Matthew O'Toole
speaker
264 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Matthew O'Toole’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
over the top or hyperbolic, but there is something very affecting if you are, as a colleague of mine had to do last night, have to find shelter for families with young children.
who have been sickly burned out of their home.
Their home has been set on fire and they have to be evacuated from it.
They need to find shelter.
They have children under the age of 10, in one case a baby, a baby who didn't have nappies and all the proper things to be fed.
You then have to find them shelter and then a more permanent place of shelter and we had to drive them to a more permanent place of shelter that was operated by one of the statutory agencies.
I think that does leave you with a real, I'm not sure that experience will leave me for a while and so that and knowing what happened elsewhere in the city, knowing the amount of people who were displaced does mean that term I think isn't over the top.
Certainly it was an attempt at that.
Do you know, it's strange to kind of see people who are your constituents, and by the way, these are people who are legally here, who are working, their kids are at school here.
I think most of the kids were probably born here, and you're kind of arriving in a situation and you're having to sort of smile and try and be...
light and pleasant to them but they're in one of the scariest situations any human being can ever be in which is being um forced from your home forced to have to flee your home uh and then be have to find shelter with your children and it was personally affecting for me because um some of the kids would see me as my kids um i had to um i happened to have to go and get nappies for one of the
babies because I have a child about the same age and you do see kids are always kind of resilient and it's kind of a sort of strange new experience for them.
But clearly it's not.
They're up past their bedtime.
And the thing particularly I think I felt as a parent is that sense of empathy with their parents who are, I think there's a real thing about your kids being put at risk and your kids being, having to look after your children.
And I saw that in their eyes and chatting to them.
I mean, these were responsible people who were
maturely kind of dealing with the situation placed in front of them they weren't hysterical but they were in an extraordinary situation and it was just like i'm not sure leave me for a long time and that's why i want people to understand quite how serious it was
Well, it's important to think about a few things.
One, these things sometimes kind of flower or manifest themselves, and then
Showing 161–180 of 264 · page 9 of 14
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