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Annabel Fenwick Elliott is a British freelance journalist who previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

*****

It might have been Tomorrow’s World, that science programme from the BBC from my dim and distant childhood, where they demonstrated an early chatbot, although I think it wasn’t called that. You typed in some text, and up on the suitcase-sized screen came what looked like a meaningful response. But not really. The presenter typed in Necessity is the mother of invention and the machine responded Tell me more about your family.

It was just a trick really, a set of pre-programmed vague comments, set to be output based on trigger words entered by the user.

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Dan McClellan is a public scholar of the Bible and religion and author of the book YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach.

*****

I don’t much talk about Jordan Peterson, I don’t think that he is as interesting a character as the internet makes out, certainly not as interesting as he thinks he is himself.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, he’s a Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor, who got a lot of attention for, what seemed to me, pretty basic psychological observations; I think he got that attention because he couched those observations in terms that appealed to a right-wing audience. I don’t think that it would be fair to call him alt-right, he doesn’t seem to like the extreme right, but they do seem to like him, because he was able to articulate criticisms of the left in an impressive-sounding way, and they were happy to ignore his criticisms of the right, which, to be fair, he did make.

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Graham Neary is a financial commentator who has been a fund manager and analyst in the London financial markets.

*****

The transport minister, Eamon Ryan who is also leader of the Green Party, it has been announced will set up an inter-departmental group to make sure the transport sector meets its emissions reduction targets.

Related to this, The National Transport Authority has published what’s called modelling on transport climate targets, which basically means having an educated guess about the effect of various possible policy choices. This basically means they have a go at understanding what would happen if they increased bus fares, kept them the same, or reduced them, and then the same for a variety of combinations of other policy levers that the government could pull, or push, or not change at all.

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Dafydd Iwan is the former president of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party.

*****

Bertie Ahern, we are told, had been readmitted, to Fianna Fáil. It might be better to use the term rehabilitated. Fianna Fáil activists gave him a standing ovation at an event recently, it was to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, obviously chosen to focus attention on the one positive part of his time as Taoiseach.

It’s worth remembering that he resigned from Fianna Fáil more than 10 years ago, ahead of a motion to expel him for lying to the Moriarty Tribunal.

It’s the little things that trip you up, as his predecessor said. He had already brazened out the ludicrous lie that when he was finance minister, he didn’t have a single bank account himself. The fact that he was going through a messy separation from his wife at the time, who would have been entitled to look at any accounts to determine appropriate support and child support payments, is not irrelevant. That’s also a good explanation as to why he owned his house under a false name.

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John Rentoul is the chief political commentator for the Independent.

*****

I’m pessimistic.

I’m not naturally a pessimistic person, but I’m pessimistic. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’m entering the ‘the whole world is going to hell’ phase of my life, maybe I’m right to be pessimistic, maybe I’m not paying attention to the right things, but I’m pessimistic.

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Jesse Spafford is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state.

*****

I was talking to someone last night. I won’t say who, but someone fairly well known, known for taking part in public debate, robust, intense debate, debates where people are strongly committed to their side of the argument, and aren’t afraid to let you know that.

They’d been listening to the podcasts that I did a while back on trans rights and the associated issues with Aoife Gallagher, and they said to me that although they had talked publicly about a number of thorny political topics, they had steered away from what is called the trans debate. I don’t think that’s a very good name for it, but I don’t have  a better one, so I’ll go with that. They had steered away from what is called the trans debate, not because they don’t have opinions on it, not because they don’t think it’s interesting, but purely because they were afraid of the potential backlash if they said the wrong thing, and they didn’t really believe the ‘right’ thing, so they said nothing.

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Brooks Newmark was a British Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Braintree and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford.

*****

I’ve got a proposal for tax reform. The idea is to make tax easier and simpler to understand, simpler for the government to collect, thereby lower costs which would lower the tax burden overall.

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Brendan is the Labour Party TD for Wexford, and former party leader.

*****

So, we’re talking about a war.

We’re talking about a war where a huge, nuclear-armed superpower, attacks a territory to its south that this formerly-communist superpower views not as a real country, it views but as an integral part of its own country, and the superpower’s nationalist leadership is still pretty sore about how this territory got to be independent in the first place.

To rub salt in the wound, this territory is doing much better, and is certainly much more democratic than the superpower; and another point of aggravation, this territory is politically much closer to the west, the United States in particular, and is receiving a huge amount of military aid from the west, and even though it is said to be exclusively for defensive use, the superpower sees that aid as a direct threat to its own security.

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Eoin Ó Murchú was the political editor for Raidió na Gaeltachta.

*****

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Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

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Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

*****

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Kellie Armstrong an Alliance party MLA for the Strangford constituency.

