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

Jamie Bryson is the editor of Unionist Voice and a prominent Loyalist activist. ***** Homelessness has been in the news a lot recently, as it deserves to be. In most normal societies, even though it’s not really polite to say so, homelessness, in the sense of people living on the streets, or very marginal accommodation, is a very different  issue to the high prices in the rental and property market, and difficulty for people in finding a place to live. The bottom line is that, in most normal societies – to the extent that people living on the streets can be regarded as a normal thing –that type of homelessness is isn’t an accommodation issue, it’s not really a housing issue, it’s a mental health issue, often closely associated with alcoholism and drugs of abuse. People, when threatened with losing their accommodation can usually access social services, or at worst find a friend or relative who can put them up on a couch until they get sorted. People who have addiction and other mental health issues find it much harder to do that – often because their problems have alienated them from those support networks. They have problems,we need to address those problems, but actual housing isn’t the issue. It is a sign of how serious our situation is that people who are clearly together in other areas of their lives – they have relationships, children that they care for, we have homeless children, think about that, children who are homeless – and that’s a sign of how serious the situation is. For thousands of people, the reason that they are homeless is that there just isn’t a home for them. That’s not normal by any standard. And we have so many suggestions for a solution to the housing crisis. Podcast listeners might know about Dr Karl, if you don’t, then look him up, he’s worth it. Anyway, he’s a medical doctor, and one observation that he likes to make is that if a disease has one cure, then it probably works. If a disease has many cures, probably none of them work. The reason is simple, if you have a cure that works, why bother researching to find a second one? And if you have more than one cure, surely one works better than the others, so why not ditch the worse ones? This is true for our housing crisis too. There are lots of nonsense solutions proposed, I’m just going to look at one. Airbnb is being held up as a villain. Thousands of homes are being rented out at huge profit,when they could be used to house needy people, or so the narrative goes. And it’s true, there are about 23,000 listings for Ireland on Airbnb. But the story just doesn’t add up. First off, many Airbnb listings are for people’s spare rooms – they make some money on the side renting out the room to tourists. They probably don’t pay tax on it, that’s a whole other issue, but it’s an issue for another day. There are about 8,500 entire homes advertised on Airbnb at any given time, but a significant portion of them are not the same 8,500 all the time. They are people who go on holidays or are away for a short time themselves, and while they are away they make some money by letting out their house while they are away. Again, yes, tax issues, also planning issues; but again, no, different issue. There are actually only 7,000 dwellings on Airbnb that seem to be for short-term rent throughout the year. Well seven thousand – wouldn’t that house 7,000 families,

Richard Tice is a British businessman, heavily involved in property management and development, and is best known as founder of the pro Brexit organisation Leave Means Leave and former co-chair of the referendum campaign group Leave.EU.  He wrote recently that May’s deal is the worst deal in history. Richard queried my quote from David Davis that “my preference would be that we should remain within the Customs Union of the EU”, even if this meant the UK would have to “give up some freedoms in terms of negotiating our trading arrangements with third countries.” In fact that statement is still on David Davis’ website. ****** I was talking over the weekend to some people who could loosely be described as politicians, and we were discussing the mathematics of Theresa May getting her newly-signed Brexit deal through the British parliament, or not as it seems. Some British sources – it’s hard to tell whether they are May supporters or opponents, but some British sources are talking about a second vote in their parliament, perhaps a few weeks after the first vote, and that enough pressure would be inflicted on enough of the waverers to get the thing passed. There is one point that I think they are missing – if one vote going the wrong way in the parliament can be overturned when necessary, then why not do the same with the public vote, the referendum result, especially now given that the British public seem to have at least some idea what Brexit will result in, which wasn’t the case in 2016. But that’s just one of the options if the vote goes against May’s deal, as seems almost certain. I should put in a rider here, there have been knighthoods being given out in the strangest of ways in the past couple of weeks. Also, whatever the commitment of the DUP to the Union, I don’t think much of the argument that they will vote for the deal to avoid a Corbyn government, but I do think that their commitment to the queen is only surpassed by their commitment to the queen’s shilling; they can be bought, the only question is the price. But let’s assume that the vote goes down. Then what? The dream of the Brexit hardliners is that it triggers a no-deal exit, the least-supported scenario happens by default. That’s a possibility. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a dream that there would be another referendum, a people’s vote that would halt Brexit altogether. I think that those two scenarios are unlikely, although the situation is so unstable that they can’t be ruled out. What I think is most likely is that the men in grey suits step in and prevent total chaos, and that Britain ends up in some sort of half-in, half-out EFTA-style situation. The one difficulty with that assumption is that the famed British civil service, which prides itself on having once run an empire where the sun never set, yadda yadda will be able to save the day. But that’s just the problem. They still believe in their competence despite the overwhelming evidence against that. They’re not so much running on fumes, as being Wiley Coyote, running off the cliff edge and keeping on going until they look down, just before gravity kicks in. But my problem with this whole discussion is that right across the political spectrum in Ireland there is a hint of smug self-satisfaction. Aren’t we great, we’re not half as daft as these idiot Brits, see how stupid they are, messing up their whole country. Well, maybe. But we’re not the Roadrunner. The predictions if the UK goes to something like an EFTA as...

