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Brendan is the Labour Party TD for Wexford, and former party leader.

*****

So, we’re talking about a war.

We’re talking about a war where a huge, nuclear-armed superpower, attacks a territory to its south that this formerly-communist superpower views not as a real country, it views but as an integral part of its own country, and the superpower’s nationalist leadership is still pretty sore about how this territory got to be independent in the first place.

To rub salt in the wound, this territory is doing much better, and is certainly much more democratic than the superpower; and another point of aggravation, this territory is politically much closer to the west, the United States in particular, and is receiving a huge amount of military aid from the west, and even though it is said to be exclusively for defensive use, the superpower sees that aid as a direct threat to its own security.

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Eoin Ó Murchú was the political editor for Raidió na Gaeltachta.

*****

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Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

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Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

*****

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Kellie Armstrong an Alliance party MLA for the Strangford constituency.

*****

I saw a load of comments from commentators online, from talking heads on radio and TV, from people on Twitter, that the mobilisation ordered by Putin last week to try to shore up his invasion of Ukraine was stupid. It was stupid to try to mobilise people with no military experience, it was stupid to think they could have any effect against high-precision, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians are now getting.

It was stupid not to consider that they would have no experienced officers, it was stupid to not understand that this lack of leadership is a key reason why Russia is losing, it was stupid not to consider the destabilising effect that this order would have in the population in Russia, it was stupid to have all the skilled young men fleeing over the closest border, it was stupid, stupid, stupid.

I’m not convinced.

This made me think of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. In case you don’t know, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is listed as the world’s richest man, has proposed and apparently started working on a high-speed mass transport system that would involve a sort of train inside a vacuum tube. With all the air evacuated from the tube and no wind resistance, people could be transported at over a thousand km per hour, as fast a jet liner. This has gained him huge publicity, and quite a bit of political traction.

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It’s Q&A time! Thank you to everyone who sent in a question!

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Joel Keys is a Belfast Loyalist activist and prolific tweeter.

*****

I discovered a big discrepancy. Well, I didn’t so much discover it as notice it. And it isn’t really isn’t a big discrepancy, it is an enormous discrepancy. A gigantic discrepancy. A sort of a so-big-you-could-see-it-from-space. discrepancy

This is the discrepancy. Have a look at Daft.ie any given day, on the front page you can choose to browse by section, and go to Rental properties. No filters, look at the whole country, any type of residence. Much has been made of this. These days, you will normally get less than 800 properties.

Of course, some properties that go up for rent don’t go on Daft, they are rented by word of mouth, via social media contacts or a postcard in the window of a local shop, but Daft on their website say that 90 per cent of property sales in Ireland are on their site, so it’s a good guess that daft have the bulk of rentals, and movements up and down in their number of listings match the market pretty closely.

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Marc Coleman is a business consultant, former broadcaster and journalist. He is currently working on a book on the persistence of western democracy.

*****

‘Magical thinking’ is a great phrase that I learnt years ago, it’s a concept that’s useful to understand someone’s thought processes, maybe even your own. If you know what it is, skip forward about two minutes; if you don’t, it’s important to understand that it’s not a positive thing, in fact it’s very negative.

The concept of magical thinking is often used by therapists, psychologists and so on, to classify a particular thought process, and to help their patients to get over it. You see it at a comical level sometimes in kids, don’t step on the cracks in the pavements or the monster will get you. That’s basically the core of it, believing that one thing can affect another thing where two seconds of rational thought by an adult will tell you that it can’t.

People with mental health problems frequently exhibit magical thinking. A very famous example would be John Hinckley, Jr, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, did it because he thought it would impress the actress Jodie Foster and make her fall in love with him.

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Jessica Berlin is a commentator at Deutsche Welle News, and she has worked for 15 years working with in security policy, transatlantic affairs, sustainable business and technology, and aid industry reform across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She founded the Berlin-based strategy consultancy CoStruct, she holds an MSc in Political Economy of Emerging Markets from King’s College London, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.

She responds to the call from many prominent Germans, including Professor Julian Nida-Rümelin from Tuesday’s podcast, published in Die Zeit newspaper under the headline Ceasefire Now.

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Seán Keyes is the finance correspondent for the Currency, a subscription news website.