*****

I saw a load of comments from commentators online, from talking heads on radio and TV, from people on Twitter, that the mobilisation ordered by Putin last week to try to shore up his invasion of Ukraine was stupid. It was stupid to try to mobilise people with no military experience, it was stupid to think they could have any effect against high-precision, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians are now getting.

It was stupid not to consider that they would have no experienced officers, it was stupid to not understand that this lack of leadership is a key reason why Russia is losing, it was stupid not to consider the destabilising effect that this order would have in the population in Russia, it was stupid to have all the skilled young men fleeing over the closest border, it was stupid, stupid, stupid.

I’m not convinced.

This made me think of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. In case you don’t know, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is listed as the world’s richest man, has proposed and apparently started working on a high-speed mass transport system that would involve a sort of train inside a vacuum tube. With all the air evacuated from the tube and no wind resistance, people could be transported at over a thousand km per hour, as fast a jet liner. This has gained him huge publicity, and quite a bit of political traction.

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It’s Q&A time! Thank you to everyone who sent in a question!

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Joel Keys is a Belfast Loyalist activist and prolific tweeter.

*****

I discovered a big discrepancy. Well, I didn’t so much discover it as notice it. And it isn’t really isn’t a big discrepancy, it is an enormous discrepancy. A gigantic discrepancy. A sort of a so-big-you-could-see-it-from-space. discrepancy

This is the discrepancy. Have a look at Daft.ie any given day, on the front page you can choose to browse by section, and go to Rental properties. No filters, look at the whole country, any type of residence. Much has been made of this. These days, you will normally get less than 800 properties.

Of course, some properties that go up for rent don’t go on Daft, they are rented by word of mouth, via social media contacts or a postcard in the window of a local shop, but Daft on their website say that 90 per cent of property sales in Ireland are on their site, so it’s a good guess that daft have the bulk of rentals, and movements up and down in their number of listings match the market pretty closely.

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Marc Coleman is a business consultant, former broadcaster and journalist. He is currently working on a book on the persistence of western democracy.

*****

‘Magical thinking’ is a great phrase that I learnt years ago, it’s a concept that’s useful to understand someone’s thought processes, maybe even your own. If you know what it is, skip forward about two minutes; if you don’t, it’s important to understand that it’s not a positive thing, in fact it’s very negative.

The concept of magical thinking is often used by therapists, psychologists and so on, to classify a particular thought process, and to help their patients to get over it. You see it at a comical level sometimes in kids, don’t step on the cracks in the pavements or the monster will get you. That’s basically the core of it, believing that one thing can affect another thing where two seconds of rational thought by an adult will tell you that it can’t.

People with mental health problems frequently exhibit magical thinking. A very famous example would be John Hinckley, Jr, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, did it because he thought it would impress the actress Jodie Foster and make her fall in love with him.

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Jessica Berlin is a commentator at Deutsche Welle News, and she has worked for 15 years working with in security policy, transatlantic affairs, sustainable business and technology, and aid industry reform across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She founded the Berlin-based strategy consultancy CoStruct, she holds an MSc in Political Economy of Emerging Markets from King’s College London, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.

She responds to the call from many prominent Germans, including Professor Julian Nida-Rümelin from Tuesday’s podcast, published in Die Zeit newspaper under the headline Ceasefire Now.

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Seán Keyes is the finance correspondent for the Currency, a subscription news website.

*****

I spoke to a Sinn Féin supporter in the years after the Good Friday Belfast agreement, I think it was during one of the interminable negotiations trying to get DUP to participate and have the institutions up and running, and she said one thing about the peace deal that I thought was perceptive, if not very diplomatic.

She said “The Unionists are too thick to realise that they’ve won, and the Shinners are too cute to admit that they lost.”

Mindsets may not have changed for some at least, but I think that calculation may have changed in the years since. First off, there’s peace. In that sense alone, everybody won; that can’t be underestimated. But secondly, the Unionists may have won the war, if you want to call it that, but the nationalists may yet win the peace.

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Ellie O’Byrne is co-editor of Tripe and Drisheen, a Cork-based local news substack, and we discussed a recent article of hers.

*****

In talking to Ellie, I mentioned a tweet from Cllr Fiona Ryan of People Before Profit, who claimed that there are 25,000 ‘Airbnb vacancies’ in Ireland. I used the website InsideAirbnb.com to show that these are mostly rooms in occupied houses or regular Bed & Breakfasts, or houses that are normally occupied by residents, and let on Airbnb when they are away.

Of those that remain – about 8,000 throughout the country, of which about 400 are in Dublin – they are concentrated in tourist areas and a number of them are purpose-built tourist accommodation, not suitable for residential use.

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Derek Mooney presents Mooney on Politics. Give it a listen.