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John Lyons is the Independent Left councillor on Dublin City Council for Artane–Whitehall.

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I want to talk about a scandal.

Actually, it’s not so much a scandal, it’s not even a scandal about a scandal, it’s a scandal about a scandal about a scandal. A third order scandal, if you like.

The first order scandal is about how gardaí handle 999 calls, or more accurately, don’t handle them. an inquiry, led by Assistant Commissioner Barry O’Brien examined several thousand 999 emergency calls about domestic violence in the two-year period, finding that about half of these calls were cancelled when they should not have been.

Basically, what happened was that someone rang 999, the operator asked what service, fire, ambulance or gardaí, and because they witnessed a crime, or were witnessing a crime or were the victim of a crime they asked for the gardaí, and were put through, and the garda who answered the phone typed into his computer system the details of what the caller reported. They typed it into their computer, that’s important, I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Then the garda had to make a decision. They had to decide to send a hoard of officer in a fleet vehicles, backed up by the armed response unit, and the garda helicopter; or they had to decide whether to send a patrol car, or an officer on foot, or to inform the local station to check up on something when they got the time.

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Dr. Roslyn Fuller is an author and founder of the Solonian Democracy Institute

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We have an expectation of a rules-based system of international order. Some of these rules are very famous, they show up in popular media, thing like diplomatic immunity, basically if you send an ambassador to another country, they can’t be arrested, their bags can’t be searched, you can’t even give them a parking ticket.

That gives us some anomalies sometimes, again, more often in fiction than in real life, but it does happen; the wife of an American government worker in England drove on the wrong side of the road, killed a young man a while back, she was whisked back to the US to escape justice. It’s not clear that she did have immunity, it’s not even clear what her husband’s position was, probably because he was a spy.

But countries almost always follow these rules, because they want to benefit from them sometimes too. Diplomatic immunity is one, but there are lots more, some of them are explicitly codified, some of them are just understood conventions. At a high level, there are rules against one country trying to prosecute rulers of another, and it goes all the way down to how leaders are treated when they visit another country, who gets a red carpet, who gets the national anthem and all that.

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Holly Cairns is the Social Democrats spokesperson on agriculture, food and the marine, and further and higher education and disability.

In the interview, Holly questioned the source of figures that indicated that the difference in earnings between men and women was concentrated in the over-40s, with no statistically-significant difference in earnings for those under 40. This information comes from the same Eurostat studies that Holly draws her 14 per cent earnings difference from; the Journal have an excellent article on it here, which includes this graph:

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Nicolas Šustr is the city development and transport editor for the German newspaper formerly known as Neues Deutschland now known as ND.

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We’re going to have a new leader of the DUP. Leaders of the DUP are generally not anyone’s favourite person, unless that anyone happens to be a DUP supporter. As an aside I have to say that much of the criticism of Arlene Foster on social media that I see has more than a tinge of sexism, but that’s a story for a different day. And, if you are looking for things to criticise Arlene Foster over, there is surely enough to say without having to scrape that barrel.

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Daniel Long farming activist and running for president of Macra na Feirme.

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Things that seem good aren’t always good, things that seem bad aren’t always bad, and things that really are good or bad can sometimes have the confounding outcomes.

If you get three education spokespersons in a studio, they’ll usually come out with at least four plans to reform the Leaving Certificate. There might be a lot of proposals out there, but they all use the same buzz words and phrases. Too much stress, continual assessment, can’t judge someone by an exam grade, credit for coursework, judge the whole student, no job interviewer will ask for it, reduce exam pressure.

Mix in all these cliches with a few badly thought-out ideas, half-bake them for a three minute interview, and hey presto, you’ve got an education policy.

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Eoin Ó Broin is Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Midwest and his party’s housing spokesperson.

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A topic which I am interested in is ageing and demographic shift. Ireland was, until quite recently, the youngest country demographically in Europe. However, as Ireland’s baby boomers, the generation that David McWilliams calls the pope’s children, push onwards towards retirement age Ireland’s relatively youthful demographic profile will change at a rate we might find quite surprising. We don’t have that many older people now but we probably will relatively soon.

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Brenda Power is a journalist for the Sunday Times and Irish Daily Mail, and whose work has appeared in many other publications, and is frequently heard on broadcast media.

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Maybe I’m giving away my age if I mention my nostalgia for the pirate radio stations of the 1980s. I’m just about old enough to remember Radio Nova, Q102 and Sunshine Radio, and I know that there were many more of them in Dublin, and dozens more around the country. Some of them were more professional than others and they were run by enthusiasts, sometimes by businessmen, sometimes by shysters.

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Jim O’Callaghan is a senior council and Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin Bay South.

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I want to talk about a coup. A coup attempt. A failed coup attempt. It was a ridiculous affair, viewed by some people as little short of comical, despite the fact that several people were killed. The coup attempt was carried out by a barely-credible bunch of thugs who had a habit of dressing up in quasi-military uniforms and showing off their weapons in the streets.

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Kate McGrew is the main spokesperson for the Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland. In our interview, I referred to my interview with Sarah Benson, then of Ruhama.

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I have a big project on at the moment, so this, I’m sorry to say, will be the last Here’s How podcast of 2020. I hope to be back bright and early in January 2021, and with that, a couple of announcements.