David Robert Grimes is a physicist, cancer researcher and frequent writer and commentator on scientific topics.  ***** I was talking in the last couple of podcasts about water charges, and the resistance to them, particularly in the light of the summer droughts, and there was quite a bit of feedback about those pieces. One of the main points that I was making was that water metering would discipline both the consumer and the supplier not to waste water. In podcast 75, I said this: And I probably should have known better than to rely on Irish Times figures without checking them out. One listener who did check them out was Brian Greene, and he pointed out that my comparison with the UK was wrong, because the figures from the Irish Times were per household, not per person, thanks to him for that. But my point that there was quite a big variation in water usage, and that these differences largely track wealth, is still valid, even if the figures are collected at the household level, rather than the individual level. I think that Brian was on the same page as Brendan Ogle of Right 2 Water, who I talked to in podcast number 78. Brendan’s take was that there just isn’t much slack in the system, there isn’t much conservation that consumers can do to moderate water use. So all this inspired me to go to the source, pardon the pun, and have a look at the raw water consumption figures and see if they told a tale; could we work out whether there is a justification for water metering. So I went to the CSO, and special thanks to Linh Nolan of the CSO who dug out the information for me and… oh, boy. What I got was the data from water meters, for 2015 and 2016 – 2017 isn’t ready yet. It’s divided into centiles, that’s to say grouped by each percent, the 1 per cent who are the lowest users, the next lowest percent and so on to the hundredth centile, the highest users, so it’s quite fine grained. One figure that screams out is that, get this, in 2015, the hundredth centile accounted for more than a 25 per cent of all the domestic water use. Get that – a quarter of all the domestic water supply, used by less than one per cent of households. The figures show that there is gigantic variation between the amounts of water used by different households. Now, we have to be careful with the figures, because for sure the bottom few centiles are almost certainly dwellings that are vacant for some or all of the year in question – the bottom centile averages only one litre of water per day, so there’s obviously nobody living there, and if there was, they’re dead of dehydration. Also according to the CSO , about 13 per cent of Irish dwellings are vacant, so if we disregard those and look in 2016 at the twentieth centile, those households are using 123 litres per day, and the fiftieth centile, the median, is only double that. But the 99th centile, those households are using 1,500 litres per day, 10 times more than the twentieth centile, and the hundredth centile, the top one per cent of users are using more than 40 times more water than the twentieth centile, more than six thousand litres of water per day, every day of the year. Bear in mind that these are domestic water users, not hotels, not swimming pools, although I don’t see how you could possibly use that much water unless you were regularly refilling a swimming pool. That amount of use couldn’t even be explained by massive water leaks, your house would fall down if that much water was leaking into your foundations every day. To put that figure in context, a good-sized domestic swimming pool, the type that you get in a bog-standard house according to some campaigners,

