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

Dr Geraldine Simmie Mooney is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Limerick and director of EPI STEM, the National Centre for STEM Education. ***** One thing that, I thought, the Green Party had that left wing parties didn’t, was an understanding of how taxes could be used to modify behaviour. The Greens are often lambasted from both left and right for this, people saying that they want to tax everything, but that’s unfair. They had recognised, I thought, that taxation is often a better way to modify behaviour than banning or regulating things. A good example was the plastic bag tax. This started out at 15c per bag, Its purpose wasn’t to raise money, it was to change behaviour. And it worked. Use of plastic bags collapsed by more than 93 per cent when it was introduced. That tiny amount of money was enough to change mindsets and encourage people not to be wasteful. I got in a brief Twitter spat with some people including the former Green Party TD and Senator Dan Boyle, about what was announced in the budget as a measure to ease the housing crisis, a three per cent tax on zoned land. This idea has been kicking around for years, not least from the Green Party, because they had recognised the bottleneck in the supply of housing. Everything that you need to build a house can be put on the back of a truck, or the back of a Ryanair flight from the continent, so there is no real reason why prices here should be so much higher. Everything, that is, except the land. If you have followed the Derelict Ireland campaign, or even if you haven't, you should know that there is a huge amount of vacant and crumbling housing in Ireland, and vastly more space still that is zoned for housing but has been sitting vacant for decades. This is not an accident. The vacant land is owned by a tiny number of fantastically wealthy speculators. Your initial thought might be “why don’t they sell up and make a fortune?” The problem is what would they do with the fortune? Put it in the bank? The property price inflation is vastly more than any bank interest rate that they could hope to earn. As they see it, it is money in the bank. Then why not build on it themselves and make a fortune selling the houses? Even building on half it would ease the housing crisis? Because, as any economist will tell you, value comes from scarcity. Their land banks make them richer than Croesus because of the housing crisis. If there was no housing crisis, if they build on and sold even a fraction of their land, they would crash the value of it all so that they would end up poorer at the end of the process. Poorer, not poor. But poorer. These people, whether you like it or not, are acting rationally. They are responding as any reasonable human would to the incentives that exist. The people who are acting irrationally is us, society, the voters. We’re incentivising them to do one thing, and expecting them to do the opposite. That’s why I thought it was a great when Fianna Fáil promised in their 2020 manifest to increase the vacant site levy to 14 per cent. It was originally three per cent, recently raised to seven percent. The first problem with the three per cent rate was that this is lower than the rate of property inflation; if the value of your land bank is going up by 10 per cent a year, and you lose three per cent in a levy, you still gain seven per cent.

Dr Karen Keaveney is Head of Subject for Rural Development, and an Assistant Professor in the School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin. ***** A short update on the last podcast about the conflicts of interest and poor academic and ethical standards at the Active Consent Unit in NUI Galway – we will be doing a follow-up on that, because we have got large tranches of information, from the press office at NUIG and their Freedom of Information department, and we’re battling for more. One thing that I can say right now is that a spokesman for NUIG essentially conceded in an email to me that the study, that led to them claiming that 29 per cent of all female students and 10 per cent of all male students are raped while in college, they have conceded that those figures do not apply to the wider student body, only to a small non-representative sample of people who answered an online questionnaire. “The statistics, as presented in the SES 2020, relate to those students who completed the survey. At no stage does it purport to be research detailing the level of sexual abuse in society, reported or unreported…”NUIG Spokesman In fact, they said that they had never claimed that those figures applied to students as a whole, and they did a sneaky edit on their website taking down the page where they in fact claimed just that… which was a bit awkward because I had taken the precaution of making an archive copy of that exact page, and when I tweeted out a link to it, they restored that page and most of its content. Preparing these podcasts is a huge time commitment, we’ve been working on that story for more than a year and there is still more to do on it, and for that reason I want to say a huge thank you to all the patrons on Patreon, that makes it easier for us to put time into researching podcasts and hopefully making them interesting to listen to, and if you could do the same and chip in a euro or two per month, that would really help to do this more often. The Patreon website allows you to do that automatically.

