Here's How ::: Ireland's Political, Social and Current Affairs Podcast

Andrew Wright is a fourth generation dairy farmer near Omagh in Co Tyrone, with a big following on Tiktok. We talked about this video he published. ***** In the world of what used to be called PR, these days they call themselves other things, information management or whatever. PR has PR’d itself. In the world of what we used to call PR, there is a standard practice of trying to present whatever the news is in as positive a light for whoever the client is. Our client is delighted with the result of this case, that the jury has seen fit to exonerate him and declare him innocent on the parking fine, and he’s more than confident that the conviction on the murder charge will be overturned on appeal. That sort of stuff. So when I saw the ah succinct headline in the Irish Times “Rising number of gardaí convicted shows force’s culture changing, Policing Authority chair says”, I had a bit of a smile. Before Drew Harris took over as garda commissioner, there were typically about 30 or 40 gardaí suspended per year. in the following years, the number went up to over 120 per year, though it has since dipped below 100. The number of convictions of gardaí has shot up in parallel. And the Policing Authority thinks that that increase is a good thing. It’s a sign that what they delicately call the culture of An Garda Síochána is improving. They might have said the quiet bit out loud, but I think that they are probably right. But whatever PR intern, sorry Junior Reputational Governance associate, wrote that line maybe should have thought it out a bit better. It is a good thing. But the fact that that it is a good thing, is not a good thing.

David Maddox is the political editor of Express Online. ***** Kevin and myself always appreciate feedback from listeners, we try to reply when we can, but Aengus Ryan send in a sound file, which is great cos I can include it in the podcast. I think this is an important question, and I think that some people are thinking about it, but not enough. In particular I’d say that Unionists are not thinking about it, which might be a bit of avoiding thinking about something in the hope it never happens, a bit like whistling past the graveyard. But we should look at the mote in our own eyes first, because we really aren’t thinking about this, we aren’t preparing. One reason for that is that it might seem like a remote possibility, but that strikes me as making the Brexit mistake, not preparing for a possible outcome that could well happen much faster than we expect, and if that snowball starts rolling, it will be hard to make detailed preparations in the heat of the debate that will bring. Jim O’Callaghan the Fianna Fáil TD and, I think, leadership hopeful, to be fair to him, has made some proposals. I think the proposals are terrible, such as having the Dáil sit in Dublin and the Seanad in Belfast. But bad as it is, it’s helpful for him to bring this up, because at least people are thinking about practicalities. But the short answer to Aengus’ question is that this hasn’t really been addressed in any official way since the Good Friday Belfast Agreement. The terms of that agreement are pretty clear, but not precise. Firstly, calling a border poll is decided by the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, so that basically means the decision rests with the British cabinet of the day. The exact text says: the Secretary of State shall exercise the power under paragraph 1, [that’s call a border poll], if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland. So that word ‘shall’ there is doing a lot of work. In legal terms it’s a requirement. When someone is given discretion in law, the word used is ‘may’, when they have to do something, it’s ‘shall’. But then in the next clause it says ‘if at any time it appears likely to him’. Is that a get-out-of-jail card? Could Chris Heaton-Harris or his successor ignore a stack of opinion polls, stick his fingers in his ears, and say ‘La la, I’m not listening it doesn’t appear likely to me that the vote would pass’. Maybe, but not really. Because it’s the Secretary of State who makes the decision, not Chris Heaton-Harris. You might think they are the same person, but not quite. When he’s acting in his ministerial role, there is case law that basically means that his decisions have to be rational, and based on evidence. That doesn’t mean he has to be right, the bar is higher than that. But there is a bar, and basically if he was claiming that something that was irrational, totally unsustainable given the evidence, it is possible that he could be overruled by a court. But in the real world if there was enough evidence to take a court case forcing a border poll, then there would be other things going on at the same time. You can be sure that there would be intense campaigning on all sides,

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn is Sinn Féin’s chief whip. *****

