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Jason Pack is the host of the Disorder podcast and the founder of the consultancy Libya-Analysis LLC.

*****

We try to cover stuff on this podcast that is under-covered in other media …  and then we got the fuel protests.

I don’t want to talk about that issue, it’s been done to death, I don’t want to talk about that substantive issue, but it brings up a couple of other things that I think are worth talking about.

There’s been a huge amount of talk about whether the protests are, or are influenced by, or infiltrated by the far-right, as well about whether the left does, or should support the protests. So I’m not going to talk about that.

And there’s been a lot of talk about whether farmers are, or should be, subsidised by the rest of society. So I won’t talk about that either.

What I want to talk about first is divisions in Irish society that we really don’t talk about so much. I could talk about an urban / rural divide, but the problem is that we don’t really have an urban / rural divide, we have more of a sliding scale. The proliferation of one-off houses has changed what is technically countryside in places near and not so near our cities into continuous lines of road-facing development. The further you go, the more this thins out, so there isn’t really a clear dividing line between what is urban and what is rural, but there certainly are differences, and just because you can’t always identify the boundary between the two, it doesn’t mean that can’t talk about the difference between the man and the boy, or between the culchie and the jackeen.

One of those differences that the protesters brought up was how much more rural people are dependent on their own transport – that’s to say cars – than people in urban areas. The increase in fuel costs hits them directly and instantly and hard. They can’t avoid driving to get their shopping, driving their children to school and so on. They don’t have those services within walking distance, and the taxpayer doesn’t provide them with Luas and Dart and frequent bus services. It’s not fair on them.

And that’s true. Except when it’s not true. People make decisions. And those decisions have consequences. They can avoid driving to the supermarket or the school. They can move house, if they want to. People live in rural or urban areas, and each of those have their costs and benefits, and people make decisions based on those costs and benefits.

One of those consequences of living in rural areas is that transport is much more expensive, and there is dramatically less public transport. One of the consequences of living in urban areas is that they will pay far more for housing, and usually get far less.

Housing is a market, and market prices reflect demand, so I would say that, roughly speaking, those lower rural housing costs balance the other higher costs, combined with how many people prefer the rural or urban lifestyle. Or they would balance them, if all those costs fell on the decision maker. But a lot of the costs of living in rural Ireland aren’t paid by the rural-dwellers. The cost of delivering services like post, telephone, internet and electricity to rural areas are vastly higher, but for the most part the prices are fixed in law to be the same as for urban areas, meaning that when urban dwellers pay for those services, the price they pay internalises a big subsidy for rural-dwellers. You can argue whether that is justified or not, but you can’t argue that it’s not the case.

And that’s only the start. A few years back David McWilliams wrote about the vast imbalance between the tax and spending in Dublin, compared to the rest of the country.

[Dublin has] 38 per cent of the country’s population.

But it accounts for 61 per cent of VAT receipts; 52 per cent of employment taxes; 45 per cent of self-employed income tax; 62 per cent of corporation tax receipts, and 43 per cent of capital gains tax receipts. While Dublin generates €22 billion in revenue, only €16 billion of this is spent in Dublin.

That was a €6bn difference in 2018 figures, working out at about transfer to the rest of the country of about €3,000 from every man, woman and child in the capital. Three grand each. Remember that when you hear someone cribbing that ‘we never get anything’.

And remember that when you see protesters demanding a cut on fuel taxes, possibly the only tax that reverses that imbalance slightly.

And that brings me to the protests themselves. I talked a while back about how well Ireland does in a whole range of international indices, the index on democracy, GDP, quality of life, child and maternal mortality and others. It’s actually shocking how well Ireland performs. Well I found another index this week, it’s from and an organisation called Civicus, and they say their mission is to strengthen citizen action and civil society throughout the world, and they produce a score for how open civic space is in every country, basically how it is easy to protest and campaign.

And it’s good to see that Ireland does very well, Ireland scores 89 out of 100 and comes twelfth out of 199 nations, which actually understates how well we do. Most of the countries in the top 10 are actually microstates like San Marino and Liechtenstein, so less than one-sixth of one per cent of the world’s population live in countries with a better score than Ireland.

And in general, I think that’s great. It’s great that people, whether I agree with them or not, can strike, march, petition, and protest to campaign for whatever they want. That’s great, as long as everyone can do it, and as long as everyone can do it equally.

