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

Dermot Lacey is a Labour Party member of Dublin City Council for the Pembroke ward. ***** That’s what he said He, by the way is Brandon Lewis, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, basically their minister for Northern Ireland. What he’s announcing there is the UK government’s shirking from the treaty that they signed last December for them to withdraw from the European Union. He immediately created a million memes of people planning to tell judges that they might be had up in front of that yes, they had broken the law, but only in a very specific and limited way. There’s been a ton of comment and speculation on what the EU might do in retaliation, on whether they could sue the UK, be awarded damages, whether the UK would pay and loads more. I’m not going to add to that pile. I’m more interested in what this tells us about what is going on in the UK government right now. It’s worth noting that this bill, if it goes to their schedule will go from being published to being law within a week, which is positively light-speed compared to the normally glacial rate that laws get enacted. And for you at the back who weren’t paying attention, last December Leo Varadkar met Boris Johnson near Liverpool, and they struck a deal for an acceptable way to prevent an economic border on the island of Ireland, and that basically meant an economic border between Britain and Ireland. The EU and the UK signed this deal, and that clip was Brandon Lewis saying yeah but no but we don’t feel like sticking to our agreement, and agreeing that was a breach of international law. Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political correspondent who is, let’s be charitable about this, close to the Conservative Party, reported being told by EU top brass that they wouldn’t take the bait. Whoever said that I think got it right. It’s pretty obvious that this stunt was designed to get attention. If you’re going to break the law, it’s not normal to stand up and announce it. So all those memes were wrong, it’s not like telling the judge that you broke the law, but only in a very specific and limited way, it’s more like telling the police that you’re going to break the law as they guard a cash transport, and then taking out your sawn-off shotgun and pulling on a ski mask. In general, announcing something like that in advance is not the done thing. But it’s particularly not the done thing when the person who you’re offending against is someone whose goodwill you are ostensibly depending on in sensitive trade negotiations. Let’s bear in mind here that we are now well into September. The odds of signing off on a trade deal for the UK, and getting all the infrastructure in place to implement it, whatever it might be, are getting slimmer by the day. The EU are threatening to cancel the trade talks if this law isn’t taken off the table – they could hardly do anything else; you can’t exactly negotiate the next treaty while the other side are off boasting how they’re not keeping to the last one. The whole purpose behind negotiating a deal is that not doing so has consequences here. Not least, by the way, risking the supposedly important trade deal with the US. Nancy Pelosi didn’t mince her words, she said Let me be clear: if the Brexit deal undermines the Good Friday Accords, there will be no U.S.-U.K. trade agreement. Local Misgovernment

Linda Ervine is a Unionist and Irish language rights activist from East Belfast, and is the president of the recently-formed East Belfast GAA. I talked to her about last year's Ashcroft polling indicating that support for a United Ireland is increasing towards a tipping point in Northern Ireland. **** I was sitting down to do an editorial piece for this podcast, and I had been particularly struck by the apparent arson attack on a house in Carnmore in Galway which, it was believed locally, was about to be allocated to a Traveller family. There were many comments of support for the family and condemning the attack on social media, but there was a significant strain, usually from anonymous accounts, that were clearly hostile to the family that had been slated to move in, and a subset of them were explicitly advocating and praising violence against Travellers and their property. These comments came predominantly from the type of account that has a fake profile picture and a username ending in a long random number. But not everyone making comments that seemed hostile to Travellers was so careful to be anonymous. Galway city Cllr Noel Larkin was quoted in the Irish Independent as demanding that locals should be consulted before Travellers be allowed to move into the area. It's not the first time that Larkin has been in controversy for his views. He said people filmed while taking part in a fracas in Galway – white, apparently Irish people – were quote, ‘behaving like Zulus’. He said that immigrants to Ireland are guilty of ‘blatant misuse’ of the social welfare system and claimed, Enda Kenny-style that a non-national told him ‘work is hard, social welfare is easy’. He also wrote a letter saying that Traveller housing should not be ‘forced on communities’, and that settled people were due an apology from Travellers for calling them racists. Galway Bay FM have had a case taken against them to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland for remarks that he made in an interview they broadcast. As I said, I was sitting down to do this editorial and I wanted to check the quotes from Noel Larkin, so I rang him up and rather than do my whole spiel, I think it’s better to just let you hear the call.

