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

Graham Linehan, now back on twitter, is the creator of numerous famous TV shows including Father Ted. *****

Annabel Fenwick Elliott is a British freelance journalist who previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. ***** It might have been Tomorrow’s World, that science programme from the BBC from my dim and distant childhood, where they demonstrated an early chatbot, although I think it wasn’t called that. You typed in some text, and up on the suitcase-sized screen came what looked like a meaningful response. But not really. The presenter typed in Necessity is the mother of invention and the machine responded Tell me more about your family. It was just a trick really, a set of pre-programmed vague comments, set to be output based on trigger words entered by the user. But if you’ve spent any time on the internet recently, you probably couldn’t avoid breathless reports about how amazing something was that someone did with some AI tool or other, usually ChatGPT. And we can’t have this podcast to be left out, so here goes. I logged in and I thought I’d be a smartass, and see how it could manage with another language, so I typed in tu parles francais? Out came the response Oui, je parle français. Comment puis-je vous aider aujourd’hui? How can I help you today? So far, so impressive, but I was always the sort of kid who had to find out what it would take to break the toy… So then I typed in An bhfuil tú in ann gaeilge a labhairt? Now this is the point where I’m going off the script that I originally had for this. I thought that me reading both sides of a conversation with a computer isn’t the most exciting thing to for you to listen to, so I wondered if I could rope someone who could voice the other side of the dialogue, but I couldn’t get someone who would could do it at short notice. Then I Googled for some text to speech services that you can find online, there’s loads of them out there, but would it be even worth searching for one that could do Irish? Then I found TTSFree. So what you’re going to hear are my questions and the answers that I got from ChatGPT, pasted into that text to speech generator. No other humans involved. An bhfuil tú in ann gaeilge a labhairt? Tá, táim in ann Gaeilge a labhairt. Cad é atá uait a fhios agam inniu? In case your Irish is even worse than mine, there might be one error in there, but ChatGPT said that it could speak in Irish and asked what I wanted to tell it today. So that put me in my place. And, having marched up to the top of the hill, I really had to come up with a question. So I asked what was the best mobile phone on the market these days. Can é an guthán is fearr atá le fáil faoi láthair? Níl aon guthán amháin is fearr ná an ceann eile, mar gheall ar na roghanna éagsúla atá ar fáil agus na riachtanais pearsanta a bhaineann le gutháin. Tá roghanna agat idir iOS agus Android, go leor brandaí éagsúla, agus go leor rialacha éagsúla maidir le conas glacadh leo. Mura bhfuil a fhios agat cad atá oiriúnach duit, ba cheart duit cuardach a dhéanamh ar líne agus breathnú ar na gnéithe éagsúla atá ar fáil le roghanna a dhéanamh. Yeah. That’s ChatGPT giving a pretty coherent explanation that there are different features on different phones that suit different people. No errors, although the text to speech didn’t quite manage to pronounce iOS, but … wow. I suppose I shouldn’t have asked it for a value judgement, so I went for something more fact-based. I asked whether Irish and Scottish Gaelic the same language. An é gaeilge na hÉireann agus gaeilge an Alba an teanga chea...