But there are some people who out there who, by virtue of their profession have access to equipment that allows them to cause far more disruption to society in general than most of us. I’m talking of course about using tractors and other farm equipment to blockade other people’s businesses, and roads that we all own.

I’m also talking about the so-called strikes by taxi-drivers a few years back, where they all parked their taxis in the middle of city streets, completely blocking them for trams, buses and other cars.

Working in a job that gives you access to this equipment – tractors, taxis or whatever – doesn’t give you a right to use it to hold the rest of society hostage, and it certainly doesn’t give you a right to have your views take precedence over those of people who don’t have access to that equipment.

If the bricklayers’ union built a wall across the M50; if childcare workers had their kindergarteners lie down blocking access to transport or infrastructure, supermarket workers dumped all the produce supposed to be on sale on roads, or anywhere that cut off other people’s access to supplies or to their workplace, they would all pretty soon be out of a job, and into a prison cell. That law should apply to all, and tractors, taxis or other equipment used to break the law should be confiscated on the spot.

I talked on the last podcast about the importance of having taxation spread broadly across the economy, with careful thought put into tax incentives which designed to influence behaviour. How exactly that is done is obviously one of the most important debates in civic space, and everyone has their right to be heard.

And people’s voices should be heard equally, not in proportion to the degree that they can hold society to ransom.  

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John Crotty is an author and historian traditionally published by The History Press and Merrion Press.

*****

I came across this on social media, it’s obviously an American anti-tax rant, he’s talking about a tax on a breakfast beverage, that’s obviously a reference to the Boston Tea Party, when according to legend, American colonists protested against a British tax on tea, I think that the reality is a bit more complicated, but it’s the legend that’s important here.

So we get the idea, the guy doesn’t like taxes, I’m pretty sure nobody does, but there is a confusion here between two different issues.

One is how much tax we pay – how much of our income, through one tax or another, ends up being taken by the taxman. That’s a real issue that deserves, especially since it has a big impact on how lots of other things in the economy work.

The second issue here is how the tax system works and, in particular for this guy, how many different types of taxes there are, and what they are levied on. That’s another important debate, and the outcome of that debate also has a big impact on how the economy works.

But I think that clip illustrates the real problem here that I want to talk about. These two issues are, these two separate issues, get confused very often, and I think that confusion makes the two separate debates on the these two separate issues run into the sand, and really go nowhere.

The first debate is how much money should the government take. In fact it’s really easy to at least measure what is being done here, because I can find on Wikipedia a list of countries and their total tax revenue, expressed as a percent of their GDP.

This can be calculated in a number of ways, and the page actually lists two listings, one complied by the World Bank, another by the UN. These figures can vary because of different methodology, but the UN measure is basically tax is defined as any money the government takes in by any means, with a couple of exceptions like fines imposed by courts, and I’m going by that where it’s available. So things like PRSI in Ireland, and social security contributions in the US are counted as tax, as are the cost of getting your driving licence, whether it’s described as a tax or a purchase price.

When you look at the list, you can see that at the bottom of the list, the countries that collect the least taxes are some failed states like Somalia and Haiti where there is no effective government to collect the taxes, along with oil-rich states like where I presume governments are funded by the profits of nationalised oil companies. Libya is at he absolute bottom, I think that it might count as both. Their tax as a percent of GDP is in the low single digits.

Unsurprisingly, the countries at the top of the list include the Scandinavian and western European social-democracies, Denmark is at 47 per cent, so nearly half of the total GDP goes to the government; New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and France are all between 30 and 35 percent.

Ireland comes in at 18 per cent, close to the middle of the rankings, but I think that figure is distorted downwards by our artificially inflated GDP figures. For the American in that clip, the US comes in slightly higher at 20 per cent, so not that high, but I think that doesn’t count the cost of non-state healthcare, which is gigantic in the US.

As I said, there is a real debate to be had here; should the state spend more to provide a social safety net for its people, or does that cause inefficiency, would the economy grow more if that was left to the market.

In the 1980s, Ronald Regan talked about the Laffer Curve, which said that lower taxes are better, because the state can get more income with lower taxes, because that stimulates more economic activity which can be taxed at that lower rate. There is certainly some truth to this, the Laffer Curve is basically a semi-circle which starts at zero, if your tax rate is zero then for sure you are going to get zero tax revenue; but it ends at zero too, which seems right because if you tax everything at 100 percent, then nobody will do anything because they wouldn’t get paid anything, and again you get zero tax revenue.

