Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Wendy Grace is a presenter on Spirit Radio and the director of a communications training company.
*****
Here’s How 175 – Rolling the Dice
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Professor Colin O’Gara is Head of Addiction Services at St. John of God Hospital and author of the book Gambling Addiction In Ireland: Causes Consequences and Recovery.
*****
There is a pattern, I suppose it’s so well-known that it’s a cliché, of people mellowing their view as they get older. One version is the famous quote, I think wrongly attributed to Churchill, ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ But I think that isn’t exactly the effect in reality; regardless of your political views, as you get older, life’s complications present themselves, so it is harder not to take account of them and acknowledge that there are many exceptions that don’t fit into the more strident views you might have on any topic. Nuance is important.
You might be a free market capitalist, and point to the explosion of wealth that it is associated with, and say that everything should be governed by the market, but if you don’t eventually notice that some areas of life persistently just don’t respond to market forces, then you’re not paying attention.
~ read more ~Here’s How 174 – The Price of Everything
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Cormac Lucey is an economics columnist at Sunday Times (Ireland), and lecturer in finance, at the Irish Management Institute, Chartered Accountants Ireland and Trinity College Dublin.
***
And we’re back!
Sorry about the unannounced little hiatus for the podcast. I’ll tell you a bit more about it, but first just to say I’m lining up a great roster of guests, interesting people to talk to, interesting things to talk about, for the coming months.
Kevin and myself will try to devote a bit of time to putting it all together, obviously we have day jobs, and I really appreciate Kevin’s help, but the thought struck me that we could probably do better on social media, so if there’s anyone out there who has the skills and wanted to volunteer to help on that front, or even just suggest a to-do list, we’d love to hear from you.
And that’s a bit of the reason for the for the hiatus, it was partly because I was busy with work and other things in life, but mostly I needed to take a break from all the awfulness in the news, I felt like not being a news junkie for a while, you could say that I needed a low-information diet.
I never wanted to deal with breaking news on the podcast, but forgive me if I’m not bang up to date on every issue, I was pretty thorough about avoiding all the news and social media apps and websites for the past while, and it seems like the algorithms got the hint, I’ve been served up all sorts of strange stuff recently… or maybe that’s just the world moving on.
That’s the Irish actor Saoirse Ronan being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, the Irish-American talkshow host a few years back.
I’m using it as an example because I don’t want to focus attention unfairly on anyone who’s just a regular person on social media, but it’s a good example of one of the things that has been served up to me online recently, which you could probably summarise as ‘Irish funny people, Irish funny language’.
You might have seen the sort of thing, people making serious or not so serious attempts to pronounce Irish words, particularly names and placenames. Inevitably there is a subgenre of other people correcting them, not always correctly, and another subgenre of people getting offended to varying degrees, saying that this is belittling a language and a culture by mocking how Irish words don’t conform to English spelling rules. A good deal of those on all sides didn’t seem to have any connection to Ireland.
To which I would say there are probably things in the world more worthy of getting annoyed about, but, y’know, they’re right.
There is more than an hint here of what Edward Said called Orientalism, essentially viewing other cultures as quaint, or inferior, or amusing or threatening, but never a valid thing in its own right, it only has an existence to be observed by the other.
And it’s worth noting that complaining about inconsistent spelling is not exactly a glass house that you should be throwing stones near if you are in English speaker.
I’m sure that all this has something to do with Ireland’s soft power in the world, but I’m not sure exactly what. Well, we know what the one thing that’s worse than being talked about …
Here’s How 173 – Hidden Faces
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Mathew Creighton is associate professor of sociology at UCD.
*****
I’ve been on a low-information diet.
I suppose I’m someone who is generally pretty well-informed but sometimes that can get a bit too much, so a few months ago I just tuned out, deleted all my news apps, Twitter – while it still had the bird – and all the other social media apps, and I didn’t log in to any news websites. For podcasts, I just hit skip on any that were covering current events.
I suppose I’d say it was for my ‘mental health’ if I was using the fashionable language of the day. I did a couple of other things too, like cycling around more often when I have short trips to make.
I can report back that it works. There is certainly something about the unrelenting negativity that gets to you in a drip-drip way. And, if the news wasn’t bad enough, the hostility and negativity about the news on social media, and in the comments section that almost every news outlet uses to generate more clicks and page impressions is even worse.
~ read more ~HH172 – Never Mind the Bullocks
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Andrew Wright is a fourth generation dairy farmer near Omagh in Co Tyrone, with a big following on Tiktok. We talked about this video he published.
*****
In the world of what used to be called PR, these days they call themselves other things, information management or whatever. PR has PR’d itself. In the world of what we used to call PR, there is a standard practice of trying to present whatever the news is in as positive a light for whoever the client is.
