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Daniel Long farming activist and running for president of Macra na Feirme.

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Things that seem good aren’t always good, things that seem bad aren’t always bad, and things that really are good or bad can sometimes have the confounding outcomes.

If you get three education spokespersons in a studio, they’ll usually come out with at least four plans to reform the Leaving Certificate. There might be a lot of proposals out there, but they all use the same buzz words and phrases. Too much stress, continual assessment, can’t judge someone by an exam grade, credit for coursework, judge the whole student, no job interviewer will ask for it, reduce exam pressure.

Mix in all these cliches with a few badly thought-out ideas, half-bake them for a three minute interview, and hey presto, you’ve got an education policy.

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Eoin Ó Broin is Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Midwest and his party’s housing spokesperson.

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A topic which I am interested in is ageing and demographic shift. Ireland was, until quite recently, the youngest country demographically in Europe. However, as Ireland’s baby boomers, the generation that David McWilliams calls the pope’s children, push onwards towards retirement age Ireland’s relatively youthful demographic profile will change at a rate we might find quite surprising. We don’t have that many older people now but we probably will relatively soon.

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Brenda Power is a journalist for the Sunday Times and Irish Daily Mail, and whose work has appeared in many other publications, and is frequently heard on broadcast media.

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Maybe I’m giving away my age if I mention my nostalgia for the pirate radio stations of the 1980s. I’m just about old enough to remember Radio Nova, Q102 and Sunshine Radio, and I know that there were many more of them in Dublin, and dozens more around the country. Some of them were more professional than others and they were run by enthusiasts, sometimes by businessmen, sometimes by shysters.

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Jim O’Callaghan is a senior council and Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin Bay South.

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I want to talk about a coup. A coup attempt. A failed coup attempt. It was a ridiculous affair, viewed by some people as little short of comical, despite the fact that several people were killed. The coup attempt was carried out by a barely-credible bunch of thugs who had a habit of dressing up in quasi-military uniforms and showing off their weapons in the streets.

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Kate McGrew is the main spokesperson for the Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland. In our interview, I referred to my interview with Sarah Benson, then of Ruhama.

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I have a big project on at the moment, so this, I’m sorry to say, will be the last Here’s How podcast of 2020. I hope to be back bright and early in January 2021, and with that, a couple of announcements.

The first is that I’m open to having a collaborator on the podcast. If you are interested in doing that, or know someone who might be, get in touch, the email is podcast@HeresHow.ie. This isn’t a paid position, but it doesn’t require too much input. A good knowledge of Irish current affairs would be helpful, not to mention a bit of fire in your belly, but there is no need to be in ideological lockstep with me, I don’t even think that would be possible.

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John Hamill is a long-time secular campaigner and participates in the Free Thought Prophet. We talked about his epic Freedom of Information request.

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You can see there that John’s story tells a pretty damning tale about the attitude of the Department of Education and Skills, as it’s now called, towards the Freedom of Information laws. And I really don’t want to single out that one department, this attitude is pervasive right across government.

Nevertheless, I did send a list of written questions to the Department of Education’s press office that related to this case. The main question I asked was about this culture of seeking to frustrate the proper implementation of the law. The department refused to answer.

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Peadar Tóibín is the leader, and only TD of Aontú, having previously been elected for Sinn Féin.

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I don’t normally do pre-buttals on a podcast interview, but I think that in this case it’s important, because in the context of the coronavirus, and Covid 19, it’s just not acceptable to allow incorrect scientific claims to go unchallenged, even for a few minutes. There are a couple of things said in this interview that I wasn’t able to correct in the moment, and I don’t want to leave the correction to the end, because that runs the risk that people hear the incorrect claim and not hear the correction.

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Dermot Lacey is a Labour Party member of Dublin City Council for the Pembroke ward.

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That’s what he said

He, by the way is Brandon Lewis, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, basically their minister for Northern Ireland.

What he’s announcing there is the UK government’s shirking from the treaty that they signed last December for them to withdraw from the European Union. He immediately created a million memes of people planning to tell judges that they might be had up in front of that yes, they had broken the law, but only in a very specific and limited way.

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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.