The two extremes of tax rates yield nothing, and the optimum point is somewhere in between, and it’s important to remember that ‘optimum’ here is a value judgement, not something that can be calculated definitively by a graph. Some people think that having taxes as low as practically possible is the optimum, other people think that it’s maximizing revenue, or funding specific services.

Anyway the Laffer Curve doesn’t claim that all tax reduces economic activity. As I said, Haiti and Somalia have very low tax takes, but these are lawless states with very little economic because they are so insecure that anything anyone makes is sure to be stolen. If you could, if you could, impose a tax to pay for an effective police force to provide security, those countries would be economically far better off. In that example higher taxes would create more economic activity, and there are many more.

So, yes, lower taxes generally tend to stimulate the economy, but that effect has its limits, and it doesn’t always work, and sometimes it works the other way. The world just isn’t as simple as the anti-tax extremists would like it to be. Like most things in political economy, it’s complicated.

And that leads me back to the rant that I started with. Many people complain not so much about the level of taxes, but the complexity of them.

[3]

Note that this guy doesn’t mention the rate of a single one of the taxes he’s complaining about. This is a really important economic effect, and it’s completely irrational. It’s not unlike the question about whether you would go an hour out of your way to pay €200 euro for a washing machine that is available for €300 next door?

Most people would. But would you go an hour out of your way to get €100 off a €50,000 car? Most people wouldn’t bother, even though the money and time cost are identical, and you tend to buy both with roughly equal frequency. Humans aren’t always logical.

For the same reason, it seems very appealing to people, even when they understand they would pay the same total amount of tax, to pay it all in one lump sum, rather than have lots of taxes like PAYE, VAT, car tax, property tax, bin charges and many more.

In their first iteration, Renua – remember them, they still exist, believe it or not, they’ve gone through several phases and now come out as full-on anti-immigration anti-EU, ironic given their founder. In their first iteration, Renua proposed something like this, just one flat-rate income tax; it didn’t go anywhere obviously, but this idea does attract some positive comment sometimes.

It’s an attractive idea, particularly because it appeals to that irrational bit of us that would go across town to save €100 euro on a washing machine, but not on a car. The problem is that, to use the words of HL Mencken, for every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong. And this is a prime example.

First off, let me acknowledge that in some cases, simplifying the tax code can reduce the collection cost, and also the compliance cost for citizens, but that’s really tweaking the edges. The real effect here is that taxes cause what economists call behavioural responses. People change what they do in response to taxes.

We can use this for good effects, higher taxes on cigarettes reduce smoking, lower taxes on schoolbooks and so on, but this means that unintended consequences are a big issue here. If we tax one area of the economy and not another, experience has shown that that this distorts economic and produces perverse results. One example is that in Britain, gingerbread men are not allowed to smile. I’m not kidding.

British VAT is not imposed on biscuits – unless they are chocolate covered, which is considered a luxury. But how coved in chocolate do they have to be to attract the wrath of the VAT man? Is a tiny bit of chocolate allowed? Yes, that’s OK. The gingerbread man can have chocolate eyes. But a mouth? No, that’s too close to making it chocolate-covered. So the result is that all gingerbread men in Britan can have chocolate eyes, but not a mouth, so no smile.

That’s a humorous  effect, other effects are not so harmless. In Ireland we have almost no taxes on property, either directly on the property itself, or indirectly for water supply or the like. The taxes that you and I pay are overwhelmingly either on our income, or on our purchases, like VAT. It won’t take you long in any political discussion forum to come across ferocious opposition to the minuscule property tax that we have to pay, and there’s no shortage of people who will puff themselves into a tizzy with all sorts of claims that property tax is an outrageous infringement on their moral right to live free as though they were a trekking the Oregon trail.

Their argument is simple, neat and wrong. Our tax system is massively unbalanced, with far more tax on economic activity – earning and spending money, and far less on economic inactivity – owning property. The effect of this is that our economy is focussed on unproductive property ownership, at the expense of actually producing anything.