Dr David Ellis is Associate Professor of Information systems at Bath University and a member of that university’s Academic Ethics and integrity committee. The Active Consent Unit has its own section on the NUIG website, and its media page posts inaccurate media coverage of its work without comment. (Update: They appear to have now hidden their media page, but not to worry, I have it archived. Update 2: Since I posted on Twitter that I had the page archived, it seems to have been restored, with some, though not all of the links to false coverage removed.) What appears to be their YouTube account incorrectly claims that the research applies to all students, and posts on their twitter account make the same false claim. The Active Consent Unit offers on its website ‘workshops’ targeted at second- and third-level students which address the problems their research purports measure. Dr Caroline West offers similar workshops on her personal website. There is no mention of this conflict of interests in the report they published. The report claims that, of students who have been raped, just 4.5 per cent of female students, and three per cent of men report this to the gardaí. This is not consistent with other research on this topic which suggests that between 36 per cent and 20 per cent of rape victims make a police report. The report claims that, of the 29 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men, 4.5 per cent and 3 per cent make a garda report, meaning that 1.3 per cent of all female students and 0.3 per cent of all male students report being raped to the gardaí. With almost 250,000 students in the country (about 5 per cent o the total population, skewing slightly female), if that figure really did apply to all students, there would be more than 2,000 reports of rape by students to the gardaí. As can be seen in this data from the CSO, the entire population typically reports 1,000 or fewer rapes to the gardaí per year, so this claim is clearly impossible.

So then this happened. And with no notice at all, in the space of a single day, AA Roadwatch disappeared off our airwaves. According to their own announcement, this was a decision made by the AA, which “decided to move away from this service and instead focus on growing other areas of [their] business”. That’s corporatespeak for closing down an unprofitable business. I had quite a few people get in touch with me about this, mostly wondering whether I had something to do with this. If you’re not familiar with my history on this, it’s pretty long-running, but in brief, the AA is a registered political lobbyist, it’s their job to persuade people,  in particular politicians, to be more favourable towards the motor industry – in short, build more roads and less public transport. They seem to have been pretty successfully. In the last few decades, while most of Europe developed sophisticated public transport, Ireland earmarked billions for motorways, often to places like Limerick and Westport that couldn’t remotely generate the amount of traffic that would justify the scale of the projects. Public transport in Ireland is pathetic compared to most continental countries, the only major project in the last 30 years has been the Luas, and even this was ferociously resisted by the AA’s lobbying. They were central to the decision to punch the heart out of the system and make sure that the two lines didn’t initially connect, a decision that cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of euro, and commuters a decade of inconvenience. The AA used AA Roadwatch to, day in, day out, beat the drum that the only significance of the Luas  was how it caused traffic congestion. I took several complaints that all basically said political lobbyists aren’t allowed to supply content for broadcast on RTÉ, and RTÉ used every trick in the book to defeat those complaints. Then, one Friday morning in July, they AA said that the slots were axed. It was obviously a pretty hurried decision, the staff didn’t even finish their day’s work, AA Roadwatch was broadcast normally on Friday morning, the announcement was made that day and the whole thing was shut down so fast that they didn’t even do the drivetime slots on Friday afternoon. The south-Dublin accents, the Exposé, the reporting of a new bus corridor as though it was the siege of Mafeking, all the jokes about pronunciation of a car crash on a roundabout… I’m not going to do the accent, I’m no good at that, I’m not Mario, the loose horses, the traffic jams caused by Luas works, it was all gone. A cultural phenomenon just disappeared. But that’s not the strangest part of it. The reasons given by the AA to axe the slot was a) that they wanted to as they put it, focus on other areas of business, basically save money, and b) because technology has moved on and people have smartphones that give traffic information that people can actually use, making AA Roadwatch even more useless than it already was. These seem like nonsense to me. Firstly, the point about traffic on smartphones, that has been true for the best part of a decade, it doesn’t really ring true that AA management only heard of smartphones last Friday week. But the really strange one is that this is a cost-cutting measure. AA Roadwatch was insanely good for the AA. Now, it’s true that my complaints did have some effect. My complaints were rejected,

