Posts by William Campbell

Here’s How 91 – Defending Europe

Sep 17, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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.

Brigid Laffan Photo: European University Institute

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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Here’s How 90 – Brexit Implications

Sep 03, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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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Here’s How 89 – the Census

Aug 06, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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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Here’s How 88 – Nuclear Ireland

Jul 12, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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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Here’s How 87 – the National Broadband Plan

Jul 02, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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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Here’s How 86 – Broadcasting in Ireland

Jun 11, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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.

Note to world-at-large: 'balanced coverage' doesn't mean each side being happy with its hearing. Sometimes it means one side getting spanked
— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) January 24, 2017

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Here’s How 85 – Data Protection

Jun 04, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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.

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Here’s How 84 – Cervical Check

May 21, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Dani McCabe is a member of the steering group of Standing 4 Women. We discussed several court cases surrounding the Cervical Check controversy.

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I wrote a piece on the website last December about Brexit, with the title that might have sounded a little pessimistic. It was called It’s Over. Brace for Catastrophe. There’s No Hope. At this point, I don’t think that was pessimistic.

. At this point, I don’t think that was pessimistic.

I can’t see any plausible way forward for the UK that does not lead to disaster, to further disaster. Nobody knows exactly what will happen, just like nobody knows exactly which cups and plates a bull in a china shop will smash, but we don’t need to know those details, to know that it isn’t going to end well.

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Here’s How 83 – Right-wing Positions

Feb 28, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Rowan Croft runs the YouTube political channel Grand Torino. He says that he’s politically centre-right, not extreme right or alt-right, though his channel heavily features figures such as Justin Barrett of the National Party and formerly of Youth Defence, Herrmann Kelly of Irexit, Jim Dowson, the former BNP and Orange Order member who has been involved in supplying equipment to paramilitary vigilanties hunting asylum-seekers crossing the Turkish-Bulgarian border.

During the interview, we talked about Rowan’s faith in Qanon, a bizarre online conspiracy theory which holds that there exists no investigation into Donald Trump conspiring with Russian intelligence, and that the Mueller investigation is, in fact, a cover for investigating how Hillary Clinton and many of her top associates are pedophiles who have abused and murdered dozens of children. Both Rowan and the anonymous online source ‘Q‘ have made many predictions to prove their access to inside knowledge. No substantial prediction has come true.

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Here’s How 82 – RTÉ and the AA

Feb 06, 2019 ~ Written by William Campbell

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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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Here’s How 81 – Unionists and a United Ireland

Dec 12, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Jamie Bryson is the editor of Unionist Voice and a prominent Loyalist activist.

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Homelessness has been in the news a lot recently, as it deserves to be. In most normal societies, even though it’s not really polite to say so, homelessness, in the sense of people living on the streets, or very marginal accommodation, is a very different issue to the high prices in the rental and property market, and difficulty for people in finding a place to live.

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It’s Over. Brace for Catastrophe. There’s No Hope.

Dec 09, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

May’s deal with the EU will go down in flames in the House of Commons on Tuesday. To say her situation is hopeless is an understatement.

Theresa May

More than 100 of her own Tory MPs have publicly committed to vote against her, as have the DUP. She could have hoped to get a few Labour Brexiteers to get her over the line if she was close, and her whips could have bullied, bribed and cajoled a few of her own waverers with knighthoods, plum jobs and threats to expose girlfriends, boyfriends and dodgy business deals.

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Here’s How 80 – Brexit Common Sense or Unicorns?

Nov 27, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Richard Tice is a British businessman, heavily involved in property management and development, and is best known as founder of the pro Brexit organisation Leave Means Leave and former co-chair of the referendum campaign group Leave.EU.

He wrote recently that May’s deal is the worst deal in history. Richard queried my quote from David Davis that “my preference would be that we should remain within the Customs Union of the EU”, even if this meant the UK would have to “give up some freedoms in terms of negotiating our trading arrangements with third countries.” ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 79 – Cervical Fact Check

Sep 27, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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David Robert Grimes is a physicist, cancer researcher and frequent writer and commentator on scientific topics.

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I was talking in the last couple of podcasts about water charges, and the resistance to them, ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 78 – Water Charges

Aug 30, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Brendan Ogle is the spokesperson for Right2Water, and is Unite the Union’s Senior Officer in the Republic of Ireland.

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In the last podcast I had an interview with presidential candidate Gemma O’Doherty, and I have to say that I found the reactions to it pretty depressing. There was a twitterstorm in a teacup ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 77 – Running for President

Aug 21, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Gemma O’Doherty worked for the Irish Independent for 17 years before being dismissed following her investigation of the penalty points scandal. Since then she has worked as an independent journalist on a number of high-profile scandals and particularly on failed murder investigations. On 19 August, she announced her intention to seek nominations to be a candidate in the forthcoming presidential election. ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 76 – the Future of Labour

Aug 14, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is a Labour Party senator and former TD.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

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I wanted to comment a bit about the controversy that blew up in the UK last week about Boris Johnson’s comment about Muslim women who wear burkas.

Boris Johnson, in case you don’t know, is the ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 75 – the Future of Renua

Jul 10, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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John Leahy became leader of Renua Ireland in September 2016. I spoke to him about aspects of his policies set out on the Renua website, including the proposal to

Introduce 90-day detention orders for those Gardai suspect of being actively involved in preparations to murder another or of being responsible for directing the activities of an organised criminal gang.

Jailing people for any length of time because ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 74 – The Case for Brexit

Jun 26, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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Graham Gudgin is a founder of Briefings for Brexit, and a research associate at the Centre For Business Research at the University of Cambridge and the Senior Economic Advisor with Oxford Economics. He was a special adviser to the Northern Ireland First Minister on economic policy from 1998 to 2002.

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You’ll remember that in the last podcast, I was talking to Steve Hinks from the British anti ~ read more ~

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Here’s How 73 – Antivax Claims

Jun 07, 2018 ~ Written by William Campbell

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‎Steve Hinks‎ speaks for the UK Association of HPV Vaccine Injured Daughters, and he attended a conference in Dublin in April organised by the the International Federation for Injured Children and Adults. The conference was also attended by Anna Cannon of REGRET and Dr Jesper Mehlsen.

The conference program claimed ~ read more ~

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