Remember that in the low-tax US, depending on where they live, many people will pay more tax on their house than on their wages. Many states have no state income tax at all, so people pay just the federal income tax and the state is funded largely by property taxes.

What does this do? Well higher income taxes deter economic activity – that’s just economics 101. Taxes have behaviours responses. If investing in property is less worthwhile, less people will do it, and if investing in economic activity is more worthwhile, that’s where the investment would go.

And that investment would have an impact. With investing in property less worthwhile, the utility of property as an investment vehicle is reduced, so the price of houses would reflect more their value as providing a home for someone. And that money would have to be invested somewhere. With relatively lower taxes on economic activity, that would stimulate the productive economy.

So more and better paying jobs, lower tax on that pay, higher property tax but no increase in the total amount of tax, and lower housing costs. That sounds like a win to me.

Remember that the next time some gombeen comes knocking on your door looking for a vote in return for a cut in the Local Property Tax that’s worth about the price of one chocolate bar a week.

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Joan Esposito is the afternoon drivetime presenter of WCPT and Arnd Bauerkämper is the adjunct professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin.

*****

This piece is not about Trump.

I promise, this isn’t a piece about Trump.

Well, just a tiny bit, but really it’s hardly about Trump at all.

In fact, forget about Trump altogether for a bit.

Think about economists. Economists and public policy people. When they are discussing policy, policy proposals, different things that governments might or might not do, one concept that they have is about how distributed the costs and benefits of a particular policy might be.

Of course, they look at the pros and cons of any given policy, but they also look at who gets the pros and cons, and in particular whether the pros and cons are highly distributed, like I said, or highly concentrated.

The reason that they do this is because they know that studying any given proposal is all well and good, but it doesn’t really mean much if it can’t be put into force, and have noticed over the years that the policies that get accepted are not always the ones where the pros outweigh the cons by the most, or even outweigh them at all.

The reason is this. People, voters, care more about things that affect them a lot. Something that affects them a lot will, possibly, shift their vote, and politicians know this and react to it. Something that only has a small, marginal effect on their lives, not so much.

So when the benefits of a policy are highly concentrated on a few people, they will campaign hard to get it or keep it; and when the costs are highly distributed, the total cost might far outweigh the total benefits, but if that cost is thinly spread across a large number of people, none of those people are motivated enough to fight against it, or even reconsider their vote based on it. The reverse can be true as well.

A clear example of this was the campaign in Donegal for the taxpayer to foot the entire bill for the rebuilding of houses built with mica and other damaging minerals in the rocks; that’s the definition of a highly-concentrated interest; so highly concentrated that they got a TD elected, Charlie Ward, for the 100 per cent Redress party. They want the taxpayer to pay the bill, because, to be fair to them, I suppose that they didn’t expect much luck sending the bill to the quarries who supplied defective product, or the corrupt Fianna Fáil minister who scrapped the inspection scheme which would have avoided the disaster.

The cost of that redress is, of course, spread across all the taxpayers in the country, and I suppose the fact that we didn’t have any Zero per cent Redress TDs elected anywhere else shows that it is small enough not to move peoples votes in the opposite direction. But, of course, with enough special pleading from enough groups with their paws out, that cost mounts up.

But cost and benefit here doesn’t just refer to money. All sorts of policies have winners and losers, and the relative concentration of the winning and losing can have a far bigger effect on the policy, than the total cost or benefit.

We learnt last month that the roll out automatic red-light cameras at junctions in Dublin has been put on hold while the Department of Transport ‘considers’ a new national strategy for the expanded use of safety cameras.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the government here, not to mention the gardaí are reluctant to face the wrath of drivers who get a fine and penalty points for running a red light. Most of the offences here happen when cars stop somewhere in the region of a red light. One car behind the stop line, another car on the advance cycle stop area, another car on the pedestrian crossing, and another jutting out into the junction. The typical garda reaction is ‘a shur at least yerman stopped’.

But of course the real consideration here is that neither politicians nor gardaí want to deal with the wrath of a motorist outraged that they are expected to obey the law; they have no concern about the person trying to push a pram between the bumpers and the fumes of the cars who stopped, but only just, and are blocking the crossing. Those politicians and gardaí calculate that the highly concentrated wrath of the motorist is likely to be more hassle than the highly distributed inconvenience of the pedestrians.

