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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.

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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

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Lughan Deane is the Communications Executive for the IMPACT trade union, who are currently running the #ClockedOut campaign.

Lughan Deane

In the discussion I slightly overstated the dominance of women in Iran's technical and engineering facilities, but the point stands. By contrast, women in Norway are remarkably reluctant to enter many male professions.

In Ireland it is illegal to pay someone less based on their gender. TheJournal.ie have prepared an excellent analysis of the raw Eurostat figures.

Eurostat also report that males suffer almost 80 per cent of workplace injuries and 95 per cent of workplace deaths.

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Bill Donoghue is the President and CEO of the Catholic League. The article that he wrote claiming that the Tuam babies story is a hoax is here. The report by the Mother And Baby Homes Commission Of Investigation which detailed the forensic findings is here.

Bill Donohue

The text of the letter by Terry Prone, pouring scorn on Catherine Corless's work and denying the existence of a grave related to the home is here. A letter a year earlier from Prone's client, Sr Marie Ryan country leader of the Bon Secours nuns confirms that, in fact, she was well aware that children from the homes were buried on the grounds of the home.

Part of Mary Merrit's story detailing life in one of the homes is here. In response to the findings, the bishop of Limerick, Brendan Leahy said in reaction to the findings “we hang our heads in shame”.

The Bon Secours nuns own the profitable Bon Secours healthcare group, and finance minister Michael Noonan opened their new €21m hospital in Limerick last week.

The annual birth rate in Ireland is here, and information about the effects of malnutrition were found by the Laffoy Commission.

Wages in Ireland in the 1940s (see table 9) were typically between £2 and £4 per week; in the 1920s, wages for agricultural workers were less than 15s (£0.75) per week. In 1928 the Connaught Tribune reported that local politicians thought that the payment to the Tuam home of 10s (£0.50) per week was excessive. It is clear that the Bon Secours nuns had a far more generous budget to feed and clothe the children than many families, before taking into account the profits from their businesses that used the slave labour of their mothers, or the profits of selling adoptive babies to American couples.

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Brendan O'Neill is the editor of Spiked Online. His 2014 article that we discussed is here, and the interim report of the Mother And Baby Homes Commission Of Investigations is here.

The second part of my coverage of this topic will be published next week.

Brendan O Neill

The global infant mortality statistics that I mentioned are here, and the historical Irish data is here.

Terry Prone runs the profitable media consultancy the Communications Clinic, with many high-profile clients. Prone wrote to French TV journalist Saskia Weber, on behalf of her clients the Bon Secours Sisters who ran the Tuam home, explicitly denying that any children were buried there, and pouring scorn on the work of the local historian, Catherine Corless.

Terry Prone

A year earlier, Sr Marie Ryan, leader of the Bon Secours in Ireland wrote to the relative of a child who died at the home saying that there was 'a very good possibility that his remains were buried at the small cemetery located at the back of the home that was operated as a general grave'. Terry Prone has refused to return calls from the podcast seeking an explanation of this, or to claify whether she contacted other journalists to discourage coverage of the story, or encourage stories that were hostile to Catherine Corless.

Rosita Boland wrote an article for the Irish Times under the title Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story that appears to refute the original story, although in fact a close reading reveals that it largely focusses on semantic quibbles. Catherine Corless' daughter Adrienne Corless wrote a long blog post taking issue with Bloand's article. The Irish Times published a long letter by Boland defending her coverage.

Eamon Fingleton wrote a piece for the well-known Forbes Magazine under the title Why That Story About Irish Babies "Dumped In A Septic Tank" Is A Hoax in which he explicitly accused unnamed elements of the press of promoting a hoax story, and repeated the allegation a week later. I had an email exchange with Fingleton, in which he agreed, and later declined to do an interview, so I sent him these written questions:

