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Gemma O'Doherty worked for the Irish Independent for 17 years before being dismissed following her investigation of the penalty points scandal. Since then she has worked as an independent journalist on a number of high-profile scandals and particularly on failed murder investigations. On 19 August, she announced her intention to seek nominations to be a candidate in the forthcoming presidential election.  ~ read more ~

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Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is a Labour Party senator and former TD.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

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I wanted to comment a bit about the controversy that blew up in the UK last week about Boris Johnson’s comment about Muslim women who wear burkas.

Boris Johnson, in case you don’t know, is the ~ read more ~

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John Leahy became leader of Renua Ireland in September 2016. I spoke to him about aspects of his policies set out on the Renua website, including the proposal to

Introduce 90-day detention orders for those Gardai suspect of being actively involved in preparations to murder another or of being responsible for directing the activities of an organised criminal gang.

Jailing people for any length of time because ~ read more ~

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Graham Gudgin is a founder of Briefings for Brexit, and a research associate at the Centre For Business Research at the University of Cambridge and the Senior Economic Advisor with Oxford Economics. He was a special adviser to the Northern Ireland First Minister on economic policy from 1998  to 2002.

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You’ll remember that in the last podcast, I was talking to Steve Hinks from the British anti  ~ read more ~

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‎Steve Hinks‎ speaks for the UK Association of HPV Vaccine Injured Daughters, and he attended a conference in Dublin in April organised by the the International Federation for Injured Children and Adults. The conference was also attended by Anna Cannon of REGRET and Dr Jesper Mehlsen.

The conference program claimed ~ read more ~

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Natalie Parrott produces the YouTube channel ContraPoints. I highly recommend her videos. I mentioned the interview I did Linda Bellos in February. 

In our discussion, I mentioned the soaring referrals to the UK's Tavistock clinic (which specialises in ~ read more ~

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David Quinn is a founder of the Iona Institute, a newspaper columnist and a regular media commentator.

During the marriage equality referendum campaign, David said that

Should the referendum pass, a same-sex couple could demand a right to marry in a church ... In Denmark, we have already seen that the Lutheran Church, a State Church admittedly, has been forced to conduct same-sex weddings.

~ read more ~

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Sandra Khadhouri is one of the founders of Renew Britain, a new political party set up to resist Brexit. James Cousins, a former Conservative party member of Wandsworth Council has recently joined their party but they have not yet had a chance to test their electoral strength. 

In our conversation, I mentioned The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart, which charts the cultural gulf that has opened between different groups in Britain and elsewhere.

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Linda Bellos is a businesswoman, radical feminist and gay-rights activist. She was a member of the collective that produced Spare Rib, a British feminist magazine, and was a member of Lambeth Borough Council in London and was the leader of the council from 1986 to 1988. 

The term 'TERF' is widely used as a term of abuse by third wave feminists for second-wave feminists, often with extreme hostility and even threats of violence. Linda was invited, and then un-invited to speak to the Beards Society in Cambridge University, as part of a bitter dispute between factions within feminism.

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I talked to Director of Retail and Consumer Services at Comreg, Barbara Delaney.

Yourtel appear to still be advertising to the Irish market, despite being convicted on 88 sample charges (out of 880) of ripping off their customers. They were fined just €750 of a maximum fine of €5,000 in each case - a total of €66,000. Their pricing scheme and the fact that they have ~ read more ~

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Keith Redmond is an independent member of Fingal County Council, having been elected on the Fine Gael ticket in 2014 previously run for the Progressive Democrats and briefly been a member of Renua Ireland. He's also a founder member of the Hibernia Forum. 

The Libertarian Party in the US is known for its anti-government stance and espousal of Austrian economics.

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I normally wouldn’t do a podcast about a blog post, but this is a blog post that has been signed by almost 500 people, so it’s not an ordinary blog post. 

You might have heard about Dean Scurry, he’s one of the activists who organised Home Sweet Home, the occupation of Apollo House by the homeless. Dean also set up a ~ read more ~

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In the main interview, I talked to Gino Kenny of the People Before Profit party. 

Gino's Facebook page shared the Facebook group Medical Cannabis Testimonials Ireland & UK, and encouraged people to share supposed 'testimony' of people benefiting ~ read more ~

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I interviewed Dr Mariano García de Palau of the Kalapa Clinic about his claims to treat a wide range of ailments with cannabis. As he mentioned, there are no clinical trials to validate most of these cures.

I also interviewed Dr Robert O'Connor, Head of Research for the Irish Cancer Society.

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This podcast is the first part of a major investigation into people selling unlicensed substances that they claim will treat or cure serious conditions. This first part of the investigation, focussing on the Dublin-based Hemp Company. 

The Hemp Company's page selling the Charlotte’s Web product for up to €5,500 per litre is here, That page contains a link on the text "View Everyday Advanced hemp oil supplement facts" with a link to this page which recommends the oil for treating depression and multiple sclerosis, and a comment apparently from a doctor saying "patient of mine uses this for cancer".

