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These are R.E.G.R.E.T.‘s website, Facebook page (Update: the page’s content seems now to be hidden) and Twitter. This is the US Food & Drug Administration page that gives Gardasil information, which references 772 serious adverse events following administration of Gardasil, out of 23,000,000 doses administered. There is no requirement for proof that the adverse event be connected to Gardasil to be included.

Anna Cannon

Dr Brenda Corcoran, MB, MPH, FFPHMI, holds a diploma in leadership and quality in healthcare, and is a consultant in public health medicine responsible for the coordination of all national immunisation programmes. She is a member of the National Immunisation Advisory Committee. ~ read more ~

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Niamh Uí Bhriain is a founder of the Life Institute, and previously of Youth Defence. We discussed the Roe v Wade decision of the US Supreme Court and the McGee v Attorney General decision of the Irish Supreme Court, and how they led to the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign  and ultimately the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution.

Niamh Uí Bhriain

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Francis Duffy is a Green Party Councillor on South Dublin County Council. We talked about his proposal to ban election posters and replace them with hoardings at council-sponsored sites.

Francis Duffy

The use of election posters is already highly regulated in Ireland, with the dates and locations of posters set in law; posters can be up for about a month before the election and must be removed within seven days of polling; they can’t obstruct road signs or cause other hazards; they must identify the person responsible for them, who can be fined €150 per poster for infringements.

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AJ Noonan is the chairman of the Small Firms Association.

AJ Noonan

The SFA’s pre-budget submission is here. AJ queried my assertion that building land around Dublin was concentrated in a small number of hands. Business & Finance magazine reported in 2000 that the bulk of the development land in Dublin was owned by just eight speculators – Gerry Gannon, Michael Cotter, Mickey Whelan, Tom and Mick Bailey, Joe O’Reilly and Brian Wallace, David Daly, Joe Moran and Liam Carroll.

I also mentioned that Ireland is the only exception to the Europe-wide trend that land prices broadly match population density. This graph shows the pattern clearly. Apart from Sweden and Finland which have huge unpopulated Arctic regions, Ireland has the lowest population density in the EU 15.

European Land Prices

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Mick Fealty is the founding editor of Slugger O’Toole, Northern Ireland’s foremost political blog.

Mick Fealty

Voting for the Blog Awards Ireland will open soon, and I will add a link as soon as it does. Here’s How has been longlisted in two categories, Best Innovation Blog and, strangely, Best Vlog.

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James Behan is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, and a spokesperson for Men’s Voices Ireland. He is also a staff writer for Trinity’s University Times.

James Behan

In our discussion, James referred to a study by Dr Roisin O’Shea which indicates a poor quality of decision-making in custody cases in Irish Circuit Courts.

James has written for the University Times about men suffering from domestic violence (be it from male or female partners) and the lack of services for them. ~ read more ~

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Gavan Reilly is the political correspondent of TodayFM.

Gavan Reilly

You can nominate the Here’s How podcast for the Blog Awards Ireland here.

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You can nominate Here’s How for the Blog Awards Ireland here.

Kian Griffin

Kian Griffin is the spokesperson for Ireland Underground. The motor insurance market is worth about €1.2bn per year, about half of one per cent of Ireland’s GDP. The Motor Insurance Justice Action Group has in the past called for government subsidies on motor insurance, although they don’t seem to be active any more.

Kerry County Council voted in 2013, on the proposal of Danny Healy-Rae, to legalise drunk driving.

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Donal Byrne of is a news editor at RTÉ who is responsible for news planning.

RTÉ News

The phrase ‘known to gardaí” appears scores of times on the RTÉ website and, as Donal Byrne rightly pointed out, frequently occurs in other Irish media. The phrase has been sharply criticised for the meaning it carries, including by novelist Frankie Gaffney:

Then that vile euphemism: Known to Gardaí. ‘Deserved it’ in other words.

Derek O’Toole died when he was struck by an off-duty garda’s car in Lucan Co Dublin in March 2007. Within hours of his death, and without naming their sources, RTÉ accused him of being ‘known to gardaí’. It later emerged that he had no criminal record or criminal associations whatsoever, and GSOC concluded that unknown gardaí had supplied false information to journalists. ~ read more ~

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Mick Byrne is a spokesperson on behalf of the Dublin Tenants’ Association. They launched a social media campaign to highlight the condition of the tenants of private landlords in Dublin, along with ‘licencees’, people who pay share a house with the owner, who are not considered tenants in Irish law. You can find them on Twitter here.

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Michael Taft is the Research Officer for Unite the Union in Ireland. He is also a writer who appears frequently on Broadsheet and the Irish Left Review, and writes his own blog at Unite’s Notes On The Front.

Michael Taft

This is the World Bank economic openness index that I mentioned that shows that Ireland has a more open economy than the countries that Michael compares us to. This measure actually understates the openness of Ireland’s economy, because it is calculated using Ireland’s GDP, which is artificially inflated by multinational transfer pricing for tax reasons. Despite this, Ireland is in the same league as Hong Kong and Singapore, not Scandinavian countries.

I mentioned to Michael that average wages for electricity workers in the republic were double those of the north. I actually understated the position, as of 2011, the figures, excluding pension costs were €85,000 in the republic and €41,000 in the north.

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Eoin Ó Broin is the newly-elected Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Mid-West. He is a former local councillor in both Dublin and Belfast.

Eoin Ó Broin

The tracking of the opinion polling for Irish political parties, including Sinn Féin, since 2007 is here. This is the text of the confidence and supply agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

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Dan Mac Guill is a journalist with TheJournal.ie, and he has authored their excellent Fact Check series, including the one that we discussed about the effect of the closure of rural Garda stations.

Dan Mac Guill

The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul article that I mentioned is here. Details about the shortages of sugar, Coca Cola and other commodities in Venezuela are here.

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Gemma O’Doherty is an investigative journalist who has worked on the disappearance of Mary Boyle, the murder of Fr Niall Molloy and the penalty points cancellation scandal. 

This is a report in the Irish Independent about Conor Lenihan’s obsequious article praising the Mr Justice Frank Roe who acquitted Richard Flynn in bizarre circumstances.

Conor Lenihan on his article heaping praise on Justice Frank Roe

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Jim O’Callaghan is a senior counsel, and TD for Dublin Bay South. He was key to the negotiations between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil that led to the formation of the current governmnet.

Jim O’Callaghan

This is the text of the confidence and supply agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Information is here about the Lib-Lab pact, where the British Labour Party, with just under 50 per cent of UK MPs was supported by the 13 Liberal MPs, who comprised two per cent of the House Of Commons, and this is information about confidence and supply arrangements in general.

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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.

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,

• Half don’t believe in hell
• 30 per cent don’t believe in life after death
• Quarter don’t believe in heaven and
• 10 per cent don’t believe in god.

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