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

Keith Redmond is an independent member of Fingal County Council, having been elected on the Fine Gael ticket in 2014 previously run for the Progressive Democrats and briefly been a member of Renua Ireland. He’s also a founder member of the Hibernia Forum.  The Libertarian Party in the US is known for its anti-government stance and espousal of Austrian economics.

I normally wouldn’t do a podcast about a blog post, but this is a blog post that has been signed by almost 500 people, so it’s not an ordinary blog post.  You might have heard about Dean Scurry, he’s one of the activists who organised Home Sweet Home, the occupation of Apollo House by the homeless. Dean also set up a podcast last year where he talks to various people, and the title of his podcast is Pow Wow with Dean Scurry. Pow wow, if you remember your John Wayne films is a term associated with American Indians. Its two main definitions are a North American Indian ceremony involving feasting and dancing, and two, a conference or meeting for discussion, especially among friends or colleagues. Dean got some criticism from a twitter user called Adele McAlear, who said that he “should know that the name you chose belongs to First Nations culture and is not appropriate”. Dean and others disagreed, and Adele went on to tweet “it would be offensive to use [the term] except in the case of an actual pow-wow which has a specific cultural and spiritual reference.” One of the people who tweeted on that thread was the novelist Frankie Gaffeny who, a few weeks later, wrote a piece for the Irish times under the title “Identity politics is utterly ineffective at anything other than dividing people”. In it, he said that, in effect, disputes like these are pointless, that they consume energy that could go into more worthwhile campaigns and that they are based on the false premise categorising people as privileged for narrow reasons, and imposing rules on them for that reason. The article was widely shared online and it provoked a response that included a post called Cop on Comrades on the blog called Feminist Ire, which was critical, not so much of the article, but of men who shared and commented on the article. The article has been signed by more than 480 women who identify themselves as Irish feminists. Feminist Ire has the tagline Not Your Fluffy Feminism, and one of the first signatories was Sinéad Redmond, whose twitter description includes a mention that she is ‘an angry feminist, [who] … enjoys ruining feminism for everyone’.

In the main interview, I talked to Gino Kenny of the People Before Profit party.  Gino’s Facebook page shared the Facebook group Medical Cannabis Testimonials Ireland & UK, and encouraged people to share supposed ‘testimony‘ of people benefiting from medical marijuana. The page promotes the most manipulative and misleading quackery; most of its posts claim that cannabis cures cancer or some other serious illnesses, for which there is no scientific support whatsoever. Paul M Brady seems to be a People Before Profit activist who seems to operate one of their twitter accounts. I say ‘seems to‘ because although I had a long DM exchange with him on Twitter, he declined to answer my questions on that directly. His twitter account posted many hostile messages to twitter users who questioned his party’s online support of people promoting quack medicine. I contacted Nick Lee, the PBP press officer and I sent him the following questions: * Does the People Before Profit party support the concept of evidence-based medicine, as done through clinical research published in peer-reviewed recognised scientific journals? * A number of People Before Profit party social media accounts, including that of Gino Kenny TD have promoted the Facebook page Medical Cannabis Testimonials Ireland & UK, which mostly posts rejecting evidence-based medicine. Does this reflect People Before Profit policy? * If not, why promote such a page? * Does People Before Profit recognise the danger of promoting quack medicine to people who are vulnerable to exploitation because of illness? * Is Paul M Brady a member of your Dublin Bay North branch, or a member of the People Before Profit party? * Is the twitter account @PBP_DublinbayN one belonging to your party? * Is this twitter account operated by Paul M Brady with or without the party’s authority? * Does Paul M Brady speak with the authority of the party? * Has People Before Profit authorised to Paul M Brady send twitter messages on its behalf on the account @PBP_DublinbayN, or any other * Is People Before Profit aware that Paul M Brady appears to have claimed ...

I interviewed Dr Mariano García de Palau of the Kalapa Clinic about his claims to treat a wide range of ailments with cannabis. As he mentioned, there are no clinical trials to validate most of these cures. I also interviewed Dr Robert O’Connor, Head of Research for the Irish Cancer Society.

