Here's How ::: Ireland's Political, Social and Current Affairs Podcast

Denis Duff, author of the website Better Environment with Nuclear Energy. He’s also a mechanical engineer with 30 years experience in ESB power generation, and is now an independent engineering consultant in Ireland and abroad. I mentioned projections of how long global uranium deposits – known and unknown – are likely to last, at the […]

Fergal Mulligan is the Programme Director at National Broadband Plan at the Department of Communications. ***** That’s audio from an Egyptian news channel called Extra news, it’s in Arabic of course. That clip is 17 seconds long, and it’s a news item that, in Arabic, contained 42 words. As I understand it, it was broadcast […]

Declan McLoughlin is a senior manager and the head of communications at the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. The Times – but not RTÉ – reported on the disgraced cardinal, Seán Brady, who covered up the crimes of the rapist priest Brendan Smith, meeting Pope Francis at Dublin Airport. Communicorp, owned by Dennis O’Brien owns: Dublin’s […]

Graham Doyle Deputy Commissioner, and Head of Communications with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. ***** This is audio from one of the count centres in the local elections. The people ah singing are from People Before Profit who lost most of their council seats, but they’ve come across housing minister Eoghan Murphy and […]

Dani McCabe is a member of the steering group of Standing 4 Women. We discussed several court cases surrounding the Cervical Check controversy. ***** I wrote a piece on the website last December about Brexit, with the title that might have sounded a little pessimistic. It was called It’s Over. Brace for Catastrophe. There’s No […]

Rowan Croft runs the YouTube political channel Grand Torino. He says that he’s politically centre-right, not extreme right or alt-right, though his channel heavily features figures such as Justin Barrett of the National Party and formerly of Youth Defence, Herrmann Kelly of Irexit, Jim Dowson, the former BNP and Orange Order member who has been […]

Dr Michael Foley is professor emeritus at the school of media at TU Dublin – formerly DIT – also a member of the NUJ’s Ethics Council, and has been invited by the International federation of Journalists and UNESCO to write a syllabus on journalism safety and ethics. ***** Because of the detailed nature of the […]

Jamie Bryson is the editor of Unionist Voice and a prominent Loyalist activist. ***** Homelessness has been in the news a lot recently, as it deserves to be. In most normal societies, even though it’s not really polite to say so, homelessness, in the sense of people living on the streets, or very marginal accommodation, […]

Richard Tice is a British businessman, heavily involved in property management and development, and is best known as founder of the pro Brexit organisation Leave Means Leave and former co-chair of the referendum campaign group Leave. EU.  He wrote recently that May’s deal is the worst deal in history. Richard queried my quote from David Davis […]

David Robert Grimes is a physicist, cancer researcher and frequent writer and commentator on scientific topics.  ***** I was talking in the last couple of podcasts about water charges, and the resistance to them, particularly in the light of the summer droughts, and there was quite a bit of feedback about those pieces. One of […]

Brendan Ogle is the spokesperson for Right2Water, and is Unite the Union’s Senior Officer in the Republic of Ireland. ***** In the last podcast I had an interview with presidential candidate Gemma O’Doherty, and I have to say that I found the reactions to it pretty depressing. There was a twitterstorm in a teacup  with a series […]

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 […]

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is a Labour Party senator and former TD. ***** 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 Tory Brexiteer who resigned in protest that […]

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 […]

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. **** You’ll remember that in […]

‎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 a speaker from the HSE […]

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 gender reassignment) of children. I also mentioned James Caspian, the doctoral candidate at Bath Spa University who […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Ken Foxe is a lecturer in DIT and a freelance journalist. On June 27 last, the Irish-American academic and blogger Catherine Kelly was leaving Ireland through Dublin airport when she was detained by two plain clothes gardaí, and questioned about online reporting that she had done on the finances of Fine Gael minister for Social […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 from medical marijuana. The page promotes the most manipulative and misleading quackery; most of its posts claim that […]