Louise McSharry

Like, babe, it would serve you so much better to say, yeah, I get it.

Like, I hear that.

I understand that people are frustrated and there are things we need to improve.

Like, I need to get in there and reframe the entire government communication strategy, Carl.

And maybe also try and get them to change their actual strategy as well.

agree that things aren't good enough, that things need to change.

But then the reality is if we had an election tomorrow, probably nothing would change or very little.

And that's the real struggle in this country and something I'll never understand is that things, there's never really any big change.

I do think whenever we have our next election, which obviously isn't today or tomorrow, I do think it's going to be interesting to see what strategies parties like Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats who are kind of, particularly the Social Democrats, like Holly Cairns is the most popular party leader in the country.

Like that's according to recent research.

So you do wonder if they ran more candidates, you know, could that result in a bigger shift?

Sinn Féin obviously are up and down, so you wouldn't know, but

it's hard not to think that we would probably just end up with a similar result to what we've gotten before.

Yeah, definitely.

But I think the thing about that is, right, if we think about that, let's just like drill down into that for a second, that idea that there could be people who would have said to Mary Lou MacDonald that they felt more safe during the protests.

We think about an area like O'Connell Street, where we know, and the streets around it, where we know there is a huge amount of, I suppose, what people would call antisocial behavior.

Much of it, a significant portion of it, if not most of it, resulting from drug use and addiction, right?

And we know that like a huge amount of the inner city's antisocial behavior,

is linked to drug addiction.

And in fact, I actually saw this week that Dublin Town, which is one of the organizations for business owners in the city center, were talking about being willing to contribute to treatment strategies for people who experience addiction, because there was such a link between shoplifting and just general problems in the city center that all come from people who are experiencing addiction.