Larry Donnelly is a native of Boston, He teaches law in NUIG. He has published law journal articles in Ireland and internationally, as well as being a regular media commentator. I talked him about an article he wrote for TheJournal.ie. ***** Two minds are better than one. That’s a fairly obviously true saying in most cases; whether in a work environment or elsewhere, most people will be familiar with a situation where people in a group contribute suggestions that together get a solution to a problem that was better than any one member of the group could have come up with. But it’s not always true. Sometimes a group of people make a worse decision than any individual in the group would have. There’s scientific research on this, it was done, like a surprising amount of interesting research, but the CIA. They did the research in the aftermath of the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, where the Americans supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in launching a military attack on their home country. The attack was a disaster, over 100 of the attackers were killed and almost all of the rest of the force of 1,500 men were captured. In retrospect it seemed obvious to everyone that such a tiny force, even with American-supplied weapons and backup, could never stand a chance against a relatively-well defended country, and the hope that this ragtag bunch of former plantation owners, landlords, businessmen and trust fund kids could inspire the population to overthrow their government and install them in charge instead seemed insane. Yet this plan, insane in retrospect, was signed off by many well-qualified committees and experienced military people in the CIA. How could so many smart people have made such a big mistake? In fact, that was the problem. Fair play to them, the CIA brought in psychologists to analyse why the mistake had been made and avoid similar ones in future. And the resulting research was clear. One problem was the number of people involved. The fact that there was so many of them, so many different committees, planning split across the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidency, and no individual thought that they personally were responsible. Each individual saw that lots of other smart people were agreeing to the plan, so if they had doubts, they kept them to themselves; with the effect that everyone in the room thought that they were the only person with a niggling doubt, none of these other smarty guys have this doubt, I must be wrong so I’ll stay shtum. And even if the whole thing does wrong, it won’t be me held responsible, it’ll be all those other smart guys. I’ve heard this research expanded on by some business leaders who talk about this effect being amplified where there is a lack of diversity in the room where a decision is being made. That kind of fits here. All those CIA decision-makers most likely had the same type of background, they were guys that came from middle-class white families, were educated in military academies, and had similar career paths from the army into the CIA. So where one of them has a blind-spot in decision making, there’s a very high risk that most or all of the others in the room have the same blind spot.

Alyn Smith is the SNP member of the Westminster parliament for the Scottish constituency of Stirling. Since we spoke, two opinion polls have been published showing the pro-independence side stretching their lead, excluding undecideds, by up to 10 clear percentage points ahead, 55 to 45. ***** You should be paying attention to Belarus. Well, that’s my opinion anyway, I think that it’s worth more attention than it’s getting. A bit of background, Belarus, then named Belorussia, was one of the republics of the USSR, and the hint is in the name, it’s much closer, culturally and linguistically to Russia than most of the other Soviet republics were. There is a Belorussian language, but its status is much like Irish in Ireland, or maybe more accurately like Welsh in Wales, it’s spoken by some people, mostly intellectual and counter-cultural type people in the cities, and in the villages in some areas they speak an odd mixture of it and Russian, but the Russian language is by far dominant, particularly in the government and workplaces. Unlike some of the republics, Belarus never had any real existence before Soviet times; much of its territory is the land seized from Poland by the Soviet Union when Hitler and Stalin made the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. They’ll hate me for saying this but apart from the alphabet, Belorussian is almost the same language as Polish, just that in catholic areas they learnt writing from the church so wrote in Latin script, and in orthodox areas they learnt writing from the church so wrote in Cyrillic script. Fast forward to 1990, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Belorussia really didn’t want to leave, they were theoretically the only member of the Soviet Union after even the Russian Federation left. That was because there was no democratic revolution, as in much of the rest of eastern Europe, the local communist bosses stayed in charge, just with a bit less ideology and a lot more corruption. This suited Putin very well indeed; Russia doesn’t really see Belarus as a separate country. You can travel between the two countries without an international passport and their economies are highly integrated, Belarus is a very agricultural country with some basic communist-style industries like making fertiliser and tractors. It’s about twice the area and population of Ireland. And it’s dirt poor, although there has been a flourishing of IT start-ups in the capital Minsk. Belarus has become more important to Russia as a food source since the imposition of EU sanctions. They’ve developed their own production of things like Belarusian mozzarella and parmesan cheese, although the joke in Moscow was that it was really the Belarusian printing industry that boomed, since it was obvious that many of these products, at least initially, were illegally exported from the EU, with Belarusian labels stuck over the originals. Alexander Lukashenko has been the unchallenged president since he created the office for himself in 1994. On 9 August it came time for him to perform a bit of dreary theatre of democracy, a sham election, not a performance that anyone inside or outside the country would find convincing.