Our client is delighted with the result of this case, that the jury has seen fit to exonerate him and declare him innocent on the parking fine, and he’s more than confident that the conviction on the murder charge will be overturned on appeal.
That sort of stuff.
So when I saw the ah succinct headline in the Irish Times “Rising number of gardaí convicted shows force’s culture changing, Policing Authority chair says”, I had a bit of a smile.
Before Drew Harris took over as garda commissioner, there were typically about 30 or 40 gardaí suspended per year. in the following years, the number went up to over 120 per year, though it has since dipped below 100.
The number of convictions of gardaí has shot up in parallel.
And the Policing Authority thinks that that increase is a good thing. It’s a sign that what they delicately call the culture of An Garda Síochána is improving. They might have said the quiet bit out loud, but I think that they are probably right.
But whatever PR intern, sorry Junior Reputational Governance associate, wrote that line maybe should have thought it out a bit better. It is a good thing. But the fact that that it is a good thing, is not a good thing.
Here’s How 171 – Tilting at Monoliths
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
David Maddox is the political editor of Express Online.
*****
Kevin and myself always appreciate feedback from listeners, we try to reply when we can, but Aengus Ryan send in a sound file, which is great cos I can include it in the podcast.
I think this is an important question, and I think that some people are thinking about it, but not enough. In particular I’d say that Unionists are not thinking about it, which might be a bit of avoiding thinking about something in the hope it never happens, a bit like whistling past the graveyard.
But we should look at the mote in our own eyes first, because we really aren’t thinking about this, we aren’t preparing. One reason for that is that it might seem like a remote possibility, but that strikes me as making the Brexit mistake, not preparing for a possible outcome that could well happen much faster than we expect, and if that snowball starts rolling, it will be hard to make detailed preparations in the heat of the debate that will bring.
Jim O’Callaghan the Fianna Fáil TD and, I think, leadership hopeful, to be fair to him, has made some proposals. I think the proposals are terrible, such as having the Dáil sit in Dublin and the Seanad in Belfast. But bad as it is, it’s helpful for him to bring this up, because at least people are thinking about practicalities.
But the short answer to Aengus’ question is that this hasn’t really been addressed in any official way since the Good Friday Belfast Agreement.
~ read more ~Here’s How 170 – Nobody Tells Us What to Do
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Pádraig Mac Lochlainn is Sinn Féin’s chief whip.
*****
Here’s How 169 – Gift of the Gab
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Mario Rosenstock is a comedian and impressionist, and creator of TodayFM’s Gift Grub.
*****
Here’s something about the Chinese economy.
China’s ‘investment’ in real estate makes Ireland’s property obsession seem breezy and carefree. Just before our crash, 12 per cent of our economy was house-building.
Even if Chinese GDP figures are true, then their reliance on homebuilding is double our peak. (If their GDP is overstated, it’s worse.)
If China crashes, it will shake the world. China holds trillions in dollar and euro reserves, and US sovereign debt. China is not a democracy, but its leaders are sensitive to public opinion, and deeply paranoid about preventing unrest.
If threatened, the Communist Party is likely to pull investment from anywhere it needs to, to keep their internal economy going, and keep their population working, not protesting. But with ghost cities, and one quarter of the economy building more of them, something has to give. But when?
~ read more ~
Here’s How 168 – Mark of Empire
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage.
I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. I should have said that Edwin Montagu, the Liberal MP and Secretary for India, who did not support Dyre, was Jewish, and the resulting campaign against him by Conservative MPs (in support of Dyre) had a strong and explicit antisemitic element.
Ben’s claim that the then Brexit Party, for which he was an MEP, provided a majority of the non-white or ethnic minority members of the 2019 European Parliament doesn’t seem to be correct; a Reform Party spokesperson clarified that they meant that all British MEPs provided a majority of ethnic minority members of the EP. The EP told us that they don’t collect this information, but reporting here and here indicates that isn’t the case, and the Brexit Party had the lowest proportion of ethnic minorities among its MEPs, of all Britain-wide parties although that isn’t a really valid comparison given the small numbers involved.
Notwithstanding all that, I think Ben’s wider point is valid, that while it is imperfect like any country, the UK has a relatively good record on race relations compared to many continental European countries.
*****
John will be 40 next April, or he would be, if he lived. But he didn’t.
He died.
~ read more ~Here’s How 167 – Holes in the Net
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Aubrey McCarthy is the founder and chairman of Tiglin, a charity that provides services to homeless people.
*****
I listen to podcasts quite a bit in arrears. I’m not too worried about being current, I suppose, and I was just listening to a David McWilliams podcast from August, he was talking about the banks, not too surprising. And he touched on a topic that I’m surprised that more people don’t discuss.
