Irish govt pilots public service benchmarking
Previous Article Next Article Comments are closed. Ireland’s 230,000 public servants will each get special pay increases thismonth as the country experiments with a public service benchmarking scheme. The salary rises, ranging from 3 per cent to 25 per cent, are in addition tothe current national wage agreement which provides for 4.8 per cent annual payincreases. The benchmarking scheme has been billed as the most extensive andcomprehensive comparison of public and private sector jobs conducted in Europe.The programme is being administered by the Public Service Benchmarking Body,which was established as a joint initiative between the Irish Congress of TradeUnions and the Irish Government – through its national social partnership –after a series of strikes across the public sector. More than 2m euros (£1.4m) was spent hiring various experts and consultantsto assess the education, responsibilities, performance, stresses, skills,judgement, competencies and management structures in 135 different sectors andgrades. The benchmarking team engaged nine leading consultancy firms, including CapGemini, Watson Wyatt, Hay Group, Saville & Holdsworth, and Mercer toprepare specific job evaluations has. It produced pay data on 202 privatesector companies, involving 3,563 jobs, and developed 276 core ‘job capsules’with which to make comparisons. The process is a historic break from the traditional grade structures withsalary scales based on relativities to key grades like clerical officer orprincipal officer civil service positions. The new rates apply to members of the police, nurses, teachers, hospitaldoctors, soldiers, council engineers, health board administrators and the civilservice, apart from the two top grades. By Gerald Flynn an industrial correspondent with the Irish Independent. Irish govt pilots public service benchmarkingOn 20 Jan 2004 in Personnel Today Related posts:No related photos.
FacebookTwitterLinkedInEmailSALT LAKE CITY-Monday, Utah head football coach Kyle Whittingham announced former Weber State assistant coach Cole Swan as the Utes’ new linebackers coach. Swan has coached eight All-Americans, including two-time selections linebacker LeGrand Toia, kick returner Rashid Shaheed and special teams standout Brady May. Tags: Brady May/Colton Swan/Kyle Whittingham/LeGrand Toia/Rashid Shaheed/Utah Football Written by That season, the former rodeo scholarship athlete at Weber State and football walk-on, netted 109 tackles, three forced fumbles and an interception for the Wildcats. Swan, who had spent the past 15 seasons as a Wildcats’ assistant, had been Weber State’s special teams coordinator/inside linebackers coach for the past two seasons. Brad James January 7, 2019 /Sports News – Local Colton Swan Named As Utah Linebackers Coach Swan also had a successful playing career at Weber State, starring as a second-team All-Big Sky Conference linebacker during his senior campaign in 2003.
They are +4 (811-807) in point differential this season and score 73.7 points per game, while surrendering 73.4 points per contest. The Trailblazers are currently scoring 71.4 points per game and surrender 74.7 points per contest. Tags: Burns Arena/Chadron State Eagles/Diontae Champion/Division II/Dixie State men’s basketball/Druce Asah/Kendall McIntosh/Matt Conway/Metro State Roadrunners/Michael Sparks Junior guard Druce Asah leads the Roadrunners with 16.2 points per game. Saturday, the Trailblazers welcome Chadron State as the Eagles currently have a record of 6-7 and 4-3 in RMAC play. However, in the Division II era, head coach Jon Judkins has led Dixie State to an 115-25 (.821) record at Burns Arena. The Roadrunners come into Burns Arena with a record of 6-5 and 4-3 in RMAC play. Redshirt junior guard Michael Sparks leads Chadron State with 13.3 points per game. Written by FacebookTwitterLinkedInEmailST. GEORGE, Utah-Friday and Saturday, Dixie State men’s basketball returns to Burns Arena to face the Metro State Roadrunners and Chadron State Eagles as Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference play ensues.
January 10, 2019 /Sports News – Local Dixie State Men’s Basketball Hosts Metro State and Chadron State This Weekend Redshirt junior forward Kendall McIntosh also bolsters Metro State, netting 11.9 points and 5.3 rebounds per contest. The Eagles score 72.5 points per game and surrender 73.6 points per contest. As has been the case all season, Dixie State is paced by junior forward Matt Conway, who posts 16.7 points and 5.4 rebounds per game, leading the Trailblazers in both categories. Senior guard Diontae Champion nets 11.6 points and 5.3 rebounds per contest, serving in a complementary role to Sparks. The Trailblazers seek their first win in program history against Metro State as the Roadrunners have taken the previous two games. The squads meet Friday for the first time since the 2008-09 season. The Trailblazers have fallen on hard times to commence RMAC play as they are 2-5 in league games and 4-7 overall. Brad James
FacebookTwitterLinkedInEmailLOGAN, Utah-As confirmed Sunday afternoon, Utah State football junior quarterback Jordan Love was named as the Mountain West Conference’s offensive player of the week for his role in the Aggies’ 37-35 win at Fresno State Saturday evening.Against the Bulldogs, Love, a legitimate NFL prospect, completed 30 of 39 passes for 388 yards and a pair of scores.Love has now passed for exactly 7,600 yards in his career and is second in program history behind Jose Fuentes (9,168 yards, 1999-2002).He has also moved ahead of QB Kent Myers (2014-2017) for fourth all-time in school history with 7,938 yards of total offense.The Aggies return home Saturday for a 2:00 pm kickoff against Wyoming as their Mountain West Conference season ensues.As was confirmed Monday by the Mountain West, senior Aggies kicker Domink Eberle was named as the special teams player of the week. He made three field goals against Fresno State Saturday, including the game-winner from 30 yards away as time expired at Bulldog Stadium of Fresno, Calif.Eberle is now tied for the all-time lead in made field goals (57) in Mountain West history. November 11, 2019 /Sports News – Local Utah State Football’s Jordan Love Named Mountain West Conference Offensive Player of the Week Tags: Jordan Love/Jose Fuentes/Kent Myers/Utah State Football/Wyoming Written by Brad James
This is not an easy play to watch. Such contentious topics as Iraq, spin journalism and sadomasochism are not merely explored, but taken apart, and often in painful detail. The script plunges the depths of the human psyche, revealing the more unpalatable aspects of everything from patriotism to sex – which is not to suggest that Guardians sacrifices entertainment for worthiness; the interspersed moments of humour, whilst uncomfortable, are also very, very funny. I almost didn’t dare laugh on occasions when the brutal humour teetered on the edge of what is bearable, but the irreverent approach and complete absence of political correctness are refreshing. The difficult line between the acceptable and the unacceptable is expertly trod by Mark Cartwright and Rebecca Gibson, who managed to command my entire attention for an hour and a half of interspersed monologues. This is even more impressive considering the fact that ‘English Boy’ and ‘American Girl’ are unsympathetic characters taken to the extreme. Yet Cartwright imbues his grasping, amoral journalist with an almost hypnotic charisma, whilst Gibson’s long-suffering soldier had my empathy even as she recounted acts impossible to contemplate. Not only is Gibson’s accent spot-on, but she embodies ‘American Girl’ down to every twitch and shuffle, and manages to convey a sense of lurking vulnerability. The intimate nature of the monologues, combined with the skill of the cast in melding the personal and the political, create an atmosphere where the audience feels like a voyeur, almost implicated in the increasingly bleak events as they are retold. ‘English Boy’ describes visiting a bondage club as like ‘going to hell as a tourist’, and that fits this production perfectly.Director Will Measham is ‘fed up with student apathy’, and as wake-up calls go, this is unignorable. You could call Guardians ‘spin’ of a different sort – counter-spin, if you will – but its versions of the truth are extremely persuasive. What’s more, the gritty realism of the acting and the sparseness of the direction combine to create a production in which I can find nothing to criticize. This play isn’t going to be for everyone – certainly not for those who go to the theatre for light-hearted escapism – but it is uncomfortably good.
READY TO PLAY — Dylan of the Patriots at Division of Recreation Youth Flag Football!
