According to the BBC commuters are facing up to three days of disruption as staff working for five operators strike over the role of train guards. RMT union members at Northern, Merseyrail, South Western Railway and Greater Anglia will take action on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, while those at Southern are staging a 24-hour walkout on Monday. The union says the use of driver-only trains will compromise safety, but ministers and train firms reject the claim.

People travelling to new jobs or job interviews may want to take note. 

Image: RMT Union members are on strike this week. 

Social Democrats co-leader Róisín Shortall TD has described today’s record high levels of hospital overcrowding as disgraceful, predictable and avoidable.

Deputy Shortall was commenting on figures from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation which show that the number of people on trolleys and wards awaiting hospital beds has risen to a new high of 677.

“This latest trolley crisis is a national disgrace and is intolerable for both patients and staff – but it is also absolutely predictable. After a summer when our health services were on a knife-edge, it was inevitable that winter flu and other seasonal illnesses would push our hospitals beyond breaking point,” Deputy Shortall said. Deputy Shortall proposed the following immediate steps to alleviate this national emergency:

• Additional funding for home care packages and home help services to free up hospital beds whilst also allowing people to convalesce at home, which leads to better health outcomes. Existing spare capacity in both private nursing homes and HSE-run premises should also be used. At any one time there are about 500 to 600 delayed discharges in our acute hospitals. These are people who are ready to leave hospital but are awaiting step down services in the community or in nursing homes.
   
• Better bed management at hospital group level so that patients can be transferred between hospitals within groups where there is spare capacity. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland group covering north Dublin and the north east is successfully referring patients between its hospitals. This efficient use of beds should be adopted by other hospital groups.
   
• Emergency funding to beef up out of hours services run by GPs and nurses in primary care centres so that patients in need of medical treatment have real alternatives to hospital emergency departments. There is considerable capacity in terms of public facilities, but only skeleton staff coverage is currently provided. That is discouraging people from attending their local primary care centres and pushing them towards acute hospitals.

Deputy Shortall added:“We need to end the annual New Year trolley crisis once and for all and the only way to do that is to get beyond quick fixes. The Sláintecare plan published in May of last year by a cross-party Oireachtas committee which I chaired set out a fully costed ten-year road map to overhaul our broken health system. Instead of acting swiftly to put this plan in place, the government has squandered the past seven months with little practical progress made.”

Image: Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation demonstrate. 

Restaurant organisation McDonald’s has recommended a pay increase for its 115,000 UK employees working across its 1,200 national franchised restaurants, effective from 22 January 2018.

The new hourly rates of pay have been recommended to rise to between £5.75 and £7 an hour for crew members aged between 16 and 17, and to between £8 and £10 an hour for crew members aged 25 and over. Hourly pay for shift-running floor managers has been recommended to increase to between £9.50 and £11.75 an hour. Employees who work between midnight and 6am are recommended to receive an extra £1 an hour added to these rates.

McDonald’s currently recommends a starting rate of £5.10 an hour for staff under the age of 18, and £7.60 an hour for employees aged 25 and over as a minimum.

Starting your professional life isn’t easy when you lack experience. You can't ever lose hope, you mustn't, but there are days when you think, My Goodness. I don't seem to have enough professional experience in my own field or even in other less qualified fields.

Tackling this problem head-on is the aim of the Youth Employment Initiative, an EU-wide financial instrument that provides support to young people living in regions with high youth unemployment.

Since 2013, this instrument has funded youth employment provisions like apprenticeships and traineeships. It supports job placements and helps Europeans under 25 in need of qualification to further their education. The aim is to act within four months of ending their studies, or becoming unemployed. The European Parliament is now pushing for innovative ways to create jobs, promote long-term employment for the young, and drive policy change across Europe. We support YEI as a more stable and targeted instrument. It is now crucial that Member States also play their role with efficient measures at the national level.

Providing opportunities and hope for its youth is an existential challenge for the EU as a whole.

Today the pay of the average top executive for 2018 so far will exceed what an average worker will make all year, according to analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the High Pay Centre.

