Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning. You're all very welcome. Derval MacDonald with you this weekend. Our newspaper panel are people who get up very early in the morning. At least one of them is because she drove up from County Clare. But they've been busy picking the best and the rest from this morning's newspapers. But before I introduce them to you, let's have a quick look at today's headlines.
With so much doom and gloom in the world just now, it is just fantastic to see joyous images of the girls in green across the front pages of several newspapers this morning. The Sunday Independent has a glorious picture of Ireland's Lucia Lynn and Katie Corrigan celebrating after beating Italy yesterday. 55-8 in the Women's Under-21 Six Nations Series match, which was held in Galway yesterday.
Not to be outdone, the senior team also beat their Italian rugby rivals, 57-20, scoring nine tries on their way to that double victory.
And it's the image of an ecstatic Marissa Shiva being swept off her feet and hoisted in the air by fellow player Emily Murphy that graces the front page of the Sunday Times after Shiva scored the only goal in Ireland's 1-0 victory over Poland in their World Cup qualifier in Dublin yesterday. Ladies, thank you for the respite.
Otherwise, it is a mix of headlines, but that seismic arrest of Daniel Kinnahan, the leadership of Fianna Fáil, fuel shortages and the ongoing crisis Iran war all form common themes across the papers this weekend.
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Chapter 2: What headlines are making waves in today's newspapers?
Erling is cutting 500 flights amid fears of fuel shortages. That's the lead for the Sunday Independent, with the disruption being blamed on mandatory maintenance and concerns about a forthcoming European jet fuel supply crisis. The Sunday Times leads on the arrest of alleged cartel boss Daniel Kinahan.
Investigations editor John Mooney writes that the arrest follows months of secret court hearings and communications between the Emirates and Dublin and reveals that the decision to seek the 40-year-old's extradition was made last year by the DPP, had given that direction, but was kept secret over fears that he might flee the Emirates.
The Business Post also highlights risks for summer flights on its front page, but it leads with a story on the proposed sale of PTSB to Austrian bank Bavag. Donald McNamee reporting that shareholders have been advised to reject the deal, which was announced last Tuesday.
Healy Ray, given an ultimatum by Taoiseach Ed, that's a splash for the Irish Mail on Sunday, which reports that Taoiseach Micheál Martin gave an ultimatum to Michael Healy Ray that a private two-for-one deal that he and his brother Danny agreed in support of the government would have to be upheld before the Kerry TD quit the coalition. U.S.
cops helped Neil Kinahan, that's the lead for the Sunday World, which has an eight-page spread dubbed a gangland special on the arrest in Dubai of Daniel Kinahan. In one of those many reports, Ryder Ken Foy says that there are no imminent plans by Gardaí, well not yet, to press charges against his father, Christy Kinahan Sr., and younger brother, Christy Kinahan Jr.,
Daniel's Dubai hellhole lets the lead splash for the Irish Sun on Sunday. The Sun reports that Kinahan has swapped his luxury lifestyle for what it has described as a hellhole prison in Dubai where inmates are shaved and starved. That's according to a former Irish inmate of the prison who spoke to the Irish Sun.
Dubai Jeopardy is the lead story in the Irish Sunday Mirror, which says that Kinahan had ruled out plans to flee Dubai for Russia or Iran because he believed he would be arrested if he ever tried to leave.
Across the Irish Sea, we mentioned it yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph leads with more pain ahead for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who insists that Downing Street was unaware that Peter Mandelson, the man he had appointed as UK ambassador to the US, had failed security vetting.
Meanwhile, the Observer carries details of a really disturbing investigation, which is drawing on new research, which has found that the design of AI chatbots appears to be linked to a growing wave of psychiatric emergencies and deaths, with some of those chatbots more likely than others to tip vulnerable users over the edge. And I suspect we'll be hearing more.
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Chapter 3: How did recent sports victories impact public sentiment?
outweighs their relevance today. And I think Mercosur, all we have to do is look at that and see the messing that went on around that to suggest there's some truth in that. None of this is to take from the fact there are real problems in rural Ireland that are unique to rural Ireland. There are problems in farming that are unique to farming.
But we're living now in a political firmament, I think, where those who shout loudest and those who have the greatest political power are the ones that are heard most and that feeds into that kind of a thing.
Aisling Meehan, I think you picked out a piece by Mary Regan in the Sunday Independent this morning where Noel Thomas, who's obviously a Galway West by-election candidate, has described these remarks as shameful.
Yes, good morning, Zarbla, I have. In that particular one, yeah, absolutely shameful. I suppose... You know, it's kind of smacks of arrogance. And that was the piece I just felt about, we'll say, you know, with the fuel protests and, you know, there's other pieces in the paper.
