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Peter Lilley is the Conservative party MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, and the former Secretary of State for Social Security, and the former President of the Board of Trade.

Peter Lilley MP

I mentioned George Eustace’s speech at the Farmers Club, where he talked about restoring powers over farming to Westminster, not to the Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh devolved governments.

EU rules don’t allow individual countries to enter into trade deals with countries outside the EU. Tweets sent by David Davis MP seem to indicate that he didn’t understand this. Peter Lilley, in the interview, disputed this interpretation of the tweets. You can read them for yourself and decide: ~ read more ~

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Happy New Year, and a short message from the podcast host.

Happy 2017

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Fiona O’Leary is the mother of five children, two of whom are on the autistic spectrum. She was a witness in the prosecution that led to the conviction of Patrick Merlehan for selling unlicensed and dangerous medicines.

Fiona O’Leary

Riko Muranaka is a Japanese journalist and medical doctor. She is a specialist in infectious diseases. Her work has appeared in many publications including the Wall Street Journal.

Dr Riko Muranaka

This is RTÉ’s Prime Time programme on REGRET, and the Irish Times’ report on the likely effects of the vaccine scare.

This is the form on the HPRA website where anyone can report an adverse reaction for any drug of vaccine. This is the claim on Regret’s GoFundMe page that their group represents 200 girls who are on 24-hour suicide watch.

There are examples here, here and here of abusive comments on social media against Fiona O’Leary in the names of Regret activists. I have contacted the people identified as having written the comments to ask if they were indeed the authors; they have not responded.

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Smári McCarthy is a programmer, a writer and one of the founders of the Pirate Party of Iceland. This interview was recorded shortly before his recent election to the Icelandic parliament.

Smári McCarthy

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This is the document that I was pointed to while searching for the source for Anna Cannon’s claim that one in 30 or one in 40 people are struck with an autoimmune disease after receiving the Gardasil vaccine. In fact, what the table on page 8 shows is that 2.3 per cent (one in 43) develop illnesses on a list which is potentially indicative of a systemic autoimmune disorder. This doesn’t mean that they have a systemic autoimmune disorder; that is one of the potential explanations.

It is also evident that, whatever their illness, it is not caused by Gardasil, because the incidence is identical in the groups that did and did not get Gardasil.

Arbaeen Procession poster

Waqar Haider is a spokesman for the Hussaini Islamic Trust UK, a Shi’ite organisation that organises the annual Arbaeen UK procession, marking dates in the Islamic calendar. The event is used to express disapproval of terrorism in the name of Islam.

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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