Brendan Ogle is the spokesperson for Right2Water, and is Unite the Union’s Senior Officer in the Republic of Ireland. ***** In the last podcast I had an interview with presidential candidate Gemma O’Doherty, and I have to say that I found the reactions to it pretty depressing. There was a twitterstorm in a teacup  with a series of journalists making what I thought were incredibly petty complaints. In particular they complained of Gemma doing an undercover story several years ago that exposed some crisis pregnancy agencies advising clients on how to obtain and smuggle into Ireland abortion pills – which were illegal at the time – into the state. Now, whatever you think of abortion, it’s pretty remarkable that a crisis pregnancy agency would advise someone to break the law, and reporting on that is absolutely a journalistic thing to do. Kitty Holland of the Irish Times in particular laid at Gemma O’Doherty’s door a tasteless joke on Twitter shared by someone who apparently supports Gemma. Now, I can see that if Gemma O’Doherty had shared a tasteless joke, then she might be justifiably criticised, but criticising her for a bad joke from a supporter of hers, that’s just nonsense, and it exposes an agenda on the part of Kitty Holland. If Kitty Holland is so short of stories to report, she might do better to cover something like the garda commissioner being called as a witness in a case that centred on him personally benefiting from garda corruption – that was a story that made international headlines, but not a single word was printed about it in the Irish Times. All that said, I don’t think that Gemma O’Doherty – or anyone else – is above criticism. I had a long discussion with Gemma O’Doherty after the recording, and she was not happy that I had asked her about instances of fake news that she had shared, including sharing stories fabricated by the Internet Research Agency, an arm of Russian Military Intelligence, the same bunch that were stoking dissent through Facebook during the 2016 election in the US, and ever since. At the time that I recorded the interview, I hadn’t seen some other things that Gemma had promoted online, and I want to look at two in particular. The first is a graphic that she shared widely in the context of a story about a chemical that is claimed to be a carcinogen, that causes cancer. The image puts Ireland among the countries with the highest cancer rates in the world, along with other rich western countries, and lists countries like Niger, Gambia, Bhutan and Yemen as countries with the lowest cancer rates. The intent is clearly to promote the idea that the industrialised west is bad for your health. And this is absolute nonsense. Cancer is a disease of old age. The reason that Ireland, Denmark,

Gemma O’Doherty worked for the Irish Independent for 17 years before being dismissed following her investigation of the penalty points scandal. Since then she has worked as an independent journalist on a number of high-profile scandals and particularly on failed murder investigations. On 19 August, she announced her intention to seek nominations to be a candidate in the forthcoming presidential election.  Amongst other stories, Gemma has investigated the cases of Mary Boyle, a then-seven-year-old missing from Co Donegal since 1977, presumed murdered, and Fr Niall Molloy, who was beaten to death in a savage attack during a house party in 1985. Both cases are suspected to have political connections; the gardaí have failed to pursue leads in the cases, and many media outlets seem reluctant to cover this aspect of the stories. In our conversation I mentioned her sharing of a video by Jerry Beades; claims that Hillary Clinton conspired to send secret messages to NBC debate host Lester Holt, and tweets featuring a conspiracy theory that Clinton was seriously ill during the 2016 US presidential election, which was fabricated by the Internet Research Agency, an arm of Russian military intelligence.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is a Labour Party senator and former TD. ***** I wanted to comment a bit about the controversy that blew up in the UK last week about Boris Johnson’s comment about Muslim women who wear burkas. Boris Johnson, in case you don’t know, is the Tory Brexiteer who resigned in protest that Prime Minister Theresa May’s Chequers plan wasn’t hardline enough. Now, everything about Johnson’s behaviour in regards to Brexit suggests that he has little or no principled beliefs on the matter and is just using it as a leverage to try to get himself into her job, but that’s a different story. Johnson started a controversy when he said that women who wear the niqab or burka look like bank robbers or letterboxes. Let’s be clear about terms here, by far the majority of Muslim wo men who wear headscarves wear a hijab, or something similar, which basically covers their hair and neck. Some go further and wear a niqab, which includes a veil which exposes only their eyes, and the most extreme, notably in Afghanistan under the Taliban, wear a burka, which even covers the eyes with a semi-transparent gauze. It’s worth noting that women covering their hair is by no means confined to the Islamic world. It’s common in more traditional areas, like in Greece or Armenia – both Christian – for women to wear scarves in public. It’s pretty common in Russia too, particularly in more rural areas, and it would have been quite normal in Ireland up to maybe 50 years ago. I have a couple of views about this. Firstly, for people in the west, I don’t like the idea of people wearing special clothes to mark out the fact that they are of a minority religion. I don’t confine that to Muslim women; the right-wing American commentator Ben Shapiro has defended the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab, pointing out that he wears a kippah, the Jewish skullcap. I disagree with Muslim women wearing a hijab in public, I disagree with Ben Shapiro or other Jewish men wearing a kippah in public, because I think that it is bad for the cohesion of society to have some people marking themselves out as not ‘normal’, with the rest of us by corollary, being ‘normal’. To be clear, I think that people have the right to wear a kippah or a hijab, I don’t want any laws to prevent them from wearing them, they have a perfect right to make that choice; but I have a right to disagree with that choice. But I think that the niqab and the burka are in a different class. They both create a barrier between people. And it’s not a symbolic barrier like a kippah or a hijab. It’s literally a physical barrier that comes between members of society. Facial expressions are an incredibly important component of communication, whether it’s between a parent and their kid’s teacher, neighbours saying hello as they take out the rubbish, or a barista and someone ordering a coffee. In a society where trust and community are in short supply, blocking the communication of facial expressions has the potential to exacerbate tensions in a way that we don’t need. That said, I don’t think that we should ban the niqab or the burka. I disagree with them, but I disagree with a lot of things, and I don’t expect my personal standards to be enforced on everyone else by the government. I can see a case for prohibiting face coverings that could amount to a disguise in some high-security zones, but apart from that, I believe in individual rights. So you might think that I agree with Boris Johnson. Well, no.