The result of this is that we must have our entire road network built around non-compliance with basic rules of the road. Unlike almost every other country, Ireland does not have a red-orange phase on traffic lights to tell drivers get in gear and be ready to start, because we know that drivers would count it as a ‘go’ signal and blast straight through it. We also have to have longer downtime in traffic lights – where all roads are signalled to stop, because many Irish drivers think that the rule is green means go, orange means go, red means three more cars.

I’m sure that many drivers out there would be outraged if they got penalty points for following that rule – there’s your highly concentrated cost – but the benefit that would allow all of us to get around faster is highly distributed, so even though that benefit is much greater than the cost, it’s not big enough for any individual to persuade them to do anything about it.

This pattern happens all over Irish public life, but sometimes it’s harder to see. One huge issue that you would think would create a huge, active lobby group suffering from a highly concentrated problem is the housing crisis. People who can’t get on the housing ladder, or people who can’t get housing at all, surely they are motivated to move mountains, let alone move votes to get their problem solved.

You’d think.

And that’s where Donald Trump comes to our aid. But this isn’t about Trump at all really. I promise.

****

Well it’s only about Trump in that he often says the quiet bit out loud. Like this.

****

Politicians might not like to admit it, but they are keenly aware that there are a lot of people out there who are quite happy about stratospheric house prices. And the people with houses easily outnumber the people without them. And they are more likely to vote, or even be able to vote, given how difficult our electoral roll makes things for people moving regularly between rental accommodation.

But hang on, what about that whole thing of distributed and concentrated. For most people, most voters, regardless of whether their house price goes up or down, their house is still worth exactly one house. Their value from living in it doesn’t change at all. Even if they are avid Daily Mail readers who like to snobbishly think of how much it’s worth, surely that still counts as a much more distributed benefit than the highly concentrated cost on the people whose whole lives are disrupted by not being able to get adequate housing.

You’d think.

But then again, there are some people who have far more property than just their own house. Property prices for them are far more than a theoretical number, and those are certainly the sort of people who can and do bend the ear of politician, and try to make sure that they go easy on any measures that would actually work at reducing the cost of housing, be they in Ireland or the US or anywhere else.

So Trump might be good at seeming like he says the quite part out loud, in an effort to recruit the lucky ones who have a home of their own into supporting him, but maybe that’s not exactly what he is doing; maybe in the US, like in Ireland, there are other people who aren’t so anxious to be campaigning in public, but still push government policy towards to suit their own highly concentrated interests.

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John Moran is the first directly elected Mayor of Limerick.

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Iain Dale is a presenter on the British talk radio station LBC, former Conservative party electoral candidate and author of the book The Taoiseach: A Century of Political Leadership

*****

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Frank Connolly is a journalist, author and former head of communications with SIPTU. Tony Lowes is director of Friends of the Irish Environment. Michael Smith is the editor of Village Magazine.

*****

Lucid Talk is the Belfast-based polling company which, every year, does a poll on attitudes in the north to a border poll. Polls are, of course, only polls, but these are useful, because year after year, they do the same poll, with the same questions, the same methodology, so even if you quibble about the results, you can’t argue with the direction of change over time.

In their 2024 poll, unionism had a 10 point lead over nationalism – 49 to 39 per cent. The same poll this year cut that margin to seven per cent. This, of course, isn’t a normal poll, just like anything in Northern Ireland is a normal anything. This is not measuring opinion going back and forth in cycles, this is mostly just reflecting demographic changes. In 2025, that lead is down to seven per cent, 48 to 41 per cent.

At a three-percent-per-year shift, that would point to a nationalist majority before Catherine Connolly is half-way through her first term as president. And that’s not even the real demographic nightmare for unionists. The real disaster is that their support is concentrated in the older demographics. Unionism is, literally, dying.

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Kev Collins’ Youtube channel his here. Ben Scallan writes for Gript.

*****

That’s a clip I played on the podcast a while back, it’s from one of the far-right protest a while back, and we’ve had a couple more of those anti-immigration protests in the last while. I saw some comments on social media about those protests, one in particular that caught my eye with, some let’s say unflattering photos of a group of protesters, and the comment was ‘Not one junior cert between the lot of them‘.

I’m certainly not going to argue that that woman in the clip or any of her cohort will be winning any Nobel prizes, but I don’t think that it’s constructive to call them stupid. It might cheer the troops, but it’s unhelpful for two reasons. First, it doesn’t win any converts. That is a debate well worn, so I’m not going to get into it.

