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This is Ray’s petition against what he calls the unfair ‘2Tier’ Irish car tax law. This is a table of the current motor tax rates for pre- and post-2008 vehicles.
Julien Mercille
Dr Julien Mercille is a lecturer in the Department of Geography in University College Dublin, and a frequent columnist and media contributor.
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Tony Downes is an Administrative Officer in Census Publicity with the Central Statistics Office. Census day is on 24 April, the exact centenary of the 1916 Rising. If you didn’t receive a census form yet, you should call 1850 2016 04 to get one.![census-logo[1]](https://hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/census-logo1.png){kind=logo}
Information about problems in the US census is here.
Note that the initial question on religion in our census assumes that the respondent has a religion, and that religions are presented in declining order of popularity in the previous census, but No Religion, the second most popular response by a wide margin, is listed in seventh place, separate from the rest of the list.
The study Religious Practice and Values in Ireland, done by the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference in 2010 found that 82 per cent of the republic’s population label themselves as Roman Catholic, but of those,
Which makes you wonder exactly what exactly the five per cent of Irish people who identify as Catholics, do not believe in life after death but do believe in heaven are thinking.
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Cllr Sorcha Nic Cormaic is the Sinn Féin councillor for Dundrum on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, and candidate in Dublin Rathdown. In our discussion, I mentioned this report from the EPA.
Sorcha Nic Cormaic
Cllr John Brassil is the Fianna Fáil councillor for Listowel on Kerry County Council and one of the party’s candidates in Kerry.
John Brassil
Seán Kyne TD represents Galway West and is a Fine Gael candidate in the new constituency of Galway West – South Mayo.
Seán Kyne
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Paddy Power’s odds on the next government are listed here, and this is Adrian Kavanagh’s analysis of recent opinion polls.
Eamon Delaney
Eamon Delaney is the director of the Hibernia Forum, he’s also a writer, journalist and former diplomat. We discussed their general election briefing and mentioned the UN’s target for overseas aid, which Ireland falls far short of. Resistance to reform of Ireland’s arcane legal system is detailed here and here.
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Bríd Smith is the People Before Profit candidate in Dublin South Central.
Bríd Smith
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Anne-Marie McNally is the Social Democrats candidate in Dublin Mid West. She also writes extensively for Broadsheet and works in Leinster House for the party.
Anne-Marie McNally
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Eamon Ryan is the leader of the Green Party, and a candidate for the Dáil in the Dublin Bay South constituency.
Eamon Ryan
This is theJournal.ie article about Glenealy, Co Wicklow persuading candidates not to display posters along with dozens of anti-poster comments, and this is their, and in their online (unscientific) poll, 89 per cent of people supported banning posters entirely.
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Mailo Power, running in Waterford for Renua defends her party’s policies ahead of the election.
Mailo Power
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With the approach of the election, I hope to interview a candidate for each political group about their platform in the 2016 election.
Finian McGrath
Finian McGrath TD will be running in the election in Dublin Bay North for the Independent Alliance. These are the 10 principles that the Independent Alliance says it will require to give its support to any government.
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This is the coverage of Patrick Durcan’s comments about Martin McNamara and his 321 previous convictions at Killaloe District Court on 5 January.
Conor Cullen is the head of communications and advocacy for Alcohol Action Ireland.
Conor Cullen
In the discussion we talked about the report recommending a minimum price for alcohol, proposed to be €1.00 per unit of alcohol – a unit is 10ml of pure alcohol. This would make the minimum price for a standard bottle of spirits (700ml, 40% alcohol) to be €28.00; a 500ml can of 5% beer would have a minimum price of €2.50. ~ read more ~
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Following the interview with Sarah Benson from Ruhama in Episode 21, Gaye Dalton got in touch with me to discuss her personal experience, and how that affects her view or Ruhama’s work. Gaye’s YouTube channel is here.
Gaye Dalton
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Sinead Carroll is a solicitor with Ernest J. Cantillon Solicitors. Jason O’Sullivan is the founder of JOS Solicitors.
Cllr Hugh McElvaney
Hugh McElvaney has been a Fine Gael councillor in Monaghan since 1999. He has been central to massive inappropriate rezoning throughout his career as a councillor.
The Standards in Public Office (SIPO) Commission has been constantly undermined by Phil Hogan and this government in general. Hogan also scrapped the investigations into planning irregularities in Monaghan, Waterford, Carlow, Dublin, and Donegal.
Michael Noonan scrapped the 80 per cent windfall tax on the proceeds of rezoning, creating a huge incentive for planning corruption.
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I referred to the damage done to children’s education, particularly to disadvantaged children by long school holidays. This is backed up by many studies, including this one from the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Dr Garrett McGovern
Dr Garrett McGovern is a GP specialising in the treatment of addiction and Medical Director of the Priority Medical Clinic in Dublin.
