The Blindboy Podcast - David McWilliams

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

A conversation with economist David Mcwilliams about solutions to the housing crisis, vulture funds, brexit and shelving yokes up his jaxxy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good morning, you Wu-Tang-Caians. We'll start today's podcast with a poem that was submitted to us by singer-songwriter Mick Hucknall from the band Simply Red. Remember them? remember them what radiant hope will assure my forlorn gullet dragged by the cuffs of my curls across the shop floor tiles guff and lint and the arse of my Ben

Sherman shirt 50 quid for a tennis racket that's taking the piss it wasn't shoplifting it was protest thank you very much for that Mick Hocknell so how are you getting on?

what is the crack? have you been enjoying yourselves? there's a lovely lick of cold in the evenings and that acrid pungent promise of turf smoke

in the air that disappears slightly every year and I think it disappears because just all people elderly people die they're the only ones left burning turf

in the fireplace em I've just had a ferociously busy few days there the past past five nights I was just I was just doing a string of fucking live

podcasts I did two in Vicar Street and one in Ulster Hall and my guests were Devin McWilliams the economist, Bernadette Devlin the revolutionary

and Roddy Doyle the author and there were three fucking amazing nights, and thank you everybody for coming out, there were truly, it's beautiful, the podcast hug was achieved, great conversations, I can't wait to show them all to you, what have I got, yes, this Saturday, in Wexford, in the Spiegel tent, I've got a live podcast, this Saturday the 13th of October I believe, and there's some tickets left, but, exciting news, because I didn't have, I didn't even speak about this podcast, exciting news because I didn't have

I didn't even speak about this podcast I'd forgotten about it to be honest but I can confirm that my guest is Tommy Tiernan who is a comedian

and a comedian and philosopher Tommy is special he's got an amazing mind but me and Tommy did a live podcast before and it didn't record so we're having a rematch in wexford on saturday so come along to that i'm looking forward to that um after the tommy incident i got my shit together regarding how i record live podcasts and invested in a bit of kit to make sure that when i put a live podcast out it sounds brilliant and a few of the live podcasts have sounded a bit dodgy

the vincent brown one recently it was okay wasn't great but um this week i'm going to i'm going to have this week's going to be a live podcast I'm going to play for you the interview with the economist David McWilliams and the reason being is it's budget week in Ireland you know

and the government are after coming out with the budget and it's kind of shit especially in the context of a housing crisis they seem to have favoured in ruled in the context of a housing crisis they seem to have favoured in ruled in the favour of landlords which is just audacious

and shocking but yeah David McWilliams is one of the most foremost economists in Ireland and on top of that he has a gift of simplifying it so that it's understanding so you're going to enjoy this.

And the audio quality is top notch too. I will be releasing the Roddy Dial podcast shortly enough over the next week or two also because Roddy has a film out in cinemas called Rosie, which is about the... It's about the housing crisis, I suppose, but it's a personal story about a lady called Rosie who's living in emergency accommodation with her whole family, and it's a phenomenal film. So please go and see Rosie in the cinemas. So before I get into the live podcast, what I want to do is our little ocarina pause if we can. So that it doesn't interrupt the interview or the conversation.

So here's the ocarina. On April 5th. You must be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't.

The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real, it's not real. What's 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. 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 hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30 p.m. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game. And you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. So Jordan, that pause, you would have heard an advert for some shit or maybe you didn't i don't know um also this podcast is sponsored by you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast if you're enjoying the podcasts

and you'd like to contribute monetarily to them being made please give me the equivalent of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month on Patreon if you feel like it if you don't feel like it you don't have to you can listen for free

it's your choice have I anything else to say if you don't feel like it you don't have to you can listen for free it's your choice em have I anything else to say yeah so the fucking those gigs were unreal they were sold out incredible fucking audience

it was just they were perfect so there's gonna be two more gigs in Vicar Street on the 8th and 9th of November, for which there are some tickets left. So please come along to them.

They're going to be great crack too. So here you go. Here's the live podcast conversation with David McWilliams. Thank you. That was based on a true story. I'll bring out my guest. Economist, broadcaster. His nickname is the darky shelver for his penchant of sticking yorks directly up his anus.

It's David McWilliams. Thank you. That's a queer introduction. Sure, what are you going to do? How's that mic for you there now? It's grand. It's great. God bless. God bless.

So, you're here to promote a book, essentially. No, but you have a new book out. I have, yeah. Which is called Renaissance Nation. Now, I first came across your work when I was a... I did economics in school, right? I did economics for the Leaving Cert, and I just didn't enjoy it,

because I'm terrible with numbers. I fucking hate numbers. And I was intimidated in school, right? I did economics for the Leaving Cert and I just didn't enjoy it because I'm terrible with numbers. I fucking hate numbers. And I was intimidated by economics. It was, as it was taught to me, and the Leaving Cert was, like, I liked the odd thing with, like, Giffen goods and things like that. But it was, once it got close to the Leaving Cert,

it was just a lot of graphs and numbers and it scared the shit out of me. Then I got my hands on the Pope's children and it was my first ever introduction to sociology, economics. It was the first time I saw economics and said, this is fucking interesting. Something, especially how you use,

like what I would say about you is you use the gift of storytelling to tell kind of complex things about economics, especially how you create, like your books are almost like a sitcom you create stock characters i'm just thinking of how i get the kings of cork into the next one i think particularly phil i like it what are they they'd just be buying feather earrings man and making their own jackets i don't know there's still a few of them around galway you'd meet a lad like that down in Galway.

But, yeah, like that's like, what I found with the Pope's children was just, you'd have different characters like breakfast roll man. And actually,

interestingly, with the breakfast roll, I was doing a bit of research for tonight's podcast and I ended up on the breakfast roll Wikipedia page. And breakfast,

there is, but here's the best part. It says breakfast roll and then it has the name in Irish no because it's obviously being recognized as like Irish cuisine because why else like why else would have the name in Irish like and I didn't know how I felt about it like and bus like tell us a whose breakfast roll man and the other thing as well just about the Pope's children

if you haven't read the Pope's children if you read it now it reads like science fiction genuinely it was a scathing I won't say scathing

it was an accurate analysis of the utter excesses of the Celtic Tiger and to read it back now it's science fiction it's like a fantasy land of people owning two cars and people not caring about money and it's

insanity like, I can't relate to it anymore you know It was funny, when you're writing the best thing is when you go out about and just open your eyes and I kept seeing these sort of characters. I didn't expect you to ask me about Breakfast Old Man, but I kept seeing, you know, particularly it was like 2005, 2006.

2004, we started thinking about it, and I could see these... I remember once going to the hot food counter in a spa, and I was really intrigued about who was there. And every single time I'd go to these places, you'd see the same sort of blokes, five or six blokes, and they'd come up, and I was always intrigued about Irish people putting baguettes.

No, really, because I remember there was a company called Cuisine de France. You might remember it. They started the revolution. Right, so Cuisine de France... Cuisine de France, anyway, bought the rights to make these little baguettes in Ireland, and apparently they hired French bakers initially to make sure that

in Italy what the fuck initially to make it's a Dunleary accent okay very rarefied and anyway but what was really interesting I was always intrigued of what the conversations between you know the French bakers and the Irish bakers would have been about what would end up in the baguette. And of course the French guys would be thinking, I think there's going to be camembert and a little bit of smelly cheese. And then you went and saw what was in the baguette.

And they'd be like, you know, two rashers, three sausages, one of them fried eggs, no please. And I just thought, hold on a second second these guys are real so your idea about economics is true i mean i did economics at school it was a cultural invention it's basically to bring economics to life you have to realize that economics is just us blind boy yeah when you go around and you think about what the economy is and lots of people and i teach it

in university now and lots of people say oh it's very in university now, and lots of people say, oh, it's very difficult, and it's maths, and it's this, and it kind of freaks kids out. But if you actually think of what the economy is, it's only the aggregation of what all of us do every day. So you make a little decision, will I buy, will I spend, will I save, will I do this? And when you add all those up, that's the economy. So therefore, to see the see the economy what it is you have to try and understand human nature us and the way I like to do this is just to mooch around and I have a little it's kind of pathetic it's kind of weird you have this little notebook this is before before notes before google notes right a little notebook and I just keep my eyes open and these characters come to you and sometimes they sometimes, sometimes they don't work and

you probably know it yourself, sometimes you've got a character that's not working, but sometimes, you know, the Breakfast Roll character, it just worked because everybody knew him and he was just there and he was eating rashers in his baguettes. But the beauty of it for me is that he's eating rashers in his baguettes, but he's doing this because he has a white van outside. He doesn't have time to go to a restaurant. Absolutely. And all this other stuff about, you know.

Yeah, no, and I remember a mate of mine who worked as an electrician. He said, look, David, you know, you're writing about this stuff, but come out and I'll tell you what it's like working as a subbie. And we went out to Navan and I had, he said look David you know you're writing about this stuff but come out and I'll tell you what it's like working as a subbie and we went out to Navan and I had uh he said look if you want to see what's happening in Ireland he says you know don't go to Dublin City don't go to Dublin Ford don't do all these places come out and I'll show you where Ireland has been built and he says basically it's Navan it's Nace it's Gorey it's towns outside of Cork, it's towns outside of Galway, Clare Galway, Ballin Collig, you mentioned, Ballin Collig, when I was a kid,

my granny's from Cork, was a village with an army barracks in it. And it became a huge, huge suburb. So we went out and had a look at those things and this mate of mine took me around. And that's where those characters come from. But the idea, Blind Boy, is always to try and if I could make

a few more of those leaving cert kids yeah feel that economics is valuable and worth it it will be a job well done because it is important and as you said the way that what I dislike so much about the leaving cert is if you think about I I've always been intrigued with this, if you think back now as you get older you realise that there's so many different types of intelligence and so many different types of clever people but when I go back to school

and I think about when I was in school and you know I can think about the fellas I sat beside, I can think about the gang I had in fifth year and sixth year and I think about all the amazing brains and intelligence that are out there now and I think Blind Boy that in our schooling system we only rewarded one type of intelligence so the the kid could go in and absorb all the stuff into his brain or her brain and then you know put it in a compartment and then in the middle of June right like fuck

right that type of intelligence which is which is a really it is a type of intelligence but that's the only intelligence we reward all the other kids who are in the class who are lateral thinkers who are skeptical who are quite different those kids not only don't get rewarded, but get punished every single day. And school then becomes for so many people, and this is back to your economics, a process of small humiliations. And I can really feel that, and I can see kids going through it. And what really amazes me, Blind Boy,

is that when you get older, you meet so many incredibly clever people who left school feeling very stupid. But the corollary is also the case. Lots and lots of actually quite stupid people leave

school feeling very clever. Yeah. And I think that that's why the leaving cert should be questioned, not just from economics, but from every aspect, because we're leaving hundreds of thousands of kids behind. And that's a huge problem, you know? APPLAUSE

And... And you see it all the time and and then then jeez now that you have me going i can't stop now but like but then you think like you know what i'm always amazed by is when those the kids that with that vertical intelligence you know they're like they're like kind of walking filing cabinets and then they go to university and they do well and then they do well they do well and then they get jobs in big companies and the

banks and insurance companies and the civil service and then something really happens we call it in economics it's a thing called confirmation bias that we like people who think like us now think about what happens then in a society like Ireland it's a thing called confirmation bias. Yeah. That we like people who think like us. Yeah.