The first is that I’m open to having a collaborator on the podcast. If you are interested in doing that, or know someone who might be, get in touch, the email is podcast@HeresHow.ie. This isn’t a paid position, but it doesn’t require too much input. A good knowledge of Irish current affairs would be helpful, not to mention a bit of fire in your belly, but there is no need to be in ideological lockstep with me, I don’t even think that would be possible.

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John Hamill is a long-time secular campaigner and participates in the Free Thought Prophet. We talked about his epic Freedom of Information request.

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You can see there that John’s story tells a pretty damning tale about the attitude of the Department of Education and Skills, as it’s now called, towards the Freedom of Information laws. And I really don’t want to single out that one department, this attitude is pervasive right across government.

Nevertheless, I did send a list of written questions to the Department of Education’s press office that related to this case. The main question I asked was about this culture of seeking to frustrate the proper implementation of the law. The department refused to answer.

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Peadar Tóibín is the leader, and only TD of Aontú, having previously been elected for Sinn Féin.

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I don’t normally do pre-buttals on a podcast interview, but I think that in this case it’s important, because in the context of the coronavirus, and Covid 19, it’s just not acceptable to allow incorrect scientific claims to go unchallenged, even for a few minutes. There are a couple of things said in this interview that I wasn’t able to correct in the moment, and I don’t want to leave the correction to the end, because that runs the risk that people hear the incorrect claim and not hear the correction.

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Dermot Lacey is a Labour Party member of Dublin City Council for the Pembroke ward.

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That’s what he said

He, by the way is Brandon Lewis, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, basically their minister for Northern Ireland.

What he’s announcing there is the UK government’s shirking from the treaty that they signed last December for them to withdraw from the European Union. He immediately created a million memes of people planning to tell judges that they might be had up in front of that yes, they had broken the law, but only in a very specific and limited way.

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Linda Ervine is a Unionist and Irish language rights activist from East Belfast, and is the president of the recently-formed East Belfast GAA.

I talked to her about last year’s Ashcroft polling indicating that support for a United Ireland is increasing towards a tipping point in Northern Ireland.

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I was sitting down to do an editorial piece for this podcast, and I had been particularly struck by the apparent arson attack on a house in Carnmore in Galway which, it was believed locally, was about to be allocated to a Traveller family.

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Larry Donnelly is a native of Boston, He teaches law in NUIG. He has published law journal articles in Ireland and internationally, as well as being a regular media commentator. I talked him about an article he wrote for TheJournal.ie.

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Two minds are better than one.

That’s a fairly obviously true saying in most cases; whether in a work environment or elsewhere, most people will be familiar with a situation where people in a group contribute suggestions that together get a solution to a problem that was better than any one member of the group could have come up with.

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Alyn Smith is the SNP member of the Westminster parliament for the Scottish constituency of Stirling. Since we spoke, two opinion polls have been published showing the pro-independence side stretching their lead, excluding undecideds, by up to 10 clear percentage points ahead, 55 to 45.

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You should be paying attention to Belarus. Well, that’s my opinion anyway, I think that it’s worth more attention than it’s getting.

A bit of background, Belarus, then named Belorussia, was one of the republics of the USSR, and the hint is in the name, it’s much closer, culturally and linguistically to Russia than most of the other Soviet republics were.

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Niall Keenan founder and chairperson of the Shared Ireland.

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Sinn Féin are calling for a complete ban on co-living. Their housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, a very talented politician who’s been on this podcast before, not sure if those two are connected, said announcing this that the new housing minister Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil, when he was in opposition was vehemently opposed to co-living, and he, O’Brien, had challenged his predecessor Eoghan Murphy, and then Taoiseach, now Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, that if they thought it was acceptable, they should try living in it.

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Last Saturday there was a demonstration outside the Dáil that was hastily organised to try to capitalise on a controversy that you may or may not have noticed, depending on what corners of Twitter you inhabit, if any.

The genesis of this was an article on the website Gript, a clone of far-right American opinion websites run mostly by former Youth Defence activists, and edited by John McGurk, who’s been on this podcast. It was about the new Green Party minister Roderic O’Gorman, his brief is the newly-renamed Department of Children, Disability, Equality and Integration – he’s basically the Minister for Woke.

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Kerry-Anne Mendoza editor-at-large of the Canary and the author of Austerity: Demolition of the Welfare state and the rise of the zombie economy, published in 2015.

We discussed this Twitter thread of hers:

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It really is good to get feedback from listeners, and to know that there is a growing number of listeners out there, I always appreciate that. And it doesn’t matter to me whether the listeners are ordinary people interested in the world around them, ordinary working stiffs, or whether they are celebrity fans, I’m just happy to know that there is anyone out there at all. I know that some people might be wowed by the rich and the famous, but I try to keep a little more grounded than that… but I have to admit that I had a little frisson of excitement to find out that I have one very well-known fan.

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Malcolm Noonan newly elected Green Party TD for Carlow Kilkenny, having spent 16 years as a local councillor in Kilkenny.

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It was announced last week that Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin won’t be reopening, the operators said that the lockdown, coupled with high rents, have pushed their business over the edge, and it’s no longer viable. That’s obviously bad news for the 110 staff that worked there.

Most of the comments broke down into two categories – nostalgia and protest. The first type was typified by Vivian Lambert, she said: