The Blindboy Podcast - Colm O Gorman

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Colm O Gorman is the director of Amnesty Ireland, and founder of 1 in 4 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, you bended dentists. What's the crack? How are you getting on? Have you enjoyed your week? Did you have a good week? Little update from last week's podcast, if you listened. I spoke last week about compassion for animals or compassion for other people as a way of managing stress because stress can make you quite self-centered and selfish so i spoke about a pair of solitary leaf cutter bees that are living out my back garden they're living in a fucking a bag of compost, the bag of compost was quite, quite close to some stray cats that I have, so this was, this was a problem that I was trying to solve, I needed to move the compost so that the, the two leaf cutter bees have planted larvae, they've planted larvae, I'd be shit talking about insects, They've planted larvae. I'd be shit talking about insects.

The two fucking leaf cutter bees have got baby leaf cutter bees, I assume, in the compost bag. So I was trying to move it without harming the baby bees. So what I did, I spoke last week about needing to create a possible Chernobyl style mesh to cover the compost, which would allow the bees access the compost, but would stop the two stray cats from sleeping on the podcast. Pa-pa-pa. The podcast. What's wrong with my mouth this week? Anyway.

Look, if you listened to last week's podcast, you know the crack. I was trying to move a bag of compost because there's two bees living in it, and there's also two cats nearby who like to piss on the compost and and sleep on the compost so this is what happened i have a bee hotel which is you can buy them in hardware shops right or you can make your own quite easily just look it up online and what a bee hotel is it's a little fancy wooden box that contains like bamboo and pine cones and it's it's a very habitable environment for insects insects love these things okay now i was skeptical i bought it in like fucking woodies or the range or some shit like that. I was like a bee hotel I'll buy one of them. So I bought it. Kind of sceptical thinking what the fuck does a bee want with this. head's birdhouse it looks like a birdhouse that an absolute prick would design because it's in in it's inviting in the way that a birdhouse is a bird would look at it and go look at that class

birdhouse i bet it's full of nuts and possibly even a space for me to rest and then the bird would go up to it and it's like what's this shit i can't get into this birdhouse because it's full of bamboo and pine cones this is a birdhouse designed and made by a prick so that's what I thought it was but no the two fucking leaf cutter bees have moved into the bee hotel and I think there's two or three other bees involved so now they're bringing their leaves into the fucking the bamboo and i can see in there and they're planting their children inside in the bee hotel so bee hotels work if you if you're interested in improving biodiversity if you're interested in using whatever available space you have to help

insects because that's what we all need to be doing either get your hands on a bee hotel or make your own they actually fucking work so all i had to do is and it's after solving the problem with the cats as well because i have the bee hotel it's it's up on a fucking on a nail so the cats aren't gonna go near it and they don't want anything to do with it i just put it close to where the compost was, kind of hoping for the best. I was like, look, I'll put it there anyway. We'll see what the crack is. And so, yeah, the little bees started moving in there. After about two days, I saw a lot of activity.

There's no longer any activity in the compost bag. They're having great crack and i think what did is i made sure it was south facing i know that solitary bees need south facing places so the bee hotel was facing south that's one to look out for and they just started moving in so i think what i have to do now is, they've put their children in there, they're going to spend the rest of the summer, doing that carry on,

looking after the little baby, solitary bees, I don't know what happens to the parents, they might die, but anyway, they're going to leave larvae inside, in this bee hotel, and this larvae then will hatch,

next spring, so come September. I have to take the B hotel. And then put it. Somewhere a bit more sheltered. Somewhere. Ideally inside in a shed. Or just under a tree.

Something that is. You don't want to bring it inside your house. But like. I don't know. I might think of a little enclosure. enclosure whereby it's slightly warmer than outside but it might be grand as well because with global warming now we're not really getting any particularly freezing winters so there you go so that's the update on the bee situation lads for anyone who was interested. Okay. Em. Looking after those bees. Looking after the cats.

These are the things I'm doing. To manage em. Stress and workload. At the moment. Because they're. They're acts of compassion. That keep me out of em. They've just.

Stress makes you fucking selfish lads. Stress will make you a selfish person because you're spending the day worrying about work-related stress you spend the day worrying about your own shit all the time and the key to get out of that is empathy and i'm too busy to be spending a huge amount of time with other people but i can spend time with animals so that's my empathic exchange there to reduce the self-centered kind of narcissism of stress and what it can do to you you know so this week um first off actually yeah i have a few live gigs this weekend i'm in the ivy gardens this saturday and sunday which i believe is the 27th and 28th of july i think those are the dates

this saturday and sunday i'm in the ivy gardens it's the comedy festival doing two live podcasts okay they're mostly sold out there's only a few tickets left but i'm going to give it the last push here i can confirm that i think it's the saturday my guest is tommy tiernan i have had tommy on the fucking podcast twice and each time it didn't record for whatever reason i don't know why i've done two live podcasts with tommy tiernan and neither of them recorded so we're fucking going for a third um and tommy is he's genius he's just he's you know he's a incredibly brilliant comedic mind but also there's a there's a philosopher's head on him, you know, he likes to probe deep kind of existential

questions, so me and Tommy have good crack when we chat, not going to tell you who my guest is for the other date, then Monday, I'm down in Skibbereen, in the Skibbereen Arts Festival, if you're near Skibbereen, come around to that, another live podcast, there you go, if you're near skibberneen come around to that another live podcast there you go so this week i am putting out this is a this is a podcast that i have been wanting to put out for a while um it's a live podcast but to be honest the quality of the recording is so intimate it sounds like it doesn't sound like a live podcast at all it's it's the best sound quality of the recording is so intimate, it sounds like, it doesn't sound like a live podcast at all, it's the best sound quality of a live podcast I've ever done, I think it's because it was recorded in Drogheda, I think, but it was in like a theatre, a little small theatre where

you'd put a play on, so the acoustics in the room were fucking phenomenal, so it actually kind of sounds like it's recorded in a studio, so I'm very happy with that. But my guest is Colm O'Gorman, who is the head of Amnesty in Ireland. And not only that, he's a longtime activist around several issues. And Colm is just, I fucking love this live podcast. Colm, first off, like a content warning okay. Colm is going to be speaking a lot about. Sexual abuse. That he suffered.

As a young lad. He's going to be talking about. Coming out as a gay man. At a time in Ireland when. You didn't really do it. So there's going to be. There's stuff in this podcast that, you know, I should be giving you a content warning about.

Okay. So those are two kind of content warning things. But what makes Colm so fantastic is the compassion and empathy. Colm speaks about his lived experience and he's had some tough lived experiences, but he can speak about them in a way Empathy. Colm speaks about his lived experience. And he's had some tough lived experiences. But he can speak about them in a way.

That. Our natural human tendency to get uncomfortable. He can cut through it. Because he's so fully fucking congruent. By which I mean. What he feels in his heart. And what comes out of his mouth. Are the exact same thing. It's full congruence, which is a captivating listen.

I thoroughly enjoy it when a person is congruent. That's what's engaging when you listen to someone. It's like, I believe this person. So Colm has that going on. so colin has that going on also he brings a lot of humor to the dark topics he talks about he brings humor to the pain he speaks about you know and before we did the podcast me and him chatted about that we were like when i said to him look colin you're going to be talking about historical abuse you're going to be talking about like he tried to fucking sue the pope do you know what i mean he's gonna be talking about all this stuff but i said to him

how how are we gonna do that and column goes let's just have a fucking laugh let's let's have a laugh um which is something i'm a huge advocate of i speak a lot about the need to use humor in situations that we think we should be serious about. My main one is mental health. Do you know? I speak a lot about mental health. I speak about suicide and I do it in a humorous fashion because I believe that humour helps to destigmatise things. And I'm coming at it from a place of personal experience.

I wouldn't be making jokes about trauma and pain that I know nothing about but I know fucking mental health I know what it's like to be suicidal all that stuff so

that's mine to talk about so for Colm that's kind of where he goes with stuff he's been through so we'll do a quick fucking ocarina pause where is the fucking ocarina bollocks okay do you know what i have a fucking inhaler i got in spain

we'll use the last puffs of it instead of the ocarina so there might be some adverts now let's get ready for the the ventolin inhaler pause The Ventolin Inhaler Pause. There you go. I wish that was in stereo. One more for the crack. I didn't put those directly into my mouth. Anyone who has... On April 5th... You must be very careful, Margaret.

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Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. 666 is the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

Who said that? The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone.

Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. As Ventlin is aware that you take five or six puffs of that and you're going to get some tinnitus-like effectsitus like effects so yeah that was a pause for some advert for something um also you know the crack lads this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page if you're listening to this podcast if you're enjoying it if you're taking something from it

um you can become a patron by going to patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast and what this means is you know what I say is do you like this podcast if you met me in real life would you say to yourself jeez I'd love to buy him a pint or a coffee well if that's how you feel

there's a way to do it once a month the price of a pint the price of a if that's how you feel there's a way to do it once a month the price of a pint the price of a cup of coffee go on to my patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast the patreon is what keeps this podcast coming out every week gives me a sense of purpose it's it's just i love doing this fucking podcast but but if I didn't have the Patreon, we'd say, I wouldn't be horsing them out every week, I'd be doing one,

every two months, I'd be doing a podcast, when a hot take would arrive into my head, in the shower, I'd go, I'll do a podcast on that, but the Patreon keeps it, weekly and regular, and all this carry on, so,

just thank you so much, thank you fucking so much, to everyone who's a patron, huge impact on my life altogether so without further ado here is the time i spoke to colin mcgarmon this is a fantastic listen it's it was a pleasure to do and thank you to colin and i hope you enjoyed as well god bless also this is a very long podcast it's like two hours because loads of you have been looking for

just longer podcasts if I can give them to you so here you go I'm really just stalling because someone was supposed to bring me down a sheet of paper with the questions for my guests the mayor of Drogheda, ladies and gentlemen.

Brought the mayor of Drogheda down to assist me. Okay. I've got a fucking class guest. An incredibly interesting person. Someone who I've had chats with before. And any time we have chats, we end up just having a very intense fun discussion.

He is the executive director of Amnesty Ireland and he's a founder of One in Four. Please welcome Colm O'Gorman. So follow that story. What is the crack? Oh, I forgot my vape today. Hold on. Oh, the ceremonial vape. All right.

So, like, it's Ireland and we're in Naes, so most people know who you are, but this podcast is going out to Yanks, Greeks, Spaniards. You can't say Greek and Spaniard without it sounding like a slur. And it's not. That's the thing. Calling someone a Spaniard is a perfectly acceptable thing to call someone. But it just sounds malicious, doesn't it?

Go over there. Go over to that Greek. You just can't. Perfectly acceptable. But, uh, look, basically, what I'm trying to get across, there's a lot of Greeks listening, alright? So... I might know a few of them, it'd be grand.

Do you know a couple of Greeks do you a few yeah any Spaniards a couple what do you call the Portuguese Portuguese is that

well fair fucking question though no because you can have Spanish or Spaniard you know so there you go that yeah I suppose like carnos mix No, because you can have Spanish or Spaniard. You know, so there you go. That.

Yeah, I suppose, like, Colin, I was mixed. I don't mind being called a Mick. Work away. Any British people here? No. Well, if there was, they can call me a Mick if you want. The ghost of Cranwell. Up there, hanging out.

Sorry. All right, call him. So there's one British guy in the front row who put up his hand. He is. He's a spy. He's one of those new Brexit spies. He's a Brexit refugee, maybe, at this point. They're over here.

The Brits are coming over for Brexit, doing press-ups and sucking the copper out of the ground. The Brits are coming over for Brexit, doing press-ups and sucking the copper out of the ground. We don't even have copper, do we? Your lips would go green. Copper oxidises into a green colour called verdigris. It's true.

All right. It's about to get dark now, I suppose. Can you tell us what One in Four is? One in Four is an organisation that supports women and men who have experienced sexual violence. So it's an organisation that I founded initially in London in 1999 and then we opened up an Irish arm of it in 2003. So what was your motivation behind founding One in Four? Well, I was working as a therapist in private practice

and a lot of the people that i was working with uh had or were disclosing issues around childhood sexual violence and um i was really pleased with the work with what we were doing in the work and that was going very very well but when you as i'd known myself from my own experience because i've been through a therapeutic process around my own experiences of rape and abuse as a child, when you begin to go to that place therapeutically, life can start to fall apart. So you're going back to trauma that you've long suppressed, that you haven't been able to deal with, and in reconnecting with it, things can become very tough. So therapeutically it was great, and it was

going well, but actually very often people then have other needs that come up as they're beginning to re-engage with that trauma it could be something as um i was gonna say practical but for instance um access to health services so you know very often i'd be working with clients women who'd never had a cervical smear because they just were terrified of the idea of any kind of gynecological examination so trying to make sure that you found health services or providers who understood what that meant for somebody who'd been a victim of sexual violence and could work with that could be an

important thing to do or practically you know people who who might suddenly not be able to work yeah they'd need to be able to navigate the benefit system or access issues around housing or if child protection issues came up or access to justice issues all of the things that that people might need to begin to deal with but as a therapist all i could do was when i say all i could do i was limited to doing the therapeutic work that had to be protected so and would you have had access to like a multi-disciplinary, I was working in private practice on my own. So your responsibility kind of ends at the door of the therapy session as such. Yeah, and also I wanted my own practice challenged and questioned and explored.