John Leahy became leader of Renua Ireland in September 2016. I spoke to him about aspects of his policies set out on the Renua website, including the proposal to Introduce 90-day detention orders for those Gardai suspect of being actively involved in preparations to murder another or of being responsible for directing the activities of an organised criminal gang. Jailing people for any length of time because of what gardaí suspect that they might do in the future would almost certainly be unconstitutional. Also, Renua will campaign for the return of national vetoes over all policy areas and the abandonment of Qualified Majority Voting [and] … introduce an Australian-type points system for inter-EU migration. We do not believe that the free movement of people is an essential element of any customs union. There is no prospect of implementing any of these policies without first leaving the EU. ***** I like free stuff. I think everyone does. Even when it’s not really free. I was on holiday recently in a hotel where they did breakfast as one of those buffet things where you can collect whatever from a huge array of food. There was pancakes, every type of cereal, cooked breakfasts, scrambled eggs, different breads, hot croissants and pastries, cake – cake for breakfast – cheeses and I dunno what else. I ate myself stupid. Some people have the presence of mind to just collect a couple of things that they want. I don’t have that sort of self-control. And the worst of it was that I wasn’t even able to eat half the things that I collected, even by stuffing myself, so I either had to eat myself even sicker, or watch it go to waste. And the food wasn’t even all that good. It looked appealing, but the pancakes were stodgy, the scrambled eggs were cold – and it was clear that I wasn’t the only glutton, there was a huge amount of food being wasted in the place. I wouldn’t mind so much, but I’m normally pretty good with avoiding that type of waste. I’m the type of person who goes to the supermarket with a shopping list, I buy what I need, I freeze leftovers. We really don’t do food waste in our house. So what comes over me at the breakfast buffet? Economists actually have an explanation for this. They have a saying: Unpriced resources will be wasted. That basically means that if we’re not paying for it, we’re not careful with it. We saw this in spectacular fashion years ago with the plastic bag levy. When it was introduced, plastic bag consumption dropped immediately by 93 per cent. I thought of this, and the Right 2 Water campaign when I was listening to all the problems with water supply during the hot, dry weather. In case you don’t remember, the Right 2 Water campaign are against all water charges and metering. Their website says Water charges will discriminate against working people and the unemployed in favour of the wealthy and are another regressive tax taking vital money out of the pockets of people and out of our economy. Our public water system is already paid for through general taxation which is progressive and we wish it to remain that way. As I said, I like free stuff as much as the next person, and I don’t want an extra bill to pay any more than the next person either, but that whole campaign was totally wrong. It was based on the premise that paying a water bill was double taxation. That was nonsense to begin with. There is far more than one type of tax; we pay income tax, VAT, motor tax, inheritance tax, excise duty, stamp duty, property tax and that’s just some of the taxes paid by private individuals, to say nothing of the taxes that are paid by businesses, and passed on through pricing to their customers. And,