Niall Keenan founder and chairperson of the Shared Ireland. ***** Sinn Féin are calling for a complete ban on co-living. Their housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, a very talented politician who’s been on this podcast before, not sure if those two are connected, said announcing this that the new housing minister Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil, when he was in opposition was vehemently opposed to co-living, and he, O’Brien, had challenged his predecessor Eoghan Murphy, and then Taoiseach, now Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, that if they thought it was acceptable, they should try living in it. In case you’re not sure, co-living is basically a student dormitory type arrangement. People get bedroom of about 12m2, about the size of a smallish single bedroom, and share kitchen, living room and bathroom facilities in a block with maybe dozens of other residents. I’m pretty sure that Eoghan Murphy and Leo Varadkar, and Darragh O’Brien for that matter, would not be interested in that type of accommodation, but to be fair, I don’t think that there would be nobody who it would suit. If I was a student, or maybe coming to a city to start my first job, it could be quite a sociable way to live, get the right crowd and you could party every night, that might be quite attractive to some people if it was a cheaper way to get accommodation. But that’s the thing. It’s not cheap. I’m not clear of his source but Eoin Ó Broin quoted a price of €1,300 per month for the privilege. Never mind students, if we had a normal functioning housing market, that would be hugely expensive for people in good jobs. There’s an international rule-of-thumb that it’s reasonable to spend about a third of your take-home pay on rent. A single person in Ireland would need to be grossing €70,000 per year to justify that. The average full-time salary in Ireland is less than €49,000. Queuing for a shared bathroom and trying to squeeze your shift into a single bed might be a viable lifestyle in your early 20s, it’s not something that someone aspires to do when they are well into their career. And that’s the problem with this. Co-living isn’t being offered to people who are up for the lifestyle. It’s being offered to people who simply can’t find, and can’t afford anything else. And Eoin Ó Broin makes another excellent point about this. Giving permissions for these co-living projects pushes up the price of land – if you can wring €1,300 a month out of someone for every tiny bedroom that you stack high, why would you go to the bother of building decent housing? Ó Broin is absolutely right that these have the potential to just lower the bar for everyone’s accommodation.  And yet Ó Broin’s solution for is absolutely wrong. He’s demanding a change to the planning act that basically bans co-living. Why would we ban it? There are some people who would genuinely like that type of accommodation, although I don’t think that there’s so many of them, but even if they didn’t matter, this is not going to solve the housing crisis, it’s not going to improve things even a little bit. Sure developers may, instead of building co-living, build some houses and apartments more suitable for the bulk of the population.