I wanted to work more within a kind of a team setting so that I had that support in the work as well. Like I had supervision. You have to have independent supervision. I did all of that stuff, but I wanted something work more within a kind of a team setting so that I had that support in the work as well. Like I had supervision. You have to have independent supervision. I did all of that stuff, but I wanted something a bit more. But also I was just hugely aware of the limits of what I could offer and that people had much bigger needs and that other needs would emerge. So I looked around for an organisation that might offer that kind of support. And the only services that were offering therapy or therapeutic supports at that time i was living in london were the rape crisis centers and they only worked with women at that time in london and they only had women working in them and then there was a male support service

that was a peer support service for men who had experienced sexual violence but it was peer support and was that like um an aa model type of that type of of thing? It was really just a peer support service called Survivors. And they were limited to that. Was there a professional? No. No, okay, yeah. So there wasn't really anywhere to do it, so I decided I'd set one up.

So what was the structure, we say, that one in four would have provided for someone who was coming forward? What I tried to do when I set it up, I mean, we got offices over this little um caribbean beauty salon in on the bromley road in catford which meant that you know the entire office was permeated with the smell of straightening fluid and nail varnish which to this day reminds me of working in that space whenever I smell it. And we opened the doors. And the whole idea behind it was we put it out

as support and resources for women and men who have experienced sexual violence. And the other thing about the organisation that we said it was run for and by people who had experienced sexual violence. Yeah, what was the funding model when you started? Didn't have one. So voluntary as such?

It was entirely voluntary. And people were asked to make a contribution towards the cost of the service and I just trusted in the idea that that was the best way to go because when I looked around at the idea of if you want to set up an organisation, a charity and you want to fund it, if you go to funders and you're setting something up, you really develop the service based on what the funder is looking for rather than based on what the people who access it might look for. So I decided just to take a leap of faith with it and kind of go look we'll find a way to open it, we'll see how people present and then we'll respond to the need that comes through the

door. And so it became about therapeutic and practical supports and then also what came up out of that was an awful lot of broader advocacy. So policy work and media work and engagement with local authorities or other agencies all of that kind of stuff evolved out of it but it was very much based on if somebody came through the door and they needed support the first meeting was to work out well what support you need and how do we find a way to respond to that so that's how we set it up and were you operating on pre-existing models no were you so you were very much um being creative and innovating within the needs of the people well i mean i i when I saw that the need was there when I was doing that work,

I went, well, there's got to be something out there that does that, so I'll go and find it and see if I can work there. And it didn't. So I just said, well, we'll set it up. And you once tried to sue the Pope. Well, only once. Which is, I found that out.

What was it? We were on Twitter and someone was talking about what's the most, I think I was talking about the time I said haunted bread on the late, late. And I was saying that's the most blasphemous thing I've ever done. And then you came in under the mentions going, well, I tried to sue the Pope. No. It wasn't that actually. You said what's the most blasphemous thing you've ever done.

And I said that I called a bishop a bastard on live TV. Okay. Which I did. In terms of... Okay, you're at the pearly gates. You're talking to... Who's your man? St. Peter, is it?

And Peter's there weighing up your blaspheming, right? In your opinion, which is it? And Peter's there weighing up your blaspheming, right? In your opinion, which is worse, suing the Pope or calling a bishop a bastard in terms of blaspheming? Well, I think given the best sum of which I both sued the Pope and called Bishop a bastard, the pearly gates would be open. I'd say they'd be wide open, yeah.

They'd be hiding them up here. I don't think you'd be worried about that somewhat. Yeah. What's it like trying to sue the Pope? It's a fairly complicated, daunting process. I mean, I didn't wake up in the morning... How do you even start that? Well, I didn't wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to sue the Pope. I mean, so the background to this is in early 1995.

Well, from about mid-1994, I'd gotten to a point in my life where I was starting to settle down a bit. You know, starting to step into myself just a tiny bit the way that I describe it is that I'd started to stop running and when you start to stop running whatever you're running from begins to kind of just get that little bit closer and catch up and I started to think about how I need to do something about that thing that happened yeah so I mean and that was how I phrased everything around my understanding of what had happened to me when I was and is that even internally too yeah I mean it was just well I mean all of that was how I phrased everything around my understanding of what had happened to me when I was 14. And is that even internally too? Yeah, I mean, it was just, well, I mean,

all of this only happened from the neck up, right? All of this was in my, so I didn't go into, like all of my initial engagement, what had happened to me was fairly intellectual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't, I didn't go into the feelings of it or like it was- Did you feel incapable of exploring the feelings of it? Oh, those didn't exist. What do you mean incapable? How do you? Yeah. Like they just, I didn't go into the feelings of it. Did you feel incapable of exploring the feelings of it?

Oh, those didn't exist. What do you mean incapable? How do you? Yeah. Like they just, I didn't go there. Yeah. So until like a few years after that, the way that I describe it is

I really lived from the neck up and the face out. Like I related to the world based on what I thought the world needed me to do. And the things that I did were all about what I thought was expected of me. And I had no sense of myself I certainly didn't look to think about what do I need what do I want what's right for me um and didn't connect in any way with myself because I was terrified of myself I thought I was

awful I mean I believed I was a hideous vile person and I believe that for an awful for a lot of my uh life up until that point because of the things that had happened to me a hideous, vile person. And I believed that for an awful, for a lot of my life up until that point because of the things that had happened to me. So when I started to think about what had happened, it was I need to do something about that thing that happened. And that was at about mid-1994. And I remember talking to my sister, one of my sisters about it, my older sister Barbara

about it and saying, you know, I think I'm going to have to do something about that. And she went, okay. Well, let me know, you know. And you'd obviously disclosed to Barbara, yeah? Years earlier, but we'd never talked about it. And I disclosed it in a way that didn't disclose it. How do you mean? I'd come out to, I'd left,

I'd ran from home when I was 17 from Wexford and came to Dublin. And I spent the first six months I was in to, I'd left, I'd ran from home when I was 17 from Wexford and came to Dublin. And I spent the first six months I was in Dublin, I was 17, on the streets. And then I finally got off the streets when I was 18, when I turned 18. Because you could then, because then I could go and get benefits or services and get access to something. Until then I couldn't, so I just, I was on the streets for six months. And so I disappeared on the streets for six months. And so I disappeared from my family. And Barbara

was in college in Maynooth then and she came looking for me. She managed to track me down and I went out to stay with her in Maynooth. And while we were out there I came out to her, I told her that I was gay. And then I said and something had happened with Sean Fortune, Father Fortune, this priest.

And that's as far as I went. Didn't say anything else after that. And I left her house the next day and I ran again. And I didn't go back for nearly four years. I just disappeared because I was so terrified of what I'd told her that I just ran. And that was as far as I ever got to acknowledging any of it.

Was that the first time you'd said that out loud? Yeah, but I mean, I'd said that stuff had happened with them but even then i was describing it as if somehow that was linked to my own sexuality or that that was something that was other than what it was which was three years of rape and assault by a priest when i was 14 that started when i was 14 years of age and see it did get heavy, didn't it? You're not fucking laughing now. Just on the subject of that there, actually, you know, like, I speak about mental health a lot and I do it,

and I say it's important to speak about mental health with humour. Like, I obviously have no context for what you've been going through, but, you know, you used humour right there to speak about something that we don't associate humour with, trauma. Do you find that humour is important for kind of, I don't know, understanding these things or to improve, destigmatise the dialogue around it? I mean, there's a couple of things that happen in it. I mean, first of all, as soon as I did that, I wanted to say, by the way, I didn't do that because I was feeling uncomfortable or because I thought you might be feeling uncomfortable because that's a really awful reason.

Yes, yes, yes, yeah. I think if I try and think about where I was in that, it was about going, lads, it's like, it's all right, right? So whatever this is, it's all right to talk about this. Like, it's grand. We can do this. So that's part of it. And also, you know, actually actually if you're going to climb

into the darkness sometimes you're just the only way to stay in it is to be able to laugh at the insanity of it all yeah like i remember at one point with when i was not long after i'd started one of four i ended up spending nine months making an undercover documentary with the bbc with the woman who who was going back into her childhood on the Wirral in Merseyside to try and expose a network of abusers who had abused across decades. She had been effectively pimped out by her adoptive father, as all of her family had, and she'd run years later. She ended up reconnecting with one of her sisters and thinking that well he's going to be in prison and he's going to be dead or all that's going to be

gone and in the course of the conversation realized it might still be going on and then recorded recorded a conversation between her sister who lived in salt lake city in utah and her adoptive father stepfather in which he named 14 other victims and seven offenders and went through the detail of it. So she reported that to the police and they wouldn't investigate it. She went to child protection services in Merseyside, they wouldn't look at it.

Why? Because they just wouldn't engage with her. By the time she came to see me at one and four... Did they view it as hassle? They just dismissed it. just yeah like that happened a lot yeah and not just in this country but in many countries when sexual crimes were reported people kind of just pushed it back and dismissed it and wouldn't engage with it by the time she came to see me she arrived in my office i remember her name is shy shy keenan she's an amazing woman it's not her real name it was a nickname that she took

on and she kind of took that on and embraced it big time and and she was agoraphobic and she drove down to meet me from her her home in Essex and she arrived in and had to sit on the floor in in like one of our one of our therapy rooms and she had all of these folders around her through which she she like built the narrative built the story and evidenced everything that had happened to her she She'd had a fucking horrific time. And she said to me, so I've written to the police, social services, the local authority, the Secretary of State for Health, the Prime Minister, Prince Charles, Germaine Greer. She said, I've told a slug at the end of my garden

and nobody will do anything about it. And in many cases, when people come to us like that and agencies weren't engaging, it's mad. But sometimes if you have a letterhead and you're right, you can force agencies to engage. You know, sometimes if somebody's tried

to report a concern of abuse and it's knocked back or not engaged with, if a letterhead comes in from an organisation... You mean one in four is the letterhead? Yeah, one in four would have been the letterhead. Or whoever. Like sometimes it's just that it's an agency is saying to another, you need to do something about this.

But when she came, where do you go now? She's gone everywhere. So I'd done a bit of stuff around the time that we launched One and Four in the UK with Newsnight. And I had a contact there, so I approached them. And we ended up spending nine months. They really went with it. We ended up spending nine months going up and down to Merseyside every other week and going back with her

undercover filming, her re-engagement with that whole network of people to gather the evidence of what had been happening to her. This started off as a story to tell me about why black humour is so important. And I mean, we'd be in moments where literally we were putting together

I ended up being quite good at putting together camera equipment yes BBC were disastrous like the first time she was going to do they were going to send her in they were going to send her in to to kind capture footage with this man who had horrifically abused her for years and she had a the camera was in a baseball hat right cameras on the front of a baseball hat right camera was on the front of a baseball hat but the unit that the camera had to feed into was under the baseball hat and the unit was so big that the baseball hat was sitting up off her head

seriously and it would have burned the scalp off her once it was up and running for a while so so i can remember i can remember and they gave us the wrong connect like there were male-made leads and like there was all kinds of shit with it and i can remember we literally took the hat apart and and and uh putting it into a fleece that she wore she was and she was a very big-breasted woman okay which presented another problem because when she was in when she came back from filming it and she was filming it was like she captured really good stuff but all you could see was the top of your man's head because when she was in, when she came back from filming it, and she was filming it, it was like she captured really good stuff, but all you could see was the top of your man's head, because the camera was pointing too far upwards.

And, yeah, it was mad stuff. But actually, a lot of the time through that, there was three of us. There was Sarah MacDonald, who made and directed that film, who I went on to make another film with about my own pursuing the Pope thing. That's how we met and became friends and Shai and myself

and we spent nine months going up and down re-engaging with the most awful, hideous, torrid, depraved shit imaginable and gathering the evidence that not only

had all of this happened but that these guys had access to children today and that abuse was likely continuing and then we determined that it had and the only way we got through it sometimes

was by laughing at the fucking madness of it all. Like the sheer madness of it all. And sometimes you just have to do that. So yeah, sometimes in that darkness you just really have to go for the... It's an inseparable part of the human condition. Do you know? I mean, I often think

like, you know, something like the 1916 Rising. There would have been bullets flying around the place but somebody farted and someone else laughed. I mean, I often think like, you know, something like the 1916 Rising, there would have been bullets flying around the place, but somebody farted and someone else laughed. Yeah. Like, that's just what humans do. You can't look at something serious, right, that requires full emotional engagement and go, this one part of me called humour, that's outside.

You can't do it. But also it gets you through it. Yeah. Like something has to break the tension. Yeah. And also something, you have to, if you're in that space where you're dealing with a lot of darkness, you need something that reconnects you with another part of your humanity.

And sometimes that means like connecting in a really idiotic, ridiculous, and even what might seem kind of obscene way yeah with the humor of what's happening and it reconnects you with another part of yourself and it's what gets you through it um you were one of the first like really loud people as well in ireland to come that sounds like an insult i've been around since god knows i was one of the first really loud people but like in we were speaking backstage right i was talking about you know there's young people now born after the good friday agreement you know yeah but now as well there's young people born after the emergence of

the abuse scandal in ireland who just they weren't there when it happened now i was young enough to see it on tv but not really understand it. But you were one of the first out there really roaring and shouting about it and making it part of the public discourse. When you think of it, it's like 25 years ago since I was thinking about what am I going to do with this?

How do I report this? I have to do something. What do I do? That's 25 years. What was your first step? What was your first proactive step? Do you know what my first thought was? What?

I'll write to the bishop Great idea man Seriously Like I'd been I'd been I left Wexford at 17 I moved to London at 19 Yeah

I'm 28 now So it's more than a decade I was 28 then Not now First of all Fuck you all for laughing When I said that Do you know

I'm now doing the thing I said I wasn't going to do with you. I've noticed when I listen to this podcast, I know some of the people he's talked to until now, and I've noticed that their levels of profanity seem to rise to meet him. I'm under strict instructions that there's at least one word I can't use or I'll be in trouble at work. But I'm okay with fuck, I think, anyway. So that'll be all right.

