Slugger O'Toole

David McCann talks with Ed Roddis and Marie Doyle from Deloitte about the 2025 State of the State Report in Northern Ireland. Read the report HERE

David McCann talks with Ed Roddis and Marie Doyle from Deloitte about the 2024 State of the State Report in Northern Ireland.

David McCann and Peter Donaghy look at how the proposed new constituency boundaries could impact the next election results in Northern Ireland

In this episode, we discuss the crisis in the GP service in Northern Ireland. What are the issues, and more importantly, what do we need to do to address the problems? Your host is Brian O'Neill, and his guests are: Dr. Michael McKenna - A Belfast GP Prof. Ciaran O'Neill - A Economist from Queen's University Belfast Michael Donnelly -  a facilitator with Future Search who works on help...

In this episode, Brian O'Neill talks to  Professor Dominic Bryan from Queen's University Belfast about the reasons for the University Strike Action. We also talk about the increasing commercialisation of education. You can follow Dominic on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Domsball

In this episode of the Slugger podcast, we speak with Ed Roddis , Head of Public Sector Research, and Marie Doyle , Partner at Deloitte about the latest State of the State Report .

Greg Keeffe is an academic and urban designer with over 30 years experience in sustainability, energy use and its impact on the design of built form and urban space. He is Professor of Sustainable Architecture and Director of Research at Queens University School of Architecture, Belfast, UK. In this episode, we discuss how the pandemic is changing on we live, work and play. We discuss trends like...

In this episode of the Slugger podcast we speak with Ed Roddis, Head of Public Sector Research and Marie Doyle, Director at Deloitte about the latest State of the State Report. We chatted about attitudes toward the health service, the protocol and confidence in the Executive.

Here's our wrap up session with Ruarai and Shane reflecting on the lessons that might be drawn from the US elections for politicians and political parties in Northern Ireland, particularly in the more down-ballot races where money was tighter.  Why did the Democrats underperform? Ruarai highlights a split between moderates blaming poor messaging for lost seats (Shane gives the example of '...

Ed Straw has been in and around government and state led projects for a large part of his later working life. He has also been involved with the UK Labour Party using his trained engineer's eye to look at how things work. His new book throws new light on the problem of poor "government agency". Governments are hooked on a systematic  approach which assumes society remains as simple as...

Today Mick spoke with his old friend and Lagan College alumnus Shane Greer, who now owns and publishes Campaigns and Elections Magazine and lives and works in Washington DC about whether in order for Northern Ireland to get a good reset we need to think more globally, not to mention bigly . The main impetus for the start of the discussion was his recent Reset essay on what he sees as a live opport...

Now today's Cargo of Bricks with Siobhan O'Neill, Northern Ireland's mental health champion was recorded before this morning's announcement of a four-week circuit breaker lockdown, which in fact is some way short of the sort of near-total lockdown we had in Spring. But in it, we cover what we have learned so far and what are the issues that come with facing the uncertainty of a sec...

In today's Cargo of Bricks, we take our first look at how the southern economy is coping with the shocks to the labour market in particular. With my guest Dan O'Brien, chief economist at the IIEA in Dublin we cover... It is absolutely impossible to read too far into the success or failure of what amounts to 'the biggest social policy or political experiment in decades'. Government...

One of the key reasons for having the Reset project in a space like Slugger is to look behind the headlines and try to assay the effects of the Covid emergency, not just in health, but in other key areas of life. As we prepare for a second wave, the effects on those leaving education are acute. So this week I spoke to Professor of Education Tony Gallagher, to get his take on what that means in pra...

Steve Bradley is a regeneration consultant, you can follow him on Twitter . Steve is a very popular writer on Slugger with some of his posts getting over 40k readers, you can view an archive of his posts here . In this podcast, we discuss the future of Derry and the Northwest. In particular, we discuss: The future of Ulster University in Derry or lack thereof The potential for an independent Unive...

Do we need a re-set in our democratic culture? We often tie ourselves in knots thinking that Northern Ireland is an exception to the rest of the world, but this week's guest on #CargoOfBricks Richard Wilson's experience is much broader and he thinks politicians are falling far short of current needs. In it we cover... Our Victorian ideas of how representative democracy works are being outr...

In today's Cargo of Bricks , I speak to Ali FitzGibbon and discover how the long slow and steady bottom-up development of Northern Ireland's cultural industries over the last thirty years provided the backbone for the recent big payoffs from TV and film, but which has yet to see any peace dividend ... In it we cover... The Covid lockdown's withdrawal of vast numbers of people from the...

Series two, episode 1 opens with an introduction to #TheReset, a joint project between Slugger O'Toole and Ulster Bank. And after a brief break after the first series of the Cargo Of Bricks , we start the second series in partnership with Ulster Bank and a brief introduction from Richard Ramsey to the Reset Project, where we find ourselves viz a viz the Covid crisis, and how you might get invo...

David Rooney is a Professor in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen's University Belfast. In this podcast, we chat about improvements in battery technology and how this will affect the growth of electric cars. We also discuss Hydrogen as a fuel source for transport.  Already nearly 50% of the electricity generated in Northern Ireland comes from renewable sources and this f...

Tim Attwood was an SDLP councillor and party worker who knew John Hume well. In this podcast we discuss the life of John Hume and his legacy.

Greg Keeffe is Head of the School of Natural and Built Environment. He is an academic and urban designer with 25 years experience. In this podcast we chat over a wide range of topics: Pandemics affect city design, desire lines, how industrialisation compartmentalised life, people who enjoy their jobs like working from home, the importance of boredom, over protected kids, why cars kill cities, driv...

Originally from the Ormeau Road in Belfast, Michael McCoy has lived in Japan for the past 30 years where he works as an executive coach. In this conversation we discuss growing up in Belfast in the 1970's as well as getting his take on Brexit and what we need to do to stimulate the local economy.

Rosa Luxemburg once observed that without all the components of democracy (elections, unrestricted free press and assembly, and free struggle of opinion), "public life gradually falls asleep, and a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy direct and rule". In Northern Ireland we certainly have elections (three of them last year alone). But after twenty years plus of on/off instituti...

Open wide, this week I chat with Dr David Suitor who has been a dentist in Belfast for over 17 years. We chat about the general state of dentistry in Nothern Ireland as well as the specific challenges of Covid-19. 

This week's guest, Barry McIlheney, grew up in Oldpark in North Belfast and became singer (or as he puts it, 'chief shouter in front') in a punk band with a bunch of school mates (including Davy McClarnon who's still about today) called Shock Treatment . For Barry Mac, as he is known these days, punk was a 'coming-out' more than 'shell shock' period, in which he lea...