Ireland's Eye: What's going on in the old sod this week

A look at news from around Ireland

Upon viewing pictures of the garden taken only last week, Judge Mary Devins expressed her shock at what she described as a “mountain” of nappies and said the dumping was “utterly shocking.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything worse than the photo of the nappies,” she said.

Des Hannick, environmental enforcement officer with Mayo County Council, said that the amount of rubbish in the garden would fill two skips, and that he had received a number of complaints from local residents about vermin and the smell from the rubbish.

He said that while initially the rubbish was in the body of the garden, it was now so large in volume that it was pushing up against the back door of the house. It included household rubbish, overflowing bins and the nappies, located close to the back door of the house.

The Sweeneys were up for two charges under the Waste Management Act.  Hannick added that Mayo County Council had given the Sweeneys “more than an ample opportunity” to remove the rubbish.

Describing the dumping as “appalling,” Ward McEllin, solicitor for Mayo County Council, said the council had “bent over backwards” in this case. He said that it was his hope that the Sweeneys would be in court where they might be asked to remove the rubbish or go to jail.
Devins issued a bench warrant for their arrest.

Mayo News

Fertility Advancements
A GALWAY fertility clinic is the first in Ireland to invest in new technology which boasts impressive results -- pregnancy rates have increased by 20%.

Dr. Declan Egan, the medical director of Galway Fertility, described the new embryoscope incubator system, which cost in excess of €100,000, as arguably the “biggest leap forward” in fertility technology that he has seen in more than 20 years in the business.

The embryoscope allows the embryologist to examine the development of the embryos using a high-powered camera system. This compiles images of them every 20 minutes without needing to remove them from the stable environment inside the incubator.

There are fewer than 100 of these high tech incubators in human in-vitro fertilization clinics around the world and Galway Fertility has the only one in Ireland.

Jenny Cloherty, the acting laboratory director of Galway Fertility, revealed that from the first 54 cases cultured in the embryoscope, a pregnancy rate of 50% was reported, an increase of approximately 20 per cent. This group included a significant proportion of difficult cases, people who had repeated failed IVF cycles in the past.

Presenting the clinic’s findings at the Irish Fertility Society’s AGM in Dublin recently, she outlined that in addition to this, 39% of the cases resulted in additional viable embryos for freezing. This should give the couples involved another chance of a pregnancy from the same cycle.

Galway Advertiser

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