Last Saturday there was a demonstration outside the Dáil that was hastily organised to try to capitalise on a controversy that you may or may not have noticed, depending on what corners of Twitter you inhabit, if any. The genesis of this was an article on the website Gript, a clone of far-right American opinion websites run mostly by former Youth Defence activists, and edited by John McGurk, who’s been on this podcast. It was about the new Green Party minister Roderic O’Gorman, his brief is the newly-renamed Department of Children, Disability, Equality and Integration – he’s basically the Minister for Woke. Gript have made a habit of mining the social media feeds of newly-elected left-wing TDs for anything that can be packaged into an embarrassing article. To be fair to them, they exposed pretty unsavoury anti-Semitic comments made by one Sinn Féin TD; they didn’t get anything said by Roderic O’Gorman that was worth writing about, but they did find a photo from a Gay Pride parade in 2018 where he and the British-based gay rights activist Peter Tatchell appeared together. This article then triggered the actor and sometimes Travellers’ rights activist John Connors to record a rant and put it on Twitter. That ends a bit abruptly there, but that’s what John Connors published. It’s worth looking into the background of this. Peter Tatchell is pushing 70 at this stage, but he was a pushing for gay rights long before it was fashionable. He was a UK Labour parliamentary candidate in 1981 in a previously safe labour seat, where he was subjected to a barrage of homophobic abuse and as a result lost badly to, ironically, the Liberal candidate Simon Hughes, who at the time was a closeted homosexual. Tatchell stepped down from his activism in 2009 because of the effects of brain damage he suffered including from being beaten by neo-nazis while taking part in a Pride parade in Moscow, and by thugs hired by Robert Mugabe when Tatchell tried to perform a citizen’s arrest in Brussels for human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and was beaten unconscious. He clearly is not afraid to stand up for his views, and in most of these views has been vindicated by history, but not all. In 1997 the Guardian journalist Ros Coward wrote a withering piece about a book edited by one Joseph Geraci calling for what he called a ‘more balanced’ debate on paedophilia. Ros Coward rightly excoriated the book. Peter Tatchell then wrote a letter to the Guardian, saying that while he didn’t condone paedophilia, he believed that not all sex with children is unwanted, abusive and harmful. He gave the example of the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea where all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation ritual. Nonsense. Papua New Guinea, is one of the most isolated places in the world, densely forested and impossibly mountainous, there are thousands of tribes who live an essentially stone-age existence, with little or no contact with the modern world. This example, by the way is very, very well known to anthropologists.

Kerry-Anne Mendoza editor-at-large of the Canary and the author of Austerity: Demolition of the Welfare state and the rise of the zombie economy, published in 2015. We discussed this Twitter thread of hers: THREAD: How we actually beat CummingsStop fact-checking with the belief that establishing holes in his Swiss cheese story is a gotcha. He doesn’t care. It keeps us occupied while he gets as much nefarious shit done as possible, then laughs at us and tosses us another lie— Kerry-Anne Mendoza (@TheMendozaWoman) May 26, 2020 ***** It really is good to get feedback from listeners, and to know that there is a growing number of listeners out there, I always appreciate that. And it doesn’t matter to me whether the listeners are ordinary people interested in the world around them, ordinary working stiffs, or whether they are celebrity fans, I’m just happy to know that there is anyone out there at all. I know that some people might be wowed by the rich and the famous, but I try to keep a little more grounded than that… but I have to admit that I had a little frisson of excitement to find out that I have one very well-known fan. That’s right folks, you’re listening in the august company of none other than the billionaire financier Dreomt Dseomnd. How do I know that? Because he sent me a fan email. Well, of course he didn’t sent it to me himself, it was sent by Suzanne Mc Nulty, his … legal counsel. And looking over it again it doesn’t come across so much as a fan letter as… Well you see in podcast episode 101 we were talking about housing with Labour Party councillor Alison Gilliland, and in the show notes I referred to what I thought was a pretty good article written by my new best friend Dessie, that’s what I call him, and Dessie listed some excellent suggestions for fixing the housing crisis, and I couldn’t really mention that and just ignore the fact that he was very close to the architect of many of the problems that we have in Ireland to this day, Charlie Haughey. Anyway, this is the email that Suzanne Mc Nulty sent me: I am Mr Dreomt Dseomnd’s legal counsel. Your allegations that “Mr Dseomnd was found by various investigations to have paid large amounts of money, often through secretive bank accounts, to corrupt political figures, and to have falsely claimed that these payments were loans”, are both offensive and defamatory.I request that you immediately remove the offending article from your website and any other media, and publish an apology to Mr Dseomnd in terms to be approved by me making a full unequivocal retraction of these false and defamatory allegations. By way of compensation, Mr Dseomnd would also like you to make a charitable donation of €1,000 to RESPECT. She went on to threaten to sue me if I didn’t comply. The problem there is that the Moriarty Tribunal found that my new BFF Dessie paid huge sums of cash to Haughey and his sidekick PJ Mara, on top of funding the refurbishment of Haughey’s yacht to the tune of IR£75,000, a vast sum at the time that would have bought you a mansion worth in the millions now. The claim that these payments were ‘loans’ is important because if it was true,