Graham Gudgin is a founder of Briefings for Brexit, and a research associate at the Centre For Business Research at the University of Cambridge and the Senior Economic Advisor with Oxford Economics. He was a special adviser to the Northern Ireland First Minister on economic policy from 1998  to 2002. **** You’ll remember that in the last podcast, I was talking to Steve Hinks from the British anti  vaccine group, the UK Association of HPV Vaccine Injured Daughters about the Gardasil vaccine, and I’ve been in email contact with him since then. Steve is a gentleman, and he’s sent me a lot of information, along with his analysis of it. Some of the information is correct and relevant, but in almost every case, his analysis is flawed. I’m going to cover just a couple of points. I made the point in the last podcast that in the UK and Ireland, any supposed ‘victims’ of Gardasil could sue for damages in the courts, as frequently happens with people who suffer medical accidents or negligence. It is notable that, in both the UK and Ireland, where the standard of proof is the balance of probabilities – 51 per cent, much lower than a criminal trial – not a single person of the supposed hundreds represented by REGRET and Steve’s organisation have even attempted a lawsuit, let alone been successful. Steve countered this with a reference to a US case where, he said, the court had ruled that it was proven that the vaccine had caused harm. He’s just plain wrong. The case he referred to was in the United States Court of Federal Claims, Office of Special Masters. The US does not operate a common law system for people who say they were harmed by a vaccine. For good or ill, the US has a system where people who can show that they have suffered illness are not required to show what caused the illness. The system is basically a bargain to prevent expensive lawsuits. Sick people can get financial help – far less than they would get in a lawsuit – and they don’t have to prove the cause. That’s specifically stated in the document that Steve sent me, so I find it startling that he takes the view that this shows that the court found that the cause was ‘proven’. Also, in the last podcast, Steve said that the Ontario department of health study, which tracked hundreds of thousands of girls who got the vaccine, and found that they had no more illnesses than is normal in the population, Steve said that this study was flawed. You might remember that I fact-checked this, I checked the scientific websites, and not a single scientific objection has been raised against this study. In his email, Steve changed tack a little. He acknowledged that there was no scientific objection, but said that he personally didn’t like the study, and that’s why he thought it was flawed. That’s not how science works. Just like I said in the last podcast that scientists have to present their work and have it analysed, it’s all done in public, objections must be public and open to scientific analysis too. You can’t just say ‘I don’t like these results so I’m deciding flawed. Finally, Steve talked about an Alberta, Canada study, which again followed up hundreds of thousands of girls who got the vaccine, and investigated every hospital and emergency department visit they had in the six weeks after vaccination. That’s how much these things are checked out. And what they discovered was that there was about 19,000 emergency department visits within six weeks of getting a vaccine. But the flaw in Steve’s thinking is to imagine that every teenager who sprains an ankle, or is involved in a car accident or some other mishap, if they’ve been vaccinated, then it must be the vaccine what done it. That’s nonsense.

‎Steve Hinks‎ speaks for the UK Association of HPV Vaccine Injured Daughters, and he attended a conference in Dublin in April organised by the the International Federation for Injured Children and Adults. The conference was also attended by Anna Cannon of REGRET and Dr Jesper Mehlsen. The conference program claimed a speaker from the HSE ‘TBC’, however a spokesperson for the HSE told the Irish Times “The HSE will not be attending.” REGRET have claimed on their GoFundMe page that 200 of the girls that they ‘represent’ are on 24-hour-suicide watch. I have talked to the Irish Prison Service, and to sources familiar with suicide prevention within psychiatric hospitals, and it is clear that this number is far and away more than the total number of suicide watch places (sometimes called special observation places) in all Irish prisons and psychiatric hospitals combined. Hundreds of millions of people have received the HPV vaccine. The World Health Organisation have reported there is no evidence of any link between the HPV vaccination and the conditions claimed by anti-vaccine activists. By contrast, the Thalidomide scandal in the 1950s and 1960s affected 10,000 pregnant women. In the podcast we discussed the Ontario Grade 8 HPV Vaccine Cohort Study. Steve said that this study was ‘flawed’, however the study has not attracted even a single criticism on PubPeer, the website for tracking suspected errors in scientific papers. This is the text that Steve sent me, from Gardasil 9 safety document. I have confirmed that the document is genuine, and the highlighting is Steve’s: It is clear from the text that there is no suggestion whatsoever that 2.3 per cent of the recipients of the vaccine had an adverse reaction to the vaccine. There were five serious reactions determined to be caused by the vaccine among 13,309. These were pyrexia (high temperature), allergy to the vaccine, asthma attack, headache and tonsillitis. Of the 13,309 girls in the study, 305 of them had an adverse event from any cause – this is all negative health events, all illnesses and accidents. Steve’s assertion that cervical cancer rates have increased is not based on reliable science. The study he referred to was published under a false name, and the author – whoever they were – lied about their academic institution. Mainstream studies show that the rates of cervical cancer in Australia, which introduced the vaccine in 2006, have halved. Steve also sent me a large volume of other documents which I have made available here, here, produces the YouTube channel ContraPoints. I highly recommend her videos. I mentioned the interview I did Linda Bellos in February.  In our discussion, I mentioned the soaring referrals to the UK’s Tavistock clinic (which specialises in gender reassignment) of children. I also mentioned James Caspian, the doctoral candidate at Bath Spa University who approved, and later rejected, Caspian’s proposed research into gender reassignment reversal. I also mentioned non-specialist doctors giving hormone treatment to young children, and the assault by trans activists on feminists wanting to organise a meeting; (Since the recording, trans activist Tara Wolf has been convicted of assault in this case) and Jessica Winfield, formerly known as Martin Ponting, while serving a sentence for a rape conviction, was relocated to a women’s prison in the UK.  

