Dan Mulhall

Certainly some reflectiveness.

And people who thrive in the noisy and the banging are seldom conciliators.

But slow work, slow talking, listening in schools, in community groups, in sport, on the ground, this matters.

And the best people to do this, by the way, are children in the playground.

are the secondary school students in the third level and in university, in the workplace.

It can get quite rough and ready on some streets sometime and we shouldn't downplay that.

There is real nastiness out there.

And if you're of colour or if you're different in some way, a colour not white, as a non-white person once said to me, you are a colour, you are of colour, you are white.

We don't even get that much, you know.

Yeah.

We got that right.

I think people are encouraged by positivity.

I think when people meet positivity, they want to be part of it.

I regret not enough people meet enough often.

I'd say something else about positivity.

And going back to the by-elections, the cost of living, there were 32 candidates, I think, between the two by-elections.

To my certain knowledge, pretty much everything every one of them had to say was the same in a critical respect, is that we could go on spending

at the rate we are spending as a country and perhaps spend more to do this, that and the other, which is recklessly foolish.

Well, it was certainly another tipping point in terms of Irish public opinion, and that Israeli security minister, Ben Gavir, I mean, he was playing to a domestic Israeli audience, not all of whom, by any measure, support him or share his view.

It applies to a couple of hundred thousand, I think.