Their new study finds the average CEO still earns 120 times more than an average full-time worker on a median annual salary of £28,758.

Staff from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection will be available from early Wednesday, 3 January to support householders in areas affected by Storm Eleanor. The Department’s Community Welfare Services staff will engage with the relevant local authorities and will quickly assess the level of service required across the country, particularly in the Galway area. This interagency response ensures that supports will be provided to those affected as swiftly as possible. As the clean-up operations begin, financial supports will be made available to householders affected and the Humanitarian Assistance scheme activated as necessary.

Image: Storm Eleanor. 

The Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Regina Doherty TD has said "we are on standby to help anyone whose homes may have been affected by today's flooding. Staff from the Department will be available to support those in the affected areas tomorrow morning and we are ready to activate the HAID at anytime should residential properties have been damaged from extreme weather today. I would urge families and individuals in need of assistance to contact their local Intreo Centre where our Community Welfare Service Teams are available to assist them."

Bags of Taste are offering free cookery classes are helping people make healthy meals for no more than £1 a portion.

The organisation is teaching hundreds of people how to cook new dishes and make their money go further.

Alicia Weston the the founder trained as a Pharmacologist but after some postgrad research, she worked in venture capital & investment banking for 18 years.  In this time she was heavily involved with charitable & corporate social responsibility activities including education and Crisis, the homeless charity.  She also founded Parkholme Supper Club in 2010, to raise money for Medecins Sans Frontieres.

In 2012 she left the City to work for the New Economics Foundation, a progressive think tank, to work on financial models to increase the amount of social and institutionally managed private rented housing; her work is currently being implemented.  Parkholme Supper Club (nominated “London’s #1 supper club” by London Live TV) to date has raised well over £60,000 for Medecins Sans Frontieres.  It operates entirely with volunteers.

It was the tight budgets that PSC works with (yet delivers highly rated food) that inspired the concept for Bags of Taste.  Working with non-professional volunteers it was easy to see where there were gaps in skills, and diners regularly marvelled how PSC could give so much of its revenue to charity, as they themselves couldn’t cook for such low budgets. Having taught cooking at Crisis, she was conscious of budgets being an issue for students, but was also aware of research showing that cooking lessons have very limited impact on students’ long-term diets.  So this inspired the design of a new kind of cooking course, one that used all the tools of behavioural science, to ensure that the effort put in paid a handsome dividend in terms of behaviour change.  Focus groups and research on students with low budgets identified the key barriers to cooking (which includes, but is not limited to, budgets) and this informed the course design.  Bags of Taste formally incorporated in August 2014 after an extremely successful pilot in March 2014 and 2 further pilots to refine the concepts.

High art it is not. The Australian Fabians send up Donald Trump.

In partnership with the WA Labor Perth Branch, The Trial of Donald Trump stars Alex Manfrin as Donald Trump, Eileen Glynn as Hillary Clinton and Jude Bridge as Judge Judy. Trump is defended by Simon Millman MLA and prosecuted by Barrister Neil Morressy.

A Happy New Year in 2018 to our audience.

It has been a tough 2017 and we will have to see what 2018 brings. We look forward in hope. 

In the meantime, Best Wishes to you all. Happy New Year 2018. 

Image: Happy New Year. 

David Duke was living rough in Glasgow after the death of his father and problems with alcohol when he saw an advert for the 2003 Homeless World Cup in Sweden. He started training and was picked for the Scotland team, which finished fourth in the competition, before leading the Scotland team to win the contest four years later.

This former homeless man who dedicated his life to helping others out of hardship is among dozens of ordinary people who have been honoured by the Queen after he received an MBE.

He later founded Street Soccer Scotland to help others experience the transforming power of sport. It provides free drop-in football sessions across the country. I’m happy to accept it but I’m just the frontman, it’s on behalf of everybody I work with and who helped me. David Duke, MBE Mr Duke, 37, said he was taken by surprise by the award for services to football and socially disadvantaged people and said it is recognition for all the staff and volunteers at Street Soccer Scotland. “I’m happy to accept it but I’m just the frontman, it’s on behalf of everybody I work with and who helped me,”