And this morning, Mary Regan has a piece where she speaks about, and you made reference to it earlier, that the Taoiseach was stubborn. He insisted that, you know, when he's speaking with the Healy Rays. And I suppose it's just this kind of arrogance of, you know, don't question us.
And I think there's a lack of understanding about which kind of then caused the outpouring of what I call as mass civil disobedience. Like it was a straw that broke the camel's back. And I think it stems from a couple of different things. People are just fed up in rural Ireland. Someone said to me during the week, you know.
You're talking to, well, I know you farm yourself, but you're talking to farmers. I deal with farmers every day. I deal with farm families every day. And I just just I suppose what what made me smile when I was reading Leo Varadkar's piece, you know, it was like the rural v urban and the workers v, you know, but like a lot of the workers, farmers are working off farm as well.
The majority of farmers are working off farm. So like all the different industries that are down, you know, we'll say we pharma, we have like big tech, like a lot of the farmers are working in those industries as well as farming on the land in the morning or the evenings. So I think it's just it's missing those particular points.
You know, I suppose since the 1960s, you know, Ireland's focus has been on attracting foreign direct investment up until the mid-90s. You know, that worked relatively well. And then, you know, rather than cooling the international investment, they ranked it up. And I think rural Ireland is just feeling left behind.
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Chapter 4: How are fuel shortages affecting transportation in Ireland?
And then they were deprived disproportionately of economic tourism for their survival.
Hoteliers were very happy with it in the initial stages of the crisis, particularly during COVID-19.
They were, but I mean, it ties into another article this year today about like payments, you know, that they're finally trying to get the hotels back and get the Ukrainians to move out of the hotels. You know, there's been a mass population explosion. 40% of employed young people between 20 and 35 now live at home with their parents.
When you compare this with Germany and France where there's 12% and in Sweden it's 2%. So in, there was, I suppose, it was a bubbling up of resentment and anger about like rural Ireland, especially in the Western seaboard, that they were getting forgotten about.
Ciara, you're nodding your head in agreement, Ciara Murphy.
Yeah, definitely. I think the straw that broke the camel's back is exactly what struck me. I decided to do some primary research for this and called my cousin, who's a farmer, to try to understand really, because he participated in the protests.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Daniel Kinahan's arrest?
And I think there's a rural urban issue and there's also an intergenerational rural issue too, where it was kind of younger people, you know, farmers are living longer, people are inheriting later. So they're working a lot off farm, a lot in contracting. And I think that a lot of urban... That's not the fault of the government that we're living for longer and we're healthier.
All of this is social change that needs to be governed and managed. And I think a lot of urban people... really underestimate the economic anxiety that goes with farming and how much risk they deal with all the time. And I think, you know, you hear stories of suicides when it goes wrong.
And I mean, I think that the level of risk that's involved in farming, and they've had really tough years, you know, feed prices, fertilizer prices being really, really volatile. There's money to be made, but there is a lot of anxiety there. And I think what's happening now, what we really see with this Leo Varadkar comment is status anxiety too. And there's cultural anxiety, too.
And you see that with the migration and the housing crisis also pushing more people into villages and towns kind of further and further out of the towns. But this status anxiety, this idea that, you know, farmers were very powerful and they still are very powerful. But there's kind of a there's a disdain happening.
And I think one thing that really came out when I talked to my cousin was this idea of how they're portrayed in the media. And this kind of looked down on disdain. And I think one thing that Leo Varadkar has missed in these comments is it's not about who pays the bills. One, there's a food security element to farming and that's why they get these subsidies.
But two, there's a social contract element.
The vast majority of our food is exported.
Yeah, exactly. And again, you know, export market and we're talking about, you know, resilience from FDI, food and agribusiness is a really big part of that resilience. But there's a social contract element here too, right? So we pay taxes and then you get stuff in return for the taxes.
And I think that what a lot of rural Ireland feels is that it doesn't get the public services in return and partially because, you know, there's population questions to what public services actually happen. But also, I think they get the kind of the hard side of government, right? Government regulations are very, I think they find them very strict.
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Chapter 6: What are the political ramifications of Leo Varadkar's comments?
It doesn't include some of the stuff that happened around Fines and Galway. But when you got down to Leash, you got to other places, it was a lot more mixed and it was a lot more organic. It was a lot more real. And you didn't have as many people on the margins of it looking to capitalize on it or to take over.
Difficulty is when you put politics onto the streets, you have a responsibility for what happens when you bring politics out on the streets. And it was quite clear that a lot of the organizers just wanted to shun that responsibility. They didn't take ownership of it.
