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Amun Bains is a journalist.

*****

The first amendment to the US constitution starts “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”

Our constitution is not quite so concise. Article 44 of De Valera’s handbook for governing deals with freedom of religion. Section one says “The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.”

But then section hits reverse gear somewhat and starts “Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen.”

It goes on saying “The State guarantees not to endow any religion” and “The State shall not impose any disabilities or make any discrimination on the ground of religious profession, belief or status.”

So we have freedom or religion, sort of.

Section four starts “Legislation providing State aid for schools shall not discriminate between schools under the management of different religious denominations…” That is a cute bit of phrasing, it says that you can’t discriminate between different religious denominations, but it does not prohibit discriminating against non-religious schools, or their pupils.

It continues saying that legislation must not affect prejudicially the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at that school.

So that’s where they are throwing a bone to the non-religious, but it’s a pretty limited one. It’s saying that if a school is receiving public money – which is pretty much all of them – it must allow pupils to attend school without attending religious instruction.

So the non-religious are not entitled to protection from discrimination in education in the way that religious are. You have a right to protection from discrimination for which religion you practice, but not from discrimination for being non-religious.

The last two sections of the article give special protection to the property of religious denomination – they can’t have their property taken away, and they have a right to manage that property and other assets as they see fit.

Note that this guarantee about property is given to each religious denomination, but not to any other organisation or individual. Religions get special protection for their property, but I want to go back to the supposed right that non-religious pupils have to attend publicly-funded religious schools, but skip the religious indoctrination.

The Catholic church and the schools that they run – still the vast majority of the schools in the country – have a long history of making life as awkward and difficult as possible for parents who didn’t want their children to be given religious indoctrination. There is no reason why religion classes couldn’t be scheduled for Wednesday or Friday afternoons, so those who didn’t want to go could go home early.

But instead, the bishops instruct each of their schools to have a religion class every day around noon. They also take advantage of the fact that the constitution says that they can’t compel parents to have their children attend, but there is nothing to say what they have to do instead.

So a common practice is to tell parents that they – the parents – must make their own arrangements for their children to be taken care of during this period, every single day, right in the middle of the school day. Other schools have told pupils that they must sit in silence in the corner, or alone in another room, and not allowed to do homework, or even read a book, because then ‘everyone else would want to do it’.

So you can see how some people might look enviously to the version of freedom of religion in the US constitution, even if that doesn’t seem to be adhered to so much these days. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about guarantees of religious freedom. I take a different view.

I don’t think we should have freedom of religion. I don’t think we should guarantee it in the constitution, or in law or anywhere else. We shouldn’t give freedom of religion, for the simple reason that we don’t know what it is.

Now, to be clear, I’m not advocating a situation where the government could pass a law sending in squads to close down the churches and synagogues and mosques, or where the state or an employer could impose any sort of sanction on you for believing or not believing in one god or another.

But here’s the thing. A long while ago – when the Catholic church was making excuses, saying that they had dealt with their rapists according to their own internal rules, Michael McDowell, I think then the justice minister, said that the rules of the Catholic church had no more relevance than the rules of the local golf club. He was wrong and he was right. It was unhelpful to put it in terms that many would find insulting and demeaning, but the message he was trying to convey was correct.

No religion can set itself up as a parallel state, and no religion can expect to be treated any different to any other institution.

What is freedom of religion? That’s the problem – we don’t really know. Most people would think about saying prayers or going to mass. But we already have in the constitution freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Those activities would be protected anyway.

Should people be denied employment because of their religion – obviously not, but if it doesn’t involve religion, should irrelevant beliefs be a valid reasons for discrimination? I think a much clearer standard would be to say that discrimination on any irrelevant grounds should be prohibited.

You shouldn’t be discriminated against because you believe in Jesus or Vishnu, or L Ron Hubbard, or aliens from the planet Zog.

If it’s irrelevant to the role you are in, or applying for. And that’s the point. Putting religious freedom into the constitution is essentially a black box. Anyone can come along and say that anything is in their black box, and by the nature of religion, we can’t tell them that it isn’t; and those things could very well include things that justify discrimination.

One example, you might have seen some of the videos on social media where sovereign  citizen freeman on the funny farm types try to tell judges or police that the laws don’t apply to them, they don’t need a driving licence or have to pay their debts or whatever.

In the US those fringe movements have  propensity to say that their belief is based on their religion. Other have said that they will not vaccinate their children, or even send them to school, and based their justification. Even the flat earthers will often say that, for some reason, their reading of Christianity tells them not to believe that the earth is round.

You or I can laugh at that, and point out that there is nothing in the bible or Christian tradition about a flat earth, but that misses the point. If they say that’s their religion, we can’t exactly tell them that it isn’t.