John Lyons is the Independent Left councillor on Dublin City Council for Artane–Whitehall. ***** I want to talk about a scandal. Actually, it’s not so much a scandal, it’s not even a scandal about a scandal, it’s a scandal about a scandal about a scandal. A third order scandal, if you like. The first order scandal is about how gardaí handle 999 calls, or more accurately, don’t handle them. an inquiry, led by Assistant Commissioner Barry O’Brien examined several thousand 999 emergency calls about domestic violence in the two-year period, finding that about half of these calls were cancelled when they should not have been. Basically, what happened was that someone rang 999, the operator asked what service, fire, ambulance or gardaí, and because they witnessed a crime, or were witnessing a crime or were the victim of a crime they asked for the gardaí, and were put through, and the garda who answered the phone typed into his computer system the details of what the caller reported. They typed it into their computer, that’s important, I’ll get back to that in a moment. Then the garda had to make a decision. They had to decide to send a hoard of officer in a fleet vehicles, backed up by the armed response unit, and the garda helicopter; or they had to decide whether to send a patrol car, or an officer on foot, or to inform the local station to check up on something when they got the time. Given that these were all 999 calls, the bulk of these situations probably didn’t need a helicopter and the ARU, but they were certainly at the upper end of the seriousness scale. But that decision, in half the cases, in HALF the cases that decision was to do nothing. Just to cancel the record in the garda computer system, and have no further action taken by any garda, just tick the entry off as completed. In just two years, 22,000 calls labelled as priority one were, in the delicate terms of the policing authority cancelled for invalid reasons. 2,000 of these were domestic violence cases. If that happened once, that would be a scandal in any normal society. But it didn’t happen once, it happened more than 2,000 times in two years; some woman was having the lard beaten out of her by a drunken partner, managed to get to her phone and dial 999, and the jobsworth on 80 grand a year who picked up the phone at the other end didn’t think that it was worth interrupting their snack box to do anything about it. That happens three times a day, every day of the year. Bear in mind that what was examined was only priority one domestic violence calls that were actually entered in the computer system. If you have faith that there isn’t a whole other set of calls that these idle, feckless, callous incompetents never even bothered to input into their computer, then god bless your innocence. So that is a scandal. Half – HALF – of the calls that actually were input in the computer system were cancelled without a single attempt by any garda to get off their fat backside and actually do the job that they are so richly paid to do. That’s a scandal. But it’s not the scandal I’m talking about here. Because when this was investigated by the Policing Authority – that’s the job of the Policing Authority – the gardaí did everything they could to block the investig...

Dr. Roslyn Fuller is an author and founder of the Solonian Democracy Institute ***** We have an expectation of a rules-based system of international order. Some of these rules are very famous, they show up in popular media, thing like diplomatic immunity, basically if you send an ambassador to another country, they can’t be arrested, their bags can’t be searched, you can’t even give them a parking ticket. That gives us some anomalies sometimes, again, more often in fiction than in real life, but it does happen; the wife of an American government worker in England drove on the wrong side of the road, killed a young man a while back, she was whisked back to the US to escape justice. It’s not clear that she did have immunity, it’s not even clear what her husband’s position was, probably because he was a spy. But countries almost always follow these rules, because they want to benefit from them sometimes too. Diplomatic immunity is one, but there are lots more, some of them are explicitly codified, some of them are just understood conventions. At a high level, there are rules against one country trying to prosecute rulers of another, and it goes all the way down to how leaders are treated when they visit another country, who gets a red carpet, who gets the national anthem and all that. There is one important thing to remember here: Rules benefit the weak. That’s not always true, there will be a thousand examples where someone can point out where weak countries suffer because of capricious rules, but that doesn’t change the basic principle: without rules, the strong can do and take what they want. Rules, even if they are imperfect, even if they are not consistently applied, generally benefit the weak. We’ve had two instances in recent weeks of people, for totally understandable reasons, demanding that Ireland throw out that international rulebook of how countries behave towards each other. The first were the demands to expel the Israeli ambassador, to mark disapproval of the ferocious attack on the densely-packed, poorly defended, and impoverished refugee settlements in the Gaza Strip. The second was the calls for various retributions against the Lukashenko regime in Belarus which, in an act of what can only be called air piracy, forced a Ryanair jet to land in order to seize the exiled opposition activists Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega. I’d add a third Irish-related incident to the outrage list: the cyberattack on the HSE IT systems that have crippled the healthcare system in Ireland. I don’t think that this was done on the orders of a foreign government, but the highly-sophisticated teams of hackers operate with, at a minimum, a nod and a wink of approval from the Kremlin. Russian intelligence services, the FSB and the GRU, most certainly know exactly who these people are, know exactly where they are, and know exactly what they are doing. They probably have these guys saved on speed-dial on their phones. It is highly likely that the bosses of this gang pay up to elements within the intelligence services, probably cash, but also putting their services at the disposal of the Russian military when required, in exchange for operating with impunity. I think that the attack on the HSE was probably purely motivated by cash, but the attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which disrupted supplies of fuel from Texas to much of the south-eastern United States,