Mario Rosenstock is a comedian and impressionist, and creator of TodayFM’s Gift Grub. ***** Here’s something about the Chinese economy. China’s ‘investment’ in real estate makes Ireland’s property obsession seem breezy and carefree. Just before our crash, 12 per cent of our economy was house-building. Even if Chinese GDP figures are true, then their reliance on homebuilding is double our peak. (If their GDP is overstated, it’s worse.) If China crashes, it will shake the world. China holds trillions in dollar and euro reserves, and US sovereign debt. China is not a democracy, but its leaders are sensitive to public opinion, and deeply paranoid about preventing unrest. If threatened, the Communist Party is likely to pull investment from anywhere it needs to, to keep their internal economy going, and keep their population working, not protesting. But with ghost cities, and one quarter of the economy building more of them, something has to give. But when? Maybe now. Shanghai is China’s largest stock exchange. The Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) Composite has been in freefall for nearly a month. That crash – nearly 30 per cent of the peak – has put the values back a year or so, but it shows no sign of slowing. No matter how unthinkable, China’s building boom must end sometime, just as ours did. There is no reason to hope that it will be a soft landing.  I suppose that I’m not the only one talking about the Chinese economy, and its potential to take the rest of the world down with it, if it collapses. But the thing about what I wrote there, is the ‘maybe now’ bit. Because I actually wrote that in July 2015. That’s more than eight years ago. I remember in about mid–2009, when the property myth in Ireland was still just barely believable, but only for the really gullible, I heard one journalist on the radio, who had been preaching the soft-landing gospel of the time that was becoming untenable, refer to David McWilliams, who had been a lone voice warning of the instability of the property market, they referred to him sarcastically as ‘having predicted all 10 of the previous one property crash’. They were trying to argue that the property crash was not a real thing. Now, I think that sort of comment was totally disingenuous, but the point is not necessarily wrong. If you keep predicting something that is at least not impossible for long enough, then odds are eventually that you will be proved right, not because you are Mystic Meg, but because most non-impossible things happen sooner or later. But I think it’s unfair to characterise David McWilliams like that, at that time he was pointing out obvious contradictions, such as the proportion of our economy dependent on building, and the unsustainability of that, as well as of the impossibility high prices of accommodation. He wasn’t so much Mystic Meg as Capitan Logical, pointing out that predictions from others were just physically impossible. That brings us to the China problem. People have been predicting the end of their long boom for years – including me. Does that mean it can continue forever? Well, no, obviously. One of those supposed Chinese anecdotes fits in well here. I’m not so sure of their cultural appropriateness, or even if it’s pure orientalism, but you’ll see the relevance. A poor man does a favour for the emperor. Here's How 169 – Gift of the Gab

Aubrey McCarthy is the founder and chairman of Tiglin, a charity that provides services to homeless people. ***** I listen to podcasts quite a bit in arrears. I’m not too worried about being current, I suppose, and I was just listening to a David McWilliams podcast from August, he was talking about the banks, not too surprising. And he touched on a topic that I’m surprised that more people don’t discuss. David McWilliams didn’t really discuss the topic I’m referring to, but he did kind of arrive at the topic. This goes all the way back to Marx, The Communist Manifesto and all that, and the workers seizing the means of production. Whatever about my other views, I think this misunderstands how economies work. Firstly, that whole thing about the workers seizing the means of production, whenever it has been put into effect, or even tried to be, it inevitably means the state seizing the means of production, nationalising industries. This was a cornerstone of left-wing policy up to about the 1970s, but became a bit taboo after that, not least because of how badly nationalised industries performed. When Mary Robinson was running for president in 1990, there were a few desperate Fianna Fáil attempts to throw back at her statements, that she had made in the 1960s, advocating nationalising the banks. So it was particularly ironic that another 20 years later in 2010, it was Fianna Fáil that ended up effectively nationalising the banks, and the Labour Party was the only party in the Dáil that voted against the bank bailout that led directly to that nationalisation. But history, or at least the observations of a pop economist is proving that … well, I suppose they were both right and wrong, but Fianna Fáil were right first. The bottom line is that the Irish public are being hosed by Irish banks. But hang on a minute, Irish banks were, and largely still are, nationalised. Haven’t the workers seized the means of production already. This exposes why the Marxist analysis doesn’t work. The government – the people – can regulate an industry, or they can own an industry, but they can’t do both. It is a fundamental conflict of interest. And the reality is that, yes, the state is the collective will of the people, but it is naïve to imagine that doesn’t have an independent existence of itself. Yes, there are people there who have the best interests of the people at heart most of the time, also there are people who only think of their own interests, but also, the state, like any other institution has a collective sense of self-preservation and promoting its own interests. And if the state owns a huge chunk of the banking sector, it is inevitable that the desire to accrue profits from that ownership comes into conflict with regulating that sector, protecting the consumers, the public, who need its services. And it’s pretty clear which side is winning in that conflict. And it isn’t just the savers who are getting ripped off. So when you hear about the record profits of Irish banks, don’t imagine that it’s some sort of business acumen, some sort of talent at running an enterprise that is making those profits.  They make those profits because they have us over a barrel....

