Iain Dale is a presenter on the British talk radio station LBC, former Conservative party electoral candidate and author of the book The Taoiseach: A Century of Political Leadership



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Frank Connolly is a journalist, author and former head of communications with SIPTU. Tony Lowes is director of Friends of the Irish Environment. Michael Smith is the editor of Village Magazine.



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Lucid Talk is the Belfast-based polling company which, every year, does a poll on attitudes in the north to a border poll. Polls are, of course, only polls, but these are useful, because year after year, they do the same poll, with the same questions, the same methodology, so even if you quibble about the results, you can’t argue with the direction of change over time.



In their 2024 poll, unionism had a 10 point lead over nationalism – 49 to 39 per cent. The same poll this year cut that margin to seven per cent. This, of course, isn’t a normal poll, just like anything in Northern Ireland is a normal anything. This is not measuring opinion going back and forth in cycles, this is mostly just reflecting demographic changes. In 2025, that lead is down to seven per cent, 48 to 41 per cent.



At a three-percent-per-year shift, that would point to a nationalist majority before Catherine Connolly is half-way through her first term as president. And that’s not even the real demographic nightmare for unionists. The real disaster is that their support is concentrated in the older demographics. Unionism is, literally, dying.



It’s tempting to say that the only argument you need against unionists is ‘tick tock’. It’s so tempting that I’m going to say it. Tick tock, tick tock. But that isn’t enough. There are two points to make here. Firstly, the south, and everyone else, but it really concerns the south here, the south is utterly unprepared for the reality of a successful border poll. You think the Brits failed to prepare for Brexit? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.



The second point was new to me, it came from a fairly young unionist I saw on social media. I say ‘unionist’ but I’m not really sure what to say because she was someone who had lived in Britain, and come back to the north and decided to that she favoured a united Ireland, despite her unionist background, and she had a very interesting point to make.



She spoke about how older unionists were furious with her, and complaining to her that she didn’t know what she was talking about because she didn’t live through the troubles; but she had a good answer for them. She said, yes she didn’t live through the troubles, so that meant her view was clearer. People – unionists – who had lived through the troubles were not being rational because they were still tied up in the fear and emotion of the violence. Younger people who escaped that, she said, were better able to evaluate the arguments on merit.



I thought that was interesting.

Kev Collins’ Youtube channel his here. Ben Scallan writes for Gript.



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That’s a clip I played on the podcast a while back, it’s from one of the far-right protest a while back, and we’ve had a couple more of those anti-immigration protests in the last while. I saw some comments on social media about those protests, one in particular that caught my eye with, some let’s say unflattering photos of a group of protesters, and the comment was ‘Not one junior cert between the lot of them‘.



I’m certainly not going to argue that that woman in the clip or any of her cohort will be winning any Nobel prizes, but I don’t think that it’s constructive to call them stupid. It might cheer the troops, but it’s unhelpful for two reasons. First, it doesn’t win any converts. That is a debate well worn, so I’m not going to get into it.






But secondly, it’s dangerous to assume that everyone who doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t agree because they are stupid. At best, that leaves you dangerously unprepared.



And it’s important to recognise that that what you’re hearing there isn’t just random nonsense. There are clever people out there who are who are promoting very extreme messages.



I don’t know if that woman is aware of it, but the version of the conspiracy theory that she is giving was created by a French far-right figure called Renaud Camus, who published a book in 2011, Le Grand Remplacement, basically saying what that woman was saying, although Camus’ book was specific to France. Renaud Camus, by the way should not be confused with Albert Camus, who actually is a noted philosopher. Renaud Camus’ conspiracy theory has been spread widely on far-right websites, and adapted for many other countries including, as we hear there, for Ireland.



It is by no means original as a conspiracy theory, the nazis had a similar concept which they called Umvolkung, which referred to the supposed dilution of the Germanic people by Slavs  in ethnically-mixed areas Eastern Europe, supposedly organised by the Jews, and in 1995 the American neonazi David Lane published his White Genocide Manifesto, which claimed that civil rights for African Americans was a plot to wipe out White people, organised by the Jews, and earlier the American lawyer with, let’s say a deep interest in ethnic issues, Madison Grant wrote a book in 1916 called The Passing of the Great Race, which claimed that the post-slavery migration of African Americans to the big industrial cities was an effort to wipe out White people organised by … the Jews … you might be noticing a pattern here.



Various incarnations of this theory have also been promoted by people on the fringes of polite society, including American journalists Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, French politician far-right leader Marine Le Pen, and it has inspired terrorism, including the 2019 attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 51 people, the 2011 attack on the Norwegian island of Utøya in which a total of 77 people were murdered,

Dr Kirill Bumin is Associate Dean of Metropolitan College of Boston University and Dr Mordechai Inbari is Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.



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That’s the diminutive Justin Barrett, formerly of Youth Defence and a string of other far-right organisations, Litler himself, talking to a commentator with the Canadian YouTube channel Rebel News, itself very much part of the Alt-Right, but he showed up in Dublin for the anti-immigration march, and I suppose he expected the crowd there to be a bit more on-message.



Anyway, I use that clip because it shows both sides of what I always thought were a couple of pretty small niches of anti-Semitic people in Ireland – one the knuckleheaded morons who fancied themselves as edgy neonazis and, two, a strand of conservative Catholics who mixed their bigotry with a conspiratorial reading of theology.



In that clip, Litler manages to lay claim to be in both of those camps, but in reality my impression was always that antisemitism in Ireland was never really an issue. That’s not because Ireland is particularly virtuous, but because there was never a very large Jewish community to be antisemitic against, and any of the typical conspiratorial complaints against Jews on the continent, that they exploited the population, that idea was clearly rebutted by the reality of exploitation of our colonial masters. Another factor is that Ireland didn’t take part in World War II, censorship was so strict that Irish people had little idea what was going on, so the debate – if you can call it that – about the role of Jews in society that you get in most continental countries, doesn’t really exist in Ireland.



You can’t have missed the slew of accusations of Ireland being antisemitic, massively prejudiced against Israel since the attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023, and the ensuing massive assault, blockade, and attacks on the civilian population of Gaza by Israeli forces.



To me these attacks seem like fairly cack-handed attempts by Israeli authorities and their supporters to undermine the reputation of their critics, easy to see through, not believable by anyone who approaches the topic with a modicum critical thought. One example was the piece written by Lisa Liel on the Times of Israel, the biggest Israeli news website. She wrote:



… most Christians today have become civilized …



But says that there is one exception to that trend:



The sectarian warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland has resulted in the societal retardation of their culture when it comes to religion. They still feel their ancient Christianity in their bones. And as a result, their views of Jews are closer to those of medieval Christians than those of modern ones.



I was aware of this, so when I was pitched an interview with two academics who had researched antisemitism in Ireland I thought that would an interesting topic to include the podcast. I read their research, and I was pretty surprised, they hired a polling company to test public opinion in Ireland, and essentially their findings were that Irish people are far more likely to express antisemitic opinions than other countries that the researchers have studied, such as the US and the UK.



I have to say that I was sceptical of this finding, for two reasons. First,

Amun Bains is a journalist.



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The first amendment to the US constitution starts “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”



Our constitution is not quite so concise. Article 44 of De Valera’s handbook for governing deals with freedom of religion. Section one says “The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.”



But then section hits reverse gear somewhat and starts “Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen.”



It goes on saying “The State guarantees not to endow any religion” and “The State shall not impose any disabilities or make any discrimination on the ground of religious profession, belief or status.”



So we have freedom or religion, sort of.



Section four starts “Legislation providing State aid for schools shall not discriminate between schools under the management of different religious denominations…” That is a cute bit of phrasing, it says that you can’t discriminate between different religious denominations, but it does not prohibit discriminating against non-religious schools, or their pupils.



It continues saying that legislation must not affect prejudicially the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at that school.



So that’s where they are throwing a bone to the non-religious, but it’s a pretty limited one. It’s saying that if a school is receiving public money – which is pretty much all of them – it must allow pupils to attend school without attending religious instruction.



So the non-religious are not entitled to protection from discrimination in education in the way that religious are. You have a right to protection from discrimination for which religion you practice, but not from discrimination for being non-religious.



The last two sections of the article give special protection to the property of religious denomination – they can’t have their property taken away, and they have a right to manage that property and other assets as they see fit.



Note that this guarantee about property is given to each religious denomination, but not to any other organisation or individual. Religions get special protection for their property, but I want to go back to the supposed right that non-religious pupils have to attend publicly-funded religious schools, but skip the religious indoctrination.



The Catholic church and the schools that they run – still the vast majority of the schools in the country – have a long history of making life as awkward and difficult as possible for parents who didn’t want their children to be given religious indoctrination. There is no reason why religion classes couldn’t be scheduled for Wednesday or Friday afternoons, so those who didn’t want to go could go home early.



But instead, the bishops instruct each of their schools to have a religion class every day around noon. They also take advantage of the fact that the constitution says that they can’t compel parents to have their children attend, but there is nothing to say what they have to do instead.



So a common practice is to tell parents that they – the parents – must make their own arrangements for their children to be taken care of during this period, every single day, right in the middle of the school day.

Daniel Mulhall is a consultant with DLA Piper law firm and, prior to that, he was ambassador of Ireland to Malaysia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.






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I want to talk about a couple of fellas that I’m really not so sure of.



It’s hard to overstate how disappointing the last century has been for Argentina. I think it was David McWilliams who said on his podcast that if you were emigrating from Ireland 100 years ago, and your choice was to go around the world to Australia, north to Canada or south to Argentina, based on economic potential, Argentina would have been the obvious choice. Of the three, Argentina came first in population, in GDP and in per capita income.



Argentina had a much better climate, huge natural resources, and a seemingly never-ending market in Europe for its seemingly never-ending supply of beef produced by its vast area of grasslands, once refrigerated shipping had become a possibility.



Not many Irish took that route, perhaps because of language differences, but there can be no doubt that those who did bet on the wrong horse, or maybe cow. The Wikipedia article on the Economic history of Argentina says




By 1913, Argentina was among the world’s ten wealthiest states per capita. Beginning in the 1930s, the Argentine economy deteriorated notably.




I think that’s putting it kindly. Argentina is now ranked at number 72 globally for GDP per capita. Canada is in the fourteenth slot, and Australia is at number 11.



Argentina holds the world record for the number of IMF interventions; 21 since they joined the International Monetary Fund in 1952, no kidding. We’re still smarting over our disgrace 15 years later, quite rightly, but for two generations, Argentina has had an average of one IMF intervention every three and a half years; in fact of the 94 countries in hock to the IMF, Argentina accounts for almost a third of the total debt.



But most countries on that IMF list were always poor, at least in modernity. The real kick in the teeth for the long-suffering Argentinians is that used to be rich. It’s a bitter irony that its name is literally about how rich it was. I could go into great detail about the reasons for Argentina’s decline; I have spoken recently about how close the correlation is between democracy and wealth, as well as every other positive index, but I don’t have the space for that here, I’ll just quote Wikipedia again:




The single most important factor in [Argentina’s] decline has been political instability since 1930 when a military junta took power, ending seven decades of civilian constitutional government.




Then came one of the fellas that I’m not so sure about.



On 10 December 2023, Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina. It’s important to note that his party, La Libertad Avanza, was not a large political force. Even now, they only hold 16 per cent of the seats in parliament. The party is variously described as far-right, ultraconservative or libertarian, and it’s hard to tell, but I think that does not describe Milei adequately.



In case you haven’t heard of him, his style is ah unique, to say the least, and I’m not just talking about his hair. He must have been an Eminem fan in the noughties, he campaigned holding a chainsaw that he revved up in front of crowds to symbolise what he intended to do to public spending.

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Now that the dust has settled after the election, congratulations to all the candidates, all 686 of them. Congratulations to everyone from Pearse Doherty who got 18,898 first preference votes in Donegal, all the way down to Seán O’Leary who stood for election in Wicklow and got nine votes.



Pearse Doherty got that massive vote despite having two Sinn Féin running mates, who got another 12,000 votes between them. If Sinn Féin had managed their vote a bit better, they might have distributed it among the three candidates more evenly and won three seats in Donegal, but that’s a story for a different day.



And Seán O’Leary, who got just nine votes in Wicklow, congratulations to him too, and let’s remember that he also ran in Carlow Kilkenny where he got 26 votes, and Cork South-West where he got 27, and he ran in a bunch of other constituencies including Cork North-West where he got a whopping 110 votes bringing his total to 324 between all the constituencies that he ran in, so I hope that cheered him up a bit.







Click or right-click to download


Although, obviously, for him and the rest of the 512 candidates who were not elected, the election didn’t go the way they were hoping. And, by the way, let’s have a bit of humanity for them all. Standing for election is an unforgiving and brutally public way to expose yourself to the judgement of your peers.



A lot of the 512 will put on a brave face, and say that of course they weren’t expecting to win, but they are pleased with how well they did. Don’t believe a word of it. I have hung around with enough election candidates of various hue, and I can tell you one thing that they will never admit. There was not one of those candidates, not a single one of them, who didn’t secretly harbour a vision of being lifted shoulder-high as some imaginary excited journalist says into a microphone phrases like ‘extraordinary vote’ and ‘unexpected result’.



And I’ll tell you more. Of those 686 candidates, the victorious and the vanquished, not one of them, not a single one of them didn’t go to sleep with feet sore after endless hours of canvassing, imagining scenarios that would have them proclaimed Taoiseach for life within hours of the polls closing. One candidate who came close but not close enough in a previous election said to me ‘the despair is no bother, it’s the hope I can’t handle’.



All this brought to my mind something said by Luke Ming Flanagan years ago, that if you don’t like what is happening, then vote for someone who will change it. And if there is nobody on the ballot offering what you want, then run for election yourself. But as I say, that’s a difficult thing to do, and for the large majority of people who do it, it ends in humbling failure, but it’s necessary for our democracy, so that’s why I say congratulations to all of them, even the ones who I profoundly disagree with.



And that brought to my mind something else. I like to challenge ideas that are held unthinkingly, especially by myself. In the past, one of those truisms that was never disputed is that democracy is a Good Thing. You might think that’s obvious, but being accepted as obvious hasn’t always been the best determinant of truth.



And there are now people, some people, who are challenging this. Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal has written that he believes that democracy is not compatible with freedom, and that he prefers the latter. You might dismiss that as the view of just anothe...

Wendy Grace is a presenter on Spirit Radio and the director of a communications training company.






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Professor Colin O’Gara is Head of Addiction Services at St. John of God Hospital and author of the book Gambling Addiction In Ireland: Causes Consequences and Recovery.



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There is a pattern, I suppose it’s so well-known that it’s a cliché, of people mellowing their view as they get older. One version is the famous quote, I think wrongly attributed to Churchill, ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ But I think that isn’t exactly the effect in reality; regardless of your political views, as you get older, life’s complications present themselves, so it is harder not to take account of them and acknowledge that there are many exceptions that don’t fit into the more strident views you might have on any topic. Nuance is important.



You might be a free market capitalist, and point to the explosion of wealth that it is associated with, and say that everything should be governed by the market, but if you don’t eventually notice that some areas of life persistently just don’t respond to market forces, then you’re not paying attention.







Or you might be hardline socialist, and demand that the resources of society be shared fairly; but if you don’t ever recognise that wealth is not a fixed quantity, and people make a better fist of increasing that quantity when they get to keep a bigger share of what they create, then you end up with having the local market stall run by a committee of the party’s local coordinating executive, and you have little or nothing to sell on that market stall.



Now that sounds like I’m going to make the case for the centrist-dad position of being somewhat moderate on everything, but not quite. George Bernard Shaw wrote “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This country exists because those who died that Eastertide attempted something completely impossible – absolutely hopeless, with no chance of success; but within five years more of their vision had been achieved than could ever have been imagined.



It’s also a cliché to point out how young the American Founding Fathers were, but it bears repeating. Alexander Hamilton, he of the musical, was 21 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence. James Madison was 25 at the time. Aaron Burr was 20. James Munroe, later president, was 18. Eighteen.



My point is that if you want to achieve anything, you need to sometimes rise above the details. The arrogance and naivety of youth might serve you well in that. If you are paralysed about breaking eggs or throwing out babies, you will never manage to make an omelette or get rid of the bathwater… there are too many aphorisms on this topic, but I hope you get my point. And I’m not ignoring all the times that revolutionaries trying the creative destruction gig got all the destruction but precious little creativity.



I was thinking about all this because one listener asked me to comment on the recent Sinn Féin Affordable Housing plan.



It’s important to remember just how appalling this crisis is. We have been building probably 40,000 fewer homes than we need every year for more than a decade. Aside from the financial cost on people who have managed to get a home, there’s hundreds of thousands of people living in some poxy kip,

Cormac Lucey is an economics columnist at Sunday Times (Ireland), and lecturer in finance, at the Irish Management Institute, Chartered Accountants Ireland and Trinity College Dublin.






***



And we’re back!



Sorry about the unannounced little hiatus for the podcast. I’ll tell you a bit more about it, but first just to say I’m lining up a great roster of guests, interesting people to talk to, interesting things to talk about, for the coming months.



Kevin and myself will try to devote a bit of time to putting it all together, obviously we have day jobs, and I really appreciate Kevin’s help, but the thought struck me that we could probably do better on social media, so if there’s anyone out there who has the skills and wanted to volunteer to help on that front, or even just suggest a to-do list, we’d love to hear from you.



And that’s a bit of the reason for the for the hiatus, it was partly because I was busy with work and other things in life, but mostly I needed to take a break from all the awfulness in the news, I felt like not being a news junkie for a while, you could say that I needed a low-information diet.



I never wanted to deal with breaking news on the podcast, but forgive me if I’m not bang up to date on every issue, I was pretty thorough about avoiding all the news and social media apps and websites for the past while, and it seems like the algorithms got the hint, I’ve been served up all sorts of strange stuff recently… or maybe that’s just the world moving on.



That’s the Irish actor Saoirse Ronan being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, the Irish-American talkshow host a few years back.



I’m using it as an example because I don’t want to focus attention unfairly on anyone who’s just a regular person on social media, but it’s a good example of one of the things that has been served up to me online recently, which you could probably summarise as ‘Irish funny people, Irish funny language’.



You might have seen the sort of thing, people making serious or not so serious attempts to pronounce Irish words, particularly names and placenames. Inevitably there is a subgenre of other people correcting them, not always correctly, and another subgenre of people getting offended to varying degrees, saying that this is belittling a language and a culture by mocking how Irish words don’t conform to English spelling rules. A good deal of those on all sides didn’t seem to have any connection to Ireland.



To which I would say there are probably things in the world more worthy of getting annoyed about, but, y’know, they’re right.



There is more than an hint here of what Edward Said called Orientalism, essentially viewing other cultures as quaint, or inferior, or amusing or threatening, but never a valid thing in its own right, it only has an existence to be observed by the other.



And it’s worth noting that complaining about inconsistent spelling is not exactly a glass house that you should be throwing stones near if you are in English speaker.



I’m sure that all this has something to do with Ireland’s soft power in the world, but I’m not sure exactly what.  Well, we know what the one thing that’s worse than being talked about …

Mathew Creighton is associate professor of sociology at UCD.






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I’ve been on a low-information diet.



I suppose I’m someone who is generally pretty well-informed but sometimes that can get a bit too much, so a few months ago I just tuned out, deleted all my news apps, Twitter – while it still had the bird – and all the other social media apps, and I didn’t log in to any news websites. For podcasts, I just hit skip on any that were covering current events.



I suppose I’d say it was for my ‘mental health’ if I was using the fashionable language of the day. I did a couple of other things too, like cycling around more often when I have short trips to make.



I can report back that it works. There is certainly something about the unrelenting negativity that gets to you in a drip-drip way. And, if the news wasn’t bad enough, the hostility and negativity about the news on social media, and in the comments section that almost every news outlet uses to generate more clicks and page impressions is even worse.







I’ve seen it said that the online comments are so much more toxic than what almost anyone would say in real life, not only because of the anonymity that some users take advantage of, but also because even users who don’t hide their identity are not getting the feedback that face-to-face interaction with a human would have given them in every single century of the existence of our species, except the current one.



Even if people are using profiles that bear their name and their face, many of them are often still far more extreme in their language, far harsher in their criticism, and far quicker to assume the worst motives in their opponents. The theory is that they are disinhibited by not having anything to represent the target of their vitriol other than, at most, a name and a tiny avatar.



Without that inhibition, they are willing to say things and behave in a way that they would agree is objectively terrible in any other circumstances.



Well, in almost any other circumstances. There is one other situation that most of us encounter where people seem to be willing to throw out the normal rules of basic respect for strangers that you meet.



If you cycle regularly in any city, you’ll know what I mean. Maybe the isolation of being in a sealed metal box plays the same disinhibiting role as being remote from the other humans you interact with on social media. But it seems to me that a chunk of the driving public, a chunk large enough for it not to be plausible that they are all sociopaths, a chunk of them are willing to treat other human beings with a level hostility and disregard for their safety that any non-sociopath would consider appalling.



One incident made this impression on me was when I was when I was cycling on a two-land street in Dublin a few years back. The street had a cycle lane, if that’s what you want to call it, but it was only painted on, there were no physical barriers. I was cycling at about the same speed as the motor traffic, in the cycle lane, when the driver beside me started to drift into the cycle lane. He wasn’t indicating, there was no junction coming up, so I presume just wasn’t paying attention.



I took evasive action, but the driver kept closing in on me, and with maybe one or two second before I would have been jammed between his car and the footpath, I whacked the passenger-side window to try to alert the driver to my presence. I don’t remember what I yelled, but I’m sure it was something his optician or his paternity. The driver buzzed down the passenger window and started to...

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.






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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.






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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.






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Mario Rosenstock is a comedian and impressionist, and creator of TodayFM’s Gift Grub.



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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. William Campbell full false 2302 http://hereshow.ie/2023/12/heres-how-168-mark-of-empire/ Thu, 07 Dec 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://blog.hereshow.ie/?p=2284 Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage. I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. I should have said that Edwin Montagu, the Liberal MP and Secretary for India, who did […] Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage. I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage.






I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. I should have said that Edwin Montagu, the Liberal MP and Secretary for India, who did not support Dyre, was Jewish, and the resulting campaign against him by Conservative MPs (in support of Dyre) had a strong and explicit antisemitic element.



Ben’s claim that the then Brexit Party, for which he was an MEP, provided a majority of the non-white or ethnic minority members of the 2019 European Parliament doesn’t seem to be correct; a Reform Party spokesperson clarified that they meant that all British MEPs provided a majority of ethnic minority members of the EP. The EP told us that they don’t collect this information, but reporting here and here indicates that isn’t the case, and the Brexit Party had the lowest proportion of ethnic minorities among its MEPs, of all Britain-wide parties although that isn’t a really valid comparison given the small numbers involved.






Notwithstanding all that, I think Ben’s wider point is valid, that while it is imperfect like any country, the UK has a relatively good record on race relations compared to many continental European countries.



*****



John will be 40 next April, or he would be, if he lived. But he didn’t.



He died.







He died of 28 stab wounds, which he suffered shortly after his birth in 1984. Neither John’s parents nor his murderer have ever been identified, though we can guess that there may be some overlap there given that, a short time later, his newborn body, partially decomposed, was washed ashore, with 28 stab wounds, near Cahersiveen.



But the fact that his parents and/or murderers were never identified didn’t stop some people from jumping to conclusions.



At about the same time, 80 km to the north-east in Abbeydorney, also in Kerry, there was a woman who had what was known at the time – this was the 1980s – she had a reputation.



What that meant was she came from a poor farming family, they didn’t have much education, and she had a boyfriend. Who was married. To someone else. That sort of thing that would get you a reputation in rural Ireland at the time, and not a reputation that would do you any good.



It certainly didn’t do Joanne Hayes any good and, when it was observed locally that she was pregnant, I think we can conclude that congratulations and best wishes were not the first things that came to the minds, or the lips, of many of her neighbours.



When it was evident that Joanne was no longer pregnant, and there was no sign of a baby, that surely drew attention. When the John’s tiny, murdered body was washed ashore, 80 km down the coast, it was probably reasonable to ask questions. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. The gardaí arrested Joanne and her entire family.

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...