Holly Cairns is the Social Democrats spokesperson on agriculture, food and the marine, and further and higher education and disability. In the interview, Holly questioned the source of figures that indicated that the difference in earnings between men and women was concentrated in the over-40s, with no statistically-significant difference in earnings for those under 40. This information comes from the same Eurostat studies that Holly draws her 14 per cent earnings difference from; the Journal have an excellent article on it here, which includes this graph: The same article notes that among full-time workers: women, on average, work fewer hours each month than men – 129 as opposed to 149. So men work 20 hours more per month, almost exactly one hour per day. That creates a difference between the gender earnings gap and the gender pay gap – with the latter adjusted to reflect the difference in working hours. Figures on the pay gap are sometimes also adjusted to account for qualifications and years of experience, but are generally not adjusted to reflect what happens during those years, such as the difference in working hours. As Holly noted, all these figures are typically calculated based on full-time workers only, bypassing the fact that part-time work is dominated by women. The most dangerous professions, as calculated by the US department of Labor is as follows: ***** I try to steer away from jargon on this podcast, but I’ve got two jargon words to give you here. The words are MUP and BOGOF. Before I tell you what those mean, let me apologise for the background noise. I’m not in my usual little back bedroom improvised studio at the moment, I’ve managed to get away, so I’m complying with all the covid regulations by self-isolating by the seaside. On a small Greek island. Good weather, nice beaches, small taverns, cheap wine. Try not to be jealous. But maybe you should be a bit jealous of the cheap wine. That brings me to MUP, that sands for minimum unit pricing, the unit in question being a unit of alcohol. The cabinet recently signed off on proposals to bring in minimum unit pricing from next January, so that there will be a floor price below which alcohol can’t be sold to consumers. Because alcohol is much dearer in pubs, when we have pubs, this really just affects off-licences and supermarkets that sell wine, beer and spirits. This idea has been knocking around for a while; it first came to prominence in Ireland in the 2011 Fine Gale manifesto, I’ll read what they said verbatim: Supporting Irish Pubs: Fine Gael recognises the importance of the Irish pub for tourism, rural jobs and as a social outlet in communities across the country. We will support the local pub by banning the practice of below cost selling on alcohol, particularly by large supermarkets and the impact this has had on alcohol consumption and the viability of pubs. ‘The viability of pubs’ – so, it was clear that this was a measure to support the viability of one business at the expense of another. Publicans, who make vast profits, have huge political power; quite a few TDs are publicans themselves.

Nicolas Šustr is the city development and transport editor for the German newspaper formerly known as Neues Deutschland now known as ND. ***** We’re going to have a new leader of the DUP. Leaders of the DUP are generally not anyone’s favourite person, unless that anyone happens to be a DUP supporter. As an aside I have to say that much of the criticism of Arlene Foster on social media that I see has more than a tinge of sexism, but that’s a story for a different day. And, if you are looking for things to criticise Arlene Foster over, there is surely enough to say without having to scrape that barrel. Anyway, the next leader is likely to be Edwin Poots, he’s the north’s Minister of Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs and he’s the MLA for Lagan Valley. And he’s a member of the Free Presbyterian Church. The Free Presbyterian Church is a tiny organisation, the membership in Northern Ireland is about 10,000, about half of one per cent of the population; it’s the church founded by the late Ian Paisley senior, also the founder of the DUP, and this church dominates the DUP, despite the fact that it doesn’t represent the overwhelming number of its voters. Arlene Foster is a member of the much larger, and much more mainstream Church of Ireland; that was perhaps one factor that isolated her in her party. Edwin Poots, and the rest of the Free Presbyterians believe in what is called young earth creationism, which means that they believe that the bibcal story of genesis, with Adam and Eve and the talking snake is literally true in every aspect and happened six thousand years ago. They have objected to, among many other things, geological information about the Giants’ Causeway posted in the visitor centre there, because that it says that the rock formations were formed by natural processes hundreds of thousands of years ago rather than by God and the flood of Noah. Needless to say, they don’t hold very liberal views on … oh, I’m not going to list them here, they don’t hold very liberal views on anything. They believe that the Pope is literally the antichrist mentioned in the bible. Now, when British journalists try to make insightful comments about Irish politics, north or south, it’s not generally a pretty sight. I’m reminded of David Davis accusing Leo Varadkar of being anti-British in 2018 because he wanted to win votes from Sinn Féin in his bid for re-election as president in that year. So when Robert Peston, the ITV political correspondent tweeted that Edwin Poots as DUP leader would drive unaligned voters to Sinn Féin, there was a predictable pile-on from Irish Twitter-ers ridiculing his misunderstanding of the politics of what is theoretically part of Peston’s patch as pol cor. In fairness to Peston, he didn’t say that DUP voters would be pushed to Sinn Féin, he said that Poots instead of Foster as DUP leader would make Alliance and Green voters switch to Sinn Féin, which really is just as daft, at least in the short term… But on another level, on a different time scale it might not be that daft at all. Now, the typical DUP voter, or the atypical DUP voter or any other type of DUP voter would be more likely to limbo-dance naked down the M1 to Dublin than they would be to switch their vote Sinn Féin. But here I’m not strictly talking about DUP voters, I’m remembering that politics in the north is intensely tribal, and the expectation, the correct expectation for the last century, is that the community that people are born into is a perfect predictor of their voting intention.

Daniel Long farming activist and running for president of Macra na Feirme. ***** Things that seem good aren’t always good, things that seem bad aren’t always bad, and things that really are good or bad can sometimes have the confounding outcomes. If you get three education spokespersons in a studio, they’ll usually come out with at least four plans to reform the Leaving Certificate. There might be a lot of proposals out there, but they all use the same buzz words and phrases. Too much stress, continual assessment, can’t judge someone by an exam grade, credit for coursework, judge the whole student, no job interviewer will ask for it, reduce exam pressure. Mix in all these cliches with a few badly thought-out ideas, half-bake them for a three minute interview, and hey presto, you’ve got an education policy. Yes, there is some merit in some of the ideas that are proposed. And, yes, there are terrible things about the Leaving Cert, they are well-rehearsed, I don’t need to repeat them all, but the thing is that it makes sense to talk about what is wrong with it, that’s how we solve problems, but are we ignoring its good points. And as for mixing up good and bad, the Daily Mail is a paper with, to say the least, an inglorious track record. Celebrity news and gossip has always been the mainstay of the Daily Mail, but directed by its owner Lord Rothermere, it was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, Hitler and nazis in general in the 1930s; it was sympathetic to the racist apartheid government in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, and the paper still regularly uses any story where it can link immigrants to crime as its splash headline, and it was reported to the UK Press Complaints Commission in 1997 for anti-Irish bias. Their science coverage is so bad that the British doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre laughed about their never-ending campaign to categorise every substance in the universe into one of two categories, those that cause cancer, and those that cure it. In the background there that’s the 1990s Punk band Antidote’s track Shock Horror!, no surprise that they pinpoint the Daily Mail as one of the many offenders in stoking up racism in Britain. Antidote won’t be happy to hear that the Daily Mail has now overtaken the Sun as the best-selling newspaper ah best-selling paper in the UK. The Irish edition of the Daily Mail was launched in 2006, with a simple strategy of using international news and all the celebrity and entertainment content from the British edition, wrapped in a few pages of Irish news provided by reporters here. So importing a dodgy British tabloid, nothing good could come of that, right. Except, the Irish Daily Mail is building a modestly impressive record of breaking exclusive political stories. That record was massively boosted at the end of last week with the front-page splash by Craig Hughes about the Beacon Hospital, diverting covid vaccines to some of the teachers in the exclusive private school attended by the children of the Beacon’s CEO, with follow-ups on how the Beacon was offering vaccines as much on the basis of your connections as your need. I think that the importance of this is not being appreciated. As we have heard on this podcast, many of Ireland’s problems flow from power being held by a cosy cartel of people who protect and l...

Eoin Ó Broin is Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Midwest and his party’s housing spokesperson. ***** A topic which I am interested in is ageing and demographic shift. Ireland was, until quite recently, the youngest country demographically in Europe. However, as Ireland’s baby boomers, the generation that David McWilliams calls the pope’s children, push onwards towards retirement age Ireland’s relatively youthful demographic profile will change at a rate we might find quite surprising. We don’t have that many older people now but we probably will relatively soon. Which brings up something quite topical and that is people in these times pandemic times dressing up essentially murderous ageism as merely very logical cost benefit analysis. The argument is very simple, the benefit we get from protecting our grandparents is very small and the cost is, allegedly, very high. For the best example of this argument here’s a statement from US political commentator Ben Shapiro: [AUDIO] nobody just wants to say the obvious truth which is that we’re all making actuarial deductions about what are the costs in terms of how many human lives… how many, years of life because that is an actual issue in actuarial tables right if somebody who is 81 dies of covid 19 that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of covid 19. I mean if this were killing children everyone would be in for lockdown forever that’s the reality right if a bunch of five-year-olds were dying with covid 19 and, and people were saying get back to work I’d be like nope I’m not letting my five-year-old die if grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81 that’s tragic and it’s terrible also life expectancy in the united states is 80. so that that is not the same thing For the uninitiated, Ben Shapiro is also famous for the expression “Facts don’t care about your feelings” which at time of recording he has as his pinned tweet. Similar arguments have been made locally. Probably everyone has seen a tweet or statement trivialising this pandemic for only killing older people and some may recall, for example, the full-page ad shamefully published in the Irish Times which advocated for a more laissez-faire approach to our pandemic response and did so by supplying a list of statements, most of them about the age profile of people who die with COVID.  So, here’s the fact about Cost Benefit Analysis; as any health economist will tell you, it’s all about perspective. Now usually, when someone advocates for policies that risk the health of a particular marginalised group, from their point of view they’ll reap the all benefit of that policy but not and none of the cost. This reveals how myopic the perspective being taken on this issue is. I aspire to live to an advanced age and I don’t particularly care for the idea of the next generation at this point taking it upon themselves to make ‘actuarial calculations’ about what to do with grandpa any time the going gets a little tough. Anyway, the whole situation seems to me an exemplary case study of why we should care about other people’s feelings and their perspective on the facts.

Brenda Power is a journalist for the Sunday Times and Irish Daily Mail, and whose work has appeared in many other publications, and is frequently heard on broadcast media. ***** Maybe I’m giving away my age if I mention my nostalgia for the pirate radio stations of the 1980s. I’m just about old enough to remember Radio Nova, Q102 and Sunshine Radio, and I know that there were many more of them in Dublin, and dozens more around the country. Some of them were more professional than others and they were run by enthusiasts, sometimes by businessmen, sometimes by shysters. It’s hard to believe now, but these were the only alternative on the airwaves to a very dry and dusty RTÉ. Radio 2, as it was then called, was set up to try to stem the massive haemorrhaging of listeners to the pirates, who mostly operated totally openly, giving out their phone numbers and addresses on air, and selling advertising to major businesses. At one point Radio Nova crashed the entire telephone system of the Dublin region when so many people called trying to win a cash prize. RTÉ was so frustrated that the pirates, who were all broadcasting illegally, were taking so much of what they saw as ‘their’ audience that they, RTÉ, resorted to breaking the law themselves and installing illegal transmitters themselves to try to jam the pirate signals. There was a lot of political instability in the 80s, which meant that the various governments had little motivation to offend the huge swathe of voters that listened to them. Then Fianna Fáil formed a majority government in 1987, and by the end of 1988, almost all the pirates were off the air, with the promise of commercial broadcast licences to come. But this isn’t about the pirates, really; if you are interested, go to pirate.ie, a great website that puts up clips of old recordings, and thanks to Brian Greene for permission to use these clips. I was listening to the clips, and when I got over the nostalgia, what really struck me was the prices in the ads. So, for the first time ever on the podcast, let’s have an ad break. This ad is from 1984. Think about that for a moment. A washing machine for £199. I presume that Prize Fighters were promoting their best bargains, but let’s have a look at the bargains today, on the PowerCity website. Washing machines start at €219, that’s £173 pounds, in ah old money. Get that, after 37 years of inflation a washing machine today costs considerably less than it did in 1984. Other household appliances follow the same pattern. That ad has a fridge freezer for £189, on the PowerCity website, as I record, they have a fridge freezer for €199 – the equivalent of £157. Bear in mind that I’m not doing any adjusting for inflation here, there’s no ‘in today’s money’ that’s just the raw price data. That ad from 1984 has an electric cooker £179, there’s some on the PowerCity website today for €219, that’s £172 old Irish pounds.