This podcast is the first part of a major investigation into people selling unlicensed substances that they claim will treat or cure serious conditions. This first part of the investigation, focussing on the Dublin-based Hemp Company.  The Hemp Company’s page selling the Charlotte’s Web product for up to €5,500 per litre is here, That page contains a link on the text “View Everyday Advanced hemp oil supplement facts” with a link to this page which recommends the oil for treating depression and multiple sclerosis, and a comment apparently from a doctor saying “patient of mine uses this for cancer“.

Derek Mooney is a public affairs and communications adviser as well as a former adviser to the Irish government. He’s a columnist on Broadsheet.ie and Slugger O’Toole.  *** In the last podcast, I was talking to Tom Geraghty of the PSEU, that’s the union that represents higher level public sector workers. The interview was in the aftermath of the PSEU annual conference, where Tom was demanding a reversal of the pay cuts of 2009. There was quite  lot of comment online about the interview, most of it was not very sympathetic  to Tom Geraghty. I said that I would come back to that topic, and I want to say a few things, but hang on, because there are actually some things that I want to say that are more supportive of Tom than you might expect. But I can’t say that I agreed with him on everything, you might not be too surprised at that if you remember the interview. Some of the things that Tom said, that I couldn’t agree with, and judging by the reaction online, I’m not alone, one of those things that I disagreed with was Tom saying that the Public Sector was pro active in using new technology. I really don’t know how he gets this. I wrote a book about governance in Ireland eight years ago, and one of the many examples of the terrible deployment of technology in the government sector was the Residential Tenancies Board, the RTB. Their job is to keep and publish a register of landlords and rented homes. It’s not that difficult. At that time, in 2009. I criticised the fact that the RTB weren’t even able to put a simple database online with a basic search function. They published the register in raw Microsoft Excel files, and they used dozens of them, because they were on Microsoft Excel 97, which has a file limit of 65 thousand lines, so anyone who wanted to use the full register had to download dozens of these files. It is trivially easy to create an SQL database from the information, and I could make a searchable front end for the data that would work on any computer or mobile phone in an afternoon, but I’ve just had a look at the RTB website again. Nine years later, the RTB is still using a 20-year-old version of Microsoft Excel to create massive files that have to be downloaded to be read. It’s awkward and difficult to use at best. If you are trying use it on your phone, like, say a student or other tenant who has limited space and budget, it’s hopelessly useless. Now hang on, I do have something positive to say about Tom Geraghty’s demands. But before that, Tom challenged me when I mentioned cases of people working in the public service suspended on pay for years. Richard Boyd Barrett TD got a response from the Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald last month saying one garda sergeant has been suspended from duty on pay, since March  2010, and another garda has been suspended since June 2010. And a prison officer has been paid a third of a million euro since July  2010 despite having not worked a day, he’s been suspended all that time. The Tánaiste also confirmed that a further three gardaí have been suspended since 2012, with three more gardaí since 2013; another two gardaí have been suspended since 2014, with another six gardaí suspended since 2015. All of them are being paid out of taxpayers’ money and none of them are doing  a tap of work. Anyone working in the private sector could not be anything other than gobsmacked by this abuse. But I can tell you from personal experience this type of thing is not rare in the public sector. I don’t have to tell anyone outside the public sec...

Tom Geraghty is the General Secretary of the Public Service Executive Union.  Tom disputed  a couple of the references that I made during the interview. The report of MABS staff dealing with an average of two new cases per week here.  The minister for justice has confirmed that there are gardaí suspended on pay for up to seven years. In case you didn’t notice, I didn’t agree with everything Tom Geraghty was saying. His job is to advocate for his members, so that’s fair enough, but I want to check if what he is saying is valid. I don’t like to get too deep into statistics because I don’t think that it works well in an audio format, but I want to take up a few of the things that Tom said, so bear with me. If you take the real boom, from about 2000 to about 2007, revenue, that’s the tax take, went up from about €30b to almost €50b; then in 2008/9, it crashed back down almost all the way to €30b a year. In the same time 2000 to about 2007 government spending, which is mostly wages shot up along with it. Remember Charlie McCreevy saying “When I have it, I spend it”? Well he really did. But what he had was once-off tax revenue from the housing boom. And what he spent it on was on salaries that would have to be paid every year, boom or no boom. When the crash came, all those people who had been hired and given big pay rises, they still had to be paid, but that huge boom in revenue, on the back of the property market, had stopped. That created a huge annual deficit, every year, clocking the national debt higher and higher; now, people will say what about bailing out the banks. And they are right. Bailing out the banks cost about €70b; a lot of that will be paid back by selling bank shares, the final cost will be about €40b. But continuing to pay the boom level salaries through the financial crisis meant borrowing more than €10b a year, every year. That borrowing clocks up, and overspending €10b a year very quickly outstrips a once-off cost of €40bn. Now Tom says that he is looking for the pay cuts to be reversed, but there is some vocabulary there that I think is a bit slippery. It’s true that public sector workers had pay cuts, technically, but they also had pay increases, even though they didn’t call them that. In the public sector there are three ways to get a pay increase. The first one is a pay increase, just like someone in the competitive sector might get one. But in the public sector, there are also what are called increments. These are automatic pay increases, usually every year, and they are written into the job description. Now most people would regard anything that gave them more pay as a pay increase, but that’s not the way public sector unions see it, and that’s how a great many public sector workers who technically had a pay cut ended up within a year or two with a higher salary than before the pay cut. And that’s the reason why, despite the pay cut, the public sector pay bill went up every single year throughout the crash, although the speed of its increase did slow down. And as well as what the unions call pay increases, and the increments, when someone in the public sector is promoted, they get a pay increase for that as well, and that increase is excluded from what the unions calculate as pay increases also. Tom also said that there needed to be a wider tax base to pay for the increases that he’s looking for.