But, so, like, I was 28 then, in 1994. but I'm okay with fuck I think anyway. So that'll be all right. So I was 28 then in 1994. Thank you for correcting me. And it had been, what, 11 years since I'd had anything to do with the church. But my first instinct about who I should tell about the fact that I'd been raped by somebody who happened to be a priest was I'll tell the bishop. Not I'll go to the police.

I was living in another country. But that was my first instinct. Now, thank God I didn't. Because I didn't. I waited. Because I was trying to work out what to do. And I didn't know what to do. And I was also, I suppose, maybe trying to get to a place where I could even think about how do I even begin to say this stuff out. But there was an extraordinary synchronicity to two things that were happening to me and to my dad. Because my sister had told my dad when I told her when I was about 17, 18. And even after I came home again when I was 21,

when I reconnected with my family, we never talked about it. And dad and I had a really really awkward relationship we couldn't be in a room together um and it wasn't because we were like there was no anger there was no there was just I always just felt he was massively disappointed like he just couldn't handle me um and I thought it was because I was gay I thought it was because a whole load of other stuff but that was what it was like what I didn't know was he couldn't be in the room with me

because he didn't know what to fucking do with himself and by on New Year's Eve 1994-1995 there was a party in my sister's house in Wexford and my dad was living there the house was actually built on land

that was in the former garden of the Bishop's Palace in Wexford, which is kind of interesting. So this party was happening there and dad brought Barbara and one of his best friends, who happened to be a guard, into a room and broke down. And my father was not an emotional man. He could get angry, but he wasn't emotional in other ways. And he broke down and sobbed and said that he hadn't been able to sleep for 12 years because of what had happened to me and that something had to be done about it. So Barbara said to him that I wanted to do something too. And she rang me the next morning. And as soon as I got off the phone to her, I picked up the phone and rang him. And he and I had the first real conversation we'd ever had in our lives. And a month later, on the 4th of February, I sat down in her kitchen to make a statement to the guards about what had happened.

And he was a huge part of it. So Barbara, who's one of my best friends, and dad, were a huge support, as were all of my family, but the two of them most intensely were a massive part of that. And dad was a huge support. How was that for your own healing? I was like,

I mean, all of that took a long time to happen in other ways, but that was a huge moment. Like dad and I ended up having conversations that I never thought we could have. And it was profound for both of us. Like it was extraordinary. I remember like he'd, he'd, I remember we went out for a drink in the middle of all of this and we were sitting in the pub talking and he ended up talking to me about me being gay and trying to wrap his head around it.

And he just started saying, you know, he said, you have a man and a woman and that's it like that's it so it was it was one of those conversations and he just couldn't he just couldn't he was really uncomfortable and really unhappy okay he was trying to talk and try and I remember saying to him dad I said the one thing you always taught us to be was honest and to be ourselves and I said and that's the only thing that I've tried to do. And I said, if you think I've chosen this, you're mad, like you're fucking mad. I said, there are people in the world right now who would kill me, who would cheerfully kill me slowly because of who I am, because I'm gay. You didn't raise stupid kids.

I'm not fucking stupid. Like, really, do you think I chose on some level to do this for what? To be obstinate? To be weird? To be a bit different? You know, just like, this is not, this is who I am.

This is me. And he just couldn't wrap his head around it. So that was fine. We had good chats about a whole lot of stuff. On the last day, on the last day that I was due to go home there was a huge moment for me because dad had been out working and he worked he he uh he uh he was working on a on on some installation of porches and stuff at the time and he came back he came

back to say goodbye to me when I was leaving and I have a photograph that's in my office which is one of the things I treasure most in the world of the two of us that day and he'd come back and and Barbara said will we get a photograph and he said he said I'm filthy he said hang on so we had to go in and put a jumper on over his work does to have the photograph taken and there's a photograph of the two of us with our arms around each other in that last day and I went back to London and the the the Sunday I think was mid or something, and on Sunday when I got back, I rang them, and I was talking to Barbara, and, oh, she said, oh, Dad is here,

and he wants to have a word with you. So Dad got on the phone, and he was chatting, and he said, and how are you going, and is everything all right? And I said, John, he said, do you remember what I said to you that night in the pub? And I went, yeah. And he went, don't mind that.

He said, you're my son, and I love you. And then he couldn't stop saying it. No, seriously, like, he started sobbingbing and he just said i love you and he was just crying and saying i love you and he had to get off the phone and um barbara rang me a little while later and and she said uh she said i didn't realize he was off the phone and i came out and i didn't know where he was and i went into his room and she said and he was sitting in his room with a teat all over his face sobbing and she said what's wrong and he said I told him that I loved him and then and actually he did something else during that

conversation in that pub as well because we were talking about it and I remember saying to him I said dad I'm so sorry about all of this and he said what are you sorry for I said I'm so sorry about all of this and uh he went what are you on about he said I'm sorry and I went no it's not your fault I said you couldn't have he said stop it he said I'm your father I should I should have stopped this from happening to you and I didn't and I was going no it's not your fault he said stop he said don't fix this for me he said said, I'm your father.

I shouldn't have let this happen to you. And I'm sorry that I didn't protect you. And I'd spent, I'll be off completely now. I'd spent most of my life at that point being terrified of what, if he found out what had happened to me or what i'd done as i believed for a long time that it would kill him like literally kill him so i'd spent most of my life terrified that he would find out because of how it would affect him and in that moment with just an absolute clarity and with huge love,

like with powerful, like furious love, that wouldn't let me make it okay for him, he lifted all of that completely for me. And that moment was the moment where I really started to heal. Because for the first time ever, I felt that I didn't have to protect him and the world from what had happened to me. So that was huge.

That's something else. Fucking hell. and the world from what had happened to me. So that was huge. That's something else. Fucking hell. At the danger of starting a new question, it's... No, there's a lot of rumbling in the background and there's an interval due so I'll give you 15 minutes to go and get a little drink and have a little wee.

Is that alright? And we'll be back in 15 minutes. Did you all get a little drink? Fair play. We were having an intense gin discussion. What do you think of gin? Not any gin, sadly. The argument we were making is that it's a good thing

that there's so much gin diversity out there now. There is, though. I mean, Jesus, you walk walk into centrand there's 10 gins like i think it's a good thing but can you spot a shit gin that was a very enthusiastic yes from the audience some woman there really cared about that yes to be fair there are there are a few shit gins, and some of them have been around for a very long time, and a few of those would be well-known Irish brands. But there's also... Gardens.

Gardens, pink, fuck that, man. It's just Ribena and gin. Do you know why? Because I did it myself at home to test it. Just fuck the pink gin, get regular gin, throw a bit of Ribena in there. Same thing. Sorry, go on, Colin.

I'm kind of dumb. Is that it? What is Amnesty Ireland? I know, see, I know what it is. But what I've done there is I've asked the question with false naivety so you can answer for the audience. I know well what it is, man. What is Amnesty Ireland?

Amnesty Ireland is the Irish branch of a global human rights organisation called Amnesty International. And you're funded by George Soros. Well, I personally am owned by George Soros, if you read... I get a tenner off him every week. Only a tenner? Only a tenner,os, if you read it. I get a tenner off him every week. Only a tenner? Only a tenner, yeah.

Fuck you're easy. But how did you end up getting stuck into the middle of Amnesty in Ireland? When did that happen? How did that happen? So I'd been with, I was still with 1&4. I'd been with 1&4 in the UK, found it in the UK in 1999, set it up here and moved back in 2003. And by about 2008 it decided it was probably time to move on and let the

thing become its own thing. I think particularly And 1 in 4 is still going? Yeah, god yeah both in London and here in Ireland and it's doing phenomenal work in both places the work here in Ireland is amazing and it's really gone from strength to strength but I think when you found an organisation it's really important that at some point you walk away from it and let it be

its own thing. And just as a model, how is one in four working now? It's like, is it regional? No, the services are based in the same office building that we opened up in

when I started it back in here in 2003 in Dublin. In Dublin, okay. But they have done... What would a person from Galway do if they wanted to access it? They have done

and do outreach services at particular points. I'm not sure where they would be right now. But a lot of the advocacy support, for instance, that very kind of practical support around access to law or access to justice or stuff, that can happen at distance or at remote or in other ways. So is... So one in four...

Like if someone, we'll say, had historical abuse with the church, if they wanted to do something about it, one in four would be an organisation they'd contact. Oh absolutely, yeah. Not just in the context of the church. I mean when we opened up one in four here in Ireland the abuse within the Catholic church was a big like it was the big

issue at the time. But even then, you know, a very significant number of the people who came to the organisation hadn't been abused in that context. Like they were abused in families and communities and schools and other kinds of spaces. Now the majority of people who access the service wouldn't be abused, you know, within a Catholic church kind of setting. And so you left that and then how did you end up with Amnesty? I was, the position was flagged, as they say. I was contacted and asked

what I think about applying for it. And it was, I wasn't sure what I was going to do next and it just, I could see a response in myself. I kind of thought,

that's interesting. So I said, I'd look at it and see what happened. So I applied for it and kind of went through that kind of, the application process

and the conversations and the more conversations I had, the more right it felt. And like, what do you do? Like, what's your day job? What? Why is that? Do you want me to walk you through the diary?

No, I mean, well, I'm the CEO of, like the executive director, the CEO of the Irish organisation. So that means I'm responsible for the day-to-day running of the Irish organisation, for implementing all of our campaigns, all of our strategies for the organisational piece. So for everything that Amnesty does in

Ireland, I'm ultimately responsible to our board and to our membership for how that happens, but also I'm part then of what we deliver at the global level as well. So I'm on a... This is really dull. It's not. People may not know. I'm also on a on an oversight group an oversight management group for all of our work in europe and central asia as

well um last week i just got back from four days of meetings in paris where we were meeting some white counterparts from amnesty entities all over europe and central asia and our chairs who are volunteers were meeting in in there to look at our work right across the region, to look at some of the challenges we face within the organisation, in some ways because of the kind of organisation that we are, but also to plan for and think about where our human rights work is at and where we're going next. So that's a big part of the work as well.

So we do, in Ireland, when I say campaigning, so lobbying is a big part of our work, influencing and engaging with government, with politicians, with decision makers to try to make sure that the policies that they develop and implement are human rights compliant. So in line with Ireland's human rights obligations

under the treaties that we've signed up to and that are human rights proofed almost. Watchdogging essentially. Well, I mean, a watchdog is a bit haughty. I mean, we have a state watchdog, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. That's their job. Our job, I mean, we're a movement.

So we've 23,000 or so members in Ireland. We've about 8 million supporters across the world. We're a movement of people. That's the unique thing about Amnesty. And our job, those of us who work for the organisation, is to really support the work and facilitate the work of our membership and to amplify their demands for change,

to help inform the kind of campaigns that we'll undertake and what we'll do. So lobbying is one part of it, media work, public awareness, public campaigning, advocacy, protest. All of that stuff is the day-to-day of what we do and like you were heavily involved in in uh marriage equality yeah uh repeal the eighth like right now like what what would you be flagging right now as the the big issue in ireland today that you're focusing on where the human rights abuse is happening what's the big

concern well first of all on on on repeal and on rights, I mean, repeal was a point in the step for us as an organisation. I mean, our overall goal as part of that work on reproductive rights is to make sure that we have human rights compliant access to abortion care in Ireland. And it doesn't mean that we have a constitution that human rights compliant or even laws. It means that that has to be delivering in the real world, that people who need access to abortion are able to access abortion. So we haven't finished that work yet.

The Eighth Amendment was repealed. That was phenomenal. That was hugely important. New laws were introduced. They're good. They're much better than many people imagine they might be, but they're still really flawed in a whole range of ways. What's sticking out? The fact, for instance, that if somebody needs to access an abortion,

they go and see their doctor and they have to wait for three days before they can, you know, and then come back and have another visit and then finally they'll be given the care that they need. Yeah. And that three-day wait, there is no medical or legal or human rights reason for that. That three-day wait

was inserted into policy and into law to give comfort to politicians who needed cover for what they would do next. Other areas would be things like abortion has not been fully decriminalised. Women and people who need to access abortion are decriminalised, but doctors and those who provide abortions are still criminalised under Irish law.

So if a doctor or anybody provides an abortion that's outside of the provisions of law, they've committed a criminal offence that could see them go to prison for 14 years. Now, some people think that's perfectly reasonable and acceptable. I don't understand and we don't understand and it's not in any way human rights acceptable or human rights compliant that you criminalise a particular medical procedure. We've lots of law in place that can deal with doctors who behave in a criminal or inappropriate way and we should use them. You know, the general code of criminal law, professional misconduct, all of those kinds of pieces should be applied in those circumstances. So that's a really important point.

But then separately, when you look at the law, if you look at the health ground it's a risk of serious harm to the health of the woman or pregnant person there's an awful lot of qualifications to get through like that's a very qualified ground yeah so it's not a risk to the health no it's a it's it's a risk of harm to the health and not just harm but serious harm yeah and who decides that? Well, a doctor has to decide that. How is that defined in law? It's not. So if a doctor makes the wrong call and the risk isn't serious enough, does that mean that they could be prosecuted and they could face 14 years in prison?