Jim O’Callaghan is a senior council and Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin Bay South. ***** I want to talk about a coup. A coup attempt. A failed coup attempt. It was a ridiculous affair, viewed by some people as little short of comical, despite the fact that several people were killed. The coup attempt was carried out by a barely-credible bunch of thugs who had a habit of dressing up in quasi-military uniforms and showing off their weapons in the streets. The intent was for them to storm government buildings to make sure that people who were theoretically their allies did what they wanted. The coup quickly fell apart when it became apparent that there was almost no plan for what to actually do once they had taken over the buildings, and many of the people involve were picked up by the authorities in the following days. The coup attempt attracted as much ridicule as anything else, but it did bring a crackpot fringe conspiratorial group to much wider attention in the country as a whole, but by that I’m not referring to Qanon, and I’m not referring to the riot in the US Capitol at all. I’m referring to what is contemptuously referred to as the Beerhall Putsch, by the then-hardly known nazi party led by Hitler in Munich in 1928; but the parallels are striking. The most striking parallel thing was how far short of credible the nazis were viewed. They were literally a laughing stock, and viewed by wealthy interests as useful idiots to keep left-wing forces at bay. They did manage to briefly hold hostage Gustav Ritter von Kahr, effectively the appointed governor of Bavaria, and his military and police chiefs, who were all far-right figures with leadership ambitions of their own, and the idea was to force them to endorse the coup, and allow the nazis take over Bavaria, but without planning the entire thing fell apart within 24 hours. It’s worth comparing that to the attack on the US Capitol. I think that the seriousness of that attack, and how close it came to being vastly more serious, is being understated. Mike Pence was literally seconds away from being captured by the mob. The CNN reporter there says makeshift gallows, other sources have said mock gallows. I’m not sure there’s any difference at all between those and real gallows. And if Pence had been captured by them, I don’t think that there is much doubt at all as to what would have been his fate. But that’s a what-if. In the end both the attack on the US Capitol and the Beerhall Putsch were ignominious failures. What’s interesting is what happened next. Hitler was arrested, tried and sentenced to five years in prison. He wrote Mein Kampf in the eight months that he actually spent in a comfortable prison. Five years later, again trusted by wealthy right-wing establishment interests to be useful in resisting the left, Hitler was in power.

Kate McGrew is the main spokesperson for the Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland. In our interview, I referred to my interview with Sarah Benson, then of Ruhama. ***** I have a big project on at the moment, so this, I’m sorry to say, will be the last Here’s How podcast of 2020. I hope to be back bright and early in January 2021, and with that, a couple of announcements. The first is that I’m open to having a collaborator on the podcast. If you are interested in doing that, or know someone who might be, get in touch, the email is podcast@HeresHow.ie. This isn’t a paid position, but it doesn’t require too much input. A good knowledge of Irish current affairs would be helpful, not to mention a bit of fire in your belly, but there is no need to be in ideological lockstep with me, I don’t even think that would be possible. It would take a couple of hours a week, it might be helpful if some of them could be in working hours, but that’s not totally necessary. I envisage this being done totally remotely so you would have to have access to a computer and an internet connection as a minimum. Also, I would be more than willing to provide training on all the software used. I’m open to suggestions, but my idea would be to have someone either as a co-producer or co-presenter or both. The second item is that I get some basic statistics on what traffic comes into the website for the podcast, and that brings me to a clip from an interview that I did with Donal O’Byrne, the editor of RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, back in the day when RTÉ would sometimes take my calls, June 2016 to be precise. I put it in there because as I said, I don’t have any way to know who views the website, but I do see what pages are popular on any given day, and for some reason the page for that particular episode every so often gets a huge burst of web traffic. On days when it happens, that one page alone, from 2016 can account for as much as 90 per cent of all the traffic on my website. Maybe it’s just that it is particularly smiled on by the google gods who send traffic, but I sort of think that someone must be recommending it and …  I’m sort of curious. If you have any ideas, please email me or tweet them to @HeresHowPodcast. So, I hope the rest of 2020 is good to all of you out there, you’ll hear me again in 2021, and hopefully that will be better still.