James Ker-Lindsay is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics. ***** Donald Trump is going to jail. That’s a whole big story in itself, the reason why Donald Trump is going to go to jail, I’ll talk about that a bit in a moment, but that’s not really the point. The real point is that Donald Trump is going to jail. And he’s going to jail soon. That’s audio of the crowd at a Trump rally when he was running against Hillary Clinton shouting ‘lock her up’, one of dozens, probably hundreds of times that it happened. I don’t think that any but the most deluded of the people shouting really believed there was any chance that Hilary Clinton would actually be going to jail; someone once said that Trump’s detractors took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally. It might be because there’s been so much insincere talk about sending people to jail that I think people aren’t really taking seriously two things that are going to happen; I haven’t seen any commentator give a reasonable analysis of what I think are two important likely outcomes. The second most important one is, of course, what do you do with the reality of having a candidate for president of the United States locked up in a federal prison cell, at the height of the election campaign. But, much more important, and it’s getting even less attention; I talked on the podcast a while ago about how important it is, when you’re discussing any topic, to give some thought to what happens next. Donald Trump is convicted in a federal court of serious crimes, he’s handcuffed, he’s led away to a prison van, and taken to a federal penitentiary where he may well spend the rest of his life. It would be a media event comparable with 9/11, but what happens next? After the World Trade Centre attack, there was saturation coverage for weeks, but very few people were contemplating the what happens next that we have been living through for more than two decades now. You might think ‘Trump going to prison? It’ll never get to that’. If you do, you’re not paying attention. First some basic facts. The US has a federal government, and a federal system of courts and prisons and criminal laws. Almost all cases are heard in state courts – murders trials like OJ Simpson, defamation trials like Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, and many less famous ones, they are all heard by state courts, under state law. The FBI and the US Department of Justice investigate federal crimes, and despite their prominence in films and TV, their cases only make up a tiny proportion of all the trials in the US. For the Feds to get involved, the crime must be something that crosses state lines, like the Unabomber who posted his bombs from one state to another, or it must be an attack on the federal government itself. So, in America, it’s pretty unusual to be charged with a federal crime, but if you are, your fate is pretty much sealed. Their conviction rate is truly spectacular. Of cases that come before the courts at all, even just for a preliminary hearing,