But secondly, it’s dangerous to assume that everyone who doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t agree because they are stupid. At best, that leaves you dangerously unprepared.

And it’s important to recognise that that what you’re hearing there isn’t just random nonsense. There are clever people out there who are who are promoting very extreme messages.

I don’t know if that woman is aware of it, but the version of the conspiracy theory that she is giving was created by a French far-right figure called Renaud Camus, who published a book in 2011, Le Grand Remplacement, basically saying what that woman was saying, although Camus’ book was specific to France. Renaud Camus, by the way should not be confused with Albert Camus, who actually is a noted philosopher. Renaud Camus’ conspiracy theory has been spread widely on far-right websites, and adapted for many other countries including, as we hear there, for Ireland.

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Dr Kirill Bumin is Associate Dean of Metropolitan College of Boston University and Dr Mordechai Inbari is Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

*****

That’s the diminutive Justin Barrett, formerly of Youth Defence and a string of other far-right organisations, Litler himself, talking to a commentator with the Canadian YouTube channel Rebel News, itself very much part of the Alt-Right, but he showed up in Dublin for the anti-immigration march, and I suppose he expected the crowd there to be a bit more on-message.

Anyway, I use that clip because it shows both sides of what I always thought were a couple of pretty small niches of anti-Semitic people in Ireland – one the knuckleheaded morons who fancied themselves as edgy neonazis and, two, a strand of conservative Catholics who mixed their bigotry with a conspiratorial reading of theology.

In that clip, Litler manages to lay claim to be in both of those camps, but in reality my impression was always that antisemitism in Ireland was never really an issue. That’s not because Ireland is particularly virtuous, but because there was never a very large Jewish community to be antisemitic against, and any of the typical conspiratorial complaints against Jews on the continent, that they exploited the population, that idea was clearly rebutted by the reality of exploitation of our colonial masters. Another factor is that Ireland didn’t take part in World War II, censorship was so strict that Irish people had little idea what was going on, so the debate – if you can call it that – about the role of Jews in society that you get in most continental countries, doesn’t really exist in Ireland.

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Amun Bains is a journalist.

*****

The first amendment to the US constitution starts “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”

Our constitution is not quite so concise. Article 44 of De Valera’s handbook for governing deals with freedom of religion. Section one says “The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.”

But then section hits reverse gear somewhat and starts “Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen.”

It goes on saying “The State guarantees not to endow any religion” and “The State shall not impose any disabilities or make any discrimination on the ground of religious profession, belief or status.”

So we have freedom or religion, sort of.

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Daniel Mulhall is a consultant with DLA Piper law firm and, prior to that, he was ambassador of Ireland to Malaysia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

*****

I want to talk about a couple of fellas that I’m really not so sure of.

It’s hard to overstate how disappointing the last century has been for Argentina. I think it was David McWilliams who said on his podcast that if you were emigrating from Ireland 100 years ago, and your choice was to go around the world to Australia, north to Canada or south to Argentina, based on economic potential, Argentina would have been the obvious choice. Of the three, Argentina came first in population, in GDP and in per capita income.

Argentina had a much better climate, huge natural resources, and a seemingly never-ending market in Europe for its seemingly never-ending supply of beef produced by its vast area of grasslands, once refrigerated shipping had become a possibility.

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*****

Now that the dust has settled after the election, congratulations to all the candidates, all 686 of them. Congratulations to everyone from Pearse Doherty who got 18,898 first preference votes in Donegal, all the way down to Seán O’Leary who stood for election in Wicklow and got nine votes.

Pearse Doherty got that massive vote despite having two Sinn Féin running mates, who got another 12,000 votes between them. If Sinn Féin had managed their vote a bit better, they might have distributed it among the three candidates more evenly and won three seats in Donegal, but that’s a story for a different day.

And Seán O’Leary, who got just nine votes in Wicklow, congratulations to him too, and let’s remember that he also ran in Carlow Kilkenny where he got 26 votes, and Cork South-West where he got 27, and he ran in a bunch of other constituencies including Cork North-West where he got a whopping 110 votes bringing his total to 324 between all the constituencies that he ran in, so I hope that cheered him up a bit.

