will be an additional 50 cent applied to the excise duty on a pack of 20 cigarettes raising the price to €10.50 while excise duty on alcohol remains unchanged.

    Adrian Cummins of the Restaurant’s Association of Ireland has welcomed the measures introduced in the budget calling it “pro-job, pro-tourism and pro-hospitality”.

    “The retention of the VAT [rate of] … 9% into 2016 is crucial to not only the sustainability of restaurants and businesses in the tourism sector but also to job creation,” he said.

    The Government also announced a number of spending increases on social benefits including a €3 per week increase in all pensions, a €5 increase in the child benefit as well as a 75 per cent increase in the Christmas bonus for those on social welfare.

    Recruitment in the public sector also received a boost with provisions being put aside for the recruitment of 600 gardaí and 2,260 teaching posts including 600 resource teachers.  A further 610 special needs assistants will also be recruited.