So all of these things that are chilling elements of the law actually mean that the very person who needs to make a decision about what's right for them in the face of a crisis pregnancy doesn't get to make that decision it's made for them and it's made for them very often by people who are gatekeepers to access who are then you know potentially facing ruin and criminal prosecution to get it wrong now people will say but you don't get prosec Well, it's not about whether or not there are prosecutions. That would be an awful lot worse. But actually, it's about the impact of criminalisation

and what it means. And we still have people travelling. Like, there are people travelling, and we've seen that in the last couple of months, particularly in the area of fatal foetal abnormality. So the law says that a fatal foetal abnormality is an abnormality where the fetus will die before birth or the baby if born alive will die within 28 days of birth

what if it's 29 or 30 what if it's three months or six months or nine months what if you can't like medicine is not certain and medical medicine is not definite you know no prognosis is absolute so doctors can advise and and and give advice to a woman or to a pregnant person and and suggest what's most likely to happen they can they can they can diagnose we know the range of fetal anomalies that will either be fatal or be incredibly severe and may lead to death, or where they'll be so devastatingly severe that people might want to make different decisions. We know what they are, and they can be diagnosed with a very high degree of accuracy. But surely it should be the person who's pregnant who decides what's right for them and their family

in those circumstances, and our law still doesn't provide that. So we still see people travelling and we're still going to see women having to travel to the UK to access abortion care there in certain circumstances. And we're still going to see migrant women and women who are living in poverty and other marginalised communities where that three day waiting period, women who are living in poverty and other marginalised communities, where that three-day waiting period, where the fact that they might not be easily able to access abortion care geographically, where all of these things start to create difficulty. Like if a woman decides or discovers that she's pregnant

at, say, nine or ten weeks, which is not unthinkable, she's now got two weeks within the law to access abortion care. So she has to find a doctor who will provide the care. Now there's a good system in place to allow that to happen. She has to arrange a visit that then has to be a three day wait. What if she goes along and believes she's nine weeks pregnant but the doctor thinks actually you could be closer to 10 or even 11 weeks. Like where do we start to get in? So again it's an extraordinary level of rigidity and very rigid conditions being put in place that actually are barriers to accessing care.

So there are a number of very real problems with the current legislation, and they'll have to change. That legislation will need to be changed. And that's what Amnesty is doing, trying to get that. Well, I mean, you know, our membership in 2013, and I want to be clear, Amnesty was late to this. So, I mean, in 2007, Amnesty

at the global level adopted a policy on abortion and access to abortion. And Amnesty in Ireland voted against that policy. And when I joined the organisation in 2008, it was not long after that. And the policy had been adopted by the global movement and the position of Amnesty here in Ireland was that we accept that decision of the global movement but our

membership has decided they don't want to work on that issue so it was like the rest of Ireland it was like we're going to leave that there we're not going to address this and but thankfully there were a number of people within the organisation at every level both in terms of our membership and some of us were working on staff who kind of of wanted to just really take some time to look at that and question the degree to which that was a considered decision by people. And by 2013, we had members bringing motions to our annual conference to endorse Amnesty's global position and to mandate Amnesty here in Ireland to campaign for access to safe and legal abortion here in Ireland. On the subject of, we said direct provision,

like where is Amnesty Ireland on direct provision and is Amnesty as a whole aware of direct provision in Ireland? Yeah, I mean one of our global priority issues are refugee and migrant rights. Like at the global level, I was at the southern US border. So on the border of Mexico and the US last month, looking at what's happening there. We've been very focused on what's been happening in the Mediterranean for a long while. And yeah, we've been very engaged on Irish asylum law.

Our primary concern around direct provision for years was actually the amount of time that people spent in it. That was the big issue. Now, I don't mean that that means conditions in direct provision are okay, they're clearly ardent. But one of the biggest problems was the amount of time that people spent in direct provision. And that was because our asylum process, our protection process was so convoluted that we didn't have what's known as a single protection procedure. you'd apply on one basis and then there might be multitude of appeals based on any particular decision and then you'd apply on a whole range of other basis and the system was designed actually to be really cumbersome

really awkward really difficult and to really drag things out and that's why you have people stuck in direct provision for so long for so many years do you think that's an agenda-based thing within direct provision that it's deliberately set up as something horrendous to discourage people coming here? You see, governments all around the world, unfortunately, approach the whole question of asylum and international protection. They're obsessed with the notion of pull factors.

That would be a pull factor. If we make it too easy, more people will come. I mean, this got so fucking obscene that I remember David Cameron in 2015 in the House of Commons standing up and at that time, the European Union had withdrawn search and rescue missions

in the Mediterranean, which they've also just done this week, by the way. There are now no more search and rescue missions being operated by the EU or by eu states including by the irish navy in the mediterranean um and there was a lot of pressure on because as

we predicted and as lots of people predicted you withdraw search and rescue missions and the number of deaths are going to go through the roof yeah and cameron in the house of commons said no we won't be restoring search and rescue missions because that would be a pull factor. Jesus Christ. And if you think about what that actually says, it says, no, we're going to let people die because we need to discourage other people from coming. Trevelyan logic. Yeah.

And I mean, you know, right now, for instance, the European Union is funding, I was going to say the Libyan government, but there isn't a Libyan government, but it's funding some of the authorities in Libya, the Coast Guard in Libya, to return people from the Mediterranean back into Libya, despite the fact that it knows people are being raped,

tortured, exploited, abused. And there's a lot of criminality. And a lot of criminality. Yeah, a lot of mafias are running a lot of this. The EU is funding those services. What's the point? Why would they do that? Under Gaddafi, the EU was funding detention centres for migrants in Libya under Gaddafi. And that's basically to keep them out of the EU, is that it?

Yeah. So the whole approach has been just stop people from coming here. people from coming here. And it hasn't been let's make sure people don't need to flee persecution or conflict or war or poverty or global warming or anything else. Let's not prevent

that. Let's just prevent them from reaching us. So, you know, for years we've been saying, you know, what we see in the Mediterranean is not the inevitable consequence of the war in Syria or in Somalia or, you know, of conditions in Ethiopia or Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, it's the inevitable consequence of decisions that were made by the EU and its member states, including Ireland. And that decision was not to respond to people's need

for protection in a way that is compliant with the international laws that they developed and designed and agreed to be by. These are laws that they wrote. Amnesty didn't write the refugee convention. States did, including Ireland. Amnesty didn't hold the hand of a prime minister and make them sign the damn thing. They signed it and agreed to be bound by it. They're breaking their own laws. They're breaking their own laws, yeah, repeatedly. So is Amnesty the thorn in their side, saying, lads, hold on a second? We're one of them.

Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely one of them. That's part of what it is that we exist to do. So our job is to research what's happening, to bring it to public attention, to bring it to global attention, including within the UN and EU systems, to litigate where we possibly can,

to advance in terms of litigation, but also to campaign and to try to get people to do something about it. Because the simple fact is, systems like this never choose to change. They only change when the demand for change becomes so big that it's irresistible. And if you think about that, what does that mean?

That means that it's only when enough of us care enough to demand change and become vocal enough about that that change happens and yeah here's a simple thing and i try and address it every podcast where i have someone on and we're talking about something in ireland that we all disagree with the average person on the street who's listening to this and now feels angry and wants change what's the number one piece of advice you could give to that person to enact their agency so think about what you can do to transform conditions in your own community to be a place that will welcome people who need

safety and protection and we've just in ireland now one of the things we've been working on with other partners from other organizations over the last couple of years has been to try to develop a programme of community sponsorship for refugees. This is based on something they've been doing in Canada since 1979. And it literally means that a group gets together in a local community. And when a family arrive in that country, they're not met at the airport by immigration services. They're met by their new best friends, their community group, and they bring them to the home that they prepared for them. And they are their new family for the first year, year and a half, or two years that they're in Canada, and they resettle them.

They support them in establishing their new life, in their new home, in their new community. They wrap their arms around them, and they take care of them. And that conveniently shuts up the racists who say, well, put them into your own house then. Exactly. But do you know what it does more importantly? It leaves the racists over there saying well put them into your own house then. Exactly. But do you know what it does more importantly? It leaves the racists over there saying, put them into your own house then, as the rest

of us get on with being decent human beings, lovingly taking care of other people, and just being the best of who we are, rather than thinking about how we have to fight with these gobshites as they talk crap and spout hate. So that programme is now up and running. The first family actually arrived in Meath

in December and it's going incredibly well and right now I was in meetings... Are they going to learn the rivalry between Meath and Westmeath? Huh? I was in meetings yesterday and today about where we're getting

in terms of getting other community groups up and running and there's about 12 or 13 groups ready to get up and running and if anybody wants to get involved in that, email iwelcome at amnesty.ie and we'll let you know about it. It's one of the most extraordinary things you could ever do. It's one of those moments where...

So does someone essentially become like a host family type of thing? You just become their best. You just become their... Like imagine so if you... Like if you go to America and walk into an Irish bar. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. That's it. Let's be honest. Or if you go to America and walk into an Irish bar. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. That's it. Let's be honest. Or if

you had, if you'd lived in some other far-flung country with a very different culture for 20 years and you're now back in Ireland and your best mate from there was going to come and live in Ireland, do you think you'd be well-placed to help them get used to living here? Yeah. So the idea is that literally you get a group of people from across the community who are going to be

the best friends of this new family and help them to settle in. That we are the best people to help people. Yeah. And living up to that international reputation we have of being friendly. Exactly. Rather than just performatively using it for free points.

But the outcome, the outcomes from it are just phenomenal. Like if Canada started doing this in 1979, the Canadians are extraordinarily decent people. They are, aren't they? They're shocking. They're so nice. They're unreal. Do you know why I heard that is?

Why? This is a real hot take. A blind boy hot take. I could have heard this in a pub. I heard the reason, there's two reasons why Canada is so nice and liberal. Number one, it's the French liberation retradition that goes back a few hundred years.

Number two, so many hippie draft dodgers left America in the 60s and moved to America that they just became overwhelmed with these loving hippies and that's why Canada is the way it is today. Don't quote me on that. I don't know what the source is.

It could have arrived in a dream, but there you go. But in Canada since 1979, they've resettled 300,000 refugees through this programme. That's separate to what the state is. And what would that have been at the time? Would that have been like Lebanon or... So it started actually the Vietnamese boat people crisis in 1979.

Oh yes. That was the origins of it. And it was actually churches and faith-based groups who started to want to do something more. Their government was doing quite a lot. And they went, you know what, though, I think we could do more if we got involved, couldn't we? Yeah. At the community level.

So it started from there. And they've kept it going since then. Wow. And it's people from all over the world, not just from one particular region. But since 2015 in particular, there's been a strong focus on Syria and what's happened there,

but not exclusively there. But 300,000 people, which means somewhere round about... It's the population of Cork. But it means somewhere round about six million Canadians have been directly involved in welcoming.

And they see it as welcoming. And by the way, they don't talk about refugees. They talk about newcomers. So, see? Fucking Canadians, honestly. And the the way, they don't talk about refugees. They talk about newcomers. So, see? Fucking Canadians, honestly. And the importance of language. Yeah, honestly.

It's newcomers. Have been involved in welcoming newcomers to Canada and intimately involved in supporting them as they resettle into their new lives. So, actually, the narrative in Canada around refugees is where the hell are the refugees? Not why are you bringing more of them. It's like, why haven't they arrived yet?

What's going on? The pressure is on the government to do more? Not why are you bringing more of them? It's like, why haven't they arrived yet? What's going on? The pressure is on the government to do more all of the time, not to do less. And I mean, that's what Amnesty is really interested in that at the global level, because we know that the resettlement system is under huge threat. It's broken in some ways.

And then you see countries like the US, who traditionally used to do quite a lot, under Trump now want to do fuck all. We see an awful lot of countries stepping back rather than stepping up and we have to both find alternative pathways to protection for people not the traditional models and community sponsorship is one of them but it also has these extraordinary effects on communities so it transforms communities I remember meeting with this community in Ottawa and they had, they wanted to do sponsorship and they needed to do it around, one of the things you have to do is you have to be involved in an organisation that's registered around sponsorship

and a lot of them for traditional reasons there for how the programme developed are churches. So there was a local community group in Ottawa, no it was in Toronto, that wanted to get up and running but none of them were part of the church so they had to connect in with the local church. The local church most of the people who attended church came from outside of the community. Now there weren't people who lived within the community anymore and one of the things they said to us, these two communities

suddenly started to meet together and work together for the first time and it transformed relationships right across the community. We see the same thing in every like from businesses to trade unions to universities. The thing you hear time and time again from people who do this is, we did this because we believed

it was a really important thing to do. We had no idea how this would transform us as a community or a group of people, how much we would get from this. And that's really powerful. But the other thing that you do is you build extraordinary advocates for refugee rights, for human rights, for the idea that when people are in desperate need of safety, we have a responsibility to do something about that.

And you drown out the hate. And there's no better way to drown out hate than to manifest love. And we need to do so much more of that at the moment. We have to stop fighting. do so much more of that at the moment. We have to stop fighting. Yeah. We have to stop fighting with hate mongers and bullshit artists because that's what they want.

And I think stop, without mentioning any of them, but like stop taking the piss out of them as well. There's a lot on Twitter in particular of certain figures in Ireland who are right-wing and saying silly things and people on the left just spend their time making funny memes out of them.

I feel that sometimes fuels them. I think the best thing to do is just shut the fuck up and try and be sound. And do something. And do something, yeah. And do something, yeah. There's an amazing video.