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Sarah Benson is the CEO of Ruhama.
Sarah Benson, Ruhama CEO
The Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity were credited with founding Ruhama on Ruhama’s website up to February 2015, but all references to both those orders have been deleted from the pages of their website since, although some old annual report PDFs still mention them. Both those orders have refused all compensation to their victims. Both orders have flatly refused to even meet victims’ groups.
The four orders who ran the Magdalene Laundries (of which Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity were two) made hundreds of millions of euro from selling the laundry properties. Despite their wealth and their influence over Ruhama, the bulk of Ruhama’s funding comes from the taxpayer.
These orders have been condemned by, among others the UN; the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said “Girls placed in the institutions were forced to work in slavery-like conditions and were often subject to inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment as well as to physical and sexual abuse”.
Headlines like “Over 300 women affected by trafficking and prostitution needed help last year” put high numbers alongside the concept of trafficked women in Ireland, however a closer reading of Ruhama’s most recent annual report reveal that in that year they first encountered “17 women [who] were suspected victims of sex trafficking” in 2013, my emphasis.
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Mike’s original audio file is here.
Syrian Refugees
This is the Baroness Jay report into the sex abuse scandal in Rochdale, England.
These are the UNHCR reports that report 1.7m Syrian refugees in Turkey and 1.8m in Lebanon, a country not much bigger than County Cork.
Update: The contributor, Mike, got back to me and queried me for a source on the tendency of immigrant birth rates to trend towards that of the host country. This study shows:
The findings support mainly the socialization hypothesis: the transition rates of first-generation immigrants vary by country of origin, and the fertility patterns of migrant descendants resemble more closely those of West Germans than those of the first immigrant generation. In addition, the analyses show that fertility differentials between immigrants and women of the indigenous population can largely, though not in full, be explained by compositional differences.
In short, that means is that the birth rates are higher partly because people tend to migrate at the start of their childbearing years, and the remaining differentials fade in second and third generation immigrants. Mike, however, correctly points out that even if immigrant communities quickly adopt a birth rate similar to the indigenous population, a constant arrival of new immigrants will increase their proportion of the population.
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Martin Collins is the co-director of Pavee Point.
Martin Collins of Pavee Point
Fr Micheál Mac Gréil published the study that measures the ‘social distance’ that people feel to various minority groups, and Travellers consistently are measured to be the most marginalised.
The health, infant mortality, maternal mortality and life expectancy of Travellers are all much worse than the general population.
The Irish Prison Service reports that male Travellers are 11 times more likely to be in prison than the general population, and female Travellers are 23 times more likely, the latter figure is based on a very small sample. This figure understates the true contrast, because a much higher proportion of Travellers are under 18 and thereby not liable to be imprisoned. In addition, there are over 450 Irish Travellers in British prisons, so Irish Travellers are more likely to be imprisoned in British Prisons than the general population is likely to be imprisoned at all.
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Mick Barry is an AAA / Socialist Party councillor on Cork City Council.
Cllr Mick Barry
This is the article, written by Frank Daly of NAMA, (behind paywall, hint open in incognito window) where he claims “Some claim we should have got a better price, but they know there was no bidder willing to pay more,” however the public records shows that NAMA debtors were willing to pay more to buy out their debts.
Below is the full text of my emails to David Clerkin of Gordon MRM that I refer to. ~ read more ~
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This is a long, detailed article on the violent attack on the Corcoran family. Like almost every other report, in every newspaper, the report omitted that the men convicted of the crime were Travellers.
Conor Faughnan
Conor Faughnan of AA Ireland spoke about automating the checking of Tax, NCT and Insurance rather than displaying disks.
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This Episode has a major interview with Jamie Bryson, the loyalist blogger and activist about his revelations on the Nama/Project Eagle affair.
Jamie Bryson
These are the reports that first uncovered the software designed to cheat on EPA emissions tests when VW cars were tested. This is the report that shows that air quality doesn’t match the manufacturers’ claims about their vehicles, and here the annual deaths from diesel emissions are quoted.
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NAMA’s Northern Ireland portfolio is named Project Eagle. The entire portfolio was sold to Cerberus. The maximum sentence for lobbying NAMA is six months in prison or a €1,000 fine.
Judge Martin Nolan said that it would be incredibly unjust to send the Anglo criminals Pat Whelan and William McAteer to prison for their part in a half-a-billion-euro illegal loan scam.
Under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, major companies have been fined hundreds of millions of dollars. The US Department of Justice served a subpoena on Cerberus on 7 September 2015.
Cllr John Lyons
John Lyons is the People Before Profit councillor for Beaumont-Donaghmede, and also their Dáil candidate in Dublin Bay North.