And as far as I can make, just in terms of looking at my own hinterland of people I would know from through WhatsApp and people I would know from my previous political involvement, there seemed to be a lot more women involved there in terms of that, but just they weren't the ones getting their play.
And that speaks to a lot of the organisations.
No, no, it doesn't at all, because I suppose on the ground I see female farmers. I suppose, what, 25% of our elected TDs are females. So they were on the ground. They're the farm families. They're the mothers that have kids emigrating. And that, you know, kids that are working full time off farm and then also trying to keep the farm going.
So I suppose just coming back, like the different organisations, I mean, you have MACRA that are representing young farmers. You have the IFA, ICMSA, various different organisations. But like quite apart from that, like it was you farmers, but you've hauled yours. You've like it was a lot of the business people and they're male and female.
And I wouldn't really make a distinction, being honest with you. I think it was widespread and across all age groups as well. you would see it on the ground and the people that were just really fed up. And then the other thing I just want to add is like I happen to be listening back to this newspaper panel during the week.
And, you know, and the fear that was there amongst like what's going to happen and, you know, the whole country is locked down and where is it going to be? And within 12 hours, everything had dissipated. Everything went back to normal.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from the protests in Ireland?
And I think that needs to be acknowledged, you know, about the, you know, even you mentioned fines there. It was completely normal. peaceful. They decided themselves that morning that they were going to dissipate and because they felt that they were being listened to and that they had met their point.
And they had got what they wanted. Mick, all of this is feeding into Micheál Martin's leadership and if I had a tenor for every newspaper panel I've hosted in this programme in the last five years that was discussing the danger, the demise and possible heaves against Micheál Martin. What is it? There's 48 TDs, they need 12, but not one.
No, I mean, it's a psychodrama that pops up every now and again. And I mean, Willie O'Dea is a column, which I think probably sums up a lot of it, where he talks about it. Despair is that it's deeper today within the party than it ever was. Now, you're talking about a party. that went through existential change in 2011 and went through some serious issues since then. Now despair is deeper.
He's saying that Fine Gael, those rotters in Fine Gael are actually playing the dark arts of politics better than Fianna Fáil.
He made some declaration about humanity. What was it?
He made a comment about we need to get back to humanity. Again suggesting presumably that the Fine Gaelers, their colleagues didn't know much about humanity. And The thing that struck me more than anything, we're talking about despair, we're talking about the party. Not once did he mention the issue that is straining the social contract, particularly in a generational sense, and that is housing.
So you had this whole existential manufactured crisis within Fianna Fáil over Micheál Martin again. And funnily enough, Willie O'Dea is the same man back in 2014, one of the early heaves against him. He had a great quote one morning where he said... He said, I look around the table at my colleagues and I don't see the Messiah and I look in the mirror and I don't see him either.
So I don't know what has changed since then in terms of the Messiah coming to rescue Fianna Fáil from this psychodrama.
And I should remind our listeners, Derek Mooney, that you used to advise Willie, a special advisor to Willie O'Dea. You know, how real is the risk, you know, to Fianna Fáil, you know, from this? Like, I mean, there obviously has been a lot of anger, but all of those main contenders, you know, Jim O'Callaghan, Derek Leary, they rule themselves out. They're not heaving against Michael Martin.
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Chapter 8: How do rural and urban perspectives differ in Ireland?
You spotted a piece by Meir Regan in the Sunday Independent this morning. Fianna Fáil rebels betting on a bloodless coup.
Yes. All right, now just one tick. Yeah.
That notion that they'd wait until after the presidency, wait until after the centenary and sure, look, by this time next year, you're going to be looking into newer cycles.
Yeah, yeah, sure. And I suppose that, you know, there's no viable alternative. And like that just leaves me feeling very despondent, as in short, leaves a lot of other people like there's no... There's no political opposition or alternative vision for Ireland.
You know, there's kind of floating parties that shift where the EU tell them to shift or where they see votes can be picked up at any given time. And it's a sad state of affairs that that's where we're at, that there's like there's this obviously very, you know, There's civil unrest.
People are very fed up with the way things are being carried out and that there's no real... Derek, is it that bad?
No vision, no values, no social contract?
I think part of the problem is if you look at Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael vote combined, most polls now put it below 45%. That was 80% for most of my voting career. It then fell to 55% around the time of the crash. And then it's been falling since. And I think that's a difficulty in terms of where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are coming from.
In particular for Fianna Fáil, Fianna Fáil is now in competition with Fine Gael, yet they each need each other to maintain themselves in government. And I think that's the overall problem. In terms of, actually, I don't think there is a shortage of possible other candidates within Fianna Fáil. I think there's at least three, possibly four.
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