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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.

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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.

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Thanks to Cathal Mac Coille, former Morning Ireland presenter for taking the chair in this special podcast.

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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.

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Peter Boland, as well as running Cases.ie is the director of the Alliance for Insurance Reform.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Steve Garner is a researcher at the department of Social Science at Cardiff University. The BBC Analysis programme that he appeared in is available here.

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You’re used to me spouting on here based on not much more than my own prejudice, but here’s a topic that I am actually qualified to talk about. I studied linguistics, and I have quite a bit of experience in language learning.

And anyone who has learnt a second language – I’ll even count National School Irish in there – anyone who has learnt a second language will know that the words and phrases in one language often don’t map exactly to the ones in another. A language is a complete speech convention, it’s not a code. Things work differently from one language to another. Some languages have several non-interchangeable words where another language has just one or maybe none, and this can make problems for a language learner who hasn’t grown up with the experience of knowing when to use which word.

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John McGuirk is the founder and editor of Gript. John referred to the cost of building passive homeshere. In our discussion I mentioned an article falsely claiming that hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed scientists ‘plotting to manipulate data, … suppress evidence … and boycott … divergent researchers”.

I also mentioned an adulatory article celebrating the election win of the homophobic, anti-semitic Polish PiS party, and an article on Gript falsely claiming that a video error by ABC News was a ‘hoax‘, and another falsely claiming that British Extinction Rebellion protestors were being paid, and suggesting without evidence that Irish Extinction Rebellion were also being paid.

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There was one thing that we discussed that I have to comment on. On the Gript website there is a video interview under the headline “Pay more taxes to change the weather” – the world’s most expensive religion” with a man called Christopher Monckton, Gript presents him as an expert in climate change and he makes various claims about himself.

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Paul Murphy was an MEP for the Socialist party, since then he’s been elected and 2014 and 2016 as a TD for what became the Solidarity party.

He has now founded the party Rise. In our discussion he mentioned the book The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips.

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Paul Cullen is the Health Editor of the Irish Times. His article headlined Almost 70% of cyclists without helmet at time of head trauma, appeared on the front page of IT last month.

The article was sharply criticised in online discussion, including in this article by Cian Ginty.

In our discussion, I mentioned a number of articles and scientific studies, including this analysis of the reporting of deaths of vulnerable road users by Joe Lindsey, and this study by Kelcie Ralph et al. I also mentioned that international and Irish studies indicate – contrary to popular imagination – motorists break traffic laws more frequently than cyclists.

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The Social Fabric podcast is created by Andrea Splendori, and I’m sharing it in the Here’s How feed to give you a chance to hear a sample episode. If you like it, you can subscribe on his website here.

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Dr Katherine O’Keefe is an author, and the director of training and a management consultant with Castlebridge, a data privacy and information governance consultancy. Our discussion referred to a twitter thread by Katherine and another by solicitor Simon McGarr.

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It’s probably just dumb luck, but I made two pretty accurate predictions about the byzantine machinations over the Brexit deal – or non-deal – in British politics. Firstly back on 9 May, before the first of the three House of Commons votes on Theresa May’s failed deal to leave the EU, I pointed out that that single vote meant that she was finished. The defeat was – as turned out to be the case – too big for her to overturn, and no prime minister could long outlive such a defeat, and that this outcome led inextricably to a takeover by a hardline Brexiteer, David Davis, Dominic Raab, Sajid Javid, or most likely Boris Johnson, and thereby a very hard Brexit.

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Brigid Laffan is currently Director and Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Director of the Global Governance Programme and of the European Governance and Politics Programme at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. She was previously Professor of European Politics at University College Dublin. While she was there she was Vice-President of UCD and Principal of the College of Human Sciences.

She also is an organiser of the annual State of the European Union conference in Florence, which has a high power guest list including the president of the European Commission, president of the European Council and president of the European Parliament.

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Harry Todd is senior research executive at Get Britain Out, previously worked as campaign manager for Conservative Party. He was also the national ground campaign manager for Leave means Leave.

I fact-checked some of the things that Harry said in the interview including that the EU required member states to maintain a VAT rate of a minimum of 17 per cent. In fact the UK VAT rate is 20 per cent, much higher than the minimum standard VAT rate that the EU allows, which is 15 per cent. It is the UK government that chooses to set it at a higher rate.

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I talked to Cormac Halpin, chief statistician with the CSO about the upcoming census.

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Let’s do a bit of science.

Maybe, like me, you have had various social media invaded by people making all sorts of complaints about something called 5G. That’s the newest mobile data standard. Unless you are really special, that doesn’t work on your phone yet, but the networks are being installed, and newer handsets using them will be available soon, probably starting at the top end of the price range.

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Denis Duff, author of the website Better Environment with Nuclear Energy. He’s also a mechanical engineer with 30 years experience in ESB power generation, and is now an independent engineering consultant in Ireland and abroad.

I mentioned projections of how long global uranium deposits – known and unknown – are likely to last, at the current rate of consumption, in which nuclear provides 4 per cent of global energy.

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Fergal Mulligan is the Programme Director at National Broadband Plan at the Department of Communications.

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That’s audio from an Egyptian news channel called Extra news, it’s in Arabic of course. That clip is 17 seconds long, and it’s a news item that, in Arabic, contained 42 words. As I understand it, it was broadcast only once on Extra News, the exact same number of times that it was broadcast on all other Egyptian news channels.

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Declan McLoughlin is a senior manager and the head of communications at the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.

The Times – but not RTÉ – reported on the disgraced cardinal, Seán Brady, who covered up the crimes of the rapist priest Brendan Smith, meeting Pope Francis at Dublin Airport.

Communicorp, owned by Dennis O’Brien owns:

• Dublin’s 98FM
• Newstalk
• SPIN 1038
• SPIN Southwest
• Today FM

There are 39 radio stations licenced to broadcast from Los Angeles – this does not count all the stations that can be heard in Los Angeles broadcasting from other locations.

DAB began in Ireland in 2006, but has atrophied since. By contrast more than half of all radio listening in the UK is on digital, and 100 per cent in Norway.

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Graham Doyle Deputy Commissioner, and Head of Communications with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

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This is audio from one of the count centres in the local elections. The people ah singing are from People Before Profit who lost most of their council seats, but they’ve come across housing minister Eoghan Murphy and they’re letting him know exactly what they think of some of the proposed solutions to the housing crisis.