Eamonn Fingleton

• Around the time you were writing the Forbes story, did you have any contact with Terry Prone? Or her firm The Communications Clinic? Or any other spokespeople for the Bon Secours nuns?
• In 2014, Terry Prone claimed that the Bon Secours nuns had positive knowledge that there was “no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried” on the grounds of the home. Was this ever claim made to you by anybody in relation to your article?
• Terry Prone, in the same letter, implied that Catherine Corless was not a ‘reputable’ historian. Was this claim, or any other claim impugning her character or her work, made to you by anyone in relation to the article?
• In your article, you said “[The media] have to show that the sewage tank was still being use for its original purpose at the time the bodies were placed in it.” Why should they have to show that? Was there any material point resting on that issue? Did any substantial outlet make that claim?
• Your article ended “The image of nuns consciously dumping babies in a septic tank is one of the most irresponsible press hoaxes of modern times”. The term ‘hoax’ implies that there was conscious deception. What evidence did you have of this?
• Do you now accept that the 2014 story, that children’s bodies were dumped in a disused sewerage facility was substantially true?

He replied in the following terms:

1. My sources. As a matter of principle, journalists in free nations do not expect to have to reveal their sources (and in many cases they have gone to jail rather than do so). That said, you and other readers have a right to expect me to be accurate in my facts and fair in my comments. If you have any complaint on either score, please feel free to air it -- but I would ask that you include links to what I wrote so your audience can judge for itself whether my commentaries fell short.
2. How the Tuam story was generally reported. Reporters are supposed to be in the business of telling the truth. Thus in a controversy of this sort, they have an obligation to recount any facts and expert assessments with a significant bearing on a controversy. If experts believed that the nuns were probably unaware of the original purpose of the facility, any reporter who believes he is in the business of the truth should have reported that point.
3. The historian. I agree that Ms. Pr one was remiss if indeed (I take your word for it) she suggested that the historian was not "reputable."

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This is the link to Episode 41 where I originally interviewed RTÉ's news planner, Donal Byrne, and this is the original of the set-up interview with Paul Reynolds where he gave what he said were details of the contents of the O'Higgins report, which was published two days later.

Paul Reynolds of RTÉ

That report, and the possibility that it was made in collusion with the embattled Garda Commissioner Nóirín O'Sullivan, has since become one of the terms of reference (item g) of the Commission of Investigation announced by An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, into the affair.

Reynolds' report was the unspoken target of another report by Philip Boucher Hayes the next day, which rebutted many of his claims. A transcript of Boucher Hayes' report is here, but the audio of it seems to have been removed from the RTÉ website. Edit: the audio of this report now seems to have been restored by RTÉ.

Ruth Coustick-Deal

Ruth Coustick-Deal of Open Media was talking to me about EU proposals for a 'Link Tax' which would require websites to pay for links with snippets to news articles, and require websites to filter posted content to suit rights-holders.

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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:

Peter Lilley disputed the idea that comments from Tory MPs might come across as hostile to immigrants and prejudice goodwill to the UK in the immigrants' home countries. Amber Rudd, the UK home secretary was criticised by her own brother, he said she was “denigrating non-British workers” when she published what she called plans to ‘name and shame’ employers who employed immigrants.

Liam Fox, the minister for International Trade said “People who come to the country and consume the wealth of the country without ever having created anything are a different kettle of fish. I think it’s about getting control of migration.” Former Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Labour party figures for meeting what he called “a bunch of migrants” and described refuges as “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”.

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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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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.

Dr Brenda Corcoran

Anna Cannon has claimed at various times that one in 30 or 1 in 40 girls who receive Gardasil experience 'very serious side effects' including 'long-term health impairments, hospitalisation long term, wheelchair for life, death, birth defects'. The US Food and Drug Administration's website says that 772 serious adverse events were reported out of 23m doses administered, a rate of 1 in 29,792. The FDA have confirmed to me that these are reported adverse events, and there is no certainty that they were caused by the vaccination. In addition the FDA pointed out that there is both under- and over-reporting. Nobody may bother to report some adverse events, and sometimes a patient or their family might report an adverse event to the FDA, and also to their doctor who then reports it to both the FDA and the drug company, and the drug company then also reports it to the FDA, and they have had incidences where a single event accounts for three separate reports.