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Wendy Grace is a presenter on Spirit Radio and the director of a communications training company.

*****

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Professor Colin O’Gara is Head of Addiction Services at St. John of God Hospital and author of the book Gambling Addiction In Ireland: Causes Consequences and Recovery.

*****

There is a pattern, I suppose it’s so well-known that it’s a cliché, of people mellowing their view as they get older. One version is the famous quote, I think wrongly attributed to Churchill, ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ But I think that isn’t exactly the effect in reality; regardless of your political views, as you get older, life’s complications present themselves, so it is harder not to take account of them and acknowledge that there are many exceptions that don’t fit into the more strident views you might have on any topic. Nuance is important.

You might be a free market capitalist, and point to the explosion of wealth that it is associated with, and say that everything should be governed by the market, but if you don’t eventually notice that some areas of life persistently just don’t respond to market forces, then you’re not paying attention.

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Cormac Lucey is an economics columnist at Sunday Times (Ireland), and lecturer in finance, at the Irish Management Institute, Chartered Accountants Ireland and Trinity College Dublin.

***

And we’re back!

Sorry about the unannounced little hiatus for the podcast. I’ll tell you a bit more about it, but first just to say I’m lining up a great roster of guests, interesting people to talk to, interesting things to talk about, for the coming months.

Kevin and myself will try to devote a bit of time to putting it all together, obviously we have day jobs, and I really appreciate Kevin’s help, but the thought struck me that we could probably do better on social media, so if there’s anyone out there who has the skills and wanted to volunteer to help on that front, or even just suggest a to-do list, we’d love to hear from you.

And that’s a bit of the reason for the for the hiatus, it was partly because I was busy with work and other things in life, but mostly I needed to take a break from all the awfulness in the news, I felt like not being a news junkie for a while, you could say that I needed a low-information diet.

I never wanted to deal with breaking news on the podcast, but forgive me if I’m not bang up to date on every issue, I was pretty thorough about avoiding all the news and social media apps and websites for the past while, and it seems like the algorithms got the hint, I’ve been served up all sorts of strange stuff recently… or maybe that’s just the world moving on.

That’s the Irish actor Saoirse Ronan being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, the Irish-American talkshow host a few years back.

I’m using it as an example because I don’t want to focus attention unfairly on anyone who’s just a regular person on social media, but it’s a good example of one of the things that has been served up to me online recently, which you could probably summarise as ‘Irish funny people, Irish funny language’.

You might have seen the sort of thing, people making serious or not so serious attempts to pronounce Irish words, particularly names and placenames. Inevitably there is a subgenre of other people correcting them, not always correctly, and another subgenre of people getting offended to varying degrees, saying that this is belittling a language and a culture by mocking how Irish words don’t conform to English spelling rules. A good deal of those on all sides didn’t seem to have any connection to Ireland.

To which I would say there are probably things in the world more worthy of getting annoyed about, but, y’know, they’re right.

There is more than an hint here of what Edward Said called Orientalism, essentially viewing other cultures as quaint, or inferior, or amusing or threatening, but never a valid thing in its own right, it only has an existence to be observed by the other.

And it’s worth noting that complaining about inconsistent spelling is not exactly a glass house that you should be throwing stones near if you are in English speaker.

I’m sure that all this has something to do with Ireland’s soft power in the world, but I’m not sure exactly what.  Well, we know what the one thing that’s worse than being talked about …

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Mathew Creighton is associate professor of sociology at UCD.

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I’ve been on a low-information diet.

I suppose I’m someone who is generally pretty well-informed but sometimes that can get a bit too much, so a few months ago I just tuned out, deleted all my news apps, Twitter – while it still had the bird – and all the other social media apps, and I didn’t log in to any news websites. For podcasts, I just hit skip on any that were covering current events.

I suppose I’d say it was for my ‘mental health’ if I was using the fashionable language of the day. I did a couple of other things too, like cycling around more often when I have short trips to make.

I can report back that it works. There is certainly something about the unrelenting negativity that gets to you in a drip-drip way. And, if the news wasn’t bad enough, the hostility and negativity about the news on social media, and in the comments section that almost every news outlet uses to generate more clicks and page impressions is even worse.

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Andrew Wright is a fourth generation dairy farmer near Omagh in Co Tyrone, with a big following on Tiktok. We talked about this video he published.