Malcolm Noonan newly elected Green Party TD for Carlow Kilkenny, having spent 16 years as a local councillor in Kilkenny. ***** It was announced last week that Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin won’t be reopening, the operators said that the lockdown, coupled with high rents, have pushed their business over the edge, and it’s no longer viable. That’s obviously bad news for the 110 staff that worked there. Most of the comments broke down into two categories – nostalgia and protest. The first type was typified by Vivian Lambert, she said: Such sad news about Bewleys of Grafton St. My great treat as a child was to go there for a glass of Jersey milk and a cherry bun with my Dad. There were loads more in that vein, and I have to admit that I could probably have written my own, I have a dim childhood memory of discovering the existence of coffee when I went with my parents, just about big enough to see over the table when I was sitting on a bench there. But, the second category of post was more political. The Green Party MEP Ciarán Cuffe tweeted When #Bewleys was last under threat 16 years ago I called up landlord Johnny Ronan and asked could he help. “Business is business” was his reply. No change there it seem There was much stronger criticism too, best represented by the People Before Profit official Twitter account’s tweet which said We need decisive state action to force people like Ronan to slash his rents. The state should then move in and take a majority share of Bewley’s, to preserve jobs and enable the café to ride out the storm, as well as preserve a cultural symbol of Dublin life. There were loads in that vein too, a lot of them critical, to say the very least, of Johnny Ronan. People Before Profit, as you heard, advocated the nationalisation of Bewley’s, other people made a variety of suggestions of market interventions the government could make to keep the café open. These ranged from seizing Johnny Ronan’s property, to forcing him to reduce the rent, or giving a government subsidy to Bewley’s, or make some other law to make it impossible to open any other business in the premises, and other daft ideas including some suggestion of a GoFundMe to cover their costs, but I’m not sure how serious that was, there doesn’t seem to be any such campaign on the GoFundMe website. But there is a problem with all these ideas, no matter how hare-brained or level-headed they seemed to be. It’s this: Bewley’s was a business. Bewley’s was a business, and it failed. And from my memories of the place, it richly deserved to fail. That’s not to say anything against the staff, I never did any analysis of the business, so I don’t know why it was failing, but it was failing. In my experience it was grubby, you could write your name with your finger in the grease on the tables, the fare was substandard, and the prices were astronomical. It’s very noticeable that the people who shared memories of Bewley’s were sharing childhood memories from decades ago. It was all about how they went there as a child, decades ago, or how the architecture or the stained glass was so nice. There wasn’t anyone saying I was there a couple ...

Malcolm Byrne won the 2019 bye-election for Fianna Fáil, but did not retain the seat at the general election. He was then elected to Seanad Éireann. Robin Cafolla is chairperson of the Green Party’s Climate Forum. His questions, which informed my interview were first published on Twitter. The Green Party has asked a slightly less-focussed set of questions of their larger rivals. ***** Right now, there is what might be a courtship dance going on between the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil on side, and the Green Party on the other, as to whether the Green Party will join a three-party coalition to form a government. I spoke to some senior Green Party sources at the time of the election, and they said that to join any coalition, they would want to be both wanted and needed in that coalition. What that meant, they explained was two things. Wanted meant that the other parties had to be at least amenable to the policies that they wanted to pursue. Clearly all parties have policy differences, but If they were only there for making up the numbers, and there was no meeting of minds, that would not, in their view, lead to a government worth their while being part of. Being needed meant that the proposed government would have to rely on Green Party TDs for their majority. If the government could function without them, they would have no leverage, and they would be fools to take responsibility for decisions they had no real power to influence. I have a interview coming up, where I put some of the realities of the Green Party intent to a Fianna Fáil politician. It’s a longish interview, so I’ll keep my own thoughts short enough here. You can judge for yourself how many straight answers are forthcoming in that interview and whether that would indicate if the Greens are wanted in government or not. But that’s a soft, values-based judgement. The question ‘are they needed?’ That’s straight maths.  The civil war parties did spectacularly badly in the election, by a huge margin their worst combined result ever. But they still got a lot of votes, more than 43 per cent, and 72 seats, not counting the Ceann Comhairle. That leaves them eight seats short of a majority of 80. You can see how the 12 Green Party TDs votes would come in handy. But would they really be needed. There were 19 independents elected last February as well. Some of them, like Catherine Conolly from Galway or Thomas Pringle from Donegal are quite left-wing and unlikely to be well disposed to supporting a Fianna Fáil / Fine Gael coalition. But most of them have strong ties to one or other of those parties and some have a long record of supporting them in government. Not counted in the Fianna Fáil / Fine Gael 72 are former Fine Gael TDs Peter Fitzpatrick, Michael Lowry, and Denis Naughten. There’s also former Fianna Fáil TD Mattie McGrath. That brings them to 76. There’s also former Fianna Fáil councillor Richard O’Donoghue, now a TD, and former Fine Gaelers Verona Murphy and Matt Shanahan. That’s 79; and that’s even before looking to other independents who have a record of supporting the last Fine Gael minority government Seán Canney and Noel Grealish. There’s 81, that’s a majority straight away.