There's a community in Fishguard because the UK actually have a sponsorship program as well. And there's an amazing community. There's a great video of a community in Fishguard who did this. have a sponsorship program as well and there's a an amazing community and there's a great video of a community in fishguard who did this and at the very end of the video one of the women says somebody said to me what you're doing is just a drop of the ocean and then she said but the ocean is made up of drops and she's right like like the the and it's back to that thing. The only thing that has huge impact is the actions

of individuals. And then it becomes the combined actions of huge numbers of individuals that transforms everything utterly. So, you know, in the face of a public discourse that's dictated through the media, that's all about conflict and hate and vitriol and distrust and the only way we counter that is by creating our own conversations and our own manifestations that are about the opposite of that we need the the best way to respond to the worst of who human humanity can be is to respond from the best of us and that means about doing something that's loving, that's good, that's committed, that's real, and understanding that that, like, love is a, like, we're at a point now where to love is a radical act. You know?

It's almost like loving has become subversive. You know, loving has become a revolutionary concept if we listen to the kind of bullshit that we're fed all of the time about who it is that we're meant to be. I don't accept that we've lost. I don't accept that everything is so toxic

that there's no hope for us all. I don't accept that for a moment because I know it's not true. So, whoever said yay,

find me afterwards and we have to have a hug. Because you really need one after that. That was a really empathic yay, wasn't it? It was one that she needs to know that bit. But it is, right? That's the only thing. The only thing that will work is for us to be who we truly are.

And not to get pulled into that place. I mean, you know, there's a line from Hosier's song Nina Cried Power, which I love, and it speaks to the meme thing and what happens online and all the rest of it. He said, it's not the waking, it's the rising. Like, there's no point in sitting in your intellectual or even emotional, empathic understanding of the world

you need to fucking do something like there's no point in sitting back and talking about what isn't good enough you need start you need to start to be good enough and there's no point in leaving it to somebody else because it's not on somebody else it It's on all of us. And, you know, if we look at human history, you know, we were talking earlier on about some of what... Actually, we started trying to talk about why I'd sued the Pope. Yeah. And, I mean, the reason why I did that was because after I reported what had happened to me, I started to find out things that I didn't know.

Yeah. So when I went to the police, I reported this one bad man who happened to be a priest who'd done something terrible to me. And I thought that was the end of the story. Within six weeks, another five men had made similar stories. Within a year, I found out or discovered, or it was suggested that the church had known about him before he was ordained. That he had been reported for abusing a group of Boy Scouts in a tent, but they'd ordained him a priest anyway. Within another six months of that, I found out that complaints had gone as far

as the Vatican. And I heard suggestions that the papal nuncio to Ireland had confirmed to parishioners that the Holy See was aware of their concerns. And yet this remained a priest for decades and continued to rape and abuse around him with absolute impunity and every time i heard something like that it demanded a response it was like well what do we do like we have there's a question that has to be asked here isn't there it's not just enough to ask the question we have to do something so i ended up then on foot of all of those questions driving home from meeting with a lawyer in russell square in london having just agreed to sue the pope and that sounded completely mad but it was it was it was the right response. And did you, because

did you feel you were actually going to win? No. But it was as an act? No. Because that's very radical. Well I knew, so two things, I was, so why was I doing it? I was doing it to try to force, so I knew all of these things were probably true, so there was all of that

suggestion of the stuff that I just said but I hadn't seen the evidence was meant to be Can you just be a bit mindful of the mic? What do you want me to be? No, not mindful, can you speak into it more? It's not going to attack you, Cullum There's a B on the end How about that, is that better?

There you go, yeah So I am, ooh, that's really loud now, isn't it? About there, yeah I am, what was I saying? You were talking about suing the poll. Yeah. Yeah.

So I knew... I just wanted to know where was I in it. I knew... I knew that there was a suggestion of all of this stuff, but we had to try and get

the evidence, the truth of it. We had to try and get to the truth of it. And nobody was asking those questions. So I'd reported it to the police and the truth of it. And nobody was asking those questions. So I'd reported it to the police and the police were investigating him

and he was facing prosecution. But nobody was saying, well, who knew about this? Nobody was looking to investigate the church or even more importantly, what did the state know and what did they do? So nobody was asking those questions. So I had to ask them.

And asking the questions mean you have to find a mechanism through which you can pursue the truth. And the only way to pursue the truth was to sue the fuckers so you see now i'm swearing again because you're sitting it's grand man you've done no no i don't i don't i don't mind swearing but i'm i'm laughing i'm laughing at myself for doing it when you're here so it's a bit of reaction i'm wearing a bag on my head like you know i have noticed that occasionally um and what did i want to achieve?

Well, I wanted to get the truth, and that was the mechanism to do it. In terms of suing the Pope, did I believe we could succeed? Well, what we were doing... And he's a saint now, so you sued a saint. I sued a saint. Not many people have done that.

He was a bit quick on the old sainthood now. He was, wasn't he? They rushed at that one for obvious reasons. Chill out there, poor John Paul. So what I wanted to do was to force them into a position where they had to do one of two things. Either they had to tell the truth or they had to refuse to do so.

Oh. Right? And that meant that they would use, because the advice from the lawyers was they will claim diplomatic or sovereign immunity and they will refuse to allow to respond. I went, mean fine let's force them to do that yeah because if we get to a point where i can say that an institution that's meant to represent the the the the teachings of the figure that we know as christ right and all of those principles and all of those values that's

meant to stand for truth for justice for love that's meant to be all about all those things, is now using man-made diplomatic law to avoid telling the truth about what it knew about the rape and abuse of children here in Ireland. We need to expose that. So regardless of what they did, if we got them into court, we would win. If they refused to come into court, we would win.

But I also knew at the national level that we were highly likely to win in terms of pursuing the church directly. So the case ran from, well, I went to the guards first in 1995. Who funded that? Because that sounds expensive. It wasn't you. It wasn't funded, no.

Oh, so just lawyers being sound. Yeah, just fine lawyers. But I mean, there was always the risk that the other side would pursue costs. I mean, there was a big risk to it. And I mean, the Vatican said they would pursue costs. I was repeatedly threatened with costs if I didn't drop it. Jesus. Yeah.

But no. So I kept going anyway. And finally, as is often the case, they wanted to settle it. Which was an interesting moment. And that was in about 2003, when it had just gotten too hot for them then that they needed to do something with it. And I refused.

And that's a bit of a problematic one, because personal injury stuff, which is the, you know, when you're taking a case like that, it's based on personal injury law. And the personal injury legal system is designed to get people to settle. It's designed to avoid a situation where people have to go into court.

But I kind of needed to get into court. Or at least I needed, like I wanted the truth out of all of this on some level. And what happens is if you're offered a settlement and you refuse it, and you then go into court, and let's say you're offered 50 grand in damages, and you refuse it, and you go into court court and you're given 49,999 euros and you've refused the 50,000 you have to pay costs Okay, and you were

suing as column? I was suing as me, yeah Okay, yeah and the diocese, so the Vatican got their certificate of diplomatic immunity from the Department of Foreign Affairs and asserted that and said they would now use this, There was no question that the case would have to be dismissed. And if I forced that case forward yet again, they were clear that they would look to recover costs.

So I was fine. I'd gotten where I wanted with that. That was exposed and I was going to be able to talk about that. The diocese offered to settle the case. But as they always did, they would settle cases on the basis of no liability and confidentiality. So for me personally, what was incredibly important was that I got an admission of some kind because up until then,

there had never been an admission and all around the world, what the church was doing was saying, well, you can't sue us. We don't exist. So, and it's true. The Catholic diocese... But their figurehead is his own son and dad at

the same time. Yeah, exactly. A Catholic diocese doesn't exist as a legal entity. It's not a body corporate. It doesn't actually exist. Cardinal Pell, who you may have heard of recently because he's now being convicted, when he was in Melbourne and in sydney he actually used that to avoid any cases being taken against these diocese by victims of abuse there and forced people instead into a system of redress that he managed so victims of abuse in those diocese had to go to his system and his structure and ask to be compensated but and they would decide what would happen so they were able to do all of that um so they i wanted to cut through that and they would decide what would happen. So they were able to do all of that. So I wanted to cut through that and get something out

of this case that demonstrated that they had a responsibility and for that to be accepted. So I only agreed to settle on the basis that there would be a statement read

into open court in which they would acknowledge responsibility and admit negligence. And I got that. And that was read into the High Court in Dublin

and we won the case and that was a really important moment Did it get like I don't remember it like I was too young to be giving a shit about things do you know what I mean? To be honest. Good.

But, like, yeah, when I was in my late teens, people in their late teens back then didn't care about politics and stuff. Not like now where they do, which is brilliant. But, like, did you get media coverage? Did you get, like, were you happy with, like, whatever about getting it read in the high court, and that's incredible.

Did the world media, was it a big spectacle? It was a huge deal. Tell us about that. Well, I mean, the whole story, or the case, had become a huge issue globally anyway, because in 2002,

I mentioned, remember earlier on, I mentioned the film that we were making on Merseyside and Sarah MacDonald, this fantastic woman from New Zealand who just became a really good friend and has been a really good friend since, helped to make that film and we were sitting outside the library in Birkenhead one day, waking to go in and

trawl through 30 years of microfiche to try and find a story that was relevant to the, a newspaper story that was relevant to the thing we were trying to reveal. And she was just chatting to me about my background and what we were doing. And somehow in the course of the conversation, it led to me just quite naturally

talking about suing the Pope. I mean, that, again, it sounds, but it was just a conversation. And she sat bolt upright and said, you have to let me tell that story. And I went, no, there's no point in telling that story. Like it's still ongoing. It's a legal case. You know, there's a book being written about the priest himself. Alison O'Connor, the journalist had written a book about Sean Fortune. It's had

like acres and acres of newspaper coverage. It's a huge deal and the case is ongoing. So, so she spent about six months convincing me to do it. And then we did. So I made a documentary with her called Suing the Pope, snappy title. And it went out initially on BBC Two on the 19th of March, 2002 at quarter past 11 at night. Because it had to go out that late because of the content. Okay, yeah. And it was the only slot that they had. And I went, sure, nobody's going to watch this. It's not going to have any impact.

And at that point, like cable didn't exist and satellite didn't really exist and bbc2 would have been picked up on the east coast of the country and that was about it um so i thought like i was so wrong like the world went mad after the film went out it had a huge impact the office in london was absolutely swamped with calls from people like the amount of reports and disclosures we were getting was overwhelming. The media focus on the story after it came out was huge. But like we did things like doorstep to Bishop.

You know, he didn't want to give us an interview so we turned up outside the church before he went to say to mass and shoved a camera in his face. He was furious. Brilliant. He was on the phone

screaming at the guards afterwards about how this had happened. And we just dug down into it in a way that and it was really uncompromising now it wasn't gratuitous and it wasn't sensational but we just we just told the stories that need to be told um and it had a massive massive impact um and actually within two weeks on april the 1st, which was the anniversary of it the other day, actually, I've just realised as I've said it, the bishop, Brendan Comiskey, resigned. And that was

the first time that a bishop had resigned because of an abuse case, and because of what had been revealed. So that then elevated it further. So it was becoming a global story. And just by another act of mad synchronicity, the Boston Globe series

had only started we were actually making the film while they were working on their none of us knew this like we were not obviously at all connected but all of that had started to roll out at the same time

so as all of this was becoming a huge story in Boston it was becoming a huge story here again and all of those linkages start to happen so yeah I mean Suing the Pope went out all over the world and then in 2006 I made another film with for panorama for bbc panorama called sex crimes in the vatican where it was kind of i thought this was probably the last time i'd

come back at it and the the idea behind the film was that whenever you're prosecuting historic crimes like this yeah you never have forensic evidence, you never have any of that kind of stuff. What you have instead is what's called same-fact evidence. You have a number of victims who are not connected to each other, who don't know each other, and they tell the same story.

You have same-fact evidence that demonstrates a system at work and at the heart of the system is the perpetrator. And that's how you prove what's happened. So I said to the BBC, I said, right, I said, let's use that approach. Let's go out and gather the same fact evidence for how abuse has been concealed and facilitated and covered up across the world. So let's demonstrate the system at work. And the common link in all of this is the Vatican. Let's put the Vatican on trial. So we did that in 2006. We went

to Brazil, the US, and looked at cases here here in Ireland and we unpicked all of that. And that film had huge global impact as well. So, yeah, there was a huge amount of media attention on the case over those years. That's a lot of rattling of cages. Yeah. And in light of all that, how do you feel today about people getting kids baptised? How do you feel today about people getting kids baptised? Like, people feeling they're forced to get their kids baptised Catholic because either the grandparents want it

or the recent thing, you won't get a school. Well, thankfully now... Yeah, that changed. Thankfully now the school thing has changed. Like, the baptism and barrier has been removed for Catholic schools. It's still in place for minority schools, which is about being able

to protect minority communities and make sure that, so that I get somewhat. Look, I mean, people make individual decisions. And first of all, I think it's also really, really important

to separate out faith and people's individual faith from the crimes of an institution. Like Catholic, the Catholic faith is not responsible for the actions of its, of the hierarchy of an institution like catholic the catholic faith is not responsible for the actions of its of the hierarchy of the catholic church or the institutions of the church you know i know and love people who are people of profound faiths and i've family members like my my father's uh some of my father's siblings and their spouses

are people of huge faith. And they're wonderful. Like, they're magnificent. And they've been magnificent in all of this. And actually, one of the things that's never been properly acknowledged is the wounds that was caused to them. Like, these are people who gave their unquestioning loyalty to an institution. You know, and if you think about that for us as a country, we gave our lives. We gave our sons, our daughters, our brothers, our sisters. We gave our money. We gave sons our daughters our brothers our sisters we give

our money we give our land we give our property we give our unquestioning loyalty to this institution and look what they fucking did to us yeah right and if you think about if you think about that you also gave your faith you handed your soul if you believe in that over to these people and look like that wound is a huge wound that's never been properly acknowledged so i think we have to separate out personal faiths from the acts of an institution and i've no difficulty at all in understanding or not understanding accepting that for somebody this is a really important aspect of their lives and i think that's that's grand yeah somebody's religious they should be able to manifest and celebrate and live from that place of faith. What they shouldn't be able to do

is impose the dogma of that faith or the rigours of that faith on a way, on other people in a way that abuses or violates their rights. That's not acceptable. Where is Amnesty at the moment, Amnesty Ireland, on issues around the housing crisis? Is that something that you're looking at? So you asked me earlier on what was one of the big things

we would like to focus on. I think in this country, we really need to focus on economic, social and cultural rights more. That means things like housing, health, education. Actually, we did a huge amount of work on those issues from about 2008 on.