Dan McClellan is a public scholar of the Bible and religion and author of the book YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. ***** I don’t much talk about Jordan Peterson, I don’t think that he is as interesting a character as the internet makes out, certainly not as interesting as he thinks he is himself. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, he’s a Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor, who got a lot of attention for, what seemed to me, pretty basic psychological observations; I think he got that attention because he couched those observations in terms that appealed to a right-wing audience. I don’t think that it would be fair to call him alt-right, he doesn’t seem to like the extreme right, but they do seem to like him, because he was able to articulate criticisms of the left in an impressive-sounding way, and they were happy to ignore his criticisms of the right, which, to be fair, he did make. This fanbase has earned him sacks of money, from Patreon sponsorship, to massive book deals and speaking tours. So, fine, there are lots of authors that I’m sceptical of. And, I have to say, I think he made one case for conservativism, political conservativism, that I think is pretty convincing. Basically, he says that the way our society is set up has got us all here to where we are today. Over evolutionary time, more than 99 per cent of all species have gone extinct. Over the past few million years, a whole slew of hominids, our cousins, have gone extinct – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and so on. And, from prehistory to today, many societies of modern humans, many cultures, many groups have essentially been wiped out, either by forces internal or external. But we haven’t. By definition, whatever we have been doing up to now works, because it got us here. Peterson’s argument is, essentially, that we should be very careful changing what we know works for the latest fad, some bright idealistic way to reform society, because there is no certainty that idea will work, and we have certainty that what we have been doing up to now does work, for us anyway. That argument is not as strong as he thinks it is, because one of the things that has got us here today is that we innovate. That’s what humans do. We’re good at adapting to the new situations. Penguins live quite well in Antarctica, but I don’t think they would do well competing with lions in the tropical jungle. Humans, by contrast can live in both, and many more environments too. But despite that weakness, his point is valid. Now, Peterson started off by commenting based on his experience in psychology, and he is well qualified in that area, but since he hit the jackpot of book deals and speaking tours, he has massively expanded the areas that he is eager to comment on, everything from Brexit to Climate Change; and unlike with psychology, he has no qualifications to talk on these topics, and it shows. It’s very obvious that he is producing content on demand for his right-leaning audience. Despite his unfamiliarity with the topics he’s talking about, he still maintains the snarky tone of someone who knows that he is better qualified than his opponent, and wants to let everyone else know that. In this vein, he retweeted recently a chart from a climate-change denying Twitter account, which purports to show the last 10,000 years of temperature record, with the recent increase in global temperatures being dwarfed by much bigger swings in the Roman and Minoan warm periods. The chart is laughably wrong. Firstly,

Graham Neary is a financial commentator who has been a fund manager and analyst in the London financial markets. ***** The transport minister, Eamon Ryan who is also leader of the Green Party, it has been announced will set up an inter-departmental group to make sure the transport sector meets its emissions reduction targets. Related to this, The National Transport Authority has published what’s called modelling on transport climate targets, which basically means having an educated guess about the effect of various possible policy choices. This basically means they have a go at understanding what would happen if they increased bus fares, kept them the same, or reduced them, and then the same for a variety of combinations of other policy levers that the government could pull, or push, or not change at all. This is a fairly normal process that the civil service and other government bodies uses to present the government with policy options, and be able to give an educated guess of what the effect of those policies might be. These scenarios necessarily include a pretty wide range of options. One of the scenarios imagined a €10 daily charge for driving in cities, and significant increases in parking charges.To be clear, this is not government policy. This is not even proposed government policy, this is just one of several scenarios that the NTA offers an opinion on, as to what the likely outcome would be, if it were to be adopted as government policy. It would go alongside sharply reducing public transport fares, and would obviously be targeted at creating a modal shift in transport from private cars to public transport.The purpose of the NTA study is to assess what level of impact it would have, how big the modal shift would be. That didn’t stop an avalanche of criticism on social media, and other media, to the effect that Eamon Ryan was … well, everything from Stalin to Pol Pot to … who knows what. Eamon Ryan, I think we might guess, might be sympathetic to effecting that sort of modal shift, but the fact that these weren’t his policies, they weren’t even his proposals, that hardly mattered to the outraged right-wing motorist mob. There wasn’t much said in all that that was rational, so I’m don’t think there’s really much point in trying to engage in a debate with blind outrage, but I still think that there is something here that is interesting. The theoretical justification for free markets is that resources are allocated more efficiently when people have to pay for the stuff that they want. The free market opposition to socialism is that the government is often not very good at producing stuff, but even if they were, the model of taking payment through taxes and distributing stuff, whatever stuff, free at the point of use, the objection is that people then use that stuff wastefully. If you waste bread, you get punished by having to pay for more bread. On the other hand, if there was an annual bread tax, like the TV licence, and then you could take as much bread as you wanted, you would not be motivated to only take what you need. The wasteful would be subsidised by the prudent, and the prudent would likely get fed up of that and not bother to be so prudent. This argument clearly doesn’t work for some goods and services. An obvious example is healthcare. People can’t be sparing in their use of healthcare, because when you need it, you need it. And you might know that you need it,