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In the world of what used to be called PR, these days they call themselves other things, information management or whatever. PR has PR’d itself. In the world of what we used to call PR, there is a standard practice of trying to present whatever the news is in as positive a light for whoever the client is.

Our client is delighted with the result of this case, that the jury has seen fit to exonerate him and declare him innocent on the parking fine, and he’s more than confident that the conviction on the murder charge will be overturned on appeal.

That sort of stuff.

So when I saw the ah succinct headline in the Irish Times “Rising number of gardaí convicted shows force’s culture changing, Policing Authority chair says”, I had a bit of a smile.

Before Drew Harris took over as garda commissioner, there were typically about 30 or 40 gardaí suspended per year. in the following years, the number went up to over 120 per year, though it has since dipped below 100.

The number of convictions of gardaí has shot up in parallel.

And the Policing Authority thinks that that increase is a good thing. It’s a sign that what they delicately call the culture of An Garda Síochána is improving. They might have said the quiet bit out loud, but I think that they are probably right.

But whatever PR intern, sorry Junior Reputational Governance associate, wrote that line maybe should have thought it out a bit better. It is a good thing. But the fact that that it is a good thing, is not a good thing.

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David Maddox is the political editor of Express Online.

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Kevin and myself always appreciate feedback from listeners, we try to reply when we can, but Aengus Ryan send in a sound file, which is great cos I can include it in the podcast.

I think this is an important question, and I think that some people are thinking about it, but not enough. In particular I’d say that Unionists are not thinking about it, which might be a bit of avoiding thinking about something in the hope it never happens, a bit like whistling past the graveyard.

But we should look at the mote in our own eyes first, because we really aren’t thinking about this, we aren’t preparing. One reason for that is that it might seem like a remote possibility, but that strikes me as making the Brexit mistake, not preparing for a possible outcome that could well happen much faster than we expect, and if that snowball starts rolling, it will be hard to make detailed preparations in the heat of the debate that will bring.

Jim O’Callaghan the Fianna Fáil TD and, I think, leadership hopeful, to be fair to him, has made some proposals. I think the proposals are terrible, such as having the Dáil sit in Dublin and the Seanad in Belfast. But bad as it is, it’s helpful for him to bring this up, because at least people are thinking about practicalities.

But the short answer to Aengus’ question is that this hasn’t really been addressed in any official way since the Good Friday Belfast Agreement.

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Pádraig Mac Lochlainn is Sinn Féin’s chief whip.

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Mario Rosenstock is a comedian and impressionist, and creator of TodayFM’s Gift Grub.

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Here’s something about the Chinese economy.

China’s ‘investment’ in real estate makes Ireland’s property obsession seem breezy and carefree. Just before our crash, 12 per cent of our economy was house-building.

Even if Chinese GDP figures are true, then their reliance on homebuilding is double our peak. (If their GDP is overstated, it’s worse.)

If China crashes, it will shake the world. China holds trillions in dollar and euro reserves, and US sovereign debt. China is not a democracy, but its leaders are sensitive to public opinion, and deeply paranoid about preventing unrest.

If threatened, the Communist Party is likely to pull investment from anywhere it needs to, to keep their internal economy going, and keep their population working, not protesting. But with ghost cities, and one quarter of the economy building more of them, something has to give. But when?

~ read more ~

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Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage.

I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. I should have said that Edwin Montagu, the Liberal MP and Secretary for India, who did not support Dyre, was Jewish, and the resulting campaign against him by Conservative MPs (in support of Dyre) had a strong and explicit antisemitic element.

Ben’s claim that the then Brexit Party, for which he was an MEP, provided a majority of the non-white or ethnic minority members of the 2019 European Parliament doesn’t seem to be correct; a Reform Party spokesperson clarified that they meant that all British MEPs provided a majority of ethnic minority members of the EP. The EP told us that they don’t collect this information, but reporting here and here indicates that isn’t the case, and the Brexit Party had the lowest proportion of ethnic minorities among its MEPs, of all Britain-wide parties although that isn’t a really valid comparison given the small numbers involved.

Notwithstanding all that, I think Ben’s wider point is valid, that while it is imperfect like any country, the UK has a relatively good record on race relations compared to many continental European countries.

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John will be 40 next April, or he would be, if he lived. But he didn’t.

He died.