Anna Cannon has claimed that the vaccine causes birth defects. I searched the scientific literature for any reference to this, and found this study which concluded "Rates of ... major birth defects were not greater than the unexposed [to the vaccine] population rates". I have asked Anna Cannon for her source on this. She has not responded.

Anna Cannon has claimed that the Gardasil product information leaflet is being hidden. In fact the US version is on the FDA website and the Irish version is on the Health Products Regulatory Authority website.

A post on the Regret Facebook page claims that this 'hidden' leaflet shows that Merck and the US Centres for Disease Control 'determined' that Gardasil 'kills' one in 912 girls who receive it. In fact, page seven of the US version of the document makes it clear that the deaths were attributable to the normal death rate in the population. Whoever compiled that figure would have to read through the paragraph stating that the deaths were as a result of car accidents, suicide and other causes unrelated to vaccination. An excellent analysis of the this is posted here.

Gardasil information leaflet

Another post was made on Regret's Facebook page, linking to a hoax story that a girl called Meredith Prohaska died as a result of getting the vaccine. The claim is debunked on Snopes here. When I posted the Snopes link without comment, I was subjected to hostile comments and banned from the page. The story is a transparent hoax, falsely implying that the girl died this year; in fact she died in 2014.

Update: I have talked to the FDA and asked them specifically about R.E.G.R.E.T.'s claims. In relation to Anna Cannon saying that one in 30 or one in 40 suffers severe side effects, Lyndsay Meyer of the FDA said "the agency is not aware of any data to support these claims".

In addition, Meyer said, "The FDA takes its responsibilities regarding vaccine safety very seriously ... Both the FDA and CDC are transparent with respect to VAERS reports. VAERS data is freely available to the public through CDC Wonder: https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html."

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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.

He has also written about the huge imbalance in the suicide rate (80 per cent of the people who die by suicide are male), and its causes.

In the discussion I raised the claim, since removed, on the Men's Voices website that, in Ireland "at least nine per cent of rape cases are provably false" (emphasis in original). The claim was sourced to this snippet from the Irish Independent, which appears to be based on this study. which does not support the claim; James supplied this link, I was not able to find it before the recording.

At the time of writing, the Men's Voices website still approvingly cites a claim that 90 per cent of rape allegations in Spain are false, using as its source a Youtube video of unclear origin. During the discussion, I referred to the large volume of Youtube videos (not produced by James or MCI) which seem to be designed to exaggerate the occurrence of false and vindictive rape accusations. ***Update*** James has been in touch to point out that he is not the webmaster and personally distances himself from the statistics on this page.

The statistics that I sourced come from the UK's Crown Prosecution Service. In an extensive study, the CPS identified 35 prosecutions for false allegations of rape in a period when there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and 111,891 for domestic violence, (0.6 per cent of the rape prosecutions).

In the US, the FBI reports that the number of unfounded reports of rape runs at eight per cent of the total number of rape reports (a figure close to the one originally on the Men's Voices website), however this is the proportion of reports judged to be unfounded, not to accusations against supposed perpetrators. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that only 36 percent of rapes, 34 percent of attempted rapes, and 26 percent of sexual assaults were reported, meaning that the ratio of false reports (not accusations) to actual rapes is between two and 2.5 per cent.

I cited the case of the rapist Danny Foley, of Meen, Listowel, Co Kerry who was convicted of raping a 24-year old woman; his denial was rebutted by CCTV recordings, amongst other evidence. The Irish Examiner reported that after his conviction, while he was sitting in the dock awaiting sentencing, a

...group of 50 people, mainly men and said to be neighbours and friends, trooped into the courtroom and marched up to the accused, in single file. Each man shook his hand – some hugged him warmly, with tears in their eyes. It was witnessed by the 24-year-old victim who cut a lonely figure in the front seat of the public gallery...

Parish priest, Fr Seán Sheehy, one of his supporters in court, said later that he had no regrets whatsoever about the display, said that Foley didn't have an abusive bone in his body, called the five-year prison sentence he received 'extremely harsh' and the conviction a 'miscarriage of justice'. Foley did not appeal either the conviction or the sentence.

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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.