Dafydd Iwan is the former president of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. ***** Bertie Ahern, we are told, had been readmitted, to Fianna Fáil. It might be better to use the term rehabilitated. Fianna Fáil activists gave him a standing ovation at an event recently, it was to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, obviously chosen to focus attention on the one positive part of his time as Taoiseach. It’s worth remembering that he resigned from Fianna Fáil more than 10 years ago, ahead of a motion to expel him for lying to the Moriarty Tribunal. It’s the little things that trip you up, as his predecessor said. He had already brazened out the ludicrous lie that when he was finance minister, he didn’t have a single bank account himself. The fact that he was going through a messy separation from his wife at the time, who would have been entitled to look at any accounts to determine appropriate support and child support payments, is not irrelevant. That’s also a good explanation as to why he owned his house under a false name. When he was shown to have wads of cash in a safe that could not be explained by any other legitimate means, his only explanation for where the money came from was that he won it on the horses. Seriously, he said that with a straight face. Nobody believed him, of course, it was all obvious lies, but when the Moriarty Report said unambiguously that he was a liar, it was impossible to even pretend to believe him, he was an embarrassment to the party who had to pretend to be horrified by all this, hence the move to expel him, and him jumping before he was pushed. Anyone who has any doubts about why Ahern was pushed to the fore like this, rejoining Fianna Fáil, big events with party loyalists to celebrate him, even DCU giving him an honorary doctorate to the disgust of many of its students and graduates, of course without the slightest pressure from anyone, if you have any doubts about why this is happening then you haven’t been paying attention, and you should note that the Áras will become vacant in two years’ time, at most. I don’t like Ahern trying to cheat his ex-wife, I don’t like his dodgy financial dealings, and I am at best amused that the dying embers of Fianna Fáil, which, let’s remember Ahern destroyed as an electoral force, I’m  at best amused that the dying embers of Fianna Fáil are willing to dredge up memories of their previous incompetence and corruption to go along with their current incompetence and corruption. But don’t let me stop them from doing whatever self-harm they feel like. I don’t like any of that, but that is not the best reason to think that Ahern should be grateful to spend his retirement in well-paid anonymity, and not bother us with this nonsense. That type of corruption, the things that everyone mentioned are bad, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t the real problem. Even at the top end, if Ahern stole ten or twenty million, like Haughey,

John Rentoul is the chief political commentator for the Independent. ***** I’m pessimistic. I’m not naturally a pessimistic person, but I’m pessimistic. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’m entering the ‘the whole world is going to hell’ phase of my life, maybe I’m right to be pessimistic, maybe I’m not paying attention to the right things, but I’m pessimistic. In the US, I think that Trump has almost no chance of becoming the next president, but the chance of a new Trump is very real. Actually it’s worse. It could be a demagogue who has learnt from Trump, from his successes but also from his failures, and someone who also has no regard for democracy. The economic inequality in the US is staggering, and it is destabilising. Research indicates that 40% of Americans couldn’t take the economic hit of an unexpected $400 expense. Think about that. A family relying on an insecure job done from home are one dropped laptop from spiralling down into poverty. That, or something like it, is 40 per cent of the country. But what’s crazier is that a huge proportion of that 40 per cent will end up voting for Trump or whichever billionaire, or billionaire’s creature his protégé turns out to be. And for sure they won’t do what is needed on climate change. The road we are headed down is leading us straight over a cliff, and the fact that a few of us might go over that cliff in an electric car, drinking from a reusable cup, I don’t really find that very reassuring. There’s the whole hell in Ukraine. I could be optimistic that Ukraine will win, they could well, but they could well lose, but even if we get the best case scenario, what is that? I just can’t see a scenario where Ukraine and Russia both go back to being relatively peaceful countries where people can live something that looks vaguely like freedom. If the Ukrainians manage to liberate their country, and that’s a big if, then it’s very difficult to see how Russia avoids doesn’t either violently fall apart, or get held by an autocrat far more vicious in stamping out opposition than Putin. Come to think of it, both of those could happen, ferocious autocracy, and violent disintegration. If Russia wins, and they largely, or totally subjugate Ukraine by force, that’s hell for the Ukrainians, but don’t dream it will stop there. Remember the slogan painted on the Russian tanks and aircraft – на Берлин, to Berlin! The ideology of the ruling elite in Russia is clear for anyone who wants to read it, they are determined to rule over at least the whole of the former Soviet block, throw in Finland and Mongolia and a few more, and undermine democracy worldwide to weaken any potential challengers. In China, the moderation that came from the unofficial rule since Mao in the 1960s, that leaders rule for only 10 years, that has been thrown out, and the cliché is that they think in much longer cycles than westerns, but there is no doubt that they see taking over Taiwan on a very short timescale, and intend to dominate the rest of south-east Asia, not to mention Africa, and democracy simply isn’t on their agenda. And much closer to us, Brexit is unrepairable. Labour is miles ahead in the polls over there, but part of the reason for that is that they aren’t dealing with that disaster, and when they get into power they will have no mandate to fix it; and outside London,

Jesse Spafford is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state. ***** I was talking to someone last night. I won’t say who, but someone fairly well known, known for taking part in public debate, robust, intense debate, debates where people are strongly committed to their side of the argument, and aren’t afraid to let you know that. They’d been listening to the podcasts that I did a while back on trans rights and the associated issues with Aoife Gallagher, and they said to me that although they had talked publicly about a number of thorny political topics, they had steered away from what is called the trans debate. I don’t think that’s a very good name for it, but I don’t have  a better one, so I’ll go with that. They had steered away from what is called the trans debate, not because they don’t have opinions on it, not because they don’t think it’s interesting, but purely because they were afraid of the potential backlash if they said the wrong thing, and they didn’t really believe the ‘right’ thing, so they said nothing. This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Previously I talked to a well known public figure, someone whose name I’m sure every listener would recognise, and again, someone not shy to state their opinions strongly in robust debates on all sorts of topics. That person had also decided never again to comment on the trans issue. They had commented on it previously; what they said was in no way hateful, in no way bigoted, and for the most part supportive the pro-trans position. But, in an attempt to sensibly analyse the topic, had strayed from some details of what is sometimes sarcastically called the ‘orthodox’ pro-trans rights position, and had received a barrage of abuse and name-calling for as a result. That person decided that they would not discuss the topic publicly ever again. So to be clear, someone who is an opinion former, an influential person, who publicly supported vindicating the rights of trans people will not now discuss the topic, because of the abuse they received for not supporting trans rights in the perfectly acceptable way. This is not the way a healthy debate happens. And this has consequences. One of the consequences – and it’s only one of them, there are many negative impacts of this – but one of the consequences is that the quality of the debate on this topic is poorer for it. I got feedback from a couple of listeners to the interview with Aoife Gallagher who remarked on one question that I asked had made them think. Aoife couldn’t answer the question – she was very straight up about the fact that it hadn’t occurred to her, but it’s interesting that such an obvious question hasn’t been teased out. The question was this: Why is organising groups by sex, by biological sex, seen by some as unacceptable discrimination, but organising them by socially-constructed gender is seen as required to vindicate trans people’s rights. That’s especially curious when the rationale for the separate groupings is based in sex characteristics. So the rationale for having separate rugby teams, or separate changing rooms, or separate services for new parents,

Brooks Newmark was a British Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Braintree and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. ***** I’ve got a proposal for tax reform. The idea is to make tax easier and simpler to understand, simpler for the government to collect, thereby lower costs which would lower the tax burden overall. We have a whole load of sales taxes in Ireland, we have VAT, we have excise duty, we have VRT, we have stamp duty, and these are all complex to administer, they are difficult to comply with, so to simplify everything, I’m recommending to the incoming Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, that he start off 2023 by scrapping them all and replacing them with one simple, easy-to-understand tax that will make life better for everyone. It’ll be fairer, it’ll be transparent, and I think that people will welcome it. The idea is a toilet paper tax. I have calculated that the tax will be about €100 per roll, and this will bring in enough money to cover the abolition of all the other sales taxes, so people’s tax rates will stay the same, the €100 per roll tax they are paying will be offset by the reduction in taxes that they pay on other goods and services, and as I say its simplicity should bring down the total tax burden over time. Everybody needs toilet paper, so nobody can escape the tax, the only difference will be that it’s easy for everyone to understand and administer, and in the long run will save us all money. It’s a no-brainer. * Oh wow, hello there to you all in January 2023. You won’t believe what happened. Firstly, Leo Varadkar accepted my proposal for abolishing all sales taxes, and replacing them with a single, simple easy-to-administer €100 euro tax on each roll of toilet paper. But the really crazy thing is that some sort of vortex in the space-time-continuum was created by the ghost of Steve Jobs in an advanced Apple research laboratory; it was intended to move their corporate profits back in time to before the global minimum tax rate of 15 per cent was introduced, but just as I was coming out of a meeting with Leo Varadkar at Fine Gael headquarters to explain details of my tax plan, the Apple executive recruitment team was going in to meet him, and one of them sneezed in front of a portrait of WT Cosgrave, dropped their space-time-continuum manipulation device, and it bit my portable podcast recorder, and this somehow allows me to actually speak to you back in time in January from here in March 2023. So anyway, all those other taxes are going to be abolished from the end March, and starting on the first day of the next month, they will be replaced with a €100 tax on each roll of toilet paper. I’m sure it’s going to be a big improvement. * OK, so now I’m speaking to you through the Apple space-time-continuum vortex recorder from the future, it’s the start of May 2023, and we’ve had the new system of scrapping all sales taxes in favour of the toilet roll tax in place for just over a month, and it’s going … fine … with some teething problems obviously. There have been great advantages of course, taxes on loads of products have been reduced, that’ll be a boon to the economy, soon, but the toilet paper tax receipts are … below projections. Apparently people have made a lot of efforts to reduce their use of toilet paper, and sales are down considerably. So to make up for that, the government is setting the toilet paper tax to €200 per roll.

Brendan is the Labour Party TD for Wexford, and former party leader. ***** So, we’re talking about a war. We’re talking about a war where a huge, nuclear-armed superpower, attacks a territory to its south that this formerly-communist superpower views not as a real country, it views but as an integral part of its own country, and the superpower’s nationalist leadership is still pretty sore about how this territory got to be independent in the first place. To rub salt in the wound, this territory is doing much better, and is certainly much more democratic than the superpower; and another point of aggravation, this territory is politically much closer to the west, the United States in particular, and is receiving a huge amount of military aid from the west, and even though it is said to be exclusively for defensive use, the superpower sees that aid as a direct threat to its own security. And the war has the potential to have dramatic economic effects on the whole world, not to mention the danger of spreading into conflagration that could result in a world-wide nuclear war. And, thankfully, the war has not happened yet. The superpower is China, the territory is Taiwan and the parallels with the Russian attack on Ukraine are striking, even if there are some important differences. One of these differences, one vital difference, is that this war, this potential future war, even though it’s not in the headlines, it’s getting a huge amount of attention from the administrations in Washington and Beijing, and probably elsewhere. If we’re lucky, the war may never come, but the people that matter aren’t taking that risk. They aren’t shouting and beating drums about it – not yet, anyway – but they are gaming out scenarios, making contingencies, and planning for all eventualities. And, have no doubt about it, they are preparing for the possibility of war. Maybe a war where China overwhelms Taiwan within hours, maybe one where Taiwan manages to defend themselves, maybe they get American aid do that, maybe – though I think that’s unlikely – maybe the Americans intervene directly. Or maybe there will be no war at all. That last possibility is actually more interesting than you might consider. Think of the huge level of military spending, the effort and the time that Finland puts into its defence forces. It’s basically the last country in Europe to have universal male conscription into the army. They have a huge amount of military hardware, on a par with Germany or the UK, despite having a population about the same as Ireland. So, that’s huge for Finland, but it’s still tiny by the standards of the obvious aggressor, Russia – it’s even tiny by the standards of Ukraine. Why bother? If Russia wants to invade, they invade. Does it make sense to devote such a big chunk of the economy and society into preparing for a war that might never come, and if it does, they would lose anyway? Actually, it does make sense. The Finns can’t change fact that the Russians would win such a war – at least not until they join NATO, but that’s a different story – they can’t change that the Russians would win, but they can change what it would cost the Russians to win. All the Finnish military service, military hardware, military planning – it’s not aimed at making Russia not win, it’s aimed at making the cost of winning so high that the Russians will see it as not worth the effort.  That’s the strategy that is being thought about in Washington and Beijing, and Taipei,