Janie Lazar is the chair of End of Life Ireland. ***** Some people have said some things about my level of political insight, thanks to them, even if I don’treally think it’s that impressive most of the time. Actually, whatever level of insight that I do have, Ithink is just down to two habits. One is, when you’re discussing any topic, to clearly define what isthe actual problem that you are trying to solve. The second is, if you think of, or hear of a solution,you consider if it’s implemented, ‘what happens next?’ or ‘then what?’. Basically try to anticipate thesecond-next step, as well as the next one.Debates on politics and social issues often take the form of saying X is a problem, we should do Y tosolve it. What some people maybe miss out on is, if you solve problem X, or if you take action Y, ifthat happens what will happen as a result of that?I suppose the average person isn’t really required to think out their position on the West Lothianquestion or the Congress of Vienna, but there are some topics that are very common in populardiscussion, debated from bar stools and office microwaves up and down country, where peopledon’t seem to do that, which is fair enough, but sometimes it seems that our politicians, ourjournalists, the people who are actually paid to do this, their debate isn’t of a much better quality.I was thinking of this listening to Mark O’Halloran on the Mario Rosenstock Podcast a while back, Imentioned this interview a couple of podcasts ago, it’s worth hearing what he had to say. That’s not the greatest tragedy that comes out of the housing crisis, but only because there aremuch bigger tragedies out there. It does though, I think, bring home to people who don’t have tothink of those difficulties, what it is like if you do; how the other half lives.A little bit later Mario Rosenstock interjects saying that people like Mark should be given more credit– literally and figuratively – by the banks.Now it’s not the job of either Mark O’Halloran or Mario Rosenstock to be experts on macroeconomicpolicy, but what they’re saying links in with a theme that can be seen often in social media, andsometimes in from professional journalists and elected politicians.Basically saying that someone is being denied a mortgage for what seems like an unfair reason, andthat the banks should be forced to give them the loan if they, for example, have shown that they areable to pay in rent an equivalent amount to the repayment, or saying that the government shouldgive or that group a tax break money to allow them to buy a house, or a grant to take account of thefact that they can’t get help from wealthy parents or whatever.These might seem like good ideas for the individual, they could potentially allow an individual to buya house, but they just don’t work at a society level.If you pass a law that says that the bank has to give a mortgage to Mary Murphy of 21 High Street,that might suit her, but you can’t make laws like that, laws apply to everyone, or at least everyone ina particular position. And if you make a law that says that the bank has to give everyone, or eveneveryone in a particular class of person, a mortgage, that doesn’t change the number of housesavailable.All that would do is allow some people who are after a house to outbid some other people who areafter a house. It might change who gets those houses, it might, but it mightn’t, because the originalpeople might be able to outbid them back. The thing that is certain not to change is that there would be an equal number of people who need a house but don’t get it. And the one thing that would becertain to change is that whoever ends up with the house would be paying more for it.

Josie Appleton is the director of the Manifesto Club. ***** You might think that you’re not familiar with the CE symbol, but you probably are, I’m sure you’ve seen it thousands of times. I can’t show you a picture of it in audio format, but the symbol is two semi-circles, the first one making a C, the second with an extra line to make the capital E, and CE stands for, conformité européenne meaning conformity with European standards, and you’ve seen and ignored that symbol on a thousand different products, electronics, toys, basically any manufactured consumer product. I mentioned cycle helmets on the podcast a few weeks back, that they are designed to protect a cyclist from a fall to the ground, but not from being hit by the driver of a car. Those design standards are codified in the conformité européenne system, and you’re not allowed to make, import or sell any products in the EU that don’t meet those standards. The products are inspected, when they pass they get to display that CE symbol, the consumer doesn’t get children’s toys covered in lead paint or, hopefully, mobile phone batteries that blow up. It is true that regulations like this have the potential include malicious requirements that some country sneaks in, to try to favour their industry over another country. James Dyson, for example, complained that the ratings for vacuum cleaners were done in a way that disadvantaged his invention, but the regulations are agreed by the EU as a whole, and everyone gets their shpake. Official CE logo The regulations are necessarily very complex, because they cover thousands of different products, and they can be very technical, and they were one of the prime rhetorical targets of the Brexit campaign, including people like James Dyson, you probably know this script by heart, the Brussels bureaucrats tying up our business up in unnecessary red tape. This is Brexit, the Movie a glossy, professionally-produced video put out on YouTube by right-wing film-maker Martin Durkin as part of the Brexit campaign, it’s typical of the rhetoric at the time. It’s very typical of the Brexit campaign in the sense that Martin Durkin has no regard for the truth, in this segment all the things that are mentioned in the voiceover appear in the stylishly-filmed routine of ‘regulated man’ getting up and having breakfast, with nifty graphics listing all the relevant regulations over each item. Except, they’re not necessarily relevant, as John Oliver observed at the time. It’s not explicitly mentioned in Brexit the Movie, but most of the regulation that they were talking about here are the CE regulations, and ‘freeing Britain’ from this burdensome regulation was a core objective, and a core selling point of the Brexit lobby. So, after much delay, what was called the UKCA, standing for UK Conformity Assessed, UKCA was launched on 1 January 2021, with the validity of CE certification to expire in the UK as of 31 December 2021, so a one-year transition period. Basically, the British government created their own standards agency to set their own standards independently,