Opposition parties have called for the Disclosures Tribunal to be expanded. The MacLochlainn Tribunal does exist, but the Boyle Tribunal does not. Yet. Honest. Village magazine summarised the Morris Tribunal report in 2005 saying “the gardaí are in a state of disarray, with low morale, poor discipline, lack of oversight, and a culture of silence…” The Moriarty Tribunal found as fact in 2011 that Michael Lowry had an “insidious and pervasive” influence over the awarding the 086 licence to Denis O’Brien’s company Digifone. Since then, on at least five separate occasions  justice ministers have given the exact same answer –  word for word – as an excuse for why no criminal investigations have begun yet, here, here, here, here and here. The text of the statute on perverting the course of justice is here. Perhaps someone can forward it to the DPP’s office. Google trends shows that the Seanad is almost never searched apart from at election time. This Future Matters leaflet clearly cast the referendum as a choice between reform and abolition, despite no reform being on the ballot.   And this Democracy Matters leaflet offered both ‘more democracy‘ in the seanad but to reserve places for ‘experts‘. Some highlights from prominent senators include Fidelma Healy Eames repeating laughable claims that the marriage equality referendum would lead to Mothers’ Day being banned, citing the antisemetic Holocaust denial website Rense.com as a source; and Lorraine Clifford-Lee proposing laser-defence systems to tackle the supposed growing problem of seagulls. They are laughable, but far more dangerous was Paschal Mooney of Fianna Fáil repeating false claims of antivax conspiarcy theorists, giving credibility to false rumours that have led to a collapse in the HPV vaccination rates, endangering the lives of many young women.

Tony Groves writes the blog Trickstersworld, and we discussed this article which he wrote for Broadsheet.ie.

Lughan Deane is the Communications Executive for the IMPACT trade union, who are currently running the #ClockedOut campaign. In the discussion I slightly overstated the dominance of women in Iran’s technical and engineering facilities, but the point stands. By contrast, women in Norway are remarkably reluctant to enter many male professions. In Ireland it is illegal to pay someone less based on their gender. TheJournal.ie have prepared an excellent analysis of the raw Eurostat figures. Eurostat also report that males suffer almost 80 per cent of workplace injuries and 95 per cent of workplace deaths.