David McWilliams didn’t really discuss the topic I’m referring to, but he did kind of arrive at the topic. This goes all the way back to Marx, The Communist Manifesto and all that, and the workers seizing the means of production.
Whatever about my other views, I think this misunderstands how economies work. Firstly, that whole thing about the workers seizing the means of production, whenever it has been put into effect, or even tried to be, it inevitably means the state seizing the means of production, nationalising industries.
~ read more ~Here’s How 166 – Tsar Wars
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
James Ker-Lindsay is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics.
*****
Donald Trump is going to jail.
That’s a whole big story in itself, the reason why Donald Trump is going to go to jail, I’ll talk about that a bit in a moment, but that’s not really the point. The real point is that Donald Trump is going to jail. And he’s going to jail soon.
That’s audio of the crowd at a Trump rally when he was running against Hillary Clinton shouting ‘lock her up’, one of dozens, probably hundreds of times that it happened. I don’t think that any but the most deluded of the people shouting really believed there was any chance that Hilary Clinton would actually be going to jail; someone once said that Trump’s detractors took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.
It might be because there’s been so much insincere talk about sending people to jail that I think people aren’t really taking seriously two things that are going to happen; I haven’t seen any commentator give a reasonable analysis of what I think are two important likely outcomes.
~ read more ~HH165 – A Step into the Dark
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Janie Lazar is the chair of End of Life Ireland.
*****
Some people have said some things about my level of political insight, thanks to them, even if I don’t
really think it’s that impressive most of the time. Actually, whatever level of insight that I do have, I
think is just down to two habits. One is, when you’re discussing any topic, to clearly define what is
the actual problem that you are trying to solve. The second is, if you think of, or hear of a solution,
you consider if it’s implemented, ‘what happens next?’ or ‘then what?’. Basically try to anticipate the
second-next step, as well as the next one.
Debates on politics and social issues often take the form of saying X is a problem, we should do Y to
solve it. What some people maybe miss out on is, if you solve problem X, or if you take action Y, if
that happens what will happen as a result of that?
I suppose the average person isn’t really required to think out their position on the West Lothian
question or the Congress of Vienna, but there are some topics that are very common in popular
discussion, debated from bar stools and office microwaves up and down country, where people
don’t seem to do that, which is fair enough, but sometimes it seems that our politicians, our
journalists, the people who are actually paid to do this, their debate isn’t of a much better quality.
I was thinking of this listening to Mark O’Halloran on the Mario Rosenstock Podcast a while back, I
mentioned this interview a couple of podcasts ago, it’s worth hearing what he had to say.
HH164 – Uncivil Liberties
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Josie Appleton is the director of the Manifesto Club.
*****
You might think that you’re not familiar with the CE symbol, but you probably are, I’m sure you’ve seen it thousands of times. I can’t show you a picture of it in audio format, but the symbol is two semi-circles, the first one making a C, the second with an extra line to make the capital E, and CE stands for, conformité européenne meaning conformity with European standards, and you’ve seen and ignored that symbol on a thousand different products, electronics, toys, basically any manufactured consumer product.
I mentioned cycle helmets on the podcast a few weeks back, that they are designed to protect a cyclist from a fall to the ground, but not from being hit by the driver of a car. Those design standards are codified in the conformité européenne system, and you’re not allowed to make, import or sell any products in the EU that don’t meet those standards.
~ read more ~Here’s How 163 – Guilty Speech
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Pauline O’Reilly is the Green Party spokesperson on Education and Higher Education and Senator and the cathaoirleach of the Green Party.
*****
I heard Mark O’Halloran on an old episode the Mario Rosenstock Podcast recently, he talked very articulately about how the housing crisis affects him, how he as a man in his 50s has to ask someone’s permission to get a pet cat. I totally sympathise with his position, sometimes it’s small things like that which capture so well the dysfunction created by the housing crisis.
I’m sure some left-wing party is writing up a bill as I speak called something like the Tenant’s Right to Pets and Animal Companionship Act 2023. In fact, Sinn Féin is actually proposing a bill to make it illegal to ask for sex in return for a tenancy. That sounds horrific, I’m not convinced how widespread a problem it is, but if it even happens once, that’s obviously unacceptable.
But consider this – do we have a problem of supermarket workers demanding sex in return for groceries? Is that even conceivable? In Ireland, it’s not, but in recent years, there have been scandals of aid workers in both Somalia and Haiti, in the midst of famine, demanding sex for food. The conclusion is obvious. That can only happen where people are so desperate – be it for food or housing – where people are so desperate that they are vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
~ read more ~Here’s How 162 – Gravy Trains and Spin Cycles
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Repeats on podcasts don’t always make a lot of sense, but if you are subscribed, you’ll know that I put up a podcast from 2019 into the feed again last week; the podcast was an investigation into RTÉ and their relationship with the AA which supplied them with AA Roadwatch, the erstwhile traffic news segments.