Pauline O’Reilly is the Green Party spokesperson on Education and Higher Education and Senator and the cathaoirleach of the Green Party. ***** I heard Mark O’Halloran on an old episode the Mario Rosenstock Podcast recently, he talked very articulately about how the housing crisis affects him, how he as a man in his 50s has to ask someone’s permission to get a pet cat. I totally sympathise with his position, sometimes it’s small things like that which capture so well the dysfunction created by the housing crisis. I’m sure some left-wing party is writing up a bill as I speak called something like the Tenant’s Right to Pets and Animal Companionship Act 2023. In fact, Sinn Féin is actually proposing a bill to make it illegal to ask for sex in return for a tenancy. That sounds horrific, I’m not convinced how widespread a problem it is, but if it even happens once, that’s obviously unacceptable. But consider this – do we have a problem of supermarket workers demanding sex in return for groceries? Is that even conceivable? In Ireland, it’s not, but in recent years, there have been scandals of aid workers in both Somalia and Haiti, in the midst of famine, demanding sex for food. The conclusion is obvious. That can only happen where people are so desperate – be it for food or housing – where people are so desperate that they are vulnerable to sexual exploitation. So it’s particularly insane that you get some people, particularly in the left, saying things like ‘we don’t have a housing crisis, we have a renting crisis’. We do. We have a housing crisis. And we get people, again primarily on the left, saying that ‘We can’t build our way out of the housing crisis’. Yes we can.  That’s exactly what we need to do. We need to build. We need to build suitable homes in suitable locations, and we need to build them in vast numbers. If you really need it to be proven, you can look at the figures. Ireland has by far the lowest number of dwellings per 1000 people in Western Europe, those are figures from the OECD. And there is good reason to think that even those figures miss just how bad the situation in Ireland is. Those figures from the OECD are from 2020, but they only had access to Irish figures up to 2019. Now, to get the number of dwellings per capita, you obviously divide the number dwellings by the number of people.  But Ireland is the only Western European country with a sharply increasing population; so those figures from four years ago understate the current population. And as per the last two censuses, Ireland has hundreds of thousands of dwellings that are being left vacant for various reasons, so those figures significantly overstate the number of dwellings available to live in. Both of those factors, more people and fewer dwellings indicate that the OECD figure, bad as it is, significantly understates the problem in Ireland. Another factor is that other Western European countries tend to ha...

Repeats on podcasts don’t always make a lot of sense, but if you are subscribed, you’ll know that I put up a podcast from 2019 into the feed again last week; the podcast was an investigation into RTÉ and their relationship with the AA which supplied them with AA Roadwatch, the erstwhile traffic news segments. The issue that I focussed on was that the supply of staff and studios for RTÉ quite clearly met RTÉ’s definition of a sponsored programme, and quite clearly breached RTÉ’s rules against accepting sponsorship from political lobbyists, and against accepting sponsorship from businesses with an interest in the content of the sponsored programme, and against allowing the sponsor to have any say in the content of the sponsored programme. In that podcast I said that the response of RTÉ to my questioning was basically stonewalling. I asked them about breaching sponsorship rules, they said that it wasn’t a sponsored programme. I pointed them to their own criteria of what counted as a sponsored programme, and that AA Roadwatch clearly met those criteria, and at various stages they promised to get back to me with answers, they promised to tell me what exactly AA Roadwatch was if it wasn’t a sponsored programme, I sent many reminders over months, but they never did. Since that podcast was first released, AA Roadwatch was scrapped by the AA. One of the reasons that I repeated that podcast was because of the current corruption scandal within RTÉ. The mission statement that we have for this podcast, Here’s How is to cover things that are under-covered in other Irish media, and the current scandal is a lot of things, but I don’t think that it is under-covered. That said, I think that there is an aspect of this that is getting, to say the very least, less coverage than it deserves. Inevitably, there is a temptation to cover the glitzy aspect of this story, when it relates to TV stars, it’s difficult not to get caught up in the sordid details, and I think that a wider story is being missed because of that. Kudos to Imelda Munster, Sinn Féin’s Louth TD who did a better job than most in trying to nail down Noel Kelly, the agent of Ryan Tubridy and other RTÉ stars who is at the centre of this scandal. What Imelda Munster was trying to nail down there was exactly how this dodgy deal got agreed. The secret payments were being routed through Renault Ireland to disguise their origin, and were paid on foot of invoices which did not bear Tubridy’s name, obviously to try not to attract the attention of anyone who might ask awkward questions. Kelly, you hear there is trying to shrug his shoulders and say ‘nothing to do with me, guv’, and points to a memo to the agreement from RTÉ, to him, instructing him not to include Tubridy’s name on the invoice, as though he had no idea why they might say that, when they all were perfectly aware that Tubridy had gotten stick in public over his salary, and none of them wanted these secret payments to leak out. There Kelly and Tubridy are trying to maintain the line that the secret payments were not really from RTÉ. Now, I’m careful about the defamation laws on this podcast, but I have no hesitation in saying that’s a lie. To the extent that they are claiming that the secret payments originated from Renault Ireland, Noel Kelly is lying, and Ryan Tubridy is lying. The money was essentially laundered through Renault Ireland to disguise its origin, to hide the fact that this was a payment of RTÉ’s money – taxpayers’ money – that was not being included in the publicly-declared salary for Tubridy. And they weren’t the only people lying.