We had a massive focus on mental health and human rights. Yeah. And we had actually a lot of quite big successes in that area in terms of changing how the conversation was happening around mental health. And then as part of. And we had actually a lot of quite big successes in that area in terms of changing how the conversation was happening around mental health. And then as part of that,

we were doing a lot of work on the right to health and the right to housing from 2008 on. In 2014, we managed to get the Constitutional Convention, which was the precursor to the Citizens' Assembly, to look at the question of economic, social, and cultural rights and got a very strong recommendation from them about proper constitution protection for those rights. That hasn't been advanced by government fully enough since then and it's something that we absolutely do need to pick up. And you yourself, not even representing amnesty, right, but just you as a human,

what would you like to see change regarding housing in Ireland, regarding access to housing? I think on a whole range of things, from housing to health to education to all of those places, we have to go back and really begin to think about

what's the mission? Like, what are we about? So, yes, you know, we live on this particular rock by an accident of geography and geology and history and lots of different things. Here we all are in this place. And at some point we decided that we would band together in some way and structure and order ourselves in a particular way. And that became a republic. But why did we do that? And the reason why I love the notion of a

republic is because at the heart of what it means to be a republic is the concept of care and mutual concern and mutual regard so what does the republic exist to do what's its responsibility so we we develop this idea to to try to to codify our structure how we'd look out for each other and how we'd care for and provide for each other i think we have to get back to looking at that and if you look at some of the underpinning, like in Ireland, we talk a lot, maybe a bit less these days, which is not a bad thing, about acts of revolution and rebellion and bloodletting. But we don't talk about the purpose or why people did it or what were the values that underpinned it. And if you go back and look at the founding values of what became this republic, they were really radical ideas that were grounded in notions of care and mutual concern and mutual regard. So everything from the cherishing the

children, cherishing all the people of the nation equally, like those principles of equality were really profound and important. If you look at the democratic programme for government of the first all, there's a section in it, and I loved hearing Michael Dee use it when he spoke recently. It's one that I've used quite a lot over the years. It says that the first duty of the government of the republic should be to guarantee the welfare of its children so that no child suffers from hunger or deprivation or lack of shelter. They describe it in that way. That was 1919.

That was seven decades, 70 years before the international community came up with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that set out those principles. Who said states have particular obligations to children and those obligations are around a whole range of areas, but they absolutely are around things like health and education and housing and all of the things that a child needs to live a life of dignity and to be cared for and supported. Those were the founding principles of our republic. If you look at the 1937 constitution, which is described now as a very conservative, church-laden, it actually isn't so much.

If you look at that, there's a section in it, the directive principles of social policy. You're defending de Valera? It, no. And even though my younger brother is called Eamon after him. And even though I grew up listening to, so John F. Kennedy's funeral was the coffee table book.

And I listened on record to de Valera's response to Churchill repeatedly. And my younger brother is named after Eamon de Valera. My mother wanted to call him Anthony because she had a particular finish for saying Anthony, but de Valera was more sainted in our house than Anthony so he got called Eamon. But if you look at that constitution there's a section in it, the directive principles of social policy that effectively lays out what are the ideas and principles that should direct

social policy in this government, in this republic. They didn't make them enforceable by law because they were worried about and concerned about separation of powers, that politicians need to make decisions and the courts shouldn't be making those decisions. It should be through a democratic process. But they gave them enough significance to say these really should be directive principles. What happened? They weren't enforceable. There was no obligation. So they were ignored.

Other things were put into the Constitution, like the right to property, which is an economic right. That's a dodgy one though. A lot of people now are saying, let's change the constitution to say not a right to property, but the right to a home. You see, the right to property is a qualified right in our constitution, but this says something about how the conversation got lost and it lost connection with mission or with purpose. The right to property is subject to the common good. So the right to property isn't absolute. So the state can interfere with the right to property if it's in the interest of the common good.

So the idea, for instance, that people can amass land banks and exploit them in order to ramp up property prices. Not even people, fucking vulture funds. But that's absolutely... The right to property doesn't grant that right. If that's detrimental to the common good, so if that means that in this country we can't provide housing for people

because of the conduct of some corporations or individuals who are looking to exploit people's extreme vulnerability, we can legislate against that. But our courts have never been asked to test it generally. And there's been a huge reluctance at the ideological level. So what does it take for that to happen? Well, we need to counterbalance that right, I think, with the right to housing in our constitution.

We need a right to housing, we need a right to health, we need a right to education. We need all of those rights to become fully what are called enumerated or protected rights in our constitution. That doesn't mean, by the way, that if the government doesn't give somebody a house, they can sue the government. Here's what it means. It means that the government would have a legal obligation

to make decisions when it comes to legislation or policy or resource allocation, how they spend our money, that are grounded in evidence and outcomes focused. So when it comes down to deciding housing policy, they would have to be able to transparently demonstrate that their policy decisions were evidence-based and geared towards providing the best possible general outcome for the people who need access to housing. And if the courts intervene, it would be on the basis of process. So you'd see the courts looking at the evidence and saying,

well, actually, there's no rationale for the decision that you've made. It makes no sense at all that your policy decisions seem to be geared towards incentivising market investment in property rather than incentivising access or availability of housing. You need to rebalance that. Go back and look at that again. I mean, imagine having a legal system or a constitution that required our parliament, our Oireachtas, to make evidence-based decisions in a transparent way that were focused on guaranteeing the best possible outcomes. Isn't it depressing that that's hilarious?

What a radical, like that's the radical idea that are social rights like housing. And yet, when you say this to policy makers or politicians they'll say, I'm not sure every fucker would be soon as if they didn't get a house. Like, literally there's that lack of an understanding about what it would actually mean. So that's what that would mean.

And it would mean that that argument about going, well, no, we can't interfere with these property rights. It's like, yes, you bloody can. And you have an obligation to do so if necessary. So we need those rights protected at the level of our constitution. That's, that's the stats. It's not a silver bullet, but it's something that starts to shift completely the way that policy is decided and the way the decisions are made. So that's, like, those past five minutes are the type of thing, I know, when people are listening to this and people in the audience,

that makes us angry. Good. And not only does it make us angry, you've framed it in a way that makes it sound like, oh, shit, that's a bit achievable, is it? Yeah. What can we do? Well, you know...

I mean, do I write to a TD? Yeah, do write to your TD. Or talk to them. Like td yeah do write your td you know or talk to them like this the one thing about you know the thing about ireland is our politics is actually incredibly accessible you know we know we know or we can get to know our politicians it's very easy to get access to a senior decision maker in ireland you know and at every level twitter or wherever seriously like but like not even just that. But by the way, Twitter is great. And that's, you know, I sort of from a debilitating tradition

called Twitteria because I'm on it so damn much all of the time. But actually, if you really care about this stuff, go and sit down and talk to your TD. Or when they're knocking on your door over the next couple of months for the local and European elections, say them.

Say to them. Say, I want you to commit to working to ensure that the right to housing is enshrined in our constitution. I want to see our parliament and any future government bound by a legal obligation to make decisions about how housing is provided, how health is provided, how education is provided in an evidence-based, transparent way where they're focused on guaranteeing the best possible outcome for all the people who live within this society, within this republic. I want a commitment to that vision of a republic

that cherishes all the children of the nation equally, and this is one that you can do that, and I'm asking for that. Like, have that conversation, and do it all of the time, and if you want to get really serious about it, go down and talk to them in their constituency clinics, because that's the thing that makes the real difference. It's not the wake and it's the rising. Within the context of that column,

like you said, we are going to have politicians knocking on doors within the next few months looking for the European elections, right? have politicians knocking on doors within the next few months looking for the european elections right what would be a good list of things for every citizen to have to straight up say where do you stand on this where do you like for me number one where do you stand on climate change yeah where do you stand on direct provision yeah where do you stand on housing what's your big idea about how you're going to... Because everybody, like every politician

will tell you that it's not about spending more money, it's about how we spend it. Like it's become such a... It's true, by the way, but it's such a trite thing to say because what they're

effectively saying then is that means that our systems through which we manage or administer public services and policy and law are really, really flawed. That's not good enough. Like if you're standing to be a legislator,

so how are you going to change that? And then present them with that idea that we need a system that requires opening up policymaking and law and decision-making in ways that demand that it be evidence-based and transparent. We should not, like we'll hear a lot about decisions that are made.

So we talk a lot in Ireland about vested interests. And by the way, I don't have an issue with any group advocating from the perspective of their own interests. And we have all kinds

of vested interests operating across our services and across how we fund and provide services. Some of them are corporate, some of them are profit-based, some of them are trade unions. It's completely appropriate

for a trade union to go in and advocate in the best interests of their members. But that shouldn't be the criteria upon which all decisions are made. The base criteria should be what's the best possible thing we can do when we're trying to deliver a health service? How are we going to get the best possible health outcome here?

And that's the last thing that's considered rather than the base thing that is considered too often. So that's the bit that we need to do. Don't accept them saying, well, it's not about how much money we spend, it's about how we spend it. So what are you going to do about that? What's your big idea?

How are you going to shift it? And if any of them tell you that they are to govern for the people who get up early in the morning, close the door in time to fuck off. Yeah, Jesus. I asked Twitter a lot of questions, but I haven't even got to answer them because we've had such a

wonderful flowing discussion. I did get some questions from Twitter. A hell of a lot of them were about how do you deal with the amount of abuse that you get on Twitter? Because you get loads of it. There's a couple of things about... They call you a Saris

funded cuck. Yeah. That's when they're being nice. Yeah, that happens so often I have like a gift that responds to it. Do you remember the seagulls in Finding Nemo? Instead of them going

it's called Saris,os soros yeah yeah yeah um uh look i mean the first thing about about about the online space is people are there right yeah and the fact that there isn't a filter the fact that it's easy the fact that it's seems anonymous to most people on twitter is means that with wild abandon they can be assholes. But like for every, like the shit that I've gotten on Twitter is just other versions of shit that I've gotten over the years that I had to learn very early on to not pay any attention to. Like, I mean, I can remember a letter coming to my house after we moved into our house because we built

we built a house when we moved back from London and it said something like I'd bend down for a priest too if I could get a nice house like that and it was sent to my house right or

or when it became known that Paul and I had two kids that we were parenting two kids you know letters came in saying pity the child raised by two queers. Or, like, loads of stuff like that, right?

Just regularly, death threats, all of that kind of stuff, right? So, like, that's there. And Twitter just means it's, like, I had somebody, I was down, I was asked to go down in Limerick to give a talk for Limerick Civic Trust, and it was actually in the Anglican Cathedral down there.

I was up in the... Oh, it's marvellous. Yeah, but I was up in the, what's it called? The pews? No, up in the big... I don't know. I'm not into churches. You know when...

Especially not, I don't know nothing about Protestant churches. You know, yeah. I tell you, they've got an 8th century misery card. Well, I don't even know what that is. It's the only fact I know about St. Mary's St. Mary's. Which you literally, like I was up there, I had to walk up the spiral staircase to get up to the part where they preach from and I was up there giving this speech.

Oh, where the Protestants, they have an eagle there. Who said, what is it called? No, is it actually called a pulpit there as well? Okay, fair enough. An audience full of mostly Catholics roaring about what the Protestants call the altar.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. I know, there has to be one. Look, you're all welcome. I remember doing that and getting a call afterwards from the organisers who were really concerned and were calling the guards because they'd had a letter delivered warning them to call off the event

and that I shouldn't be speaking there because of my promotion of the murder of the unborn. Oh, yeah. I got a few of them. I got a few of them. And that Gorry, which is where I live, so they'd done their little bit of research, wasn't that far away.

And all it would take would be a pot of boiling water to render me celibate. And then making loads and loads of reference to me being gay and all that kind of stuff, right? So that came. And then, like all i mean through the work on on actually do you ever worry about those ones the the impassioned detailed ones because that's that's not trolling it depends right i mean i i got another one around the same time which was on it was on post-it notes but they were lined which was really weird that's that's, it's a bit of a red flag.

Better get out my ruler for this hate. This one made me, this one made me almost, like, nostalgic. It was like there was some really fucking 1980s homophobia going on there. It's like I was a fudge packer and a dirty shirt lifter. Like, I hadn't heard that stuff

in a very, very long time, right? So I guess the point that i'm making is like that that crap's always been out there when it's online it's a little bit more accessible and it's a little bit easier and i suppose or it's it's easier for them to do it and look i've developed a really really thick skin but i would say that that's all very well and good for me to do it. But there are people that I love and people who love me who are affected by that. And I won't go into it because it invades on their privacy to talk about that. But people that I love deeply and members of my family have been hit by this. And it's been tough for them to deal with. I'm very resilient, but it doesn't mean that everybody around me is.

them to deal with. I'm very resilient, but it doesn't mean that everybody around me is. I mean, you know, some of the stuff, particularly during the three or four years we were working on the Eighth Amendment, that became very personalised, like stuff about, you know, effectively calling myself and my husband child sexual abusers and saying there'll be dark things to come out of that house and then naming the kids, like using their names. Like loads of stuff like that online. And actually, when you report that stuff to Twitter, they'll go back, Twitter has investigated your report

and has found no violation of our rules against hateful conduct. That's just mad shit. So there's a lot of that. I mean, one of the things, there isn't a day when I, and I do, I love Twitter. I think it's a great space. I really enjoy using it.