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Derek Mooney is a public affairs and communications adviser as well as a former adviser to the Irish government. He's a columnist on Broadsheet.ie and Slugger O'Toole. 

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In the last podcast, I was talking to Tom Geraghty of the PSEU, that’s the union that represents higher level public sector workers. The interview was in the aftermath of the PSEU annual conference, where Tom was demanding a ~ read more ~

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Tom Geraghty is the General Secretary of the Public Service Executive Union. 

Tom disputed  a couple of the references that I made during the interview. The report of MABS staff dealing with an average of two new cases per week here.  The minister for justice has confirmed that there are gardaí suspended on pay for up to seven years.

In case you didn’t notice, I didn’t agree with everything Tom Geraghty was saying. His job is to advocate for his members, so that’s fair enough, but I want to check if what he is saying is valid.

I don’t like to get too deep into statistics because I don’t think that it works well in an audio format, but I want to take up a few of the things that Tom said, so bear with me. If you take the real boom, from about 2000 to about 2007, revenue, that’s the tax take, went up from about €30b to almost €50b; then in 2008/9, it crashed back down almost all the way to €30b a year.

In the same time 2000 to about 2007 government spending, which is mostly wages shot up along with it. Remember Charlie McCreevy saying “When I have it, I spend it”?

Well he really did. But what he had was once-off tax revenue from the housing boom. And what he spent it on was on salaries that would have to be paid every year, boom or no boom. When the crash came, all those people who had been hired and given big pay rises, they still had to be paid, but that huge boom in revenue, on the back of the property market, had stopped.

That created a huge annual deficit, every year, clocking the national debt higher and higher; now, people will say what about bailing out the banks. And they are right. Bailing out the banks cost about €70b; a lot of that will be paid back by selling bank shares, the final cost will be about €40b. But continuing to pay the boom level salaries through the financial crisis meant borrowing more than €10b a year, every year. That borrowing clocks up, and overspending €10b a year very quickly outstrips a once-off cost of €40bn.

Now Tom says that he is looking for the pay cuts to be reversed, but there is some vocabulary there that I think is a bit slippery. It’s true that public sector workers had pay cuts, technically, but they also had pay increases, even though they didn’t call them that. In the public sector there are three ways to get a pay increase. The first one is a pay increase, just like someone in the competitive sector might get one.

But in the public sector, there are also what are called increments. These are automatic pay increases, usually every year, and they are written into the job description. Now most people would regard anything that gave them more pay as a pay increase, but that’s not the way public sector unions see it, and that’s how a great many public sector workers who technically had a pay cut ended up within a year or two with a higher salary than before the pay cut.

And that’s the reason why, despite the pay cut, the public sector pay bill went up every single year throughout the crash, although the speed of its increase did slow down.

And as well as what the unions call pay increases, and the increments, when someone in the public sector is promoted, they get a pay increase for that as well, and that increase is excluded from what the unions calculate as pay increases also.

Tom also said that there needed to be a wider tax base to pay for the increases that he’s looking for. That’s tax increases to you and me.

I'm going to have a look at what value for money is on offer for tax increases in the next podcast.

~ read more ~

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Opposition parties have called for the Disclosures Tribunal to be expanded. The MacLochlainn Tribunal does exist, but the Boyle Tribunal does not. Yet. Honest.

Village magazine summarised the Morris Tribunal report in 2005 saying “the gardaí are in a state of disarray, with low morale, poor discipline, lack of oversight, and a culture of silence…”

The Moriarty Tribunal found as fact in 2011 that Michael Lowry had an “insidious and pervasive” influence over the awarding the 086 licence to Denis O’Brien’s company Digifone. Since then, on at least five separate occassions  justice ministers have given the exact same answer -  word for word - as an excuse for why no criminal investigations have begun yet, here, here, here, here and here.

The text of the statute on perverting the course of justice is here. Perhaps someone can forward it to the DPP's office.

Google trends shows that the Seanad is almost never searched apart from at election time. This Future Matters leaflet clearly cast the referendum as a choice between reform and abolition, despite no reform being on the ballot.

And this Democracy Matters leaflet offered both 'more democracy' in the seanad but to reserve places for 'experts'.

Some highlights from prominent senators include Fidelma Healy Eames repeating laughable claims that the marriage equality referendum would lead to Mothers' Day being banned, citing the antisemetic Holocaust denial website Rense.com as a source; and Lorraine Clifford-Lee proposing laser-defence systems to tackle the supposed growing problem of seagulls.

They are laughable, but far more dangerous was Paschal Mooney of Fianna Fáil repeating false claims of antivax conspiarcy theorists, giving credibility to false rumours that have led to a collapse in the HPV vaccination rates, endangering the lives of many young women.

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Tony Groves writes the blog Trickstersworld, and we discussed this article which he wrote for Broadsheet.ie.

Tony Groves