Natalie Parrott produces the YouTube channel ContraPoints. I highly recommend her videos. I mentioned the interview I did Linda Bellos in February.  In our discussion, I mentioned the soaring referrals to the UK's Tavistock clinic (which specialises in gender reassignment) of children. I also mentioned James Caspian, the doctoral candidate at Bath Spa University who approved, and later rejected, Caspian's proposed research into gender reassignment reversal. I also mentioned non-specialist doctors giving hormone treatment to young children, and the assault by trans activists on feminists wanting to organise a meeting; (Since the recording, trans activist Tara Wolf has been convicted of assault in this case) and Jessica Winfield, formerly known as Martin Ponting, while serving a sentence for a rape conviction, was relocated to a women’s prison in the UK.  

David Quinn is a founder of the Iona Institute, a newspaper columnist and a regular media commentator. During the marriage equality referendum campaign, David said that Should the referendum pass, a same-sex couple could demand a right to marry in a church … In Denmark, we have already seen that the Lutheran Church, a State Church admittedly, has been forced to conduct same-sex weddings. At the time, lawyers pointed out that there was no basis to imagine that the then-proposed referendum, now passed, could be used to force Catholic or other churches to conduct weddings outside their own internal rules, just as they have not been forced to marry divorced people since the 1995 divorce referendum, and no attempt has been made to do so. The Lutheran Church in Denmark is an established government-run church; its governing body is the Danish parliament, and the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs (currently Mette Bock, a member of the Liberal Alliance party) is an MP and member of the Danish cabinet. An established church is a branch of the government. The word ‘forced‘ means that one entity had its behaviour unwillingly constrained by another, but here there is only one entity. Some clergy of the Danish church had been conducting informal same-sex weddings since the 1970s. Same-sex marriage was approved in Denmark in 2012, and as an arm of the state the Church in Denmark began to carry out such services on a legal, formal basis at that time. David is correct that the Christian Institute, a campaign group which concentrates on opposing LGBT rights, is registered in the UK as a company, although this appears to be against company registration rules.

Sandra Khadhouri is one of the founders of Renew Britain, a new political party set up to resist Brexit. James Cousins, a former Conservative party member of Wandsworth Council has recently joined their party but they have not yet had a chance to test their electoral strength.  In our conversation, I mentioned The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart, which charts the cultural gulf that has opened between different groups in Britain and elsewhere.

Linda Bellos is a businesswoman, radical feminist and gay-rights activist. She was a member of the collective that produced Spare Rib, a British feminist magazine, and was a member of Lambeth Borough Council in London and was the leader of the council from 1986 to 1988.  The term ‘TERF‘ is widely used as a term of abuse by third wave feminists for second-wave feminists, often with extreme hostility and even threats of violence. Linda was invited, and then un-invited to speak to the Beards Society in Cambridge University, as part of a bitter dispute between factions within feminism.