The Mormon church was forced to prohibit polygamy, under threat of having Utah refused statehood in the US, and a minority of Mormons still reject that claim. Up to this point, the crazier, outlier beliefs have been swatted aside by the courts and wider society basically refusing to take them seriously, but that informal system breaks down when there isn’t such a monolithic mainstream view of what is and is not religious.

We are fragmenting as a society, and we in danger of someone coming up with an interpretation of what they say is their religion that is not nuts enough to ignore, but is nuts enough to cause disruption.

The solution is that we must agree which freedoms are allowed for everyone, and agree that there are no other special freedoms that you get depending on which cosmic zombie you believe in …  or which golf club you are a member of.

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Daniel Mulhall is a consultant with DLA Piper law firm and, prior to that, he was ambassador of Ireland to Malaysia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

*****

I want to talk about a couple of fellas that I’m really not so sure of.

It’s hard to overstate how disappointing the last century has been for Argentina. I think it was David McWilliams who said on his podcast that if you were emigrating from Ireland 100 years ago, and your choice was to go around the world to Australia, north to Canada or south to Argentina, based on economic potential, Argentina would have been the obvious choice. Of the three, Argentina came first in population, in GDP and in per capita income.

Argentina had a much better climate, huge natural resources, and a seemingly never-ending market in Europe for its seemingly never-ending supply of beef produced by its vast area of grasslands, once refrigerated shipping had become a possibility.

Not many Irish took that route, perhaps because of language differences, but there can be no doubt that those who did bet on the wrong horse, or maybe cow. The Wikipedia article on the Economic history of Argentina says

By 1913, Argentina was among the world’s ten wealthiest states per capita. Beginning in the 1930s, the Argentine economy deteriorated notably.

I think that’s putting it kindly. Argentina is now ranked at number 72 globally for GDP per capita. Canada is in the fourteenth slot, and Australia is at number 11.

Argentina holds the world record for the number of IMF interventions; 21 since they joined the International Monetary Fund in 1952, no kidding. We’re still smarting over our disgrace 15 years later, quite rightly, but for two generations, Argentina has had an average of one IMF intervention every three and a half years; in fact of the 94 countries in hock to the IMF, Argentina accounts for almost a third of the total debt.

But most countries on that IMF list were always poor, at least in modernity. The real kick in the teeth for the long-suffering Argentinians is that used to be rich. It’s a bitter irony that its name is literally about how rich it was. I could go into great detail about the reasons for Argentina’s decline; I have spoken recently about how close the correlation is between democracy and wealth, as well as every other positive index, but I don’t have the space for that here, I’ll just quote Wikipedia again:

The single most important factor in [Argentina’s] decline has been political instability since 1930 when a military junta took power, ending seven decades of civilian constitutional government.

Then came one of the fellas that I’m not so sure about.

On 10 December 2023, Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina. It’s important to note that his party, La Libertad Avanza, was not a large political force. Even now, they only hold 16 per cent of the seats in parliament. The party is variously described as far-right, ultraconservative or libertarian, and it’s hard to tell, but I think that does not describe Milei adequately.

In case you haven’t heard of him, his style is ah unique, to say the least, and I’m not just talking about his hair. He must have been an Eminem fan in the noughties, he campaigned holding a chainsaw that he revved up in front of crowds to symbolise what he intended to do to public spending.

All this I can source online, but after that it gets difficult. Things are so chaotic in Argentina that it’s easy to manipulate start and end-dates to make figures sound either very good or very bad. So many people are determined to paint him in either a good or bad light, that it’s hard to work out the truth, and trying to research Milei’s job performance feels like …

Argentina’s inflation rate, as reported by Reuters, now has a rate of about three per cent [yaaa]  three per month, which works out to about 45 per cent per year, but that’s down from a rate of over 1,500 per cent, but that rate was when Milei was first in office [awww] but in the years before he took office, the rate was between 100 and 200 per cent, so getting it under 50 per cent is still an achievement [yaaa], or maybe it’s not because Milei cut public spending by 31 per cent, taking a massive amount of money out of the economy which of course flattens the inflation rate, because nobody has any money to buy anything.

There’s a story in Reason magazine – and I want to preface this by saying that this is not a neutral source, it’s very much a libertarian publication, and they are really fanboys for the sort of economics Milei promotes, but to be fair, their reporting is usually factual. The Media Bias Fact Check website rates them as ideological, but highly credible.

Reason magazine’s story says that Milei swept away rent controls on private residences, along with most other non-financial regulation on residential letting. This caused some rents to shoot up, not surprisingly. But Reason reports, it also caused a huge influx of new supply into the market, which they say has caused real rents, that’s to say adjusted for very substantial inflation, it caused real rents to go down.

