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Linda Ervine is a Unionist and Irish language rights activist from East Belfast, and is the president of the recently-formed East Belfast GAA.

I talked to her about last year’s Ashcroft polling indicating that support for a United Ireland is increasing towards a tipping point in Northern Ireland.

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I was sitting down to do an editorial piece for this podcast, and I had been particularly struck by the apparent arson attack on a house in Carnmore in Galway which, it was believed locally, was about to be allocated to a Traveller family.

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Larry Donnelly is a native of Boston, He teaches law in NUIG. He has published law journal articles in Ireland and internationally, as well as being a regular media commentator. I talked him about an article he wrote for TheJournal.ie.

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Two minds are better than one.

That’s a fairly obviously true saying in most cases; whether in a work environment or elsewhere, most people will be familiar with a situation where people in a group contribute suggestions that together get a solution to a problem that was better than any one member of the group could have come up with.

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Alyn Smith is the SNP member of the Westminster parliament for the Scottish constituency of Stirling. Since we spoke, two opinion polls have been published showing the pro-independence side stretching their lead, excluding undecideds, by up to 10 clear percentage points ahead, 55 to 45.

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You should be paying attention to Belarus. Well, that’s my opinion anyway, I think that it’s worth more attention than it’s getting.

A bit of background, Belarus, then named Belorussia, was one of the republics of the USSR, and the hint is in the name, it’s much closer, culturally and linguistically to Russia than most of the other Soviet republics were.

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Niall Keenan founder and chairperson of the Shared Ireland.

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Sinn Féin are calling for a complete ban on co-living. Their housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, a very talented politician who’s been on this podcast before, not sure if those two are connected, said announcing this that the new housing minister Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil, when he was in opposition was vehemently opposed to co-living, and he, O’Brien, had challenged his predecessor Eoghan Murphy, and then Taoiseach, now Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, that if they thought it was acceptable, they should try living in it.

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Last Saturday there was a demonstration outside the Dáil that was hastily organised to try to capitalise on a controversy that you may or may not have noticed, depending on what corners of Twitter you inhabit, if any.

The genesis of this was an article on the website Gript, a clone of far-right American opinion websites run mostly by former Youth Defence activists, and edited by John McGurk, who’s been on this podcast. It was about the new Green Party minister Roderic O’Gorman, his brief is the newly-renamed Department of Children, Disability, Equality and Integration – he’s basically the Minister for Woke.

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Kerry-Anne Mendoza editor-at-large of the Canary and the author of Austerity: Demolition of the Welfare state and the rise of the zombie economy, published in 2015.

We discussed this Twitter thread of hers:

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It really is good to get feedback from listeners, and to know that there is a growing number of listeners out there, I always appreciate that. And it doesn’t matter to me whether the listeners are ordinary people interested in the world around them, ordinary working stiffs, or whether they are celebrity fans, I’m just happy to know that there is anyone out there at all. I know that some people might be wowed by the rich and the famous, but I try to keep a little more grounded than that… but I have to admit that I had a little frisson of excitement to find out that I have one very well-known fan.

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Malcolm Noonan newly elected Green Party TD for Carlow Kilkenny, having spent 16 years as a local councillor in Kilkenny.

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It was announced last week that Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin won’t be reopening, the operators said that the lockdown, coupled with high rents, have pushed their business over the edge, and it’s no longer viable. That’s obviously bad news for the 110 staff that worked there.

Most of the comments broke down into two categories – nostalgia and protest. The first type was typified by Vivian Lambert, she said:

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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.