I really enjoy the engagements that happen. But one of the great joys at the moment is when you go on and you tweet something and you see there's replies under words, but you can't see them. That usually means there's just a bunch of people that have already muted. So I use the mute button a lot.

I don't block so much. If I block it's because I want somebody to know I've blocked them, right? Because it's really going to piss them off. But most of the time, I don't want people to know because i don't want to give them the oxygen of it and then secondly i kind of quite like the idea of them howling into the void yeah and getting no response and actually i really do think to go back to something i said earlier we need to let the fuckers howl into the void like leave them to us um and and just focus on who we are and what

we need to be a bit more but i mean you know you just get on with it um i should i should say as well before i come across as way too worthy and all of that i am absolutely guilty on occasion of engaging and like i'm stuck in, you know? But I do that less and less and less. A sixth trade argument with someone who has three followers and a photograph of a dog. There was actually a satirical piece written in the Sunday Independent one day about

me having a row with somebody with 28 followers. Yeah. Yeah. Would Amnesty ever knock on the door of Google or Facebook or Twitter and kind of... Yeah, we do all the time. Here, lads, can you sort this stuff out? We did a huge report last year on toxic Twitter,

on the abuse and threats and threats of violence and harassment that women in particular get online, particularly women of colour. And we continue to have a huge engagement with Twitter on that at the global level, including through their European offices here. In the last few months, we published a big report on digital companies and their businesses in the occupied territories,

in the occupied territories, in the occupied Palestinian territories. So looking at TripAdvisor and Airbnb in particular. Yes. In settlements. That's SodaStream. Yeah. We actually weren't looking so much at SodaStream in that moment,

but that's a different issue. But on Airbnb, for instance, I mean, you know, you go on Airbnb and you see these fabulous homes that are being advertised on Airbnb. They're in settlement territories. Yeah. They're literally built on land stolen from people who've been shoved across the road and who are watching people come. And like it's obscene. And then the TripAdvisor stuff as well.

And we've had good success there with Airbnb and we'll keep doing that. I mean, there's a really important deal, as you know, going through Parliament at the moment, going through the Oireachtas. Senator Francis Black introduced it to try and introduce a legal ban on the importation of settlement goods. That's a really good way forward as well, but it builds on some of that. Do you think it's to

the advantage of, like, in the work that you're doing there, you know, approaching digital corporations, right? Corporate wokeness right corporations now as part of their branding really want to be seen as woke and we care and all of this stuff do you think that benefits when like it's not great for airbnb trying to be a bunch of sound lads and amnesty are knocking on their door do you think that helps i mean i i i understand the cynicism and that, by the way,

and I share some of it. But also, you have to remember when you're sitting down to have a conversation with anybody that you're sitting down with a human being. And like any corporation, it's a human organisation as well, right? And there's humanity there. And we have to find a way to engage the humanity there.

Now, that means that sometimes you have to batter down the door a bit and really confront them with the demand that they're going to have to change what they're doing and get them to engage in a conversation. That's really important. But within organizations, like you mentioned Google earlier on, Google had this thing called Dragonfly in China, where they were developing new technologies that would assist the Chinese government in monitoring their citizens. Where's Amnesty on that, actually? With the Chinese credit system?

We weren't for it. Well, I know that. We thought it was a great idea. You know what's going on in China, yeah? The social credit score system. They've basically invented... Do you know the concept of God as being this omniscient thing. Remember when you're

four years of age and you think God is real and you're like better not do that. Or Santa. Santa. Better not do that. Santa's watching. They've turned that digitally into a thing so your social media where you move everything goes to the government and it's a social credit system

and your social credit system directly relates to how your life exists. So Black Mirror, yeah, but this is China right now. It's real. So let's just say you visit the off-license six times a week, okay? In China, that is seen as this is a person that's drinking too much,

therefore their social credit goes down because they've physically gone into an offie. That means then the next day that person, their toaster breaks and they ring up the company to fix the toaster. If their social credit system is low, they're put at the end of the queue. Black bear, black bear.

So Charlie Brooker just robbed China then, did he? Or China took it on from Charlie Brooker. You better remember what he writes. This is happening in China, and I'm scared that it's going to happen here. So we were talking about Google, because there was a point to be made about how organizations are made up of people.

They were enabling that, were they? No, Google were developing a technology that would have assisted China in some aspects of what they were doing there as well. It was called Dragonfly. And so there were lots of engineers and developers within Google who weren't happy about that.

And what we were able to do was research exactly what was happening, start a campaign on it, but also encourage people within Google to challenge the company to change direction. And they did. And you see that now in Microsoft as well. It's about the use of some of their technologies for training the US military,

where developers are saying, we didn't develop this technology so that it would be used in this way for these applications. So, I mean, it's important to remember that in any corporation, it's a human organization and there will be people there who are as principled, have as much integrity, who want to do good, who want to be good, and we have to try and find ways to work with them. And we have to call out corporations when they're being utter,

like when it's really clear that their agenda is dark. Yeah. Well, I was trying not to use the one word i'm not meant to use um as the like being amnesty ireland do you think you have a do you feel a greater sense of responsibility for this because so many corporate headquarters exist in dublin um well we have a greater opportunity to work on it yeah so it's not so much about i mean at the global level we have that like that's work on it. Yeah. So it's not so much about, I mean, at the global level, we have that, like, that's what we do. So we'll work closely with our colleagues in our global,

wherever the global research team are based, who are working on the issue, we'll be working closely with them. We'll link in. So yeah, it presents more opportunities to work on those issues. And that's a good thing. Mm-hmm.

Has Colm ever been so enraged that he has knocked the shit out of a neighbour's wheelie bin? The internet lads So Colm have you ever gotten so angry that you

kicked shit out of a wheelie bin? No No? No Neither have I Funnily enough It's an intro

I feel vaguely disappointed that I haven't somehow as well, but I say my neighbours are probably happy. I'm not going to be taking it out on a wheelie bin, you know? Poor old wheelie bin. Although I tell you, a lot of wheelie bins went on fire in Limerick, you know?

Spontaneously. Yeah. But it was just young lads doing it for the laugh. Young lads wanting to see things on fire because they're bored. But the woman in the wheelie bin company, anyway, someone had obviously told her that young lads are doing this

because what they do is they set fire to the wheelie bin and then all comically gather around it like a choir and inhale the fumes of the burning plastic. Which isn't what's happening at all. But that's what she thought anyway. Mr. Bin Man, down in Limerick, thought that. Okay. Sorry, just...

I don't know if this is a question or a statement. Is the concept of human rights a fundamentally left libertarian concept? Jesus, well, left and libertarian are very often two very different things. See, again, I don't know who wrote that. I like it. I mean, you know,

human rights and the human rights framework, again, it's not a silver bullet. It's not a cure-all for everything, but it's a framework that we can use as we try and address particular problems. Where did it come from? I mean, you know, modern human rights and international human rights law has its origins really in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948. And that was a response to the horrors of the Second World War when the international community, it was actually Eleanor Roosevelt who led that process, said never again.

And they came up with a document that set out in 28 articles all of the rights that all of us possessed by the simple fact that we were human and the obligations that we have and that states have towards each other and from that then flowed all of the big treaties. How do you think the world is doing right now compared to

that charter? I mean well you know six million people had been exterminated just before that we haven't fixed that problem I mean we've had genocide since six million people had been exterminated just before that. We haven't fixed that problem. I mean, we've had genocides since, and we'll

have genocides again. You mentioned China earlier on. There's a population of a small Muslim minority in China known as the Uyghurs, who right now are being rounded up and thrown into camps and subjected to forced labour and a whole

load of other violations there. And there's a fair bit of silence about that. I'm sure that their particular faith is part of the reason for that. If we look at what's happened in Syria over the last five or six years, so, I mean, we're not in the best ever place. But, I mean, at the same time, there are other advances that we can celebrate and that we can look to. I'm trying to think what they are now. But like, I mean, if we look at like, well, let's talk about Ireland, right? I mean, I think Ireland's a really interesting, I mean, I feel

extraordinarily lucky to be in the job that I am and doing it here, right? You know, I've colleagues, even in Europe now, I remember an amnesty meeting a number of years ago in a European country in a general election that just had happened. And my counterpart there said, we're now going to have to get used to working in a country where the government doesn't agree with 95% of what we say. And the rest of us went, well, welcome to our world generally.

But that country, which had been, that was the Netherlands, which was, you know, liberal and progressive and open and enlightened, has moved to a much darker place over the last little while. And at the same time here in Ireland, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. I mean, if you look at some of the big moments here over the last, you know, five years or more, the referendum on marriage equality and the referendum on the eighth, at the same time as the rest of the world seems to be regressing on things like LGBT rights and on women's rights

and women's reproductive rights in particular, we're going in the opposite direction. At the same time as in other parts of the world, if you talk about refugees and migrants, you're met by suspicion and hate and vitriol and there's pockets of that here. But actually, our experience in Ireland is, you know, people care deeply about those

issues and genuinely want to see the right thing being done. Ireland's sound, actually. We've discovered our soundness. Yeah. And that's exciting. It's exciting to live here. It's exciting to work here. It's exciting to be here. But in all of that, there's

also the possibility that we're holding up, isn't it grand that we're holding up a bit of a light at the moment? I mean, after both of those referendums, the impact that they had globally, which wasn't why we did it. And I love the fact, by the way, that when we approach both of those issues, we approach them very much from the perspective of who are we? What are we about? What have we got to say to ourselves, what do we need to do for each other? The one thing that people did not care about, and this is so contrary to one of our diseases as a country,

is we didn't give a shit what the rest of the world thought. We weren't operating from that weird kind of combination of inferiority-superiority complex that we sometimes have, where we're trying to prove to everybody that we're great, really. It didn't matter. The one thing in both of those referendums that would not have flown was think about what the rest of the world

would think we're a holy show if we don't get this right. People were not interested in that. We had a conversation about who we were, what we were about and what we stood for. But the impact that it had beyond here. Like after the marriage equality referendum, it was hilarious watching the rest of the world respond.

And I saw a lot of it because of the, you because of the fact that I work within a global organisation. People were scratching their heads and going, Ireland? Yeah. Germany kind of went, fucking hell, Ireland. Australia went, Ireland, and started to get on with it then. You were seeing that happen around a lot of the world. And actually, even more importantly, for LGBT communities and activists and organisations around the world, they went, you know what, if they can do that there, if that country can move from a country that only decriminalised homosexuality in 1993. Like when I came out, homosexuality was criminalised. When I left Ireland, homosexuality was criminalised. I saw the decriminalisation happen,

you know, from the UK where I was living then. I remember being in Dublin's one gay club, the NGF, which was down behind the Central Bank and Fulham Street.

Did somebody say, hmm, somebody remembers. Somebody else was there. I probably knew you. There was not very many of us at the time. I remember, you know, being down around there

and the guards would come in and walk around the place and stare at people at various points. You know, we couldn't have, we couldn't, there was no drinks license, there was a coffee bar that you'd volunteer in. I used to volunteer to get in there for free because I was on the dole and it was the way I could go out four nights a week. Like, it was that kind of, but the

guards would come in and walk around the place and eyeball people. So it wasn't an open gay bar, it was just like a secret? It was a nightclub. It was a club. It was a community space, actually. And it ran a club four nights a week there as well. And we'd go to that. But the level of intimidation was huge. And we went from that to becoming the first country in the world by a popular vote,

not just to permit people of the same gender to marry, but to require at the level of our constitution laws that provided for that. It wasn't kind of like your grand get on with it. It was like, no, no, fucking do this. Like it was directive. That's huge. And for people in other countries who are struggling in the face of what they feel are hugely conservative, church-dominated or religiously dominated societies, to see Ireland do that was just huge for them. And again, after the Eighth Amendment result, I remember getting an email from a colleague who was at a reproductive rights meeting in Botswana on the time that the results come out with a whole load of active small across Africa. And she said people were crying and cheering in the room. And like we didn't do it for that reason.

I think we did it. And I'm not, by the way, I'm not presuming that everybody in this room agrees with that decision because we know not everybody voted for it. But if I just reflect on it in very general terms, we did it because we believed it was the right thing to do and i was so committed to the marriage equality referendum and not because i'm gay and the personal piece was there sure but i was really committed to that because i was fascinated by the idea that here we

were being asked a question about who we by the idea that here we were being asked a question about who we are which is essentially what we're being asked but it was framed in the context of allowing people around gay people or people of the same gender to marry um and look look at the conversation like it was now it wasn't easy it was not great for lots of us like to go around and and anybody who was involved, and I know there are lots of people who were involved in both campaigns, but let's talk about the most recent one, the Eighth Amendment campaign.

