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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.

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Alan Shatter became minister of justice in 2011. Brian Purcell, his secretary general, was judged to be running a grossly incompetent department. Shatter extravagantly complained that the Guerin Report was a breach of his human rights and called on the Human Rights and Equality Commission to investigate the process, and he humiliatingly lost a case challenging the findings of the Guerin Report.

Martin Callinan, Brian Purcell and Alan Shatter

Bashir Otukoya is a PhD candidate at Sutherland School of Law at UCD.

Bashir Otukoya

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The episode of the Claire Byrne Live show is available here, but RTÉ don’t tend to leave them online for very long. This is the James Reynolds who was presented as a ‘man in the street’ speaking from the audience. Cllr Seamus Treanor, the anti-immigration councillor from Monaghan was identified, he falsely claimed that there are 900,000 Eastern Europeans in Ireland, the true figure is about one quarter of that. Norah Casey claimed that 400 children disappeared into child trafficking after arriving in Ireland. I can’t find anything to verify this, and I have attempted to get in touch with her to ask for her source, so far without response.

Clare Daly TD

Clare Daly is the independent TD for Dublin North, originally elected for the Socialist Party.

Pat McCormack is the deputy president of the ICMSA.

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This is the original article where Rosanna Davison claimed that gluten was responsible for autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia and arthritis, and here she backtracked, claiming that she merely suggested that ‘gluten-free diets can play a role in helping to manage … auto-immune and neurological disorders’; my emphasis. This is the website where she visually and verbally promotes her qualifications, from from the College of Naturopathic Medicine in Dublin and the US-based Institute of Functional Medicine. Neither offer any recognised qualifications.

Rosanna Davison, natural therapist

Here Arthritis Ireland rebutted her claims, and here is a scientific study discounting gluten in the treatment of autism.

Deirdre Ni Fhloinn is a solicitor and PhD candidate in the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin.

Dr Lorcan Sirr is a lecturer in housing studies, urban economics, and research methods in the School of Real Estate and Construction Economics at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Dr Theresa Reidy is is a lecturer at University College Cork.

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David Quinn, Director of the Iona Institute

David Quinn is the director of the Iona Institute and a columnist with the Irish Independent. The Religious Practice and Values in Ireland study by the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference found that half of Catholics don’t believe in hell, a quarter don’t believe in sin or in heaven, almost a third don’t believe in the afterlife and more than 10 per cent of Catholics don’t believe in god.

Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop is the CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.

Nial Ring is a former member of Fianna Fáil who left the party and won a seat on Dublin City Council having failed to secure the Fianna Fáil nomination as a candidate.

I misspoke and attributed the study of traders’ perceptions of their customers mode of transport to the Irish Cycling Campaign. In fact, the Shopping Travel Behaviour in Dublin City Centre Survey was done by DIT and shows that traders overestimate the proportion of their customers who travel by car and underestimate the proportion who travel by foot or by cycle.

David O’Connor is a lecturer and MSc Spatial Planning Programme Chair at Dublin Institute of Technology.

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Long Term Economic Value (things look more meaningful when they get capital letters) was not an established economic concept when it entered public discourse in 2010. The acronym LTEV did not exist in relation to it before it was applied to NAMA. This is the statement by Ian Coulter saying that he deposited GBP £7m from his employer’s client in his personal offshore bank account for unspecified ‘complex’ legal reasons.

Klaus-Peter Willsch is a member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, who opposes Greece remaining in the euro.

Klaus-Peter Willsch

John Handelaar is a freelance developer behind KildareStreet.com, FixMyStreet.ie and the forthcoming www.FoI.ie

Michael Moriarty is an accountant who has studied the role of philanthropists in Irish society, and has worked on a number of projects funded by Atlantic Philanthropies.

Nicolas Sölter is a PhD candidate at Hamburg University, the economics spokesperson of Junge Union Deutschlands, the youth wing of Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party.

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PARC, the road safety lobby group did a survey of court cases and found that 80 per cent of drivers sentenced to penalty points in court and 96 per cent of drivers disqualified from driving in court did not have their driver licence number recorded by the court clerk.

The Moriarty Report was published in 2011, following an interim report in 2006. TheJournal.ie reported that ministers have been giving copy-and-paste answers as to why there has been no garda investigation into its findings.

Dr Julien Mercille of the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD

Dr Julien Mercille is lecturer in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD. Reports say Greek DJs and hairdressers retire aged 50 because their jobs are deemed ‘hazardous‘. A BBC More or Less programme calculated that they subsidies to the Greek rail system cost more than it would cost to send all the passengers in taxis.

Matthew Wallis is Senior Lecturer at the College of Business Law & Social Sciences at Nottingham Business School.

John Hamill is a member of the National Executive of Atheist Ireland.