John Downing
speaker
506 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 10 Sep
John Downing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
He's not going to be giving you a list of promises, as we said, or a list of maybe a park that needs to be redone or traffic issues or anything like that or cycle lanes or bus lanes.
He doesn't seem to have a specific issue that he's running on.
Absolutely.
He's trying to maybe have a bit more politics about him this time, I think, than the last time he ran.
We saw a couple of campaign videos, essentially, and that he posted on social media.
One where he's wearing a black and white horizontal striped jumper.
So you can question whether that was a wise choice.
But he talked about in that video, particularly Pascal Donoghue, who vacated this seat in Dublin Central.
because he went off to have a new job with the World Bank in Washington, D.C., a huge salary of, I think, €600,000.
And he talked about how before Pascal Donoghue left, when he was finance minister in his last budget, he gave €10 million extra to the World Bank, more than the Department of Finance officials recommended.
This isn't like a very traditional style attack ad that other political parties would be sending out press releases about.
They'd be bringing it up in interviews.
You'd see that kind of messaging from other establishment parties.
So he's definitely trying to hone in on something there.
And also in particular, he talked about how Simon Harris, who's the Tánaiste now, but he was the Minister for Health when they brought in the Children's Hospital Plan, which has now obviously we know been severely delayed.
I think we've missed 19 deadlines already.
or something in that realm and has gone into the billions in terms of overspend on that hospital.
And he talked about in the interview as well how he thinks Fianna Fáil and Fianna Gael will struggle in this election.
That's no surprise and it's no astute political opinion because in all by-elections, government parties struggle.
I think in the last 33 by-elections since the 1980s, government candidates have only won three of those.
Showing 381–400 of 506 · page 20 of 26
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