Yeah, woo us. But, like, literally, you know, women having to go and knock on doors and ask for their dignity, their autonomy, their integrity, their rights to be granted to them as if that was a gift that could be handed, like having to go door to door and knock. And similarly with marriage equality, to have to say, will you please acknowledge the dignity of my family and my

loving relationships? And could I please be entitled to the same rights as everybody else? That's an appalling thing for people to have to do. It's awful. But we needed to do it. And the way that the country responded to it was extraordinary. So for me, the marriage equality question was, who are we and what are we about? Are we actually a republic that believes in the idea of equality? Do we really believe that the loving, intimate relationships that we form with each other are the stuff upon which we build our lives,

our families, our community and our republic. And if we do, shouldn't we do that for everybody? Isn't that what we're about? And I think that's why we voted yes. I remember being on Morning Ireland on the morning of the count and 20 minutes after the boxes opened, they were calling it for yes.

Something else. I mean, I knew we were going to win, but like 20 minutes afterwards. And the presenter said to me, you know, Colm, is this sign of, you know, Ireland embracing, of a new and modern and outward looking Ireland embracing modernity?

I went, no, it's not. I said, this is not, this is not a vote for us to be something new or something different. This is a vote for us to become more of who we actually are. This is a vote for us to become more of who we actually are. This is a vote that's grounded in really deep, ancient understandings of what it means to be human, to be the best of ourselves. It's a commitment to each other, an understanding of the

value of love, of family, the understanding that that's diverse and takes many forms, the understanding that in those moments, in many forms, the understanding that in those moments, in those relationships, there are times when we need to be supported, there can be times of great joy and of great challenge, and so why wouldn't we want to take care of all of that? So it wasn't about us becoming something new, it was about us becoming something real and something more and something much more vital. And that's what excited me about that referendum. And if that was true about that one, by Christ it was true about the eighth because that was the big one because then it's about at moments of crisis

or tragedy or difficulty, how should we respond to each other? You know, are we still prepared to ignore the appalling suffering that we're inflicting on women for the simple fact of their reproductivity, given everything that we've learned about the consequences of that in this republic? If we look at our history, if we look at what we've done to women just because they were women, just for the simple fact of their reproductivity have we learned from that and are we prepared to still be blind and allow that to continue or not or are we better than that and if

we think about that then how do we want to respond to people in moments of crisis whatever that crisis might be on whatever basis and i knew we were going to win that referendum because that's where we managed to bring the conversation to and there's only only one answer when you get to that place if you do it properly and and it was the answer that we got and I'm so proud of us and there's about ten minutes left, so I'm going to open up the audience for some questions. Jesus. That was a bit harsh.

Well, it was a bit sudden rather than harsh. Do you know why that is now? Because the fucking lights are controlled by an app. You better bring it back up now. Split the difference. There we go now. There we go. We didn't need a straw blade.

It's not a rave. Anyone got a question? It can be about fucking anything. This gentleman at the front here. Wait for the microphone, sir. It's on the way. No, the fucking Greeks need to hear it, man. The Greeks and the Spaniards are listening.

And the Portuguese. That was deadly. Thanks very much. I didn't really know you beforehand, and you coming in, like, that was really moving. Just have to say that first of all. Thank you.

That was phenomenal. Thank you so much. And Blind Boy, where is Mr. Crumb? Where is Mr. Crumb? That's not my question, because everyone's thinking it. Do you want me to answer?

Yeah, I want you to answer. He's still around. On Twitter today, I shared... You know our song, Dad's Best Friend, was in the Trainspotting film, yeah? Today on Twitter, we basically got the royalties for being on Trainspotting 2,

for our video being in Trainspotting 2, and our song being on the soundtrack. We got the royalties for that today, the royalty check, right? For a year. So guess how much that both of us earned for having our song and video in Trainspotting 2, the massive Hollywood film?

I saw it on Twitter. 36 euros. Woo! So, Mr. Chrome is still around, right? But the thing is, is that it just, it simply isn't possible for both of us, rubber bandits wise,

to be earning a fucking living making music, making videos. So as a result of that, I'm here doing my thing and he has a job. He's got a real life job, you know? So we are back. We're making a new album. We will be releasing tracks and tunes, but it just is not economically possible for us to, because we like to make shit that's challenging. We like making shit that's weird. We know that

when we make a song, it's not going to get played on Today FM. I don't want it played on Today FM. So in order for us to continue doing that, we have to essentially be part-time. So Chrome is still there. It's just he's kind of on a break at the moment, but tunes will be happening and videos are going to come out. And the reach of that stuff is mad. I was in Romania

recently. Oh man, we have six people in Romania. You love us. You're more than one. One of the things I love to do when I'm visiting a new city or a new place is do like a walking tour. And I generally like to do those kind of free walking tours where you pay people at the end. Because two things. First of all, you know the money's going to

go directly to the person who's doing it. And secondly, you're going to meet local people. And very often they're the best kind of tours you can do. So we ended up doing this brilliant tour of Bucharest with this guy. He was 27 years of age he was a pediatric psychiatrist who had qualified two years earlier and was working within the health system and at the weekend supplemented his income by doing walking tours and when he heard we were from early went oh rubber bandits not James Joyce not Oscar Wilde not even you U2. Rubber Bandits.

But Chrome isn't going anywhere. Me and him are fully committed to... We can't wait to see what we're going to be doing when we're 70. Seriously, we talk about it. It's like, are we going to be doing ads for nappies? You know what I mean? We really are looking forward to it. So what was the question?

Oh, yeah. Thanks. Yeah, Chrome. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Chrome. Oh yeah. Where I work, I work with a lot of people that are like in around late 50s,

60s, all right? And nearly all of them, when I was trying to challenge them on the two referendums, they're either, yeah, we're sound,

we'll go for it. Or like, no, God and stuff. So I'm thinking, and that comes from like, I think, brainwashing from when they're young age, which was Catholicism, and that comes from like I think brainwashing

from when they're young age, which was Catholicism back in the day. It was just brainwashing. But now we live in the age of information. Do you think in about 30, 40 years' time, we're going to get to a time when Catholicism is basically just, well, I don't want to say atheism, but just like we'll get to a time where you can just be yourself and not have to have a religion and it'll kind of fade away does that make sense i mean it makes sense but i'm not sure that i'm not sure

that i care enough to answer the question and i don't mean that in a dismissive way i don't mean that in a dismissive way and i actually don't mean that i'm i i'm i'm dismissive of that right i said earlier on that i think people's faith is a very personal thing to them and who would want to deny somebody you know that sense of identity or expression or connection that's profound and that is meaning to them neither would i want to disrespect it for all i know they're right you know who knows right they might be right i don't know and it's not for me it's not my belief system it's not my belief structure what i think is really valuable about where we are right now is um we're not dictated to by that anymore so you know 74 percent of people in ireland describe themselves as religious part of what we did right throughout that campaign was we did an

awful lot of polling to understand for our own reasons to understand where people were and what influenced people's positions but also more, what did people not know? Because I really believe that the reason why we don't make sound decisions are because we don't know enough to make them. And if we give people the right information, we'll get to a good place. So a lot of the time, we're trying to understand where you're caught, what do you not know? If you don't care about this, how do you not know about it and where where are you caught so one of the questions we were looking at was the impact of religion on people's decision making and actually didn't particularly it did for some people but religion didn't have a very a very significant influence on people's decision on how they were going to vote or on their position on

abortion at all what it did mean though was that we were able to have a conversation that wasn't dictated from a pulpit. The big difference is, and the reason why I think we've gotten to that point is, remember earlier on I talked about the betrayal that many people might have felt. One of the outcomes of that is that we've learnt, like all of those systems and structures and institutions and pillars that we look to, to tell us what we should think, that infantilized us and that told us how to be good, proved to be completely and utterly corrupt. And at some point, we woke up and realized that the only people we could look to were ourselves. And we've started to have those conversations for ourselves.

And we're getting bolder about it. And, you know, in the last two referendums, that's what you really saw. So I think you'll see people who have a profound... Like, there are many people who have a very strong Catholic faith who voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment and who are fully pro-choice. And it's entirely consistent with their faith and with their value system. Interestingly, during the marriage equality referendum, there were a huge number of people, including clergy, like priests who came out and

said, I'm voting yes, and I'm not voting yes despite my faith, I'm voting yes because of my faith. I remember meeting a woman down in Waterford, we were canvassing down in Waterford, Winnie, she was 83, and I sat down beside her because we were told that, you know, men over 55 and people over 65 are the big worry. So I always made it my business to talk to men over 55 about this and to see how they might react, but also to talk to older people, because I don't believe some of those kind of stereotypical takes that we have on what people's positions might be. And I sat down beside Winnie to chat to her because she let me. And I remember saying to her, so how do you think it'll go and

like she was too cute like you know you don't particularly I mean in Ireland particularly in rural Ireland you don't ask people how they're going to vote it's like asking how much money they have so she looked at me and she said it kind of at Linda and she said well it could go either way I went fuck's sake thanks for that and uh and so we talked a little bit more and I said so you know you can see that I'm trying to get people to vote yes. What do you think? You know, do you have any idea? Are you inclined at all to vote yes?

And she said, well, she said, I know what my religion is telling me. And I thought, OK, we're going to have that conversation. That's all right. I can have that conversation. And then the next thing she said was, but who am I to tell anybody they have to stay on the other side of any line? She's 83 years of age, Winnie, from a small village outside Waterford. That was her view.

And that was consistent with her values and her faith. And many of her values found expression and she understood them and related to them because of her faith. She then talked to me later on about, she was opening another conversation, she said actually she said last week I was in mass and the priest said to us, there's a letter

down the back of the church from the bishop and I went oh so she does want to have that conversation, then she said and then he said to us, you can take one of the way out if you like but no bishop is going to tell me how to vote and no bishop should tell you either. And he said this from the altar. And then she said, and then he went on to tell us about his 50-year-old nephew who was gay

and why he was voting yes for him and how that was absolutely grounded in his understanding of his own faith. So like all of the conversations, I've been really lucky to have some amazing conversations with people in this country over the last 20 years and over those two referendums in particular and the one thing that it's taught me is don't imagine for a moment that you have

any understanding or that you are in a position to make any assumptions about anybody else's value judgments or statements based on some aspect of their identity it's like one of the other thing that we hear from the last referendum was that, you know, the only age group to vote majority no were people over 65. So people over 65, 40% voted yes, who voted? 40% voted yes, 60% voted no. If you look at people under 25, 87% of them voted yes. However, twice as many people over 65 voted as people under 25. twice as many people over 65 voted as people under 25.

In fact, more people over the age of 65, in terms of numbers, voted yes than people under 25. Similarly, with the marriage equality referendum, we hear all of the time that it was young people who won that referendum. I don't think we could have won it as emphatically without just the brilliant engagement of young people in that referendum. But if nobody under 30 had voted in that referendum,

it would have passed comfortably. So the thing we have to understand is, let's not go to that space. And I mean, I'm 53 this year. I'll be 53 in July. Much to my surprise, I'm not 30 anymore. But I'm not 30 anymore um but like i'm not ancient right and and if you think about the the abortion referendum in 1983 who do you think voted against the eighth and what age are they now

you know and also my generation of of people and you alluded to this earlier on and in a way you've you've said it in a different way as well. It's my generation, even more to the point, the generation older than me, my parents' generation, are people 10 years older than me, who really know and understand the consequences of how Ireland used to be. Like we know, we know. And that informs who we are now and how we engage in conversations about big issues like this.

So whatever happens in terms of faith, that's incidental. What matters most is who are we, what are we about, and what will we stand for. Thank you. One last thing. No, hold on.

I'm time conscious, so I want to give the mic to someone else, if that's all right, brother. No problem. Is Gerry Adams in the IRA? Gerry Adams is not in the IRA. Well, I don't know. He could be.

Do you want to ask a question? Yeah, sure, fuck it. Why not? You've got the mic. Hello. Okay, so you talked a little bit about being in the online space, and you mentioned slightly

that arsehole who lives on the very left of the ocean to us and what he's doing at the Mexican border but what I'm worried about or have a concern is we repealed the 8th last May and then I know there's all issues with clickbait and what we see now

coming in over the last year or so is a lot of things like reproductive rights being rolled back in a lot of different countries and like Alabama yesterday a woman could get 99 years in prison or something like that for getting an abortion and I'm wondering what is is there a concern about that and what is the trickle-down consequence for us around the globe and is there a concern about that or are we? It's a massive concern about that like Roe versus Wade, which was the decision that granted access to legal abortion in the UK, is under threat.

If that comes back to the US Supreme Court, it could well be overturned. So there's a huge concern there. If you look at what's happening in Poland, if you look at what was attempted in Spain a couple of years ago, the rollback on reproductive rights and on women's rights at the global level is a massive, massive concern. And then at the same time, look at some of what's happening in parts of Latin America. What almost happened in Argentina just last year and will bloody well happen there soon. And what we managed to achieve here, what was achieved actually in Spain and in Poland, where those attempts to roll back were defeated, despite the rise of the ultra-conservative right in Poland, for instance. They couldn't go that far because women rose up and wouldn't accept it. So there's huge risks and

there's huge threats and we have to be alive to those and we have to do something about it. And again, I think it's why what we did for ourselves last year, it last year now isn't it? yeah last year was so important and has such significance globally so there's a huge huge risk it's not a good time no it's not so I'm going to leave you gone now right

because it's 11 o'clock that's an awful negative place for us to stop though before I sign out I just want to say Colm that was a fucking pleasure it was amazing for

what there's been two two live podcasts where I'm sitting here and I feel like a member of the audience and it's Bernadette Devlin and yourself

and it was amazing and to all of you lads, you were fantastic it was a lovely evening to be a part of I could feel a collective fucking energy in the room that's what I'm looking for when I'm doing this thing thank you so much for coming out and God bless and have a good crack

There you go I will talk to you next week that was very enjoyable. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm.

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