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THE PUBLIC ACCOUNTS Committee is to question the head of the Department of Finance over an accounting error in which a €3.6 billion payment between the state agencies the NTMA and the Housing Finance Agency was counted twice.
Minister Noonan said yesterday that he had recently been made aware of the error, but that the NTMA had contacted the department a year ago to query how the €3.6 billion was being treated in the public accounts – and did nothing about it.
Speaking in the Dáil, Noonan blamed “human error on behalf of one individual” for the mistake.
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The error means that that state’s outstanding debt is 2.3 per cent of GDP less than previously calculated, but is not expected to make any impact on the coming Budget.
Secretary General of the Department of Finance Kevin Cardiff is due to take up a new position with the European Court of Auditors in March of next year. Speaking to Breakfast on Newstalk yesterday morning, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) John McGuinness questioned the appointment.
The European Court of Auditors assesses the sound management of the public funds of EU citizens.
McGuinness also criticised what he termed the finance department’s “culture” of ignoring outside sources, including the PAC, when receiving recommendations. He said the PAC had contacted the department 22 times with recommendations on a number of issues last year, but had not received any response.
The Fianna Fáil TD said yesterday that he was seeking a report from the parties involved in the issue for a committee investigation into the error. Officials from the department, the NTMA and the CSO are to appear before the PAC today.
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The Earth’s orbit around the Sun was based on a hypothesis because the original framework was Ptolemaic.
“Moreover, we see the other five planets also retrograde at times and stationary at either end [of the regression]. And whereas the Sun always advances along its own direct path, they wander in various
ways, straying sometimes to the south and sometimes to the north; that is why they are called “planets” [wanderers]. Copernicus
Instead of God and Spirit, you follow Royal Society icons and I assure you, that explains a lot.
@Ted Daly: is praising such a cruel organisation the opposite of dopey to you ? How warped, delighted they’ve been neutered from their sanctimonious views on everything when I read such tripe
@Sean oSuilleabhain: I’m no fan of the church. I’d end them this second. The dopey father Ted comments is what I was referring to and the sheer predictability of it
@Allo Allo: this assumption that god is love , where does it come from? God could be petty jealousy and peevishness for all we know. And the notion that we are all one. We might be 3 and 5 eights (during the week) and 2 and a half (on bank holidays and weekends).
I am sure you like the fairy tale of neighbouring Galapagos islands; however, natural selection is a product of the neighbouring islands of England and Ireland as Anglo-Saxon and Celt ‘races’.
If it is any consolation, denominational Christianity stays silent on this self-inflicted wound on humanity.
@Allo Allo: spoken like a sheep who did what they were told and hasn’t read much of the bible, even if you skim read you can see the violence, hatred and sectarianism spewing from the major books Bible No.1 and a certain other takes No.1 spot everytime. THIS GOD is mean, sectarian, spiteful and does not love the christians
@Charlie O Connell: Pretty sure there’s a parable or a story in the Bible where Jesus goes to meet a bunch of heathens and everyone’s surprised that he’s not meeting the holy people, but he points out that it’s just like how a doctor calls only to sick people…
@Alex: yeah get rid of God that fairy tale instead let’s believe a man can be a women or a women a man. Let’s support and promote this in society in schools. Yeah no more fairy tales.
Presumably an atheist now. Jimmy Fallon also a narcissist, sorry atheisty too. No one going late night in the US is more of a phoney, he thinks everyone loves him
Remarkably, there isn’t a single priest I could meet and offer to show them how to resolve an issue between Pope and Galileo that created the awful dynamic that science is one thing and religion something else. There is an issue with the Ptolemaic framework that the first Sun-centred astronomers were obligated to use in proposing a moving Earth as a hypothesis and a solution that eluded people 400 years ago.
It requires an orbiting satellite to resolve and specifically this observation.
This short description is for people who can appreciate something new.
Galileo could only use Jupiter’s moons’ back-and-forth motions around their parent planet to prove that not all celestial objects orbited the Earth as the geocentric astronomers imagined.
A contemporary satellite tracking along with the Earth around the stationary Sun, free from the daily rotational influences of the surface Earth, now shows the faster-moving Venus and Mercury running back and forth around our parent star.
Yes, it is simple, and that is how it should be, notwithstanding the complex issues needed to provide the demonstration. It removes the bottleneck created by the Ptolemaic framework in an exquisite way.
There is no need to waste time on those who cannot appreciate what is in front of them, even when satellite imaging demonstrates the analogy of Jupiter’s moons with the motions of Venus and Mercury.
Nobody could resolve the issue of whether the Ptolemaic framework, which is brilliant for predicting astronomical events as dates, can also be used to prove that the Earth and other planets run circuits around the Sun.
It has been resolved using 21st-century observations and by a Christian, and that is all that matters.
@Jimmy Wallace: To be spiritual is the ability to be inspired and inspiring.
Those who consider themselves non-spiritual have not developed their perceptive faculties that distinguish between street noise and great music, an instruction manual and great literature, a painted object, and a work of art.
The Age of Reason ( enlightenment) was an attempt to operate without perceptive faculties, so you are driven by those celebrities who lack the real education behind astronomy and natural sciences.
Christ never prayed for the world, never said to love thy neighbour as thyself, render onto Caeser, and so on. People who realise the Bible is not one book but many traditions understand this, so they are not troubled by trying to reconcile traditions that cannot be done.
@Science: Newton’s Principia is the bible of the damned.
The Earth’s orbital motion is derived from observations that the slower-moving planets fall behind in view as the Earth overtakes them, as Jupiter and Saturn are seen to do.
Putting Earth in motion between Mars and Venus replaced the geocentric view of the Sun’s 365-day period between those two planets.
Newton conjured up a hypothetical observer on the Sun to account for the motions of the slower-moving planets.
“For to the Earth, planetary motions appear sometimes direct, sometimes stationary, nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the Sun, they are always seen direct.” Newton
That is the vandalism of a mathematician at the expense of Western astronomy.
@Science: Most of you students try to behave like SS guards with no manners, reason or sense of goodness, but that doesn’t work with me as a Christian.
The Catholic Church, at a certain administrative level, has indeed behaved worse than the hapless supporters of the Enlightenment subculture insofar as the decisions made centuries ago by the Church have led to the desolation of Western society today due to technical reasons I already outlined. I would offer to demonstrate all the technical issues, but so many are content to remain with a mixture of science fiction and fantasy.
Nothing is more magnificent than the heliacal rising of the stars in Job, which is now easily understood by satellite imaging.
“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the Earth?”
@Jack Cantwell: I cannot remotely stand any organised religion, but Len Brennan is a gas man although with the jewels and the girls in his bath moments, more than a deliberate air of certain Taoisigh and others about him. Well done to writers
So Your Holiness: how’s the son? The son of God, that’s what he meant.
So what’s the Catholic Church take on the whole racism thing? Personally I don’t mind as long as I can have a go at the Greeks. They invented gayness.
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