Eoin Ó Murchú was the political editor for Raidió na Gaeltachta. *****

Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author. *****

Kellie Armstrong an Alliance party MLA for the Strangford constituency. ***** I saw a load of comments from commentators online, from talking heads on radio and TV, from people on Twitter, that the mobilisation ordered by Putin last week to try to shore up his invasion of Ukraine was stupid. It was stupid to try to mobilise people with no military experience, it was stupid to think they could have any effect against high-precision, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians are now getting. It was stupid not to consider that they would have no experienced officers, it was stupid to not understand that this lack of leadership is a key reason why Russia is losing, it was stupid not to consider the destabilising effect that this order would have in the population in Russia, it was stupid to have all the skilled young men fleeing over the closest border, it was stupid, stupid, stupid. I’m not convinced. This made me think of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. In case you don’t know, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is listed as the world’s richest man, has proposed and apparently started working on a high-speed mass transport system that would involve a sort of train inside a vacuum tube. With all the air evacuated from the tube and no wind resistance, people could be transported at over a thousand km per hour, as fast a jet liner. This has gained him huge publicity, and quite a bit of political traction. Musk has also proposed underground tunnels and rail systems that would move cars around with huge efficiency, and argued that he could construct tunnels and tubes like these to connect major American and world cities, and would begin by connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, with travel times that seem fantastic compared to the driving times in car-choked southern California. Fantastic, in that it is a fantasy. There have been no shortage of people pointing out that this project is impossible. It will never happen. The cost of tunnelling is hugely expensive, very time-consuming and a legal nightmare in densely-populated areas like California with disputes about title, risk of subsidence, not to mention the safety risks of having accidents and fires in inaccessible tunnels, and the potential for huge congestion at entry and exit points. The idea of a train in a vacuum tunnel is even more hot nonsense. There doesn’t even exist a proposal for how air might be evacuated from such a vast space as an intercity tunnel, let alone any equipment that could do it. And even if that could be achieved, there is no design proposal, there isn’t even any material known to humanity that could withstand the gigantic stresses of the outside atmosphere bearing down on the vacuum, and even if you could propose a design and materials, it would be certain to include internal struts, which would make it impossible to run a train through the space. If you’re interested, there’s no shortage of YouTube videos on this, ridiculing Musk’s plans, and they make a good education on the physics, the engineering and the logistics that show that this proposal is just totally impossible for a whole host of reasons – and along the way, you can have a good chuckle at just how stupid Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was to propose this in the first place. Check out the channels of Thunderfoot or Kurtzgesagt if you are want to laugh along. But here’s the thing.

It’s Q&A time! Thank you to everyone who sent in a question!

Joel Keys is a Belfast Loyalist activist and prolific tweeter. ***** I discovered a big discrepancy. Well, I didn’t so much discover it as notice it. And it isn’t really isn’t a big discrepancy, it is an enormous discrepancy. A gigantic discrepancy. A sort of a so-big-you-could-see-it-from-space. discrepancy This is the discrepancy. Have a look at Daft.ie any given day, on the front page you can choose to browse by section, and go to Rental properties. No filters, look at the whole country, any type of residence. Much has been made of this. These days, you will normally get less than 800 properties. Of course, some properties that go up for rent don’t go on Daft, they are rented by word of mouth, via social media contacts or a postcard in the window of a local shop, but Daft on their website say that 90 per cent of property sales in Ireland are on their site, so it’s a good guess that daft have the bulk of rentals, and movements up and down in their number of listings match the market pretty closely. Now go to the census results. There were 166,000 vacant properties on census night this year. 166.000. There have been various attempts to pooh-pooh this figure, but I’ve spoken to the CSO about this and they are very confident in their figure. One reason is because their enumerators visit the property several times before and after census night, talk to neighbours and ask them if anyone lives there, and when someone lived there last. Also, the enumerators lose pay if a house on their does not return a census form, so they are highly motivated to get it right. And we have a breakdown of what sort of houses are vacant. 23,000 are vacant because they are undergoing renovation. 27,000 are vacant because the last occupant died. And 35,000 are vacant because they are available to rent. 35,000 Let the figure sink in for a minute. 35,000 homes were vacant, awaiting a tenant. Compare that to less than 800 being listed on Daft. Those figures don’t overlap, by the way, they were marked down as one category – renovation, occupant deceased or for let, some may fit into two categories, but they are put in one or the other, not both. So which figure is right? Are there 800 properties to rent in the country or 35,000? You don’t have to spend long in a pub on a Friday night, or on social media to hear stories of the incredible difficulties that home-seekers are experiencing, to know that the 800 figure is the one that is far closer to the truth. And the market doesn’t lie. Rents have been shooting up, by more than 12 per cent per year. The basic law of supply and demand tells you that there isn’t a huge idle supply out there; if there was, why would desperate would-be tenants be willing to pay ever-increasing rents? So where in the hell is the CSO getting 35,000 properties to rent from? I called them up and asked, and they were nice enough to talk to me, even give me the odd hint of some of the statistics that aren’t finalised for publication yet. The first thing is that of all those vacant properties, about 30 per cent of them were recorded as vacant in the 2016 census too; so barring the occasional coincidence,