Now think about what happens then in a society like Ireland. So all these kids were told all the time, every single day, since they were little kids, right, that they're really clever. Like the teacher told them they're clever and the priest or whatever told them they're clever because their mummy told them they were clever, which is...

I was trying to explain Irish mothers to an American audience about four weeks ago. And it was an American audience of a certain genetic background, let's say. And I said, the Irish mother is the sort of mother that makes the Jewish mother look unambitious. I was trying to explain to a whole lot of Jewish people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, but think... There is a point. I was trying to explain to a whole lot of Jewish people there's a bunch of Jewish people but think, there is a point so you think all these kids and they go through and because our education system tells the kids there's one right answer the kids

who are rewarded by our education system also believe that they have that one right answer. And if you think there's only one right answer, and again, as you get older, you realise there's loads of right answers to every question. But if you believe that you have the right answer and your status as an individual has been dominated

since you were a kid by being the smartest person in the class, what you hate to be, blind boy, is wrong. So think about this. Then you get all these people, all in the sort of commanding heights of the economy, in these good jobs. They can't admit they're wrong. And then you put in this idea of confirmation bias.

So basically what happens is you say, oh, no, no, no, you're clever, you've got all the answers. No, you're clever, no, you're clever. No, no, no, no, you're clever. No, you're so clever, and eventually you say, fuck it, just have a job with me, right? So we employ people who think like us, and then what happens in a small country like this is you get groupthink at the top. And that's what happens here. And I believe it starts really early. And I look at my own children, and I look at their mates

and they come into the house and there are a wide spectrum of gorgeous kids, right? But lots of them every day are getting up. Like tonight, kids have the fear on a Sunday because they've got to go into the system and the system is rewarding a certain type of brain and that becomes very difficult to unravel. And that's why we make these big mistakes in the economy,

not because people are corrupt, or maybe they are a bit like that, or corrupt, but it's because at the top, everyone thinks the same. And this is a big dilemma. And in a small country, this is a bigger dilemma, because the mistakes can be bigger. Have you ever heard of a fellow called Howard Gardner? No, but you're going to tell me about him.

Gardner is an educational psychologist, but he presented the theory of multiple intelligences, and it's kind of quickly replacing the IQ model, you know? Yeah, which is great. What's so beautiful about multiple intelligence is that there's no such thing as someone being smart or dumb in multiple intelligences. It's like you look at a person's intelligence as you have different components. So there's visual spatial intelligence, numerical intelligence, linguistic intelligence,

physical intelligence. When I started studying Gardiner and taking that view on board as well, I found it made me a nicer person, because I remember... Not possible. I remember applying it to David Beckham. David Beckham was put out in...

Like, he was presented as a tick man. He was presented by the media as a thick man and under Gardner's model he mightn't be great with his linguistic skill you know his ability to get ideas from his brain to his mouth isn't great so we perceive that as him being thick but his physical physical intelligence is off the chart yeah Yeah. Like if you think of, now I know nothing about sports, but what he can do, we'd say with curling a ball into a net.

Here's me now talking about sports. I love it. I love it. I love it. The mathematics and physics involved in his brain. I'm turning into Dumpy already. It's brilliant. Do you know what I mean?

But what it does is it immediately strips your assessment of another human being. It takes it free of judgment. This kind of stuff comes to you when you're a parent, mainly. My daughter is just on the lead insert. She's dyslexic. And she'd go to school and she'd come back to me. I remember as a kid, like really young, and she said,

Dad, look, and it would break your heart. She said, I can't read. She says, you write all these books and I can't read the simple stuff. And I can't read. She says, you write all these books, and I can't read the simple stuff. And I can't process it. And the way my head works, every time they give me a page with stuff written on it, a little part of me just dies. And I cannot do it. And I remember thinking, all the people in my class and school in the 80s, right,

who were maybe dyslexic and had learning difficulties, we didn't diagnose them, so they were called stupid. Yeah. And then this humiliates kids, and this is what leads to, I think, a lot of kids having problems, because, you know, when I look at my daughter now, she can sing, she's really good at piano, she's expressed herself lots of different ways.

Just her brain wasn't working in this linear fashion. And we've improved dramatically in terms of understanding this. But when I go back to when I was a kid, loads and loads of people who might have been dyslexic or dyspraxic or some small problem not just working in the way the school system wanted them and that destroyed them so i'm very sensitive to that and it's interesting when you talk about economics you know economics is one of those weird sciences that bizarrely takes out humanity from the equation when humanity is actually what it's about. And that's why I think economists get things wrong. Because they don't understand this crazy thing called the human.

What I enjoy about your books is, like, you put the humanity back into it. It's like you talk about economics, but what you do is, you do make it a sitcom, like. I'm glad. No, it's good. Different characters. No, it is good. And that's, you do make it a sitcom, like. I'm glad. No, it's good. Different characters. No, it is good.

And that's how I, all of a sudden, then was able to... It's nice to write, because, you know, you begin to... It makes writing easier, because you get in and you see the person, and, like, you know, you just observe what's going around you, and these creatures come to you. And sometimes they work, and they make what you're trying to explain that little bit more comprehensible. Can you tell us about some of the, we said, the new characters? Like, this new book that you have now

is like a spiritual successor to The Pope's Children. It's what's happening right now. So, like, what new characters have you got in this book and what do they represent? It came to me writing the book on the morning of the repeal referendum and I was interestingly voting in the Dominican convent in Dun Laoghaire which shows you that you're actually going to vote in a religious institution

and that struck me as kind of odd and what I remember from the first repeal referendum, I was too young to vote but Dun Laoghaire voted, I think it was the highest against the amendment I was too young to vote, but Dun Laoghaire voted, I think it was the highest against the amendment vote, and we at the time, I know people felt that

it was a real outlier and then what happened after the referendum was you realised that Dun Laoghaire was not an outlier at all the whole innish man voted the same way as Dun Laoghaire which I think is amazing so I thought that maybe a good way of looking at the world would be look at, take the first abortion referendum in 83,

take the abortion referendum now, take the first Pope's visit in 79, when there was a big crowd, and there was a slightly smaller crowd last time. And, there's probably more people here. And to look at that, Blind Boy, and see, OK, what is that 40-year transition? And what is really amazing is that you don't realise how unbelievably dynamic this country has been over those 40 years.

And we have problems, and I'm sure we're going to talk about them, and there are serious economic problems that could be fixed. But the broad span of the last 40 years has been phenomenal. So it's looking at that last 40 years. And then, of course, the characters. I'm intrigued at the explosion of GAA in South Dublin

yeah when I was a kid there was no hurling right I can't believe that Dorky are the fucking hurling champions of Ireland

right I'm from there right when we were kids only mad fellas hurled, right? And it was like, it was soccer territory and then rugby. And then maybe a bit of God, there was kind of hurling aristocracy families.

It was a genetic thing, right? And then I was really intrigued. I went down to Kula, which is this huge GAA club in Dalky. And when I was a kid, I used to play soccer in Dalky United, which was the soccer club. And there was a small GAA club in Dalkey and when I was a kid I used to play soccer in Dalkey United which was this soccer club and there was a small GAA club beside us called Kula now Kula is sponsored by Davies fucking stockbrokers okay so Davies stockbrokers the poshest company in Ireland so this is the sort of shit that interests me and I went down uh undercover obviously uh on a Sunday or whenever they play or whatever and uh and I was looking at and I went

down to to take notes on this phenomenon where does it come from and how did it happen and and there was a sort of woman I kept seeing came out usually of a Nissan Qashqai on a Tuesday night with a clipboard. And you know this is the sort of woman that could have organised the invasion of a small country. You know, you just have this thing. So I was intrigued about this type of suburban person. And I went back, like yourself, I went back reading.

When Bill Clinton was voted in in America, they created this swing voter that they were trying to say, who is, so basically, as you know, in America, there's like 48% Republican, 48% Democrat. So it's all about the little bit in the middle. And in 1992 and 1996, where Clinton was voted in significantly, they identified this suburban mother called the soccer mom. Yeah.

And she was voting for Clinton. And Clinton, oddly enough, was speaking to her. And in many ways... So I was looking at this woman, and I just thought, the Irish government is a schlittermom, right? And you just look at them, and you now, if you go around, go to a G8 club this weekend or during the week, and you'll see these persons.

So then I started to research a wee bit more about Schlitter Mom. And then I started finding out about, you know, basically, in South Dublin, where hurling has become really popular, what you basically have is these couples where either... Well, what interests me was, in the 1990 1990s there was a very interesting economic study done on who benefited most from free education in Ireland over a 30 or 40 year period it's really interesting by a guy called Cummins who was working in University of Galway sociologist and they were trying to track free education was introduced in the mid-60s

so who actually benefited from it and it's really phenomenal that the single biggest indicator of how a county was benefiting was the number of small farmers in the county so the sons and daughters of small farmers in Ireland benefited enormously from the education, free education, which is interesting because at the time they thought it was going to be Dublin working class, but they didn't take it up in the same numbers.

And then I thought, okay, and then I investigated a bit who they were. So basically in the 1970s a sort of a national school teacher aristocracy moved into Dublin, right? Playing hurling and things, right? And then their kids have become hyper-educated and have become the upper professional class.

And because house prices have gone so ridiculous, the only people who can now afford to live in South Dublin are this hyper-professional class who took with them a love of GAA. And the really interesting area is that they have identified the sons and daughters of small farmers from East Galway

are the most successful people in Ireland. Isn't that amazing? Fucking hell. So it's reverse colonisation of the cult she. You're absolutely right. The chapter's title is called The Culturisation of the cult. You're absolutely right. The chapter's title is called The Culturisation of Dun Laoghaire. But it's interesting.

So that's the sort of stuff I like. Where does it all come from? Where does Schlittermom come from? Because she didn't exist when I was young. Why is she into this sort of stuff? Who is she? And then you go back and you see there are real economic reasons.

And they happened. so for example it's that east galway constituency is pat rabbit and eamon gilmore and a huge amount of people so it's it is that's the way i like to look at the economy it's it's what you're doing is it's a more sinister version of what you're doing is what cambridge analytica did. Ah, Jesus! No, but seriously, Cambridge Analytica were using software to find Slitter Mom. Well, Slitter Mom's fella now is, yeah, but you don't

need software. Just open your eyes. And her fella is Quango Man. Quango Man? Yeah, you might notice. You know these fellas have got all these quango. That sounds like a very bad superhero. I tell you. What the fuck does he do? But he's, again, you notice it.

This is another thing I've noticed over the last, even since the crash, the explosion in quangos in Ireland. What's a quango? It's one of these things that, it's when, for example, when the state has, the amazing thing about Ireland is there's no accountability. So when there state has... The amazing thing about Ireland is there's no accountability. So when there's a crisis... LAUGHTER

And even worse than there's no accountability, every crisis presents an opportunity for a quango to grow, OK, to investigate the crisis. So I just noticed that there's a whole load of these guys and where you'll see them is around on a Sunday morning on a very light bike. Okay. Sounds like we're trying to spot a rare heron. It is. It is. It's like a rich savannah. You have to sneak up on the fuckers.

But I don't know, have you noticed this explosion and fellas of my vintage on on carbon bicycles yeah on a sunday morning right and the the ratio of ma of weight from man to bike has got to be 100 to 1 right so the big fat lads yeah yeah yeah yeah take our bouncing out of him and he's up on this little small thing and these things intrigue me like where did they come from because they didn't exist five or six years ago so so I I I went undercover in Enniscerry which is a funny place at eight o'clock you have to go black they'll take you take the bag off the gown no one will recognize you and we'll go and that's these are the things I'm interested in is who are these people what they're doing how they've changed society how they see the world how they vote and their biases and their

their their i wouldn't say prejudices just their notions and how they've changed the society and it's it's a bit of crack it's better it's better than doing equations for a living, you know? Of course. We have a potential intermission coming up where you can go and get a pint. Would you like that? See, I can't tell because it's a Sunday. Would you like an intermission at a half nine where the bar opens and maybe you could do a wee?

Does that sound nice? Okay. You fucking, you predicted the economic crash and people told you to fuck off. But like you became, I remember seeing Max Keiser, Max Keiser who's on Russia Today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like he did a whole piece about how you were shunned from television because you were too dangerous at a time after the recession.

It was kind of mad, you know. I think what happens in Ireland, if you come out with ideas that are against the mainstream or the consensus, your ideas go through three phases. The first phase is what I call the open ridicule phase, where you're laughed at all the time.

David Icke, or David Icke. And I remember going on the Late Late Show years ago, and like, what fucking gobshites on the panel? Yeah. And you're just thinking, and you're, and part of you in your head is, you want to sit up on the Late Late. Was this during the boom now?

In front of you, this is during the boom when it was all going bonkers. In front of, well, I couldn't because my mother was watching, but you feel like saying, anyway. Yeah. So the first phase is this sort of

open ridicule phase. And then the second phase, when your ideas get a wee bit of traction, is the violent opposition phase. Yeah. Didn't Bertie call you a party pooper? Slightly worse than that. Bertie, that peaked...

..for me, with Bertie... Bertie's obviously litigious. Bertie speculated as to why I didn't go and commit suicide. Oh, he did indeed, yeah. Which was a very bizarre thing. Wouldn't get away with that in 2018. My mother, it's true, but my mother rang me, and she's from Cork, a retired teacher,

so you know that's time. She said to me, she goes, Bertie, I know he's after mentioning you inside the door. I said, yeah, I know, Mum, but it wasn't really that complimentary. And she says, well, I didn't care. We didn't mention Mrs. McCarthy's son. LAUGHTER

You know, court mothers. And that's the second phase, is violent opposition. And then you get to the third phase, where we are now, which is the one I really love, which is the everybody pretends they were on your side all the time phase. Yeah. And that's, you know it. And you just have to deal with it.

That's the way of the country. It's got loads of great things, lots of good stuff going on here. But there is a tendency amongst the mainstream establishment to really try and crush dissent. In a very, very skillful and subtle way. Not in a sort of old Soviet way. Where you just take the fella out and you end up

very cold in Siberia. You know, here it's more insidious. And a lot of the media certainly at the time, not so much now, but were involved in that game, I think. You were seen as, you were portrayed as someone

who was, he's just saying controversial things to get attention. But what you were saying was, there's going to be a property bubble, the economy is going to crash. And you were seen as a lunatic. Yeah, well, the thing is that,

there's some truth to that, actually. The most popular question I had tonight, now everybody is going, can you tell us when the next crash is going to be? But the naivety of the country in 2002, people were just like, how can it crash? That's impossible. My house is class.

No, the difference is... I know. I'm not even driving the house. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, it was just... Again, these are things, these are common sense things. Luckily, if I'd worked abroad for most of the 90s and I'd seen the same sort of thing happening,

the banks borrowing loads of money, lending that to people, people then chatting to each other. I remember it was at a mate's wedding, it was about 2000, and... 2000, 2001, and I went, I knew there was one of those moments, I went to the Jacks,

and this fella came up and he's totally scuttered. And, you know, the elbow against the urinal pose, which doesn't really inspire confidence for the next sentence. No. And he said, he said, you'd be fucking mad not to load up on houses. I said, really? Really? And then I noticed people I knew were buying this, that and the other.

And then for one of the TV programmes, which was, I mean, it's kind of funny, but it's also quite harrowing uh the madness was so great that i said look i'm making a program about a potential property crash which was the book of the pope's children the documentary the pope's children and there was a big piece and these guys were selling property in bulgaria and i said look we we wrote to them said would you mind if we came and followed you with the camera to tell the story because we believe that this is a bad thing for people to do. And they were selling it to Irish people? Your man says, not at all. How many you want to come? And I said, well this

mightn't look very good but they were so caught up in their own sense that everything was going to be fine. And we went out, and this was in summer of 2006, so just when the madness... And what really amazed me is that the people who were on the flight, it was a charter flight to a place called Varna, and we talked to a couple of Bulgarian people. They were selling the flats for 128 grand to start with

and the take-home wage in Bulgaria was 280 quid a month, right? So we talked to the Bulgarians and they said, what are you doing, man? Our houses cost us a few grand. And the worst thing was it wasn't the big developers and it wasn't the big developers, and it wasn't rich people. These were people who had been persuaded that this was their pension.

And they were schoolteachers, and they were nurses, they were people in the civil servants, they were brickies, they were people in the trade. And that really kind of pissed me off, because I thought, these people are going to suffer. And yet, all the time, when you went on TV or tried to say this is going to happen, there was your own patriotic. Yeah.

Put on the green jersey was the one. Yeah. But I don't... Remember we started this conversation about the leave insert and the groupthink? Yeah. You've got to go back there. It's not that anybody is particularly more greedy or much more

of a shiser than anybody else. It may be true but in the aggregate what happened here was groupthink and that groupthink comes from not putting critical faculties in place early for our kids. That's what I really believe and I think that's what scares me. Do you feel there's also an element of defence mechanism too though? I mean if you're it's like telling someone who like when someone's smoking fags right there's a period in your life as a cigarette

smoker where you just love it. And it's class. I know. And it's grace. And when people say to you that'll give you cancer you're like fuck off. Yeah. You know it is but it's like just stop is it a bit like that yeah it is it's but it's also it won't happen to me the human nature there's all sorts of psychological stuff about you know basically we think it's going to happen to the next fella

but it's not going to happen to us or it's going to happen over there this time it's different and it's the same it's the same with with any of us smoking fags or whatever you think it's the same with any of us smoking fags or whatever. You think it's not going to be me. And it's human nature. So my sense, blind boy, is that you shouldn't get so angry about what happened here. Because a lot of it was just our own human frailties, which all of us have all the time. And if we didn't have those,

we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. If you think about it, there was an Italian communist, a fellow called Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, and he said that life is a conflict between the pessimism of the intellect, so we're trained to be pessimistic, and the optimism of the will, which is what gets us out of bed in the morning. What gets us out of bed in the morning is this small sense in our head

that tomorrow or today is going to be a bit better than yesterday, or tomorrow's going to be better today. So when I look at what happened here and the housing and all that, my sense is that it was more a reflection of our own frailties. And these are the things that make us beautiful, as well as make us a little bit silly. And I think that's the lesson that I've learned from it all. a little bit silly. And I think that's the lesson that I've learned from it all. One kind of vibe I get as well about the tiger is like, there's a post-colonial vibe to it.

Yeah. There's a drinking game, by the way, whenever I say post-colonialism, you're allowed to have a drink. But there was a sense of, we've never had nothing. Yeah, exactly. Or as well as that, the Irish obsession with,

you know, fucking... I was saying, like, if the Bull McCabe was around today, he'd own about ten flats on Gardiner Street and would have it full to the brim of Brazilians. And we'd be occupying the Bull McCabe's house. But we would. Yeah. Because it's house. But we would. Yeah.

Because it's that, the farmer class. It's like, my land was taken off me by the Brits before that. My grandfather was in the penal laws. I'm fucking taking this house. I want 10 of them. But you can blame the Brits for everything. It's brilliant, isn't it? That's post-colonialism, man.

It's great. It's great. But I think you're right. There is this element of, don't wreck me buzz. It's great. But I think you're right. There is this element of don't wreck me buzz. People were buzzing, and it was like a big group trip, and then some eejit like me comes in and says, I wouldn't do that if I was you.

I mean, I wouldn't take another one a thousand. So I can understand that people say, would you ever fuck off. And there is, it is, because I think that there was a sort of a group trip and everyone was coming up

and the last thing you want is somebody saying, I wouldn't do that. And that was me, unfortunately. So, but somebody had to do it. And were you treated, was Max Keiser's assessment right?

Were you shunned away from RTE a little bit? When shit went really fucking bad and you would have been the man to go, this is why it went bad and it was them. No, I wouldn't get... No, I think that, you know... I'm not sure, actually. I don't want to think about that.

I'm not sure. It kind of felt like that. But, I mean, that's grand too you know if you were if your mental health was predicated on decisions in rte oh christ tell me about it i think we'll leave it there exactly exactly yeah um here we'll we'll uh have a little intermission for 15 minutes and you can go for a pint or have a slash or whatever, all right? Thank you.

Are you nice and settled? So one thing I wanted to talk about. There was a particularly terrifying moment around... It was around 2000 and... About 2010 or 2011? Go on. I remember reading the Minister for Finance at the time, Brian Lenehan,

and it was a particularly... He was basically ready to make some very important decisions for Ireland just as the recession had the crash had happened. This was at a point where the government were seriously considering whether they need the army on the streets to stop people from taking money out of cash machines.

Seriously. It was like the banks could go bust basically. The Minister for Finance knocks on your door at one in the morning, eating raw garlic out of his pocket. Yeah, it was unusual, to say the least. Can you tell us about that terrifying moment, please? LAUGHTER

It was in 2008, It was in 2008, and I had been on the Today at One, which is that RT political programme about two weeks prior to it, and the Minister of Finance, who I'd never met before, was on it, and the Fianna Gael spokesperson on finance, and it was very clear to me that basically what happened in Ireland is the economy was actually set up to fail blind boy if you run an economy like this it's not a matter of when it all collapses or if it all collapses but when and what we did was this is why my writing became increasingly more I don't know maybe dramatic towards the end, I was saying, look, basically when your banking system

borrows loads of money in order to lend to the punters, what it does is it borrows money for three months. So you can roll over that loan every three months. But it's lending to you, blind boy, for 30 years for your mortgage, right? So basically, if the bank starts to run out of money, they can't sell the houses to generate the cash to pay the people they've borrowed the cash from. So banks run out of money, they can't sell the houses to generate the cash to pay the people

they've borrowed the cash from. So banks run out of money. That's how they go bust. the more we were borrowing, the banks were borrowing. And you could see this... And who were they borrowing from? This is amazing. They were borrowing from British banks, German banks, French banks, American banks. It was an entire Ponzi scheme.

Okay? And what was happening in Ireland was initially they were borrowing for one year to lend to you for 30 years. By 2007, nobody would lend to them for more than 30 days. So the whole world was saying, these guys are going bust. And our government kept coming out and saying, there'll be a landing we have loads of money everything will be kosher and the problem is how bank runs happen in the modern world is not when you remember the 1930s I see a fella going to the bank and saying give me all my money what it actually happens is it's most of its done by just somebody on a screen

yeah so the people who lose all their money last are the average person. And all the financial players were getting their money out of Ireland all that period. And our central bank was just saying, don't worry. They were almost saying it'll be grand, right? And I was sitting listening to this

and I'd seen these bank runs before because I worked a little bit in Asia in the the mid-1990s and I saw how this happens and I remember going on this program and and the presenter was talking about everything except the banks they were talking about social partnership and the trade unions and regional policy and building roads and I said at the end, I said, look, this is all very interesting but our banks are going bust and we need to fix this. And the minister said, you can't say this, this is dangerous talk. Remember that idea you're talking down? And I said, look... So that was the first time

I met him and... Now, he also had... He had terminal cancer too. I don't think he also had terminal cancer too. I don't think he had it at the time. So why was he eating the garlic? Search me. Because he was creepy. No. Okay.

I thought there was at least... He'd read online that you eat raw garlic for... It was really... It was very strange. And then one night, my phone rang. Out of his pocket? It was very strange. And he came to the house. And I've never had a politician in my house, let alone a minister.

So it was kind of quite surreal. And I didn't know him. And I kind of, it's funny, but I felt really quite sorry for him. Because he came in and he was obviously knackered. Yeah. He was really tired and he obviously was getting conflicting advice from all over the shop and he sat down and we had a chat and I said look you're a couple of years too late first of all you know we were in the middle the thing about a crisis is, if you look at the only thing you don't have in a crisis,

in any crisis, is time. That's the thing you don't have, right? So the question is, the most important thing in a crisis is, how do you buy time to try and figure out how bad the situation is, right? Fucking hell. And I said that to him. I said, the problem is not money.

The problem isn't money per se. It is money, but the problem is you don't have any time. And money is leaving the Irish banks, and the more you guys say there's no problem, the more they're going to go bust, and the more people are going to lose everything. Because when a bank goes bust, people don't forget this, when a bank goes

bust, all the deposits disappear. And you arrive there and you've nothing and he said look what do you think's going on and i said you need to figure out some way to buy yourself time in order to create i mean that basically i said look you're not going to be sitting here and saying we've got a good option and a bad option. In a crisis, you have a very bad option and an even worse option.

And they were saying, the central bank was saying, oh, don't worry, we'll get money from the European Central Bank. And then the ECB said, no, you won't. And then they said, oh, shit, okay. And then they said, oh, we'll get money from Merrill Lynch. And then Merrill Lynch went bust. Okay. And we'll get money from the american financial markets they said no you won't and there was no money anywhere so i remember talking to him and say look you've got to do something

temporary that stops the fear that people have that there's no money in the banks that's how you stop a bank run that you basically tell people there is money there, right? And you've got to do this for a short period of time. You've got to lie. You've got to... No, what you've got to do is you've got to say to people, we are going to provide the cash for you. Yeah.

OK? Even though you don't know where it's coming from, yes. Even though... And you've got to then, by time, over a year or two... Remember, tell them you should guarantee these things for about two years. And then, in that period calm the crisis down go to the European Central Bank deal with all the creditors and buy yourself

time and he headed off I met him once again after that and then I never met him again. Then it just, I didn't see him again in the sense that we never had another meeting. And then what amazed me is how the whole thing unraveled that the guarantee became a five-year guarantee and then a 10-year, and they guaranteed everything and went on for ages.

But I kind of, what was quite, I think your first expression was terrifying, was the fact when you realise that the people who are running the place haven't a clue. And it's really terrifying. Because you're just sitting there going, oh. And then you look at some of the individuals. He was the Minister for Finance and you had to explain to him junior cert level economics

That's like the Minister for Finance But you know maybe that comes from a sort of entitlement we go back to that idea you know like if you're there are certain political families let's say in Ireland and they're kind of like an aristocracy

that we've created within our republic. So the Ralph Follower was a politician, and the Ralph Follower's Ralph Follower was a politician. You know, again, it's like a genetic inheritance, like sickle cell anemia or something like that. Maybe not. And that's the interesting thing, that some of the people who end up in these jobs

don't seem to have the qualification to do the job other than the job that Alfa did. And they might even be getting votes because we voted for his dad. I think so. So, I mean, again, you know, when you look back on these things with 10 or 11 years of 10 years of hindsight things that become apparent to you is how did

that end up being the case you know why did those the establishment wait so long and then panic so profoundly when they didn't have to. That's what I kind of tend to wrestle with. And then when I think about now, you think, well, are there other issues going on now that could be similar? And we're saying, don't worry, it's going to be grand. It'll be OK. Do you think the way that loans are being given, like, are they more responsible now? Like the last, the problem the last time is there was

no regulator. There was a fella. He was wearing a turnip on his head and masturbating on a clock. Yeah, well that image has just stuck with me. So now the

difference is, this is very interesting, is that the people, there's a lot of credit in the system here now, but private equity firms, largely American, called the vulture funds, have become banks here. Yeah. And that is what has happened.

So all the good assets of the country have been sold very cheaply to people who don't really want to own them. And by that I mean... There's going to be questions and answers at the end. By that I mean their long-term interest is to sell Ireland. Because they've no interest in owning apartment blocks here indefinitely. So we've gone from a very strange position where we have a crisis that was caused

by Irish banks borrowing too much, lending to Irish people, and buying expensive property to a crisis that may well also end up with Irish people buying the same expensive property to a crisis that may well also end up with Irish people buying the same expensive property off different types of banks. And a transfer of wealth as a result. And a massive transfer of wealth out of the country.

Like, what is a vulture fund? What is a private equity fund? Well, it's just, it's basically very, very rich people getting very, very richer. No, it's, well, what it is, is it's initially very, very wealthy people. When you get a massive crisis, like a global crisis, right, and the banks lose money, what you find is that they then won't lend to anyone at all

who hasn't got really good collateral. But the only people who have really good collateral after a crash are the already very wealthy. So crashes amplify inequality because of the way in which lending happens after it. So what you saw in Ireland was that the people

who had the opportunity to borrow money between 2011 and 2015, let's say, were already incredibly wealthy funds. And they have bought large parts of the country. They've bought commercial real estate. They've bought private real estate. They've bought residential real estate. And they now sit. And the rents that we are paying, this is what is hard to get your head around, the very high rents that people in this room are paying, a lot of that money is going straight out of the country.

And... I heard 50% of the housing market is owned by these vulture funds. Certainly 30% worldwide, having gone from zero in 2010. So, by what you're describing there, is it fair then to say that it is in the interest of the richest people in the world to continually have recessions? That's a, look, very well...

And is this why the 1% is getting bigger and bigger? Yeah, I mean, basically what happens is that very rich people make lots and lots of money in a crash, not in a boom. The average dude always thinks, in a boom, we are getting richer. But in fact, what actually happens in a boom, particularly if it's credit-driven,

is we are actually getting poorer, but we think we're getting richer. And then what happens is you get a crash, and is just so this happens all the time you get a crash and the assets that you bought for 100 quid let's say you now sell for 20 quid okay the person who has the 20 quid tends typically to person who's already very wealthy so there's many many very rich people who just sit on the sidelines and wait. And in Turkey, I was in Turkey last week, Turkey had a crash recently, South Africa had a crash, Argentina,

so they just wait and they deploy their money. And the interesting thing is the system not only tolerates this, but encourages this. I mean, the interesting thing is the best way to rob a bank is to run one, right?

No, I mean this, like, banks, they go bad from the inside out, right? It's all to do with behaviour, right? And this is something that hasn't been fixed since the global crisis. And my sense is that what you're seeing in dublin with the rents the hot property prices you see the same thing in london you see similar things in many capital cities not half as bad as what we have here but we could it can be fixed here is a reflection of this and and it's it's it's it's it's what is wrong with this kind of cowboy capitalism that has emerged.

Is this neoliberalism? Well, the interesting thing is, like, liberalism is a very good thing. You know, to the liberal world, liberalism gave us the vote. Liberalism gave us equality. Liberalism is really a very, very strong force for good. But economic liberalism is a famine. Your idea of neoliberalism is where the interests of the very, very wealthy

become conflated with the interests of the average person. And that's never the case. One thing as well that, like, when you're describing, we'll say the way this wealth gets transferred, what also goes along with it, which pisses me off, is a culture of lowering of standards of also work standards, zero hour contracts. And shit like that.

Yeah, that's where you have to vote against that. That goes along it. But you really have to, I mean, I was doing- Is it insane, right, to go to the government and say, vulture funds are illegal in Ireland? No, it's not insane. Like, has a country done that? Well, no, what you can do, what you can do is you can

say, look, hold on a second. There was a moment in Irish history, right, where these people took advantage of a situation. But that moment is not here anymore. So, for example, if you take in a country like Switzerland, Switzerland is not the bastion of, you know, Marxism and any sort. But in Switzerland, you're not allowed to own two houses.

You have to justify why you want to buy a second house, right? In lots and lots of countries, there are significant rules about buying accommodation let's not call them houses or assets let's go accommodation right and I think that we in Ireland are on the cusp of some something that socially is very worrying which is that a whole generation of people are getting locked out of accommodation what really amazes me is that the whole generation of people are getting locked out of accommodation. What really amazes me is that the social ramifications of this are really significant. When I was a young fellow, let's say you could get a job,

a job paid reasonably well, you could save a little bit, you could move out with your mates, you could move in with your girlfriend or your boyfriend, you could begin the process in your late 20s of growing up, of leaving the nest. And now if you look at what's happening in Ireland, that is not possible. And that is a function of the housing market. And so unless we see the housing market in the context of people's lives, and not in the context of prices going up or down, or property pages or whatever, you'll never get to the fact that accommodation is the issue. And many countries, like Ireland,

is amongst the least populated country in Western Europe, and we have the highest property prices. That makes no sense. And it only makes sense if you understand the market is rigged here and it's a total scam and it's been a scam for a long long time and this we have as a society to get up and speak about it in language that is comprehensible not that oh it's supply and demand and this that it's not what you have is a system that has been built up over a long, long time to reward property hoarding. So with land you can do two things. Land is a resource. You can either use it or you can hoard it, right? And if prices

go up, right, what happens is this is why the market doesn't work. When prices keep going up, people who own land, economists will say, oh, well, don't worry, you know, when the price goes up, the supply will go up. You all hear this nonsense all the time. It sounds really good, but it's actually wrong. What actually happens when the price of land goes up, the people who own land say, do you know what? I'd be mad to sell today.

I'll wait for next year or the year after and make 20 or 30 percent more so they hoard and blind boy this is what we have to stop because if you hoard land when prices are going up supply stops deadness tracks you don't build anyone anything and people panic so you've got to come in and say, change it. And it's really simple. So you penalise hoarding land. You say to people,

look, if you want to... Thank you, that was my wife who clapped first. She's heard this shite before. Imagine living with me, it's pox. Anyway. But we've a huge, we've a decent movement at the moment before. Imagine living with me. It's pox. Anyway. But we've a huge, we've a decent movement at the moment.

Take Back the City. Yes. Yes. There's two issues I'm finding with it online. Like I obviously support Take Back the City. The people, there's two types of dissenters. There's the ones who are

kind of on the fence going i'll give it a lash but what are you looking for then there's this is the most depressing thing when i argue with people online about take back the city the people who have an issue with it they're not fucking landlords they're people who whose rent is very very high and i the only explanation I can have is they're people who are actually under the boot of the renting system, but they view themselves as rich people who haven't happened yet. Yes, well that's a really good way of putting

it actually. Their rent is the same as yours. But it's like when poor people vote for Trump. They feel like we're rich people, we're just not rich yet. We're going to be like that guy, which is kind of shocking. But it's a simple question.

Two will say a Take Back the City protester, they get asked what are you looking for, right? You as an economist, how do we solve the housing crisis? What you've got to do with a movement like Take Back the City, I think, is an entirely legitimate movement. Because you know, for example,

before I came in, I was over in the clock across the road, right? And I came out and I was just looking. So you look at this street and there's shops on the ground floor. But if you look above most Dublin streets, they're entirely vacant. Nobody lives up there.

So we're not utilising the land of the city. Take, for example, Copenhagen has a footprint exactly the same as Dublin between the canals. Copenhagen has a population of 600,000 in that footprint. We have a population of 100,000. And Copenhagen isn't some high-rise dystopia, it's an intensively used city of maybe six-storey buildings, right? So the question is, why don't we use it? And then you think, OK, we don't use it because there's no incentive to use it

and there's no penalisation for dereliction. I mean, dereliction is just vandalism for the landowning classes. That's all it is. APPLAUSE classes. That's all it is. And I think that... We do have a dereliction tax, but it's not enforced. It has to be high. Taxes, like a dereliction tax, has to be

something that somebody who owns a building, let's say here on Thomas Street, right? Has to think twice about. If property prices are going up by 20% and this individual is sitting on a building that is worth notionally a million quid, that means that every year his property is going up by 200 grand.

Yeah. And the government say, well, don't worry, we're going to put a tax of five grand on that. He's like, fuck you. Yeah. Right? So what you do, the tax has to be material and but it can't all be taxed because then you have to do this idea of rewarding different types of behavior if you think that leaving a building derelict is

bad behavior and good behavior is doing it up to rent yeah okay then punish the bad behavior but reward the good behavior yeah say look we you know we you we will give you a tax break or whatever it happens to be in order for you to make this land available for accommodation and it's not hard but i worry about the take back the city because they're constantly being harassed by the mainstream yeah that this is a radical movement and this is a leftist movement and you know and unless you create a logical narrative that you can sell to people broadly it's very easy for these movements to dissipate and to actually lose momentum so what i would you know when you said what can i say to people as i say

these radical leftist hippies that you see you might think they're radical leftist hippies but they're protesting for you exactly you're absolutely right and that's that's the idea in ireland that we don't seem to see that like we're all in this together. Yeah. At some level, right? That if you have, let's say, if you have kids, right, in this city, very soon you're going to hit up against this dilemma. So even if you think it's nothing to do with you, it's got everything to do with you. And also, if you don't get housing right

and you don't get accommodation right, you don't offer people dignity, basic dignity. And that's what it's all about. Yeah. At the crew of this, 75% of our government are landlords. Do you think, like, is that... Am I being an international-shaping lizard man?

Or interdimensional? No, look... And they say that, like, 75%, they said possibly a good proportion of the other 25% who aren't landlords are, but they have the property in their children's names. Yeah. Well, look i think the even the more telling thing is about two or three years ago i did a documentary um on the same rte that we're

talking about uh called the wealth divide and uh it was something that i'd always got a feeling you know you have a feeling that maybe the numbers are going to tell us that there was a huge or significant wealth divide. Not income, but wealth divide here. But when we started exploring it and doing it, the figures were phenomenal. Basically, the top 10% in the country own more than 43% of the wealth. And of that, 87% is land and property.

So that's it. So we cannot create a society that's more democratic. And what I mean by more democratic is that people have a stake in it if you don't give people wealth. This is the key. For somebody in Ireland

to believe in the country you have to have a stake is this is my little bit of this country yeah and I have got something here and if you have wealth division like we have which is not out of the the interesting thing it's not out of the ballpark for Europe most European countries are the same but our population younger, so there's a different dynamic. I think you need to address it as a matter of urgency. I was writing yesterday in the paper that the budget's coming up on Tuesday, right? And it's all shouting and roaring and Pascal this and blah, blah, blah, right? And Leo sucks or whatever the fuck they talk about, right? But I was looking at the numbers, right? So it costs 50 billion quid, beth ydyn nhw'n siarad am hynny. Ond roeddwn i'n edrych ar y niferoedd, felly mae'n costio 50 biliwn quid, euroedd, i wneud gweithredu y wlad. 50 biliwn bob blwyddyn mae'r Llywodraeth yn cynyddu.

Maen nhw'n cynyddu 26 biliwn o fuddsoddiad cyflog. Felly o'r person cyffredinol. Maen nhw'n cynyddu 6 biliwn o fuddsoddiad, o ffagiau a fwys. Maen nhw'n cynyddu tua 20 biliwn, no, about another 19 billion from VAT. Do you know how much we raise from housing? Go on. 500 grand out of 50 billion. Fucking hell. Every year. So that's it. So there it is.

What's going on there? There it is. So what I'm saying is, the funniest thing, the kind of nerd in me, you know, the fellow who, you know, it's all great writing about Schlitter moms and breakfast rolls

and yada yada. But there's numbers at the bottom of this thing. How much of... Like, does everybody in this room have a rent book? Like, a lot of rent is going into the black economy. Yeah. But again, my point is, this can all be fixed.

This is what interests me, because, look, economics is it is the art of the possible. It is about doing things better. It is about Ireland going from a country that was 28th on the UN

Human Endeavor Human Development Index, sorry, in 1979 to being fourth now. So that happened because the economy began to work better over the last 30 years. So it's a big deal. And if you can get that right, and if we can go from a country that was exporting people and was poor and was the poorest of the rich to a country that's taking in immigrants and is reasonably wealthy now by any standards we can fix the housing problem

because it's simply a management issue about changing the incentives for people to build and not to hoard land. That's it. It's not hard. The housing crisis and all it encapsulates, including, like, the homelessness crisis that goes along with it, like, that is clearly a fucking national emergency, right?

Yeah. How do you feel about the government, like, terrified of calling it a national emergency? Like, what's that about? Um, you know, I don't know. I actually don't know. What I'm just saying is, like, if you look around Europe, right, I actually don't know.

What I'm just saying is, look, if you look around Europe, right, lots and lots of countries have absorbed in big population shifts and have housed people because they've taken out the notion that housing is a rapacious asset that you can actually extract rent, unquantifiable rent out of people.

They've actually said, look, you can't do this, right? So if you look at Germany after the Second World War, entirely destroyed country, entirely destroyed. They had to rebuild their housing stock from zero, and they did it, right? If you look at Denmark, if you look at Netherlands, all these countries have extraordinarily brilliant cooperative movements in housing, right?

That basically run like a credit union for housing. These are basic things. Is that like a condominium type of thing? No, it's like, for example, you take a country like Austria. Austria, the Austrians, I think over 40% of houses in Austria are co-ops. So you join a cooperative, right? The cooperative then, you have a piece of paper saying, I am a Austrians are co-ops. So you join a co-operative, right? The co-operative then, you have a piece of paper saying, I am a member of this co-op.

The co-op builds the houses. So the banks are not involved. The developers are not involved. So every bit of where you're skimming off the money is not involved. And they don't have house price inflation. Like, let's look at the countries that are doing it right and do what they do. Yeah. that's it

it's not that hard um ireland's corporation tax the low corporation tax right people say oh if you get rid of that small corporation tax the uh the companies will leave now there's a part of me that thinks you could raise it it's our collective sense of low self-esteem we do have tax the the companies will leave now there's a part of me that thinks you could raise it it's our collective sense of low self-esteem we do have a fucking well educated English speaking workforce like you know what I mean yeah it's true years ago on that issue I wrote a book called the good room and it's a was about Irish psyche I don't know if anybody here's granny had a good room at home.

My granny had a good room that was so good, I wasn't good enough to go into it. And do you remember those, right? And it was kept for good people. Yeah. And it was my granny down in Cork. And I've always been intrigued by this. And I have triplet cousins, right?

Born in the 60s, so pre-IVF triplet cousins. Very exotic creatures. And they're from a little place called Balavurni, which is a Gaeltacht village. My mother describes them as incomprehensible in two languages. But I remember when my granny, she owned a pub in Cork, and the Good Room was opened on a Sunday morning. And myself, and of course my triplet cousins are so unusual, they're still referred to in the village as the Three Twins.

Because you might imagine, the fucking Three Twomy Twins, Jesus! But I remember this good room thing when i was a kid like i was about eight and my granny would would open the good room and we'd all meet myself and the three twins be sitting there and with you know and my granny then would give us waterford crystal goblets to be drinking our my waddy out of and you're like oh jesus and all the things going through your head. And of course, you weren't allowed to speak to the good people until they spoke to you, right?

And I've always been intrigued about what was going on there. And what was going on was my granny was pretending that she was posher than she was, right? Because she didn't have the self-esteem to say, listen, I own the local pub. I know what you fuckers are up to, right? I know everything about you.

And then the local, I don't know know Fine Gael solicitor would come in and there's a weird knowing cork people answer the phone yeah the old days and the accent changes completely that's not just car and it kind of goes from that's like you know kind of goes remember my granny is her voice went from writing assumptions just sounded like cross between the queen mother and marty morris but you're sitting there as a kid and i've always thought what is this and this is about our self-esteem issue that my granny who was a really cool woman and was really decent felt socially inadequate and in the good room, her accent changed

and the my wadi and the gumblets, just to try and pretend we were as good as you. So to come back to your point about dealing with not just multinationals, all things that we feel are a little bit better than us, that that good room mentality remains.

And it's really, really interesting. So I think with the multinationals the multinationals have been unambiguously good for this country there's 200 000 people working them they pay not as much tax as they should do but they pay eight billion a year so let's look at the positives right and figure out right if we were to change our tax system would they move or not i don't think so but the question is what's the cleverest way of dealing with this over the next couple of years? Is there another way? And I've always thought that we should deal with multinationals. We should regard them like the Norwegians regard an oil find. So Norway found oil in the 60s out of nowhere. It's like, wow, okay, this is cool.

And what they did, could you imagine if we found oil? Imagine the fucking craziness of it. It'd be like Sonny Abacha going mad. It was a Nigerian gentleman, Sonny, who pocketed most of the oil of Nigeria. Imagine Haughey with an oil fight. Oh, for fuck's sake. But the Norwegians, being good Norwegians, said, OK, we found oil, and what we're going to do

is we're going to create this huge pension fund. Norway's pensioners are fully funded for the next 362 years. Jesus Christ. Because they haven't spent it. They said, OK, right? Whereas that's... But think about the multinationals, right? The multinationals are a bit like an oil find for us, right?

Because it's a one-off. Nobody else is doing it. The Norwegians take the oil money and they convert it into the shares of big companies. The shares of big companies keep rising. The Norwegians get all the dividends. They don't take them out now. They just have it there for everyone.

So that's this idea of having a stake in society. If you're born in Norway, you know you have a stake. I've always felt that the difference between what the multinationals do pay and what they ought to pay, which is about six or seven billion a year, we should sit down with them and say, we want you to give us that money,

but you don't have to pay it straight away in tax. Give it to us and we will invest it in shares of either your companies or other companies. So we begin to create a wealth fund and that gives people a stake here because the difference between people just surviving and people becoming comfortable is this idea of equity,

owning something that actually makes money when you're sleeping, right? And I think we should be really confident to say, hold on, there is another way of dealing with multinationals, which is a real win for us and is a win for them. And that just demands getting out of this good room and thinking, let's think for ourselves, you know, and it can be done. And within 15 or 20 years, you'd have a wealth fund here, not for pensions. I don't understand why people are obsessed with pensions. We should have startup

funds here. Because a pension is kind of a winding down fund but the problem in Ireland is the kids don't have any capital. It's not that the old people don't, it's the kids don't have any capital. So if you could say we have a wealth fund here, it's your collateral, if you want to open, if you want to do

something, we will back you. And that I think could change this country immensely. Thank you. Jesus, I'd better have a drink after all that. So, like, on that... Do you know what I mean? So, I mean, think for ourselves. Don't be, like, terrorised by other people's agenda.

Say, hold on, we have something here. We can make it better. Rather than we have something here. Because the good room mentality not only exists with being unable to say, we're going to talk to you one on one, but it also exists with our willingness to take other people's slagging of our country.

Do you know what I mean? You've got to say, fuck off. We're going to do our own thing here. But as well, nobody will be genuine in the good room. Not at all. So you've got to get out of the good room. It's a fake protection of themselves. You've got to get out of the good room. And the good room, and it's funny, you know, this is all like, sometimes when I'm writing you think, oh, it's all chit-chatty, chit-chatty, but it's actually, these good room things, these reflect deep idiosyncrasies

in our culture, which go back many, many years, and I don't think we need that shit anymore. I think we're strong enough now. We can stand our own two feet. On that positivity, tell us how scary Brexit is. Brexit, I don't know.

One part of me thinks, do you remember that thing Y2K? Yeah. There's a little part of me, a little gremlin in my head thinks it'll be, do you remember Y2K? Oh, Jesus, planes are going to fall out of the sky. Your computer's going to blow up in front of you. Y2K was so bad that I remember on the evening, New Year's Eve 2000,

I had a shitty Windows computer. I wasted my New Year's Eve 2000 staring in terror. Waiting for that clock and for everything to explode. And nothing happened? Nothing happened. And maybe the reason nothing happened is because what really terrifies you, humans, is being taken by surprise, okay? Like when a crash happens and nobody expects it, right?

And the thing about Brexit, it's been ventilated so much and talked about so much that my sense now this is just my sense is that it will be fudged in the next couple of weeks what do you mean fudged?

basically what will happen is the Brits will accept some form of checks, okay, which are sufficient for them to suggest that their Brexit is still together. It's this hard Brexit. And the European Union will accept that that's enough,

and our government will accept that that's enough. and our government will accept that that's enough. I don't think... That's my sense. Do you think it's in the EU's interest to give Britain a bad deal because if other countries see Britain doing all right out of it, like Italy or someone, they'll fuck off out of the EU too? Yeah, I think the Brits have got this crazy delusion. They've actually many crazy delusions

the crazy delusion is that you can leave the club and still get all the goodies and that can't happen it just can't happen and I think our problem in Ireland is because we're so porous to British media

you can't avoid it. Like, I've been intrigued travelling a little bit around the continent. Nobody talks about Brexit. It's like somebody else's problem. It's like, yeah, off you go. You don't see this in the front of the German papers or the French papers or whatever.

And then, you know, the funny thing about Brexit, I don't know about you, but it's brought out my inner Provo, which I never thought existed, you know? Someone's going to get that clip. Oh, shit. And it'll just be that online. Someone out there with an iPhone.

It's on Twitter now already. Oh, bollocks. No, but by that I mean, you know, I'd forgotten how awful the English upper class were. No, really, you know what I mean? I awful the English upper class were. No, really, you know. I think everyone's getting that sense. You get that sense. But it's like, how many bombs needed to happen for you to know what Northern Ireland was, at least?

But, you know, the likes of, you know, Boris Johnson and Rees-Mogg. I mean, you'd put a fella like that in the zoo if it came out. It's nuts, yeah, yeah. You know, and it is kind of nuts. So, you know, my sense, so is kind of nuts so you know my sense so these kind of Brexit jihadis over there right

well that's what they're kind of like you know that's a great way to turn your provo comment on its head they're the terrorists

Mick Williams is in the row but at least Rhys Mogg is a jihadi but anyway so anyway I can't fucking believe I said that anyway but when you see these

sort of Rhys Mogg's and all this you forget I forgot those people existed, you know like during all the Good Friday Agreement and so but my sense is that

the Brits will do a deal that they might be able to sell but my sense is that they'll do a deal with the EU they'll come back to the Parliament they won't be able to sell it, there will be an election, and then you have a totally different dispensation in the UK.

And that election, what's amazing is that... Some are saying they want to hand Labour a poison chalice. Yeah, and that's what Corbyn's trying to avoid. But Labour have opened up the idea of a second referendum on the terms. So this thing isn't over yet. That's what I'm saying, it's not over. But to come back to the Y2K thing, there's a huge industry. There's a massive industry in the media and everything,

building this up, and editorials, and Brexit. And I'm sure there's many. I'm invited to Brexit fucking breakfasts in this town. You know, there's so many people who like to come along from Brexit, you know, and it's like PwC or some sorry, oh shucks.

I forgot what I was about to say. But you know, so there is an industry. And I'm assuming there's people making money, like, advising companies on Brexit proofing yeah some people someone's having a good Brexit

yeah he's having a great Brexit inside in the jacks doing a Brexit but come on does it not scare the shit out of you no no

look I mean the big the big the big scary thing is the North. The North, okay, yeah. That's the big scary thing because... That's what I'm saying. The big scary thing is the North

because Brexit has accelerated an ongoing process towards unification of this country. There's no doubt in my mind that... Well, that the demographics have changed profoundly. I was looking at, they have a census every 10 years in the north and we have one every five years. So the last one they had is in 2011 and they break down the population in every five-year cohorts.

And so the oldest people are those over 90. And the split split if you take catholic protestant to be more or less a good proxy for people's intentions the split between catholic and protestant is 70 percent protestant and 28 catholic and then a couple of don't knows in the middle so that's basically the status quo around partition, the people in Northern Ireland who are over 90. If you look at the people under the age of five, the entire thing has turned its head. The Catholic population has doubled,

and the Protestant population has almost halved. Because Protestants won't fuck. Protestants won't fuck. And... It's true. Calvinism, man. They're terrified of each other. I might have to just make a small confession here. My wife is a Northern Protestant. So, there you go. And I can tell you they do know.

So our little kids are, you know, the Good Friday Agreement incarnate. You know, they're little mongrels. When they're down here, they're all GAA, and when we're up north, they're all cricket. It's all fine. You'll learn. The best thing to do with the Northern Broad is to sleep with them. It's much easier.

That's... No, but... So if you look at the... Jesus. Man, that's the fucking... Someone's going to do a super cut. I'm in the raft. Let's have sex with all the Protestants.

Anyway. Do you ever think that... So, yeah. You look a bit like a Dorian Gray version of Niall Boylan Jesus Christ that's so fucking low that's a compliment

anyway so I think that the I look like shopping men the demographics are screaming a united ireland probably sooner than we think and then you've got to see does brexit accelerate that or decelerate that and my sense it accelerates it so for us this is the big conversation but at what point here's my fear is that at what point of acceleration do you then start to see

a community who are very protective of their identity who are afraid of disappearing kicking back because we're not really seeing that quite loudly now you know but that would be my fear and that's where ambiguity is a really good thing you know that what I've

done in the final few chapters of the new book that's out next week that I drove around I went to last July I was asked to talk at the Seamus Heaney Centre in

Balaki, Balaki is in South Derry and so to go up you know you're driving up Dundalk and you go a little bit county down through Armagh a little bit tyrone into derry just driving around and so i'm not going to belfast that i know very well my wife my wife's there all our relations are up there in belfast but just going into rural what they call middlestar yeah right and what what i've noticed because i drive up much more than most southerners up the north is the very flamboyant expression of

loyalism in in in what used to be middle of the road protestant areas so i could be in a town like cookstown in county tyrone and town like armagh market hill all these little small places places and what would have been obviously a 12th of July march and procession has now become this outrageous sort of terrified loyalists kicking back so I think the other way in Belfast and around the size there's a very very good uh index you know the size of the bonfire and the fear of United Ireland, right? And the higher the bonfire, the bigger the fear. And we have to figure out in our heads how we're

going to deal with a community which will only be about 15% of the population post-unification. But we need to do a Mandela on these people. Mandela, when he first... What he did was he didn't first go to the black people.

He went to the Afrikaners. He wore the rugby shirt during the World Cup. He said, I am going to protect you. I am going to help you get over this, right? We have to do this to ulster unionism. We have to say your story can be our story and we're going to listen to your tunes as well as our own because if we don't do that... Here's my fear of that though.

We have to do that. This is my fear. The nature of loyalist culture, right? The nature of an Orange March and a bonfire, it's predicated very much on victory. An Orange March and a bonfire only works when you're celebrating, we won and we're here and we're not going away. How do you say to the Orange men, you can have your culture,

you can have your Orange Marches, your bonfire, in a new country where now you've lost? But that's really, seriously, it's all victory, victory. It's reminding them, we won here, now stay underneath the boot. That's what it does.

Like, how do you do that when, like, what's a British flag when the Brits are no longer running the place? I thought about this, you know, that, you know, is the British flag a the Brits are no longer running the place? I thought about this. Is the British flag a flag of convenience? It could be a Dutch flag. But we've got to realise that real power and real

leadership is understanding the anxieties of other people and helping them. That's real leadership. Real leadership is not wrapping yourself in a Celtic scarf and, you know, singing the four green fields, right? Real leadership is saying, your anxieties are our anxieties,

and we're going to help you. And you remember this idea of the crisis? Buy you time. We're going to give you 10 more years, we're going to give you 15 more years, but to begin to change the national story and therefore really

going out of our way to making them feel that they have some say in this new country and I think we can do it, I really do I don't think we can do it. I really do. I don't think... I'd like to think... We can do it.

You know? Of course we can. The one... The pessimism I have... And I know these people well. You know, I mean, this is not a lumpen... Down here, there's a sense that, you know, unionism is a lumpen mass of people who simply say no surrender.

There's all sorts of grey in that tribe, like there are in our tribe. And it's up to us to understand their anxieties. And it's not up to them to understand ours. Because as you say, at the end of the day they're kind of losing their position so we've got to be really generous and i think we can do that i hope so but the other thing as well is that like what you're describing is actually the irish like the irish flag is the green represents the nationalists the orange represents the protestants the white represents the unity between the two but But they burn the Irish flag and they burn themselves on it and they don't see the irony.

But I also think, look, we have to realise, and I come back to it, that real leadership is putting ourselves second and really trying to understand what it is that they fear, right? And maybe then, like, I mean, like, I know, you know, when I first went up north and met my missus, the narrative was we were too Catholic. And now we're too liberal, right?

That's an interesting one. It's true, though, you know, because we were too Catholic. You're too conservative down there. Fuck, we go down south now and you're too conservative. And now we're too liberal because, you know. So there's always going to be a huge element. But it's up to us to break it down.

And I think what we've created here in the last 30 years with the legislation, with the recent legislation, with repeal, with being much more open, with having a big immigrant population, all these positive things that we've done here, and we've done them kind of despite ourselves, and they've just occurred organically, we can present a picture to loyalism, maybe not extreme loyalism, maybe that's always going to be difficult, but to the middle ground of unionism that is attractive. If we get over our own urge to win and allow there to be a draw. Yeah. Thank you.

On that point as well, an important question I think we should all be asking ourselves too, because my darkest fear is in the event of a united Ireland, right? If we have this unionist minority and they do a little bit of an uprising, we will most likely see our own guards possibly committing brutality against this new protesting community and we now have to ask ourselves, we will most likely see our own guards possibly committing, like, brutality against this new protesting community.

And we now have to ask ourselves, can we extend our social justice to stop that? And it's not nuts. Like, look at what Israel does. Look, like, Israel was set up to get away from the fucking Holocaust, and now they're repeating those actions on the Palestinians. This is a human thing.

This is what humans do. Humans are cunts. Collectively, I mean, Liberia. Liberia is an African country that was set up to provide freed slaves with a state in Africa, and the former slaves of Africa went to Liberia set it up and became horrible rulers of the people that were living in Liberia this is a human thing that we do but it doesn't have to be like that it

doesn't have to be like that there's loads of examples of the better side of human nature there's loads of examples if you look actually flappy bird that was great there's loads of examples though most of in the last 50 years it western societies have become more fair much less violent okay much more tolerant this country imagine think about what this country was like even in the 1990s. Yeah. And it's changed. And it's changed because of, you know, your man...

Even fucking Europe, like, I mean, Jesus, Spain and Portugal had fascist governments up until the 70s. They killed a million of their own people in a short period of time. You know, V.S. Naipaul, the Indian writer, talked about India and him looking at India, and he talked about these, what he called, millions of little mutinies that occurred within the heads of the average Indian person

in the last while. And I think that's what happened here. You know, since, you know, the first repeal or abortion referendum, since the church going from a dominant position, what really happened here wasn't some great movement started from the top, but was like little mutinies going off in all our heads,

in our kitchens, in our homes, saying, I'm not putting up with that anymore. And that is an amazingly powerful force. And I think that we should look and harness those mutinies rather than look at the apocalyptic side. Once you start talking apocalypse, it tends to happen. Words are unbelievably important. Words are the most important weaponry humans have. If we decide to have a conversation that is dictated by catastrophe and apocalypse,

that will happen. And we probably have to get rid of words like unionists or orange men and things like that. I mean, Freud was doing his study on the Holocaust, right? He had a book called Civilization and its Discontents. He says that that type of brutality happens when we dehumanise. But dehumanisation starts with

labelling and having a name and putting people into groups. You've got to marry them. You've got to... We should have a masked campaign. We should have, like, Tinder for northerners, you know? Swipe left for the prod. No, but I'm saying it's the only way you don't other people is you get to know them. for northerners, you know? Swipe left for the prod.

No, but I'm saying it's the only way you don't other people is you get to know them. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're no weirder than Kerry people. But does, you know,

does a twelfth work if we all show up in solidarity? How does that work? No, we could have Potemkin villages. Who are the Russians? Do you know what one of the keys could actually be? And I was thinking this and fell past the other.

How many people here are drinking gin? A lot of people. Gin exists because of William of Orange. William of Orange conquered fucking England and the Battle of the Boyne and all that shit. He brought gin with him from the Netherlands and so that's a little positive example of

Orange. You're all enjoying your gin. You are drinking Orange culture right there and then and it's not too bad. We've 10 minutes left so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up to the audience and pass a microphone around. Can you turn on the house lights a little bit, but not too much that it ruins the ambience?

Little bit more. Little bit more. There we go. This lady over there with her hand up saying, I have a question. Could we get a microphone over there, please? From Manahan. From Manahan. God bless you. Hold on, we can give you a microphone.

We can do this in a technological fashion. Where is the mic? Is it around the gaff? My voice is normally loud enough, so... Oh, God, it's very loud. Eat the mic. No, it's slightly... It's underneath your chin so um i i understand what you're saying about northern ireland i love the fact that there would be unity and maybe not but then how do you think from uh like to bring that in like how would it be like we would we're already like have a homeless crisis academic like how do you think that we would be able to take on the economic fear of like yeah yeah yeah i just wonder why you think

of that economically like if we get landed with belfast in the morning like is that good or bad yeah i look at it it's like a kind of a custody battle right between and and here's the other thing i was in belfast this morning the roads and the trains are amazing so are we gonna make their trains worse or our trains better because you seriously like this infrastructure's better of course no but it's a really it's a very fair question I'm we're being The problem is that demography is moving in one direction and we can't change

that. Well, we can obviously, but it takes a while. So there is going to be some border poll at some time quite soon that basically says to the Republic, there you go. That's yours.

And then it's up to us to figure out what are the handover conditions and how long they're going to be and what are the terms they're going to be. I think economically we could quite easily absorb Northern Ireland. I won't bore you with the numbers, but the Republic's economy is so much bigger than the North's now it's what is really amazing is at partition 80% of the industrial production of this country came from the three counties around Belfast, 80%

now the Irish economy is about eight times larger than the northern economy. So it can be absorbed economically, but the problem is culturally and social and all these issues. One of the reasons we probably have to fix the housing problem is because we've got a much bigger challenge ahead, which is called unification. Anyone else? Can I turn off the lights a little bit more? Oh, someone used a light. I like that. Can we give the microphone to the gentleman there who put his phone up? Oh, you were taking a photograph of me.

Okay, he wasn't looking. I thought he was being clever. Sorry, sir. This lady here with the fetching wrist. Yeah. Yeah. Just coming over here. I've got two questions.

I've an intelligent question for David and a silly one for Blimey. Okay. So my intelligent question is, when I was eight, I was brought into a billing society to put my communion money in. And that was the...

There was a B involved. I can't remember who it was. EBS, maybe. EBS. And that's who I have my mortgage with now. What happened to billing societies or EBS in that there's no... You mentioned co-ops. Is that what billing societies were? Yeah. And how do we get them back?

And my silly question to blind boys, would you sign my ocarina? OK. I have it in my handbag. And how do we get them back? And my silly question to blind boys, would you sign my ocarina? Okay. I have it in my handbag. An ocarina is a Spanish clay whistle, by the way. I was about to say. It's a Spanish clay whistle. Do you want to keep hanging yourself there?

You're absolutely right. The EBS was privatised in about 1999. The co-ops we have are the credit unions. Credit unions are probably the most representative financial organisation in the country. They were set up by John Hume interestingly because John Hume

felt that parts of civil rights was financial rights to actually be able to have your own financial organisation in Derry in the 1960s. So the credit unions are the nucleus and the interesting things. So the credit unions are the nucleus. The interesting thing about, because the credit

unions exist, we have the infrastructure to create this cooperative movement. We just have to liberate it because there are many people in this room, I bet you, whose parents or grandparents went to the credit union

and got money for education and got money for this, that and the other based on really local finance. And they're still there. They have 14 billion euros of deposits. That's a lot of money. Is using a credit union an act of resistance against big banks?

Seriously though, is it? I think it comes back to something deeper than that, which was that there was a time where banks wouldn't give working class people loans. That's where it comes back to. Small farmers, working class people, that you couldn't turn up at Bank of Ireland or AIB and be entertained.

So you went to the credit union, and I think they're really interesting, grassroots financial organisations that provide the basis for cooperative housing. Anyone else from over here? We got someone? This gentleman with the illuminated hand. This gentleman with the illuminated hand. Hi, I've also got two questions.

So, first question, David, you talked about a lot of good ideas about solving the housing crisis and other issues in the country. Why do you think it is that the government is actually not listening to some of those ideas? And the second question is, have you ever thought about running for political office yourself? you think it is that the government is actually not listening to some of those ideas? And the second question is, have you ever thought about running for political office yourself? The second one's the easiest. No. And the first one, I don't know, like, I think that when I look at Ireland, you know, there's only five odd million of us here.

You know, the problems are not that complicated and they're easy to solve. And many other countries with much more problems have solved our issues quite quickly. issues quite quickly. So then it strikes me that there is a resistance to change here which is really quite deep. And one thing that worries me a little bit is that

all this growth in the economy over the last 30 years has made people actually quite resistant to change because they feel they lose something. And so consequently, I think the system might... When I look at the system, I think politicians come and go,

but where the real dilemma in Ireland is in the permanent government, which is the top civil servants, the top echelons of the civil service. When I look at the Department of Health, I think, OK, why has this not been solved? echelons of the civil service. When I look at the Department of Health I think, okay, why has this not been solved? Most people have travelled to other countries with similar populations and they have much better health services and it's a management issue. It's actually a management issue and I think that politicians, some of them actually really do try their best

I really believe that but I think where a huge resistance to change is deep in what people call the deep state and we have a deep state we really do and it's the sort of the Mandarin class at the very top of the civil service and they are the people who are

resistant to new ideas they're also the people who never pay when things go wrong. Ever. Thank you very much. I'll take one last question. This lady back there. It's almost like I'm deliberately making the poor bastard who has the microphone's job difficult.

You have a mic there, have you? Yeah, I do. Hi. How are you? How's it going? I don't have an entire question. Essentially... We'll take half questions, please. Oh, yeah, yeah, half questions.

Blind Boy, I basically just wanted to say that I am very, very grateful for you and for the podcast. I was in the A&E with my first ever epileptic seizure last July, and I was listening to your podcast. And from the hot takes to the cognitive psychology, you've helped me a lot. Thank you. And I'm just really grateful. psychology you've helped me a lot thank you

you're fucking deadly thank you You're a great one for the owl recovery. Okay. Thank you very much, but one thing I will reiterate, right, regarding the cognitive psychology. Don't give me credit for that. Oh, no, no, no. I know, but...

Thank you for it. That's fantastic. But just for everybody, that's called psychology, and it should be taught to us in schools. it, that's fantastic, but just for everybody, that's called psychology and it should be taught to us in schools. No, Blimey, you invented psychology. That needs to be taught to our younger brothers and sisters in fucking school because...

Yeah! Here's the thing with... Here's the beauty of something like cognitive psychology or transaction analysis, right? It's like when you hear it, OK, Here's the thing with that. Here's the beauty of something like cognitive psychology or transaction analysis, right? If, it's like when you hear it, okay? It's not like your experience of hearing it. It's not like you're receiving new information.

It feels like you've been given the language to unlock something that you already knew. Do you get that? And that's why it's so fucking hell. It's like it's there already but your tongue was tied inside your head and it's like, oh that's why I do that. I knew it all along, I just didn't have the fucking words. Psychology is a book full of words for all of the shit that is wrong with us that we don't need to be doing. And one final thing. I was, I was Moudy last night on Twitter and I lashed into Jordan Peterson.

Yes! But here's the thing with Jordan Peterson, like I can see why people like Jordan Peterson. The reason is the man is talking about psychology, psychotherapy and philosophy. Brilliant things. He didn't invent them. And unfortunately he's Trojan horsing in conservatism, a little bit of social Darwinism and also a nice little bit of religion in there as well.

If you're a fan of Jordan Peterson, you can find psychology in other places. Just be cautious is what I'm saying. Because just anyone I know who loves him is also kind of racist and misogynistic. But thank you so much for that. No, you're welcome. I would just say that, like, obviously,

I mean, you did invent psychology single-handedly. But, you know, I've been... I'm going through therapy, and I have been for years, because I actually do have a personality disorder. And you mentioned that what you say on your podcast doesn't apply to people who are mentally ill, more so people going through mental health issues. But I think that when you go through therapy as well,

like I've done CBT, I've done DBT, I'm doing all this stuff because... And sometimes when you hear things over and over and over again, they don't entirely make sense, but one person says something in a certain way, and it does, it clicks, and you democratise psychology like that, and it makes sense. Thank you.

Thank you so much. You're welcome. And fair play to you for getting up and being so honest about your mental health. Thank you. All right, lads. It is... It's 11 o'clock.

We had a fucking wonderful evening. Thank you so much to you for just being a shout of sound cunts. And listening and having crack. And again, we achieved a podcast hug. There was a lovely... That lovely collective mental energy

where you just feel everyone is on the same buzz the same wavelength and it was beautiful to be a part of so thank you so much for that and thank you to my guest

David McWilliams for democratising economics go in peace you cunts. Thank you. 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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