John Hamill is a long-time secular campaigner and participates in the Free Thought Prophet. We talked about his epic Freedom of Information request. ***** You can see there that John’s story tells a pretty damning tale about the attitude of the Department of Education and Skills, as it’s now called, towards the Freedom of Information laws. And I really don’t want to single out that one department, this attitude is pervasive right across government. Nevertheless, I did send a list of written questions to the Department of Education’s press office that related to this case. The main question I asked was about this culture of seeking to frustrate the proper implementation of the law. The department refused to answer. The next most important question, in my view, was about the practice of just flatly refusing to accept an FoI request, saying that they were dealing with it outside the FoI process, and then refusing to grant a review because, according to them, they question was dealt with outside of the FoI. Since this is entirely illegal – the FoI is mandatory, it’s not something that they can choose to apply or not – I asked the Department if they accepted that the law applied to them and they had to follow it whether they liked it or not. In response, a spokesperson said, quote: The concept of providing information “outside of FOI” is undertaken by public bodies to allow for information to be provided where it may not be covered by the FOI Act or where requests do not relate to “records” (for example, many requests are often in question form). This is profoundly dishonest answer. As was entirely clear from my question, nobody is quibbling with the department applying common-sense flexibility and giving citizens more information than the bare minimum that is required in law, the problem is of course when they refuse disclose records that the are required to hand over, and then saying that because they made that decision to refuse ‘outside the framework of the FoI’ that you can’t request a review of the decision, as set out in the FoI law. This is not a rare occurrence; I’ve had it happen to myself. This is where you send an email to the email address foi@ whatever department, with the subject line Freedom of Information request, the first line of the email is I want to request records under the Freedom of Information act… and the public body refuses the records, and then say that because they unilaterally made that decision to refuse outside of FoI, you can’t ask for a review of that refusal. The department also refused answer my question asking what disciplinary process applies to staff who defy the FoI laws, but they did admit that not a single member of staff has ever been disciplined for that, so presumably the answer is none. Finally, the spokesperson said “the Department does not believe that any change is required”. I don’t think we needed an FoI request to get that nugget of information.

Peadar Tóibín is the leader, and only TD of Aontú, having previously been elected for Sinn Féin. ***** I don’t normally do pre-buttals on a podcast interview, but I think that in this case it’s important, because in the context of the coronavirus, and Covid 19, it’s just not acceptable to allow incorrect scientific claims to go unchallenged, even for a few minutes. There are a couple of things said in this interview that I wasn’t able to correct in the moment, and I don’t want to leave the correction to the end, because that runs the risk that people hear the incorrect claim and not hear the correction. So two things. First up is the claim made by Dr Anne McCloskey, the deputy leader of Aontú that, quote, anyone who had a temperature or a cough prior to their death, no matter what else was wrong with them, was to be counted as a Covid death I have investigated this with the NHS in Northern Ireland – Dr Anne McCloskey is based in Derry but she was the Aontú candidate in Sligo Leitrim in the general election, I’ve investigated it with the statistics agency in Northern Ireland and with the HSE in the Republic. All of them were clear that this is not the way that deaths from Covid 19 are classified. The HSE have confirmed to me that there are three classifications for: * Confirmed Covid 19 deaths where a lab test has confirmed the infection, either before or after death* Probable Covid-19 deaths, where a person dies with an infection meeting the Covid-19 case definition* Possible or suspected Covid-19 deaths where patients have symptoms clinically compatible with Covid 19, such as people with a pending lab test, or are part of an infection cluster such as a care home and there is no clear alternative cause of death. So, there are clear guidelines on classifying deaths, and the idea that hundreds of doctors were given a secret order to falsify death records and the only one who has mentioned this in public is Dr Anne McCloskey, just isn’t credible. The second issue that I want to clarify is that during the interview, Peadar Tóibín says that the government changed its mind on the efficacy of face masks, first saying that they didn’t work, then saying that they do. That isn’t true. At the start of the crisis, there was a critical shortage of face masks and other protective gear, called PPE, and the government said that they did not want the general public to use up masks that were in short supply and needed by medical staff. So the government did change the position on masks, but not from saying that they didn’t work to saying that they do, they changed from saying that the short supply was needed by medics to, when more supplies came online, saying that everyone should wear them when possible.