Thanks to Cathal Mac Coille, former Morning Ireland presenter for taking the chair in this special podcast. This is the complaint that I sent to RTÉ. Complaint-to-RTÉ RTÉ gave it short shrift. This is the totality of their response. RTEs-Response-to-Complaint There was some back-and-forth between me and RTÉ, and RTÉ eventually they made it clear that they would not refer my complaint to an internal reviewer, so I referred the complaint to the BAI. Complaint-against-RTÉ-BAI-William-Campbell As per their procedure, the BAI asked RTÉ for their response to the complaint, and forwarded me the that response. This was the first time that RTÉ actually admitted how they classified AA Roadwatch – as an independent radio production. BAI-C5094_RTEBAI-2019-2463_AA-Roadwatch_RTE-Response-180619 I responded to the points made by RTÉ, in particular the claim that the AA were, in fact, an independent radio production company. C5094-Response-to-RTÉ-William-Campbell There followed much wrangling where the BAI initially refused to consider all but one of the grounds for complaint that I had made. After some negotiation, and me asking what legal basis they had to refuse to consider a complaint, I agreed to specify under what rule of the BAI I was making each ground of the complaint. C5094-Jean-Crampton-Letter-September-10

Alison Gilliland is Labour Party member of Dublin City Council for Artane/Whitehall. She is also chairperson of Dublin City Council’s Strategic Policy Committee on Housing. In our discussion I mentioned the article in the Irish Times by billionaire financier Dermot Desmond about solutions for the housing crisis. Desmond was found by various investigations to have xxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxx. I also mentioned the huge cut in the windfall tax on profits from rezoning made while the Labour Party were in government, and the lackadaisical enforcement of the of the vacant sites levey by local authorities around the country; and the huge attention paid to the tiny impact of Airbnb on the housing market. ***** Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices … great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night … And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug … And I, Agnolo di Tura … buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. That’s a quote from the Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura about the effects of the Black Death, which did a deadly circuit of Europe in the 1340s and 1350s, killing perhaps a third of the population or more. It returned at various intervals for centuries, causing more localized but sometimes just as deadly epidemics. But don’t let that get you too paranoid, this disease can be now easily cured with antibiotics, which weren’t available in the fourteenth century. Nevertheless, the Black Death is something that still haunts the culture of Europe and beyond. The danse macabre, with its awkward dancing skeletons, is still a common image, as is that of the plague doctor, with the black gown and long beak-like plague mask. The southern German village of Oberammergau still follows a vow that they would faithfully perform a Passion Play, reenacting biblical stories, every decade if they were spared the plague that was ravaging the area in the 1630s. But even more influential, for an event that happened nearly 700 years ago, are the social and economic effects of the Black Death.

