Ciara Kelly
speaker
347 appearances
15 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 14 Jun
Ciara Kelly’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 12.
Appearances
John Mooney has been writing about how Angarda Siakana has established a new national security service to tackle threats ranging from espionage and cyber attacks to political extremism and terrorism.
And joins me on the line now.
John, this is...
Look, it's not an entirely new intelligence agency, but rather a reorganisation and expansion of capabilities that already exist within An Garda Siocana.
Can you tell me what its purpose is going to be and whether this new service will have any powers that the Garda do not already possess?
And there are some pretty interesting eye-catching additional initiatives here, including talk of a terrorism hotline, of de-radicalisation programmes, and indeed this purpose-built digital fortress that is going to house this new agency in a couple of years.
Thanks to John Mooney, Investigation Editor with the Sunday Times, who has that story today.
Pat, do you see this new service as a necessary response now to the new modern threats that are out there or an expansion of, I suppose, state powers, guard powers that maybe requires greater scrutiny?
OK, because he does point out in this article, Paul Cleary, who's leading up this new deputy commissioner, he talks about taking the work out of the shadows and he talks about greater transparency so the public can see what it is within reason that the security service does.
But to that point that Pat makes, Louise, is the biggest problem here that we are actually still woefully inadequately funding these departments.
Do we need to look at increasing our defence spending?
Yeah, but we need to, I suppose, do all of these things in parallel, don't we, Paul?
No, and in fairness, I suppose the story is just really breaking today in the establishment of this new agency.
And I would imagine over the coming days, there will be civil liberty groups talking about that level of surveillance and the concerns they have.
But I do think there's a wider conversation, Pat, about the level of defence and security spending in this country.
But as expected, Pat, given the week that was in Belfast, there was a lot of coverage about what led to the riots and I suppose the fallout, the aftermath of the riots.
And there's actually an interesting piece within this Sunday Independent in Ireland thinks
poll which says 70% of people in Ireland, 71 to be precise, think that racism is rising in Ireland.
And Dr. Ibn Joseph, the special rapporteur for racism, says it's time to look at that hate speech legislation again.
And to be clear, I suppose, there's no issue in Dublin with a lack of leadership in loyalist communities because they simply don't exist.
Showing 41–60 of 347 · page 3 of 18
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