Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Dr Geraldine Simmie Mooney is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Limerick and director of EPI STEM, the National Centre for STEM Education.

*****

One thing that, I thought, the Green Party had that left wing parties didn’t, was an understanding of how taxes could be used to modify behaviour. The Greens are often lambasted from both left and right for this, people saying that they want to tax everything, but that’s unfair.

They had recognised, I thought, that taxation is often a better way to modify behaviour than banning or regulating things. A good example was the plastic bag tax. This started out at 15c per bag, Its purpose wasn’t to raise money, it was to change behaviour.

And it worked. Use of plastic bags collapsed by more than 93 per cent when it was introduced. That tiny amount of money was enough to change mindsets and encourage people not to be wasteful.

I got in a brief Twitter spat with some people including the former Green Party TD and Senator Dan Boyle, about what was announced in the budget as a measure to ease the housing crisis, a three per cent tax on zoned land. This idea has been kicking around for years, not least from the Green Party, because they had recognised the bottleneck in the supply of housing.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Dr Karen Keaveney is Head of Subject for Rural Development, and an Assistant Professor in the School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin.

*****

A short update on the last podcast about the conflicts of interest and poor academic and ethical standards at the Active Consent Unit in NUI Galway – we will be doing a follow-up on that, because we have got large tranches of information, from the press office at NUIG and their Freedom of Information department, and we’re battling for more. One thing that I can say right now is that a spokesman for NUIG essentially conceded in an email to me that the study, that led to them claiming that 29 per cent of all female students and 10 per cent of all male students are raped while in college, they have conceded that those figures do not apply to the wider student body, only to a small non-representative sample of people who answered an online questionnaire.

“The statistics, as presented in the SES 2020, relate to those students who completed the survey. At no stage does it purport to be research detailing the level of sexual abuse in society, reported or unreported…”

NUIG Spokesman

In fact, they said that they had never claimed that those figures applied to students as a whole, and they did a sneaky edit on their website taking down the page where they in fact claimed just that… which was a bit awkward because I had taken the precaution of making an archive copy of that exact page, and when I tweeted out a link to it, they restored that page and most of its content.

Preparing these podcasts is a huge time commitment, we’ve been working on that story for more than a year and there is still more to do on it, and for that reason I want to say a huge thank you to all the patrons on Patreon, that makes it easier for us to put time into researching podcasts and hopefully making them interesting to listen to, and if you could do the same and chip in a euro or two per month, that would really help to do this more often. The Patreon website allows you to do that automatically.