I think that it’s about time to hear this edition of the podcast from 2019 again. Dr Michael Foley is professor emeritus at the school of media at TU Dublin – formerly DIT – also a member of the NUJ’s Ethics Council, and has been invited by the International federation of Journalists and UNESCO to write a syllabus on journalism safety and ethics. ***** Because of the detailed nature of the podcast, I sent a rough cut of the show to Neil O’Gorman of RTÉ in advance for his comments a couple of days before publication, and invited his comments. Below is Neil’s response, with interjections in italics from myself. Thank you for sending in advance. I have three comments/asks: Given that your podcast is themed around bias and journalistic ethics, it is both misleading and unethical to not disclose upfront that the conversation with me was recorded without my knowledge. It is essential that you highlight this at the front of the piece in the interests of full disclosure and potential impact on my professional reputation. On this same point, was Michael Foley informed that the conversation he has just heard was recorded without my knowledge, particularly as he is presented as an expert in ethics in journalism? In the podcast it’s clear from my comments and the audio that I didn’t tell Neil in advance that I would record the call. RTÉ’s guidelines for its own journalists say secret recording is justified where there is “evidence of behaviour, or intention to carry out behaviour, that it is in the public interest to reveal”. I emailed Neil at length and made it clear to him that I believe RTÉ, a public body in receipt of hundreds of millions of euro in public funds, have a duty to respond to valid queries. Despite repeated clarifications, Neil refused to respond meaningfully to a several questions regarding RTÉ’s compliance with its own rules. In particular I asked Neil to give a narrative explanation of how RTÉ arrive at conclusions which seem to fly in the face of known facts. Neil declined. I feel it is fully justified to use the recording of Neil to illustrate that fact. Given that your podcast is themed around bias and ethics in journalism; dismissing responses – fully approved official RTÉ responses – as ‘PR guff’ without sharing those responses is disingenuous and also misleading. In particular, we have stated clearly that this is not a sponsorship. RTÉ is clear on that. Why not let your listeners decide? I asked Neil to give an example of any RTÉ response to a question from me that I had not included in the podcast. He was unable to do so. Significantly, you present a conversation with me – recorded against my knowledge – as definitive comment from RTÉ. It is not. Rather the conversation raised new issues which I asked you to put in writing and was the beginning of a number of exchanges in which RTÉ – not me personally – responded to a series of questions. These responses do not appear and suggest bias on your part. RTÉ declined to answer the key questions that I asked. I fully stand over describing long, non-responsive texts which were sent in the place of answers to my questions as ‘PR guff’. I would ask that you take these comments into full consideration before p...