This, they say, is evidence of the free market working. The previous laws had been keeping a lot of supply out of the market, because rent controls were set in pesos, rent could only be adjusted at set periods, and in line with the official inflation rate, which didn’t reflect a currency and economy in freefall.

Again, I want to put a big health warning beside this story, it seems like they are using data from just one listings website to judge both the supply and rental prices, but I think that with hundreds of thousands of vacant properties in the midst of a housing crisis, we don’t have to look too far to realise that regulation can have a big impact on supply.

But what about the other fella?

He’s Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador. Like Milei, he also comes from a minor party, and even more than Milei, his radical policies have made him wildly more popular than his party.

El Salvador, has its share of economic problems, but it’s real issue is crime, and whatever you think of them, there is no ambiguity about the success of his policies, and the voters certainly agree. Bukele won with 53 per cent of the vote in 2019, and was re-elected a year ago with 85 per cent of the vote – he got 13 times more votes than his nearest rival.

With about the same population as Ireland, El Salvador had 6,656 murders in 2015. El Salvador had 200 times more murders than Ireland. You heard that right, 200 times more. Ireland has about one murder every 10 days, El Salvador had 20 murders every day, the large majority of them associated with the country’s huge and powerful criminal gangs, notably the notorious MS13.

Bukele basically sent in the military to defeat the gangs, and has rounded them up into newly-built maximum security prisons.

In March 2022 Bukele started the régimen de excepción, basically emergency powers which suspended many constitutional rights along with making a series of criminal reforms, making conviction and imprisonment easier and harsher. It was supposed to last for 30 days, but it is still in force and has been extended 28 times. On its own terms, it’s working. The murder rate is down 98 per cent.

The effect of this cannot be underestimated. It seems to have brought El Salvador from being one of the most dangerous countries in the world, to being close to par with many western countries.

But, even without talking about the human rights issues here, it might not be all that good. The murder rate peaked in 2015, seven years before Bukele’s régimen de excepción, when the gangs essentially negotiated a nonaggression pact between themselves,   followed by a more comprehensive peace pact in 2019.

And the figures don’t include killings by police, which have shot up, there have been about 150 since the start of the régimen de excepción, plus maybe 100 murders in prisons, [awww] where so many gang members now are. It’s hard to tell, but gang members may also have started a policy of hiding the bodies of victims, to avoid police attention, where before they would often display victims’ bodies prominently, to create fear in the population.

But here’s the thing. Taking all that into account, you could say that Bukele has cut the murder rate not by 98 per cent… but only by 90 per cent.

And if you question either his methods or achievements, or those of Milei in Argentina, you have to do that in the context of the situation.

You may say that Milei, in his efforts to reform the economy could end up burning the house down. The problem is that he simply can’t do that, because the Argentinian economy was already a burnt-out, smoking wreck when he arrived.

And the human rights violations in El Salvador are real and serious, but Salvadoreans were not choosing between rights violations and no rights violations; they were choosing which rights violations, and even the post-gang truce murder levels, 120 murders a month or so was horrendous, and of course they are tip of the iceberg of the vast criminality that Salvadoreans had to endure every day.

Of course, the reason these two outsiders were elected was because of the horrendous state of their countries.

So what’s to learn? One, criticise them, for sure, but Two do that in the context of the situation they are trying to handle, and Three most of all thank the stars that we have the luxury of not having to choose which of our rights should be violated.

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*****

Now that the dust has settled after the election, congratulations to all the candidates, all 686 of them. Congratulations to everyone from Pearse Doherty who got 18,898 first preference votes in Donegal, all the way down to Seán O’Leary who stood for election in Wicklow and got nine votes.

Pearse Doherty got that massive vote despite having two Sinn Féin running mates, who got another 12,000 votes between them. If Sinn Féin had managed their vote a bit better, they might have distributed it among the three candidates more evenly and won three seats in Donegal, but that’s a story for a different day.

And Seán O’Leary, who got just nine votes in Wicklow, congratulations to him too, and let’s remember that he also ran in Carlow Kilkenny where he got 26 votes, and Cork South-West where he got 27, and he ran in a bunch of other constituencies including Cork North-West where he got a whopping 110 votes bringing his total to 324 between all the constituencies that he ran in, so I hope that cheered him up a bit.

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Wendy Grace is a presenter on Spirit Radio and the director of a communications training company.

*****

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Pádraig Mac Lochlainn is Sinn Féin’s chief whip.

*****

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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 ~

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Uki Goñi is a historian, journalist and author who has lived in the United States, Ireland, and Argentina.

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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.