Mr Pierse said that after the Queen’s visit to Ireland, sterling had been a very popular destination for people looking for a safe haven for their money.

While he said the Department of Health would be making a major fund available for the expansion of primary care centres, he added that Hawkins House was also “in negotiations with a major fundholder of a half a billion euro”. “I can’t say too much more about that because there are at least two such funds who would be interested in investing in primary care in this country,” the Minister added in relation to the €500 million investment.

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Curious. The European People’s Party (EPP), the group to which Fine Gael is affiliated in the European Parliament is to hold a two-day meeting in Killarney tomorrow and Friday. The future of EU cohesion and tourism policies is on the agenda, as well as the economic situation in Europe. The meeting is to be addressed by the Taoiseach, the Minister for Tourism Leo Varadkar, Europe minister Lucinda Creighton as well as European Commissioners, MEPs and many other distinguished personages.

It’s almost as if Fine Gael and the government don’t want to publicise the meeting in case either a) a gang of unruly protestors turn up, or b) some Eurocrat has a microphone stuck in his face and says something distinctly unhelpful to the referendum campaign. But that couldn’t be it, could it? Though it is exactly what one high-ranking source rather mischeviously suggested to me today

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Willie Frazer hit out at St Patrick's Primary in Donaghmore, posting a picture of the school flying the flags of Poland, Turkey and Italy on Facebook. Seeming to mistake the red in the Italian flag for orange and thinking it was an Irish flag, he commented: "This is a school in Tyrone flying the Irish flag on the school grounds why". The 51-year-old founder of Families Acting for Innocent Relatives also claimed the school was "the junior headquarters of SF/IRA youth, or it may as well be".

-- NYT's Sabrina Tavernese: "Whites Account for Half of Births in U.S.": "After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States." "Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities - including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race - reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country's history...." "While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country's economy, its political life and its identity. "This is an important tipping point," said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution..." [URL]http://tinyurl.com[/URL] /77ncz9a

The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change. “This is a watershed moment,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in family issues. “It shows us how multicultural we’ve become.” Although minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, the District and four states are majority minority — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas. Metropolitan Washington, where whites are in the minority, is far ahead of the curve. Among children younger than 5, there are more minorities than whites in virtually every jurisdiction except Arlington and Loudoun counties. Statewide, Virginia has just barely more white children under age 1 than minorities, but they are on the verge of falling below half. One of the biggest factors in the demographic change is age. Whites are by far the oldest group. Their median age is over 42, so many are beyond their prime childbearing years. In contrast, the median age for Hispanics is under 28. Blacks and Asians have median ages in their early 30s.

Barack Obama is to put pressure on Germany to ease the pain of austerity with policies to boost growth, as he uses two days of talks with the G8 industrial nations to warn Europe it needs to act swiftly to spare the world economy from a second deep recession in four years. Ahead of the G8 summit, at Camp David this weekend, a warning from the ratings agency Fitch that Greece's days in the single currency could be numbered heightened fears in Washington that the worsening crisis in the eurozone poses a threat to America's fragile recovery and President Obama's re-election chances. Obama will welcome the new French president, François Hollande, as a potential ally in his push for Europe to follow the US in giving a higher priority to expansionary policies, and as a counterweight to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Obama can expect support from David Cameron, who told Merkel and Hollande on Thursday that eurozone leaders must embark on a series of urgent steps to prop up the single currency, to avoid a major implosion across the continent.

“One good thing might have come out of this. All the houses in Sligo have now been refurbished by the corporation.”

Erik Satie bajo la lluvia. - YouTube