Peter Boland, as well as running Cases.ie is the director of the Alliance for Insurance Reform. ***** There’s a lot of people talking about the other thing, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough about it by now, and there’s nothing extra that I can say that hasn’t already been said, so let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about the state of the world and its people. Bear in mind that life expectancy in Ireland in 1916 was just 53. Thinking of all the countries in the world, taking into account the huge populations of the poor countries in Africa and Asia, what would you guess is the average life expectancy of people today? 50 years? 60 Years? No, the average across the whole world is now 70. And again, across the whole world, what percent of the population do you think has access to electricity? The answer is 80 per cent. And if you had to guess what percent of children had at least some of their vaccinations? Again, across the planet, the answer is 80 per cent. Finally, if you had to guess, over the last hundred years, taking into account the massive population explosion we’ve had, what has happened to the number of people – the absolute number, not the proportion – the number of people who die each year in natural disasters; has it more than doubled? Stayed the same? In fact, that number has more than halved. All these figures come from a book by the Swedish academic Hans Rosling, and he formulated them to show us that sometimes, things are much better than we think they are, and in particular, for all our cynicism, things can and do get better. Lots better. By those metrics that he chooses, the average person in the world today is vastly better off than the average person was in Ireland a hundred years ago. More children – much, much more children – are getting educated, much more people are getting basic healthcare, much more people have access to the basics of comfort that the whole of humanity went without for almost all of our existence. Sometimes we can be terribly stupid, but on the whole, humans are clever and creative. We can solve problems. We can make our lives better. That makes it all the more tragic when we don’t, but on the whole, we’re doing better, lots better than we were, and often way better than we actually think we are doing. Sometimes we create terrible problems, but we can solve problems too, and we do solve them, and maybe with that whole loss aversion thing in our mentality, we remember our failures better our successes. That music you can hear in the background is the Italian resistance anthem, Bella Ciao. It’s being played by the National Theatre Orchestra of Serbia. But this is a recital with a difference. They’re playing together, but they’re not together. The recital was recorded over a live video call with a conductor, and dozens of musicians each playing from their own home. This technology would have been unimaginable just a decade ago, now we take it for granted that it’s in

Michael O’Regan is journalist and former parliamentary correspondent of The Irish Times. He says he doesn’t have a book for me to plug, ‘yet’. ***** I managed to grab an interview with Sinn Féin’s Aengus Ó Snodaigh at the election count in the RDS. To put this in context, Aengus Ó Snodaigh got one of the highest votes of any politician in the country, and at the moment I spoke to him those votes were being counted and tallied – it might have been quicker to weigh them – so of course I started with congratulating with on his vote. But I really wanted to ask him about a topic that I think is very relevant given the possibility that was emerging then of Sinn Féin going into government. The Cash for Ash scandal in Northern Ireland, whereby some people in the know, often DUP supporters, made huge amounts of money claiming subsidies for renewable heating that were vastly higher than what they actually spent on the heating bills. To Sinn Féin’s credit, it’s clear that their politicians did not have their sticky hands in the till on this, unlike some others. But the enquiry into this revealed a series of emails that Sinn Féin clearly would rather have remained secret, and it’s clear that the emails were written in the belief that they would never come to light. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir was the Sinn Féin finance minister in the Northern Irish executive from 2016 to 2017 when the executive collapsed. Ó Muilleoir wrote an email to Ted Howell. Howell is a secretive figure who largely disappeared in the early 1970s, probably to work for the IRA outside Ireland, and re-emerged on the Árd Chomhairle of Sinn Féin during the peace process. No serious commentator doubts that Howell was the closest of confidants to Gerry Adams, and a senior member of the provisional IRA. And the email that Sinn Féin finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir sent to Howell asked whether he, Howell, was content if the writer, Ó Muilleoir, would make particular decisions in his capacity as minister. That’s dodgy as hell. It’s also extra-constitutional. Ministers, north or south, have a particular duty in law, and that is to make executive decisions. They are not supposed to be the vassal for other people’s decisions. Whatever about actions in the past, any minister elected now has a duty to be the bona fide person who is answerable to the electorate for what they do, not answerable to an entity, any entity, that meets in private. That’s the context for some of the questions that I ask Aengus Ó Snodaigh here.