The issue that I focussed on was that the supply of staff and studios for RTÉ quite clearly met RTÉ’s definition of a sponsored programme, and quite clearly breached RTÉ’s rules against accepting sponsorship from political lobbyists, and against accepting sponsorship from businesses with an interest in the content of the sponsored programme, and against allowing the sponsor to have any say in the content of the sponsored programme.
In that podcast I said that the response of RTÉ to my questioning was basically stonewalling. I asked them about breaching sponsorship rules, they said that it wasn’t a sponsored programme. I pointed them to their own criteria of what counted as a sponsored programme, and that AA Roadwatch clearly met those criteria, and at various stages they promised to get back to me with answers, they promised to tell me what exactly AA Roadwatch was if it wasn’t a sponsored programme, I sent many reminders over months, but they never did.
~ read more ~Here’s How 161 – Once Again for Those at the Back
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
I think that it’s about time to hear this edition of the podcast from 2019 again.
Dr Michael Foley is professor emeritus at the school of media at TU Dublin – formerly DIT – also a member of the NUJ’s Ethics Council, and has been invited by the International federation of Journalists and UNESCO to write a syllabus on journalism safety and ethics.
*****
Because of the detailed nature of the podcast, I sent a rough cut of the show to Neil O’Gorman of RTÉ in advance for his comments a couple of days before publication, and invited his comments. Below is Neil’s response, with interjections in italics from myself.
~ read more ~Here’s How 160 – Heading South
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Uki Goñi is a historian, journalist and author who has lived in the United States, Ireland, and Argentina.
*****
Sometimes it helps to draw a parallel between two events in the news, but two big recent stories – in Ireland, the scandal of RTÉ lying about Ryan Tubridy’s salary, and internationally the over-before-it-began apparent coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin, those two might seem like they exist on two totally different planes, never to intersect.
But I think that there might be a parallel. To deal with RTÉ, I think that far too little attention was paid to an anonymous article written in the Sunday Independent by someone that Sindo editors assure us they know the identity of, and who is a senior Irish media ad agency figure. It tells some very important details about how the advertising world works.
~ read more ~Here’s How 159 – War and Peace
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
James Ker-Lindsay is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics.
He has created many Youtube videos explaining his subject.
*****
The Financial Times recently made a change to their style guide. The style guide of a newspaper is a list of rules about how articles should be written, all big newspapers have them, it’s to keep the language and spelling and so on consistent across the whole publication.
So most style guides specify, for example, that numbers up to ten should be spelled out, and numbers from 11 onwards are written as digits. They also say what spelling or what grammar style to use if there is more than one version considered correct.
The change that the Financial Times made was to treat the word ‘data’ as a singular rather than as a plural. That means instead or writing ‘the data are showing’ something, they will use English the way most of us do and write ‘the data is showing’ whatever.
~ read more ~Here’s How 158 – Up with this sort of thing Part II
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Freda Wallace is the cohost of the Gender Nebulous podcast.
Statistics of the sharp rise in the number of referrals to the Tavistock clinic, and their age distribution are here, and here.
False claims that puberty blockers, given to children to delay typical-age puberty are ‘completely reversable’ are incredibly common, and have been made by the taxpayer-funded GenderEd, authored by a TCD academic, on the website of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Gay Community News, the student paper Trinity News, and Noah Halpin of TENI, quoted without challenge on RTÉ.
~ read more ~Here’s How 157 – Up with this sort of thing Part I
Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Freda Wallace is the cohost of the Gender Nebulous podcast.
*****
I want to comment on a rant that was previously posted on this podcast. The rant in question was posted with episode 120 Levelling the Field and the topic was Minimum Unit Pricing for Alcohol or MUP. MUP, long-time listeners may recall, prohibits the selling of an alcoholic beverage below a price determined by the alcohol content of the beverage.
To recap, by my reading, William made three arguments. First, that the MUP policy is motivated by a desire to advantage pubs over off license competitors. Second, that demand for alcohol is inelastic and therefore this measure is unlikely to be an effective measure for reducing alcohol consumption. Third, and relatedly, that higher prices may paradoxically lead to increased consumption. Therefore, it was concluded that MUP should not be perceived as a public health measure. Supporting evidence is presented by pointing out that page 26 of the 2011 Fine Gael General election manifesto says that below cost alcohol sales will be banned to support the viability of pubs. Further, it was noted that Ireland has both high alcohol consumption and high alcohol prices so the correlation is not there to support price increases as a preventative measure. Finally, marketing strategies from other industries, like the diamond trade, were identified as positive examples of an industry conspiring to increase the price to increase the importance of the product.
~ read more ~