By Matt KoellingDespite the calendar reading June 9, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue made sure the kickoff of Summer Concert Series 2017 at Ocean City Music Pier, was like the 4th of July. A strong opening set by New Breed Brass Band set the tone for an evening of funky, New Orleans horn-driven, genre-bending, musical gumbo. At a quarter to nine, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and his band of merry men, took the stage. “What’s up, Ocean City, you ready to party?!?” Shorty asked the crowd, which responded enthusiastically in the affirmative, just as he and the crew blew in with their aptly titled instrumental “Hurricane Season”.On a warm Friday evening in Ocean City, with a full moon illuminating the sea’s shore line directly behind, the crowd along with the band onstage, road the wave. What followed was a dizzying cocktail of Crescent City, and Shorty’s own, rich musical heritage, beginning with the late great Allen Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down” and ending on The Meters’ classic “It Ain’t No Use”. The blended effects in between, on a crowd from ages 4 to 88 in a dry town, were intoxicating.A trombone and trumpet-playing prodigy from New Orleans’ cultural hotbed Treme district, playing second lines and accompanying Bo Diddley on a New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival stage at age 4, it’s almost scary to consider that Trombone Shorty might just now at 31, be entering his prime. Yet if last night’s show, or his recently released Blue Note Records debut, Parking Lot Symphony, his best since 2010’s Backatown, are any indication, he truly may be.Now entering a second season covering the summer concert schedule for OCNJ Daily, I can say without hesitation that Friday night’s show, featured the highest percentage of standing patrons of any OC Music Pier crowd. They also spent the longest amount of sustained time on their feet, moving and grooving. As Shorty devotee Angela Johnson, front and center all evening, declared with satisfied laughter, “We sat in our chairs…until the band came on”. Johnson, in town from Silver Spring MD, has attended at least one Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue show “every year” for a decade, in locales ranging from Clearwater FLA, to Hampton VA, New Orleans LA, and now Ocean City NJ. This weekend’s Ocean City show was particularly special, since she brought longtime best friend Denaise Seals, up from Northwest DC on I-95 North with her, to celebrate Denaise’s birthday, as the pair spend a boardwalk-based weekend at The Harris House.Throughout the evening, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews exhibited his musical dexterity on both of his chosen brass weapons, while displaying a supreme bandleader sense of showmanship, via his singing and crowd work. During his recent “Here Come the Girls”, Shorty prowled the edge of the stage and sung the title into fruition. Once he had the adoring flock at his attention, he was passing out Mardi Gras beads to those flanking the stage during “Long Weekend”, which featured a blistering trombone solo, plus a deft interpolation of Kool & The Gang’s roller-rink anthem, “Get Down on It”. On “Where Y’At”, Shorty’s call-and-response staccato sounded closer to rap, before the band seamlessly shifted into the intro segment of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”. Towards the end of the show, Shorty even slid behind the drum kit and quite literally didn’t miss a beat.If he hadn’t earned his stage name as a youth, he could’ve just as well been known as Trumpet Shorty. He is equally adept on that smaller, non-slide instrument. During the slow, jazz-blues build of “Laveau Dirge”, Shorty delivered a trumpet solo, deploying his free hand as a mute, along with seemingly every ounce of breath he had left, that would’ve made Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong proud. Meanwhile, in the space between lingering gust-filled notes, you could hear “whoooh!”, “what?!” or “ugh!”, bubble up inside the crowded concert hall. Shorty was not the only ace musician onstage in nearly two hours of show time. Each member of his five-piece accompanying band since 2009, Orleans Avenue, was a gifted player in their own right and made the most of their time to shine. Jersey native “Freaky” Pete Murano shifted from chicken-grease rhythm guitar on “Where It At”, to white-hot Hendrix-like leads on “The Craziest Thing”. Drummer Joey Peebles kept time with seemingly boundless energy, while his long hair flew everywhere and flop-sweat could be seen splashing as his cymbals crashed. Ninth Word N.O. native “Uncle” Dan Oestreicher’s baritone sax, like his physical frame, loomed large in the evening’s proceedings. Mike “Bass In Your Face” Bailey, truly earned the nickname, particularly during an extended solo on “One Night Only”.Last but certainly not least was the most recent addition, Bernard “BK” Jackson. BK is a Tampa-bred, 25-year-old tenor saxophone wizard, hired into Prince’s NPG Orchestra while in college at FAMU back in 2012. Moving continuously through the night, he rose to the challenge Trombone Shorty issued when asked to “give him some Maceo Parker”, launching into a James Brown medley that included parts of “Cold Sweat”, “Get Up Offa That Thing”, “I Got The Feeling” and “I Feel Good” among others. During Jackson’s final solo on the set-closing “It Ain’t No Use”, Shorty took rhythmic respite behind the drum kit, BK snuck in horn licks from Outkast’s “Spottieottiedopalicious”, Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”, and once Shorty returned to trombone, all three horns blasted off into the wordless melody of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” chorus in unison.As the joyful noise finally came to an end, performers and patrons looking happily spent, Shorty took a bouquet of flowers from the grateful audience while each member of the group took turns tossing out gifts to the crowd including t-shirts, beads, guitar picks and drum sticks. “Thank You, Ocean City, from right here all the way down to New Orleans…we love you and we’ll be back soon!”. Judging by the standing ovation and smiling faces filtering out of the Music Pier, it’s safe to say Ocean City loves him and New Orleans too. In fact, the next time Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue return to play a show, OC Summer Concert Series promoters Bob Rose & BRE Presents may want to considering booking two, to give the Jersey Shore one more summer day, of laissez les bons temps rouler.