Colin Harvey is Professor of Human Rights Law in the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, a Fellow of the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies. In November, his group, Ireland’s Future sent a letter to An Taoiseach calling for a new conversation about the constitutional future of the island of Ireland. The polls from Michael Ashcroft – conducted by professional polling companies – gave the first indication of a majority in Northern Ireland in favour of reunification with the south, but the demographic breakdown is the real shocker: ***** Following on from what I was saying at the top of the last podcast, I got in a couple of Twitter debates, I won’t say Twitter spats, it was all very polite, I’ll link the threads on the website, but I got in a couple of Twitter debates during the week. It was about housing, building and planning policies. People are, rightly, very annoyed when they see homelessness all around them, and derelict buildings, empty houses, and prime sites that lie empty for decades. The thing is that, as with almost every problem, there a quick, simple, easy-to-understand solution that is completely wrong. In this case the two quick, simple, easy and completely wrong solutions are rent controls and using compulsory purchase orders – CPOs – to forcibly buy empty properties and house homeless people in them. The first thing to say here is that I don’t doubt for a moment the good faith of the people who I was disagreeing with, I’m certain that they are motivated by nothing but a desire to help their fellow citizens. But let’s take those ideas in order. The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, said “Next to bombing, rent controls are the most efficient known technique for destroying cities.” What he meant is that, like with any product, if you artificially lower the price, then the producers respond by just stopping the production of that product. Why should they invest over here when the government forces them to give that product away for below its market value, when they can invest over there and make more money. Most people will see the flaw in that argument; even if it’s true that rent controls lead to dereliction, that is treating housing like just another commodity like lawnmower widgets – but housing is much more important than that, and we can’t do with a shortage of housing in the way that we could probably manage with a shortage of lawnmower widgets. And I agree, housing is different, it’s not just a product, and that means we’ll probably need special rules to deal with it. But just because we have special rules, that doesn’t mean that people won’t still act in their own rational best interests. Everybody will still try to get the best housing they can for the best price, and developers and landlords will try to get the most profit from their investments. At the moment we have a serious lack of suitable housing, and that is causing rents that are high and rising.

Seán Fleming, currently Fianna Fáil TD for Laois, if the gods of the ballot box smile on him he might become the Fianna Fáil TD for the reconstituted constituency of Laois Offaly. He’s been a TD since 1997 and for 15 years before that he was Financial Director of Fianna Fáil at national level. Gavin Reilly’s twitter thread helped me in researching this interview: https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1216802428856782848?s=19 This is the three-page form (plus three pages of explanatory notes) that you need to fill in, get stamped at a Garda station, and hand in to your local authority office during office hours if you want to get on the supplementary register. Anyone who is trying to work out if they are currently registered to vote might not find it possible. This is what I got: ***** Nobody likes taxes. People don’t like paying taxes, but they also don’t like talking about, or even thinking about taxes. It stresses people out. You can even see that in the support for proposals for things like ‘flat taxes’ because people think that they will be simpler, even if they pay just as much or more. Politicians know this, particularly when they make promises like this. And, of course when those promises are broken, there are serious ramifications. Any politician going into an election promising to introduce a new tax isn’t likely to prosper. But that’s just what the economist David McWilliams is recommending. And he’s right; in fact, he doesn’t go far enough. McWilliams article on the topic is titled The party that taxes land hoarding will get my vote. I would argue that we need an wide-ranging property tax that covers all – well, all property. That would include houses, building land, agricultural land, commercial and industrial property, the lot. Before you start saying that you don’t want to pay any more tax, bear in mind that I’m not advocating you should pay more tax. I’m saying that taxes should be levied in a different way. To be clear, this is not to collect more tax or less tax. This is to collect the same amount in a different way. So why go to the bother of changing the system if you’re collecting the same amount of money as before? The reason why is because incentives matter. Right now Ireland is almost unique in the developed world in that almost our entire tax take is levied on economic activity, with income tax, VAT, stamp duty, excise duty, VRT and others. Ireland has basically no taxes on economic inactivity. And this matters. If you tax brown bread and don’t tax white bread, then people will eat more white bread. This has a real impact on people’s economic activity. Right now, hoarding and speculating on property gets attracts no tax whatsoever. We have plenty of experience with tax exemption schemes for everything from nursing homes to the film industry, and the reaction to them is very predictable. When you make an area of the economy tax-exempt, you suck in not just capital, but also talent and initiative.