I talked to Director of Retail and Consumer Services at Comreg, Barbara Delaney. Yourtel appear to still be advertising to the Irish market, despite being convicted on 88 sample charges (out of 880) of ripping off their customers. They were fined just €750 of a maximum fine of €5,000 in each case – a total of €66,000. Their pricing scheme and the fact that they have – or had – 5,000 customers for several years makes it clear that the fine barely put a dent in their revenue. Premium-rate 0818 numbers are hugely expensive to call – 30 minutes on hold for an operator could cost you €15. They are advertised as a way to “earn money from your calls” by phone commercial companies, but their numbering does not follow the 15x pattern of other premium rate lines, and companies are not required by Comreg to publish the price of calling with the number. These numbers are used by companies such as Ryanair and Sky to make it difficult and expensive to complain about poor service. This practice is explicitly outlawed by the European Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights which says Member States shall ensure that where the trader operates a telephone line for the purpose of contacting him by telephone in relation to the contract concluded, the consumer, when contacting the trader is not bound to pay more than the basic rate. In guidance for enforcement, they make it clear To comply with this ‘basic rate’ requirement, traders should use telephone numbers such as standard (geographic) fixed or mobile numbers that are not subject to any special tariff regime. Non-geographic numbers that electronic communications service providers normally include in their offers of ‘bundles’ of minutes at a fixed monthly price, and numbers charged at no more than rates for calls to geographic numbers would also be examples of numbers charged at the basic rate. By contrast, traders should, in particular, avoid using those telephone numbers that enable them to finance or contribute to the costs of call centres or draw additional revenues from these telephone calls through revenue sharing with telecom operators, such as Premium Rate Service (PRS) numbers. Despite this, Comreg have declined to implement this directive into their regulations.

Ken Foxe is a lecturer in DIT and a freelance journalist. On June 27 last, the Irish-American academic and blogger Catherine Kelly was leaving Ireland through Dublin airport when she was detained by two plain clothes gardaí, and questioned about online reporting that she had done on the finances of Fine Gael minister for Social Protection Regina Doherty. Ms Kelly says that she was ‘cautioned’ not to write any more about Regina Doherty, and bullied into signing the garda notes without being permitted to read them, under the threat that she would be made to miss her plane if she didn’t. Regina Doherty has confirmed that she made a criminal complaint against Catherine Kelly – it’s not clear for what; and neither the minister nor the gardaí will comment on the case. The gardaí who detained her talked about Catherine Kelly supposedly harassing Regina Doherty on twitter, and didn’t appear, according to Kelly, to understand that since they both blocked each other years ago, that this isn’t plausible. It’s not clear how, or whether Catherine Kelly’s detention at the airport was legal. There has been some comment online suggesting that she was given a formal garda caution, but a quick look at the information online about the Adult Cautioning Scheme makes it clear that this is not the case. That was back in the summer. I mention this because Regina Doherty has a record of being touchy – to say the very least – about criticism online. Then, on the second of September, a twitter account called Newsworthy_ie put together a couple of clips which started with an excerpt from an interview Regina Doherty gave about the new public service cards, which she said did not contain biometric data, and followed with several clips rebutting that assertion. That was pretty sharp research, but it was made possible by a playback feature on the Oireachtas website, which allows users to find and view video and audio of almost everything that went on in the Dáil and in committees, going all the way back to 2006. The archive was used extensively by journalists – Gavan Reilly of TV3, Philip Boucher Hayes and Katie Hannon of RTÉ all subsequently commented how useful it was for their work – as well as other politically-interested people online. But, without warning, within a day or two of that tweet about Regina Doherty, the entire playback function and all its content was taken offline. More than a decade of material was just made unavailable. Coming up I have an interview – sort of an interview – with a spokesperson for the Houses of the Oireachtas, but first I talk to one of the journalists who first broke the story. So, having talked to Ken Foxe, I thought that the obvious thing to do talk to whoever was in charge. Derek Dignam, the ‎Head of Communications at the Oireachtas had given an interview to RTÉ, but that didn’t cover much of what I wanted to talk about, so I got in touch with the Oireachtas offices to try to arrange an interview with him. I emailed and got a statement from Verona Ní Bhroinn, Press and Public Relations Officer. It was obvious that it was a cut-and-paste response that didn’t address the questions that I asked, and contained a number of errors. I rang and asked could I record an interview, and I was given a time a few days later that I would be able to talk to Derek Dignam. A few minutes before this was due to go ahead,