Pressure group Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) has called for a boycott of breads with high salt levels as part of its Salt Awareness Week campaign, which runs until February 4.It says that while many bakery products now contain significantly less salt than a few years ago, salt levels in others are still too high.Its research found that a white crusty farmhouse loaf bought from Marks & Spencer in September 2004 contained 1.75g of salt per 100g, whereas the same product bought at the end of 2006 contained around half this amount of 0.9g salt per 100g.Many other loaves now contain around 0.8-1g of salt per 100g. However, some bread still contains as much as 1.5g of salt per 100g.CASH has urged consumers to avoid buying Tesco’s Stayfresh Medium Sliced Wholemeal bread (1.5g salt per 100g) and choose Sainsbury’s Stay Fresher For Longer Medium Sliced Wholemeal bread instead, as it contains much less salt (0.9g per 100g).Indeed, any bread that contains more than 1.25g of salt per 100g should be boycotted, as lower salt alternatives exist, according to CASH.”The UK is leading the world on salt reduction – many of our food manufacturers should be congratulated on the effort they have made to reduce the amount of salt they add to our foods,” said Professor Graham MacGregor, chairman of CASH. “This proves that lower salt versions can be developed.”In its latest survey, CASH revisited 127 products it had previously ’named and shamed’ to see how their salt contents had changed.It said products still found to have a high salt content included Sainsbury’s and Tesco Crumpets, which contain 2g of salt per 100g.
Royal Town Planning Institute CEO Trudi Elliott takes up post of Chair of the Planning Inspectorate board on 1 April 2018. Social media – MHCLG The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has today (22 March 2018) announced the appointment of Trudi Elliott as the new independent Chair of the Planning Inspectorate board.From Sunday 1 April, Trudi will work with other Non-Executive Directors to provide support to Chief Executive Sarah Richards and the management team through the advisory board for a period of 4 years.Trudi, a Chartered Town Planner, has a wide-ranging and in-depth knowledge of planning, a sector where she has worked for 20 years.She has been Chief Executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute since 2011 but will step down from that role at the end of March 2018.Trudi takes over the role of Chair at the Planning Inspectorate from Sara Weller who held the position from August 2014 to September 2017.Commenting on her new role, Trudi said: national infrastructure planning planning and enforcement appeals examinations of local plans Office address and general enquiries Please use this number if you are a journalist wishing to speak to Press Office 0303 444 1209 2 Marsham StreetLondonSW1P 4DF If your enquiry is related to COVID-19 please check our guidance page first before you contact us – https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-for-local-government.If you still need to contact us please use the contact form above to get in touch, because of coronavirus (COVID-19). If you send it by post it will not receive a reply within normal timescale. General enquiries: please use this number if you are a member of the public 030 3444 0000
The Planning Inspectorate plays a vital function in the planning system and the future development of England and Wales. I am absolutely delighted to have been appointed to help with that task and look forward to working with Sarah Richards and her executive management team to continue to shape this renowned organisation. Contact form https://forms.communit… Media enquiries Email 
The government is to temporarily guarantee business-to-business transactions currently supported by Trade Credit Insurance.Trade Credit Insurance insures suppliers against a customer defaulting on payment and helps give businesses confidence to trade with each another.As of April 2020, more than £171bn of business activity was insured, covering transactions between around 13,000 suppliers and 650,000 buyers, according to the Treasury.The government has said its support will help supply chains that rely on Trade Credit Insurance. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, some businesses are struggling to pay bills and risk having credit insurance withdrawn, or premiums increase to unaffordable levels.Under the new scheme, the government will temporarily guarantee business-to-business transactions currently supported by Trade Credit Insurance through a temporary reinsurance agreement with insurers.The guarantees will cover trading by domestic firms and exporting firms, and it is hoped agreements will be in place with insurers by the end of this month. The government said it would work with businesses and the industry on the full details of the scheme to ensure firms were supported and risk was shared between the government and insurers.“This country’s businesses are crucial in helping us to kick-start the economy,” said economic secretary to the Treasury John Glen. “By guaranteeing business-to-business transactions currently supported by Trade Credit Insurance, we will help to maintain a vital cog in our economy.”The move has been welcomed by the Food & Drink Federation.“We are delighted that the government has introduced a guarantee scheme for Trade Credit Insurance,” said chief executive Ian Wright.“It is news that will be warmly welcomed by food and drink manufacturers of all sizes, and an intervention we have been calling on government to introduce since lockdown first began. We look forward to working with the Treasury on the details.”