Uki Goñi is a historian, journalist and author who has lived in the United States, Ireland, and Argentina. ***** Sometimes it helps to draw a parallel between two events in the news, but two big recent stories – in Ireland, the scandal of RTÉ lying about Ryan Tubridy’s salary, and internationally the over-before-it-began apparent coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin, those two might seem like they exist on two totally different planes, never to intersect. But I think that there might be a parallel. To deal with RTÉ, I think that far too little attention was paid to an anonymous article written in the Sunday Independent by someone that Sindo editors assure us they know the identity of, and who is a senior Irish media ad agency figure. It tells some very important details about how the advertising world works. I’m not going to go through the article, but in short, it relates to the Tubridy affair because Tubridy was being paid out of a barter account that RTÉ maintained. The reason that account exists is because of, at the very best, a lack of transparency in the three-way deals whereby advertising agencies book advertising for a big clients on RTÉ, and possibly other broadcasters. The agency, theoretically, gets a 15 per cent commission. So some big company has a million euro to spend on advertising, they pay that to the agency, the agency adds value by using their expertise to book the most effective ads for the client’s target market; they pay RTÉ €850,000 euro for the ads, and they get to keep the difference. I’m not sure about the maths there, but I’ll let that go. But then, maybe at the end of the month or the end of the year, RTÉ gives the agency a retrospective discount. Based on the volume of ads they bought from RTÉ, RTÉ give them back a percentage of the cash. Obviously, unless the agency pays that back to the advertisers, whose money they were spending, that fattens up their commission very considerably. It seems that, in at least some cases, that’s what happened. The anonymous writer says that this practice has been made illegal in places like the US, but not in Ireland. Depending on how the contracts were written, that could constitute breach of contract, or even criminal fraud, but since we don’t have sight of the contracts, we don’t know. Why was it made illegal in the US? Think of the incentives that this sets up. Firstly, if the agency is getting undeclared retrospective discounts from the broadcaster, that they can just pocket as pure profit, then the advice of the advertising agency, their expertise that they are selling, should you buy ad space on RTÉ or on satellite channels, on Radio 1 or on TodayFM, that advice could be hugely coloured by which broadcaster gives the agency the biggest retrospective discounts, rather than just being motivated by the best interests of their clients. And what about the incentives for RTÉ? This system would create a huge temptation for them to set a very high headline price for their advertising,

James Ker-Lindsay is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics. He has created many Youtube videos explaining his subject. ***** The Financial Times recently made a change to their style guide. The style guide of a newspaper is a list of rules about how articles should be written, all big newspapers have them, it’s to keep the language and spelling and so on consistent across the whole publication. So most style guides specify, for example, that numbers up to ten should be spelled out, and numbers from 11 onwards are written as digits. They also say what spelling or what grammar style to use if there is more than one version considered correct. The change that the Financial Times made was to treat the word ‘data’ as a singular rather than as a plural. That means instead or writing ‘the data are showing’ something, they will use English the way most of us do and write ‘the data is showing’ whatever. There is a concept in linguistics … yes, I did study it, in case you didn’t notice that before … the concept is in sociolinguistics, which is about the interaction between language and society, called hypercorrect. Correct language is pretty easy to understand for the most part, if I say ‘the dog are barking’ that’s easy to spot as being incorrect grammar, if I say ‘the dog is barking’ you all know that’s correct.  But it’s important to understand that those rules aren’t made up by some professor in an academy somewhere. The correct use of a language is the way it is spoken by its speakers; dictionaries and grammar books describe the language, they don’t proscribe it. So ‘the dog are barking’ is clearly wrong, but if, instead of saying ‘the dog is always barking’, if instead of that I say ‘the dog does be barking all the time’, that is not incorrect grammar. It’s not an error, it’s not wrong, it’s not nearly incorrect, it’s not a mistake at all. ‘The dog does be barking all the time’ is not standard English, it’s a Hiberno-English dialect, but saying ‘the dog does be barking all the time’ conforms with the rules of that dialect, that’s why it is emphatically not wrong and not a mistake. Now, it’s true that standard English is sometimes considered to have a higher-status than some dialects of Hiberno-English, so you mightn’t want to use that in a job interview, or if you were reading the news, but that’s a different argument. Lots of people speak different languages, and even the people who don’t can often speak several different dialects, or registers, of their own language, and it’s very common to signal the type of interaction that you’re having with someone by what register you speak to them in. In a lot of European languages this is formally marked out, there is a distinction between tu and vous in French, Du and Sie in German. In English, that distinction is not so formalised, but it does exist, you hear it in things like the switch between using ‘I haven’t got’ and ‘I don’t have’. But the thing about the distinction being more subtle in English is that it c...