*****

I spoke to a Sinn Féin supporter in the years after the Good Friday Belfast agreement, I think it was during one of the interminable negotiations trying to get DUP to participate and have the institutions up and running, and she said one thing about the peace deal that I thought was perceptive, if not very diplomatic.

She said “The Unionists are too thick to realise that they’ve won, and the Shinners are too cute to admit that they lost.”

Mindsets may not have changed for some at least, but I think that calculation may have changed in the years since. First off, there’s peace. In that sense alone, everybody won; that can’t be underestimated. But secondly, the Unionists may have won the war, if you want to call it that, but the nationalists may yet win the peace.

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Ellie O’Byrne is co-editor of Tripe and Drisheen, a Cork-based local news substack, and we discussed a recent article of hers.

*****

In talking to Ellie, I mentioned a tweet from Cllr Fiona Ryan of People Before Profit, who claimed that there are 25,000 ‘Airbnb vacancies’ in Ireland. I used the website InsideAirbnb.com to show that these are mostly rooms in occupied houses or regular Bed & Breakfasts, or houses that are normally occupied by residents, and let on Airbnb when they are away.

Of those that remain – about 8,000 throughout the country, of which about 400 are in Dublin – they are concentrated in tourist areas and a number of them are purpose-built tourist accommodation, not suitable for residential use.

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Derek Mooney presents Mooney on Politics. Give it a listen.

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Frank Armstrong is the editor of the magazine called Cassandra Voices.

*****

I got a lot of the ideas for this discussion from an article by Yuriy Gorodnichenko on Berkeley Blog.

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Reinhard Bütikofer is the senior member of German Green Party delegation to the European Parliament.

*****

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Sarah Hurst is a journalist who has been reporting on Russia for thirty years – her interview starts at 15:00.

*****

Sharon Keogan is an independent member of Seanad Éireann, she’s one of those independent politicians who discovered her deeply-held belief in independent politics, just after she discovered that she had failed to get a nomination to run as a Fianna Fáil candidate, despite being on that party’s national executive.

She’s made a career of gaining publicity off the back of baiting public outrage with ludicrous statements targeting vulnerable members of society, such as when she said that disabled children should be microchipped. She’s cute enough to couch her trolling in terms of concern, while dog-whistling to the lowest instincts in society.

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Michael Doherty is the PRO of the Mica Action Group.

*****

I was talking to Billy Kelleher in the last podcast about Ukraine, and the west’s reaction, and in particular the attitude of MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace.

Naomi O’Leary started and epic Twitter discussion over Easter about the contrasting attitude of Wallace and Daly to authoritarian regimes and to the west. My attitude to this is pretty simple, it’s that two separate things can be true at the same time. It can be true that the west is responsible for gross human rights abuses, resource extraction, environmental destruction in other parts of the world, it can be possible to condemn that, while still acknowledging that there are totalitarian regimes in different parts of the world that are worthy of being condemned, and that are, in fact, much, much worse. Saying that they are worse doesn’t undermine condemnations of actions by western governments that are bad, just not on the whole as bad. And condemning the abuses by western governments doesn’t undermine criticism of authoritarian governments elsewhere.

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Billy Kelleher was Fianna Fáíl’s only MEP from being elected in 2019 for the South constituency until he was joined from the subs bench by Barry Andrews. He previously he served as a senator since 1993, and as a TD since 1997, including as and served as a minister of state from 2007 to 2011.

There have been numerous credible reports of people being taken hostage by invading Russian troops in Ukraine, including that of Svetlana Zalizetska mentioned here.

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Ewan Mackenna is a sports journalist who was written five books on sports. Recently, he has been blogging and tweeting about the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

*****

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John McGuirk is the editor of Gript.ie

There is no doubt about the extent of the housing problem in Ireland, certainly not if you’ve been listening to this podcast, I’ve been banging on about it for longer than I, probably longer than you, care for.

And if you’ve been listening, you’ll know that I’m a sceptic about the more creative, more interventionist suggestions that are supposedly targeted at easing the crisis. There are two reasons why I don’t trust them. The first is that they generally don’t work – for example the focus on banning Airbnb, which sounds good, until you realise that, in Dublin for example, the number of houses or apartments on Airbnb that could potentially be released to the residential market is 253.