Mary Regan

speaker

767 appearances 11 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Mary Regan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Indo Daily · Drones, cyber-attacks and Putin's war: Is Micheál Martin's EU Presidency a poisoned chalice? · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

200 meetings taking place across the country over the next six months or so.

There'll be informal events, dinners and social events and all sorts of dignitaries visiting Dublin mostly.

Now, there will be some meetings happening in other parts of the country.

So it's going to be a massive, massive security operation, really.

Yeah, so I mean, the cost of this event is massive.

The six-month presidency, it's expected to cost around 165 million to 185 million, but that excludes the security costs.

So we have seen reports that 125 million has been allocated to Angarda Síochána.

alone.

So I suppose that brings the cost around 300 million, I guess what you can say.

The main thing, though, really, I think it's going to create such a huge, extra significant workload for all sectors of the state.

So you have the ministers who are chairing their various meetings.

You have the public servants and the civil servants.

This is going to take up a huge amount of their time.

And then, of course, there is the amount of work that the guards will have to put in, the amount of policing involved, the amount of security involved.

And it's kind of so high stakes that nothing really can go wrong.

So I guess what we'll be hearing, you know, from probably the opposition is that the costs are too high, that the guard resources are being put towards policing the presidency and they're not being used and other things will be falling through the gaps.

I mean, the presidency has kind of highlighted what many people have been talking about for some time or what people say is a real sore point from our European colleagues in the sense that they're watching Ireland with eye-watering levels of corporation tax receipts coming in and saying Ireland really isn't contributing to its security and defence.

Notwithstanding that it's a neutral country, it's still not contributing to the

security and defence in the same way as it should be or it's not pulling its weight.

Ireland has asked other EU nations for some assistance during the presidency, which they were happy to give.

Showing 201–220 of 767 · page 11 of 39