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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Moore Holmes is a Loyalist and a member of the advocacy group Let’s talk Loyalism.

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You probably think that you’ve never heard of the WSM, the Workers Solidarity Movement, but you probably have heard of them, even though you don’t remember it; most people don’t pay much attention when they are offered a leaflet from one of the various fringe political associations that set up stall at the pedestrian pinch-points in our city centres.

The Workers Solidarity Movement aren’t to be confused with the Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Solidarity Party or any of the other small and sometimes minuscule groups on the far left. I say that, but in reality they are often confused with each other, which makes all the more ironic the ferocity with which these tiny groups sometimes dispute the most esoteric distinctions between each other.

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Inspector Peter Woods is an inspector at the Dublin Roads Policing Division of An Garda Síochana and Seán O’Kelly is the cofounder of Access for All Ireland.

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In the last podcast I talked to Professor Norman Fenton the professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London; he takes a position that could fairly be described as opposed to Covid vaccines, Covid lockdowns, and pretty much everything else he calls the ‘official narrative’ to do with the Sars Cov 19.

We had a lot of feedback on that podcast, to say the least. Some of that feedback was around my interviewing style, people complained that I didn’t allow Professor Fenton to speak enough, that I interrupted him too much.

There are a couple of things to say about that. Firstly, it’s certainly true that I interrupted him more than I usually do in interviews with other guests. Secondly, despite that there were five occasions in the podcast where Professor Fenton spoke for between one and a half and two minutes, completely uninterrupted. Given that a typical Morning Ireland interview might be three to four minutes in total, questions and answers together, I think that indicates he had ample opportunity to get his points across.

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Professor Norman Fenton is a professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London.

I want to clarify a couple of things that Norman said there. First off, Klaus Schwab is the founder of the World Economic Forum, this is basically an annual event where the captains of politics and business get together to hobnob. This organisation is the centrepiece of a whole slew of the craziest conspiracy theories, I’m not going to go into them here, but the core claim that Norman made was that Schwab and the WEF are making decisions that he doesn’t like.

This is nonsense. The WEF has no legislative function, and no executive function other than to manage its own event. It doesn’t have the power to decide anything much bigger than what’s on the menu for their shindig. Now, I’m sure that Schwab is a pretty influential person, given who he probably has saved in his phone contacts, but that means soft power, access to decision makers, the ability to persuade them. Neither he nor the WEF have any authority over them.

It’s certainly true that politicians meet at the WEF, it’s probably also true that to some degree they make plans there to coordinate their policies, but what Norman is claiming, that the WEF as a body is making legally binding decisions is just nonsense. It’s the equivalent of claiming that the manager of the Inchydoney Island Hotel is in control of Ireland, because political parties often have their think-ins there.

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Dr Geraldine Simmie Mooney is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Limerick and director of EPI STEM, the National Centre for STEM Education.

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One thing that, I thought, the Green Party had that left wing parties didn’t, was an understanding of how taxes could be used to modify behaviour. The Greens are often lambasted from both left and right for this, people saying that they want to tax everything, but that’s unfair.

They had recognised, I thought, that taxation is often a better way to modify behaviour than banning or regulating things. A good example was the plastic bag tax. This started out at 15c per bag, Its purpose wasn’t to raise money, it was to change behaviour.

And it worked. Use of plastic bags collapsed by more than 93 per cent when it was introduced. That tiny amount of money was enough to change mindsets and encourage people not to be wasteful.

I got in a brief Twitter spat with some people including the former Green Party TD and Senator Dan Boyle, about what was announced in the budget as a measure to ease the housing crisis, a three per cent tax on zoned land. This idea has been kicking around for years, not least from the Green Party, because they had recognised the bottleneck in the supply of housing.

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Dr Karen Keaveney is Head of Subject for Rural Development, and an Assistant Professor in the School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin.

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A short update on the last podcast about the conflicts of interest and poor academic and ethical standards at the Active Consent Unit in NUI Galway – we will be doing a follow-up on that, because we have got large tranches of information, from the press office at NUIG and their Freedom of Information department, and we’re battling for more. One thing that I can say right now is that a spokesman for NUIG essentially conceded in an email to me that the study, that led to them claiming that 29 per cent of all female students and 10 per cent of all male students are raped while in college, they have conceded that those figures do not apply to the wider student body, only to a small non-representative sample of people who answered an online questionnaire.

“The statistics, as presented in the SES 2020, relate to those students who completed the survey. At no stage does it purport to be research detailing the level of sexual abuse in society, reported or unreported…”

NUIG Spokesman

In fact, they said that they had never claimed that those figures applied to students as a whole, and they did a sneaky edit on their website taking down the page where they in fact claimed just that… which was a bit awkward because I had taken the precaution of making an archive copy of that exact page, and when I tweeted out a link to it, they restored that page and most of its content.

Preparing these podcasts is a huge time commitment, we’ve been working on that story for more than a year and there is still more to do on it, and for that reason I want to say a huge thank you to all the patrons on Patreon, that makes it easier for us to put time into researching podcasts and hopefully making them interesting to listen to, and if you could do the same and chip in a euro or two per month, that would really help to do this more often. The Patreon website allows you to do that automatically.

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Dr David Ellis is Associate Professor of Information systems at Bath University and a member of that university’s Academic Ethics and integrity committee.

The Active Consent Unit has its own section on the NUIG website, and its media page posts inaccurate media coverage of its work without comment. (Update: They appear to have now hidden their media page, but not to worry, I have it archived. Update 2: Since I posted on Twitter that I had the page archived, it seems to have been restored, with some, though not all of the links to false coverage removed.) What appears to be their YouTube account incorrectly claims that the research applies to all students, and posts on their twitter account make the same false claim.

The Active Consent Unit offers on its website ‘workshops’ targeted at second- and third-level students which address the problems their research purports measure. Dr Caroline West offers similar workshops on her personal website. There is no mention of this conflict of interests in the report they published.

The report claims that, of students who have been raped, just 4.5 per cent of female students, and three per cent of men report this to the gardaí. This is not consistent with other research on this topic which suggests that between 36 per cent and 20 per cent of rape victims make a police report.

The report claims that, of the 29 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men, 4.5 per cent and 3 per cent make a garda report, meaning that 1.3 per cent of all female students and 0.3 per cent of all male students report being raped to the gardaí.

With almost 250,000 students in the country (about 5 per cent o the total population, skewing slightly female), if that figure really did apply to all students, there would be more than 2,000 reports of rape by students to the gardaí.

As can be seen in this data from the CSO, the entire population typically reports 1,000 or fewer rapes to the gardaí per year, so this claim is clearly impossible.

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So then this happened.

And with no notice at all, in the space of a single day, AA Roadwatch disappeared off our airwaves.

According to their own announcement, this was a decision made by the AA, which “decided to move away from this service and instead focus on growing other areas of [their] business”. That’s corporatespeak for closing down an unprofitable business.