Bill Donoghue is the President and CEO of the Catholic League. The article that he wrote claiming that the Tuam babies story is a hoax is here. The report by the Mother And Baby Homes Commission Of Investigation which detailed the forensic findings is here. The text of the letter by Terry Prone, pouring scorn on Catherine Corless’s work and denying the existence of a grave related to the home is here. A letter a year earlier from Prone’s client, Sr Marie Ryan country leader of the Bon Secours nuns confirms that, in fact, she was well aware that children from the homes were buried on the grounds of the home. Part of Mary Merrit’s story detailing life in one of the homes is here. In response to the findings, the bishop of Limerick, Brendan Leahy said in reaction to the findings “we hang our heads in shame”. The Bon Secours nuns own the profitable Bon Secours healthcare group, and finance minister Michael Noonan opened their new €21m hospital in Limerick last week. The annual birth rate in Ireland is here, and information about the effects of malnutrition were found by the Laffoy Commission. Wages in Ireland in the 1940s (see table 9) were typically between £2 and £4 per week; in the 1920s, wages for agricultural workers were less than 15s (£0.75) per week. In 1928 the Connaught Tribune reported that local politicians thought that the payment to the Tuam home of 10s (£0.50) per week was excessive. It is clear that the Bon Secours nuns had a far more generous budget to feed and clothe the children than many families, before taking into account the profits from their businesses that used the slave labour of their mothers, or the profits of selling adoptive babies to American couples.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked Online. His 2014 article that we discussed is here, and the interim report of the Mother And Baby Homes Commission Of Investigations is here. The second part of my coverage of this topic will be published next week. The global infant mortality statistics that I mentioned are here, and the historical Irish data is here. Terry Prone runs the profitable media consultancy the Communications Clinic, with many high-profile clients. Prone wrote to French TV journalist Saskia Weber, on behalf of her clients the Bon Secours Sisters who ran the Tuam home, explicitly denying that any children were buried there, and pouring scorn on the work of the local historian, Catherine Corless. A year earlier, Sr Marie Ryan, leader of the Bon Secours in Ireland wrote to the relative of a child who died at the home saying that there was ‘a very good possibility that his remains were buried at the small cemetery located at the back of the home that was operated as a general grave‘. Terry Prone has refused to return calls from the podcast seeking an explanation of this, or to claify whether she contacted other journalists to discourage coverage of the story, or encourage stories that were hostile to Catherine Corless. Rosita Boland wrote an article for the Irish Times under the title Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story that appears to refute the original story, although in fact a close reading reveals that it largely focusses on semantic quibbles. Catherine Corless’ daughter Adrienne Corless wrote a long blog post taking issue with Bloand’s article. The Irish Times published a long letter by Boland defending her coverage. Eamon Fingleton wrote a piece for the well-known Forbes Magazine under the title Why That Story About Irish Babies “Dumped In A Septic Tank” Is A Hoax in which he explicitly accused unnamed elements of the press of promoting a hoax story, and repeated the allegation a week later. I had an email exchange with Fingleton, in which he agreed, and later declined to do an interview, so I sent him these written questions: * Around the time you were writing the Forbes story, did you have any contact with Terry Prone?

This is the link to Episode 41 where I originally interviewed RTÉ’s news planner, Donal Byrne, and this is the original of the set-up interview with Paul Reynolds where he gave what he said were details of the contents of the O’Higgins report, which was published two days later. That report, and the possibility that it was made in collusion with the embattled Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan, has since become one of the terms of reference (item g) of the Commission of Investigation announced by An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, into the affair. Reynolds’ report was the unspoken target of another report by Philip Boucher Hayes the next day, which rebutted many of his claims. A transcript of Boucher Hayes’ report is here, but the audio of it seems to have been removed from the RTÉ website. Edit: the audio of this report now seems to have been restored by RTÉ. Ruth Coustick-Deal of Open Media was talking to me about EU proposals for a ‘Link Tax‘ which would require websites to pay for links with snippets to news articles, and require websites to filter posted content to suit rights-holders.

Peter Lilley is the Conservative party MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, and the former Secretary of State for Social Security, and the former President of the Board of Trade. I mentioned George Eustace’s speech at the Farmers Club, where he talked about restoring powers over farming to Westminster, not to the Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh devolved governments. EU rules don’t allow individual countries to enter into trade deals with countries outside the EU. Tweets sent by David Davis MP seem to indicate that he didn’t understand this. Peter Lilley, in the interview, disputed this interpretation of the tweets. You can read them for yourself and decide: Peter Lilley disputed the idea that comments from Tory MPs might come across as hostile to immigrants and prejudice goodwill to the UK in the immigrants’ home countries. Amber Rudd, the UK home secretary was criticised by her own brother, he said she was “denigrating non-British workers” when she published what she called plans to ‘name and shame’ employers who employed immigrants. Liam Fox, the minister for International Trade said “People who come to the country and consume the wealth of the country without ever having created anything are a different kettle of fish. I think it’s about getting control of migration.” Former Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Labour party figures for meeting what he called “a bunch of migrants” and described refuges as “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”.

Happy New Year, and a short message from the podcast host.