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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.

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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