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

Fiona O’Leary is the mother of five children, two of whom are on the autistic spectrum. She was a witness in the prosecution that led to the conviction of Patrick Merlehan for selling unlicensed and dangerous medicines. Riko Muranaka is a Japanese journalist and medical doctor. She is a specialist in infectious diseases. Her work has appeared in many publications including the Wall Street Journal. This is RTÉ’s Prime Time programme on REGRET, and the Irish Times’ report on the likely effects of the vaccine scare. This is the form on the HPRA website where anyone can report an adverse reaction for any drug of vaccine. This is the claim on Regret’s GoFundMe page that their group represents 200 girls who are on 24-hour suicide watch. There are examples here, here and here of abusive comments on social media against Fiona O’Leary in the names of Regret activists. I have contacted the people identified as having written the comments to ask if they were indeed the authors; they have not responded.

Smári McCarthy is a programmer, a writer and one of the founders of the Pirate Party of Iceland. This interview was recorded shortly before his recent election to the Icelandic parliament.

This is the document that I was pointed to while searching for the source for Anna Cannon’s claim that one in 30 or one in 40 people are struck with an autoimmune disease after receiving the Gardasil vaccine. In fact, what the table on page 8 shows is that 2.3 per cent (one in 43) develop illnesses on a list which is potentially indicative of a systemic autoimmune disorder. This doesn’t mean that they have a systemic autoimmune disorder; that is one of the potential explanations. It is also evident that, whatever their illness, it is not caused by Gardasil, because the incidence is identical in the groups that did and did not get Gardasil. Waqar Haider is a spokesman for the Hussaini Islamic Trust UK, a Shi’ite organisation that organises the annual Arbaeen UK procession, marking dates in the Islamic calendar. The event is used to express disapproval of terrorism in the name of Islam.

These are R.E.G.R.E.T.‘s website, Facebook page (Update: the page’s content seems now to be hidden) and Twitter. This is the US Food & Drug Administration page that gives Gardasil information, which references 772 serious adverse events following administration of Gardasil, out of 23,000,000 doses administered. There is no requirement for proof that the adverse event be connected to Gardasil to be included. Dr Brenda Corcoran, MB, MPH, FFPHMI, holds a diploma in leadership and quality in healthcare, and is a consultant in public health medicine responsible for the coordination of all national immunisation programmes. She is a member of the National Immunisation Advisory Committee. Anna Cannon has claimed at various times that one in 30 or 1 in 40 girls who receive Gardasil experience ‘very serious side effects‘ including ‘long-term health impairments, hospitalisation long term, wheelchair for life, death, birth defects‘. The US Food and Drug Administration’s website says that 772 serious adverse events were reported out of 23m doses administered, a rate of 1 in 29,792. The FDA have confirmed to me that these are reported adverse events, and there is no certainty that they were caused by the vaccination. In addition the FDA pointed out that there is both under- and over-reporting. Nobody may bother to report some adverse events, and sometimes a patient or their family might report an adverse event to the FDA, and also to their doctor who then reports it to both the FDA and the drug company, and the drug company then also reports it to the FDA, and they have had incidences where a single event accounts for three separate reports. Anna Cannon has claimed that the vaccine causes birth defects. I searched the scientific literature for any reference to this, and found this study which concluded “Rates of … major birth defects were not greater than the unexposed [to the vaccine] population rates“. I have asked Anna Cannon for her source on this. She has not responded. Anna Cannon has claimed that the Gardasil product information leaflet is being hidden. In fact the US version is on the FDA website and the Irish version is on the Health Products Regulatory Authority website. A post on the Regret Facebook page claims that this ‘hidden‘ leaflet shows that Merck and the US Centres for Disease Control ‘determined‘ that Gardasil ‘kills‘ one in 912 girls who receive it. In fact, page seven of the US version of the document makes it cl...

Niamh Uí Bhriain is a founder of the Life Institute, and previously of Youth Defence. We discussed the Roe v Wade decision of the US Supreme Court and the McGee v Attorney General decision of the Irish Supreme Court, and how they led to the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign  and ultimately the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution.

Francis Duffy is a Green Party Councillor on South Dublin County Council. We talked about his proposal to ban election posters and replace them with hoardings at council-sponsored sites. The use of election posters is already highly regulated in Ireland, with the dates and locations of posters set in law; posters can be up for about a month before the election and must be removed within seven days of polling; they can’t obstruct road signs or cause other hazards; they must identify the person responsible for them, who can be fined €150 per poster for infringements.

AJ Noonan is the chairman of the Small Firms Association. The SFA’s pre-budget submission is here. AJ queried my assertion that building land around Dublin was concentrated in a small number of hands. Business & Finance magazine reported in 2000 that the bulk of the development land in Dublin was owned by just eight speculators – Gerry Gannon, Michael Cotter, Mickey Whelan, Tom and Mick Bailey, Joe O’Reilly and Brian Wallace, David Daly, Joe Moran and Liam Carroll. I also mentioned that Ireland is the only exception to the Europe-wide trend that land prices broadly match population density. This graph shows the pattern clearly. Apart from Sweden and Finland which have huge unpopulated Arctic regions, Ireland has the lowest population density in the EU 15.

Mick Fealty is the founding editor of Slugger O’Toole, Northern Ireland’s foremost political blog. Voting for the Blog Awards Ireland will open soon, and I will add a link as soon as it does. Here’s How has been longlisted in two categories, Best Innovation Blog and, strangely, Best Vlog.