Freda Wallace is the cohost of the Gender Nebulous podcast. Statistics of the sharp rise in the number of referrals to the Tavistock clinic, and their age distribution are here, and here. False claims that puberty blockers, given to children to delay typical-age puberty are ‘completely reversable’ are incredibly common, and have been made by the taxpayer-funded GenderEd, authored by a TCD academic, on the website of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Gay Community News, the student paper Trinity News, and Noah Halpin of TENI, quoted without challenge on RTÉ. Taxpayer-funded GenderED website. Note that the ‘completely reversible‘ claim is unsourced. The NHS has changed its website to remove claims that puberty blockers are ‘fully reversible‘, now saying ‘it is not known what the psychological effects may be … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations.‘ Reuters have reported how a 10-year-old, who said they were trans at the age of two years, according to the parents, both themselves trans, became a model at New York Fashion Week. Girls, overwhelmingly those who are lesbian and bisexual, and aged 13 – 15 are vastly overrepresented in the young people referred to the Tavistock clinic, in particular those diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum, and suffering from an array of mental health difficulties, to the degree that they make up the bulk of the explosion in the number of child referrals since 2010. The Cass Report on the investigation into the Tavistock clinic found that the UK’s Care Quality Commission “reported that when it inspected GIDS, there did not appear to be a formalised assessment process, or standard questions to explore at each sessi...

Freda Wallace is the cohost of the Gender Nebulous podcast. ***** I want to comment on a rant that was previously posted on this podcast. The rant in question was posted with episode 120 Levelling the Field and the topic was Minimum Unit Pricing for Alcohol or MUP. MUP, long-time listeners may recall, prohibits the selling of an alcoholic beverage below a price determined by the alcohol content of the beverage. To recap, by my reading, William made three arguments. First, that the MUP policy is motivated by a desire to advantage pubs over off license competitors. Second, that demand for alcohol is inelastic and therefore this measure is unlikely to be an effective measure for reducing alcohol consumption. Third, and relatedly, that higher prices may paradoxically lead to increased consumption. Therefore, it was concluded that MUP should not be perceived as a public health measure. Supporting evidence is presented by pointing out that page 26 of the 2011 Fine Gael General election manifesto says that below cost alcohol sales will be banned to support the viability of pubs.  Further, it was noted that Ireland has both high alcohol consumption and high alcohol prices so the correlation is not there to support price increases as a preventative measure. Finally, marketing strategies from other industries, like the diamond trade, were identified as positive examples of an industry conspiring to increase the price to increase the importance of the product. Firstly, I think we shouldn’t dismiss MUP as a public health measure without presenting what public health professionals think of it. There is peer reviewed academic literature which describes how an advocacy coalition called Alcohol Health Alliance Ireland was formed by the public health community specifically to secure the enactment of the 2015 Public Health (Alcohol) bill which contains MUP alongside other provisions. The bill was informed by an alcohol steering group, co-chaired by Tony Holohan, that recommended restrictions on price and other measures based on the international best evidence. By the way, the coalition was opposed by an industry group and Diageo are alleged to have threatened to reduce operations in Ireland over the policy. This is one reason why I am not worried that this measure serves the interests of the pub lobby or is part of a scheme to increase the sales of alcohol.  It also needs to be said that a ban on below cost sales would mean that retailers are not allowed to sell an alcohol product at a price that is less than the cost of its manufacture. Retailers sometimes do this for strategic reasons, to undercut and drive out competitors. The policy that was proposed in the 2011 Fine Gael manifesto is different to the MUP measure that was introduced in the bill that became the 2018 Public Health (Alcohol) Act. Another reason is that all available evidence suggests that the policy will be effective. The World Health Organisation’s draft Global alcohol action plan endorses pricing policies to control consumption and a brand new study in the Lancet has found that Scotland’s MUP policies are associated with reductions in deaths and hospitalisation. Scotland’s lessons, by the way, are the most relevant for what is possible in changing Ireland’s drinking culture.