James Behan is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, and a spokesperson for Men’s Voices Ireland. He is also a staff writer for Trinity’s University Times. In our discussion, James referred to a study by Dr Roisin O’Shea which indicates a poor quality of decision-making in custody cases in Irish Circuit Courts. James has written for the University Times about men suffering from domestic violence (be it from male or female partners) and the lack of services for them. He has also written about the huge imbalance in the suicide rate (80 per cent of the people who die by suicide are male), and its causes. In the discussion I raised the claim, since removed, on the Men’s Voices website that, in Ireland “at least nine per cent of rape cases are provably false” (emphasis in original). The claim was sourced to this snippet from the Irish Independent, which appears to be based on this study. which does not support the claim; James supplied this link, I was not able to find it before the recording. At the time of writing, the Men’s Voices website still approvingly cites a claim that 90 per cent of rape allegations in Spain are false, using as its source a Youtube video of unclear origin. During the discussion, I referred to the large volume of Youtube videos (not produced by James or MCI) which seem to be designed to exaggerate the occurrence of false and vindictive rape accusations. ***Update*** James has been in touch to point out that he is not the webmaster and personally distances himself from the statistics on this page. The statistics that I sourced come from the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service. In an extensive study, the CPS identified 35 prosecutions for false allegations of rape in a period when there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and 111,891 for domestic violence, (0.6 per cent of the rape prosecutions). In the US, the FBI reports that the number of unfounded reports of rape runs at eight per cent of the total number of rape reports (a figure close to the one originally on the Men’s Voices website), however this is the proportion of reports judged to be unfounded, not to accusations against supposed perpetrators. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that only 36 percent of rapes, 34 percent of attempted rapes, and 26 percent of sexual assaults were reported, meaning that the ratio of false reports (not accusations) to actual rapes is between two and 2.5 per cent. I cited the case of is the political correspondent of TodayFM. You can nominate the Here’s How podcast for the Blog Awards Ireland here.

Gavan Reilly is the political correspondent of TodayFM. You can nominate the Here's How podcast for the Blog Awards Ireland here.

You can nominate Here’s How for the Blog Awards Ireland here. Kian Griffin is the spokesperson for Ireland Underground. The motor insurance market is worth about €1.2bn per year, about half of one per cent of Ireland’s GDP. The Motor Insurance Justice Action Group has in the past called for government subsidies on motor insurance, although they don’t seem to be active any more. Kerry County Council voted in 2013, on the proposal of Danny Healy-Rae, to legalise drunk driving.  

Donal Byrne of is a news editor at RTÉ who is responsible for news planning. The phrase ‘known to gardaí” appears scores of times on the RTÉ website and, as Donal Byrne rightly pointed out, frequently occurs in other Irish media. The phrase has been sharply criticised for the meaning it carries, including by novelist Frankie Gaffney: Then that vile euphemism: Known to Gardaí. ‘Deserved it’ in other words. Derek O’Toole died when he was struck by an off-duty garda’s car in Lucan Co Dublin in March 2007. Within hours of his death, and without naming their sources, RTÉ accused him of being ‘known to gardaí’. It later emerged that he had no criminal record or criminal associations whatsoever, and GSOC concluded that unknown gardaí had supplied false information to journalists. Jeffrey Hannan was murdered in Limerick in 2007, and on the day of his death he was described by RTÉ and other outlets as being ‘known to gardaí’, and it turned out that that he also had no criminal record or associations whatsoever. At his funeral, Fr Pat Hogan sharply criticised the media for this specifically: “What a phrase. I imagine that those who use such a phrase are trying to pitch Jeffrey and others into another world — a world where such violent things happen, a world to which we do not belong and that will never touch us.” RTÉ journalism guidelines state that “We should be reluctant to rely on a single source especially if the information from that source has been given on condition of anonymity.” If what Donal Byrne said is true, it is remarkable that in both cases RTÉ and other media outlets all secured multiple sources giving incorrect but identical information within the very few hours between the death of each and the accusation being made on-air. Donal suggested that ‘being criticised by both sides‘ was an indication that RTÉ is, in fact, objective. Leaving aside this logical fallacy, it is clear that outside RTÉ, Paul Reynolds is widely viewed as a reporter sympathetic to garda management, for example here, here, here, here and here. I said that there was a virtual news blackout on RTÉ about the case of the firing of Gemma O’Doherty, as witnessed by the Guardian, a British newspaper publishing many times more stories on the case than RTÉ.

Mick Byrne is a spokesperson on behalf of the Dublin Tenants’ Association. They launched a social media campaign to highlight the condition of the tenants of private landlords in Dublin, along with ‘licencees’, people who pay share a house with the owner, who are not considered tenants in Irish law. You can find them on Twitter here.

Michael Taft is the Research Officer for Unite the Union in Ireland. He is also a writer who appears frequently on Broadsheet and the Irish Left Review, and writes his own blog at Unite’s Notes On The Front. This is the World Bank economic openness index that I mentioned that shows that Ireland has a more open economy than the countries that Michael compares us to. This measure actually understates the openness of Ireland’s economy, because it is calculated using Ireland’s GDP, which is artificially inflated by multinational transfer pricing for tax reasons. Despite this, Ireland is in the same league as Hong Kong and Singapore, not Scandinavian countries. I mentioned to Michael that average wages for electricity workers in the republic were double those of the north. I actually understated the position, as of 2011, the figures, excluding pension costs were €85,000 in the republic and €41,000 in the north.

Eoin Ó Broin is the newly-elected Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Mid-West. He is a former local councillor in both Dublin and Belfast. The tracking of the opinion polling for Irish political parties, including Sinn Féin, since 2007 is here. This is the text of the confidence and supply agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.