David McCann and Peter Donaghy look at how the proposed new constituency boundaries could impact the next election results in Northern Ireland David McCann David McCann holds a PhD in North-South relations from University of Ulster. You can follow him on twitter @dmcbfs ..read more

In this episode, we discuss the crisis in the GP service in Northern Ireland. What are the issues, and more importantly, what do we need to do to address the problems? My guests his guests are: Dr. Michael McKenna – A Belfast GP. Prof. Ciaran O’Neill – A Economist from Queen’s University Belfast specialising in health. Michael Donnelly –  a facilitator with Future Search who works on helping groups address complex problems in society. You can listen and subscribe to the Slugger Podcast on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts or Spotify  Or play the audio below: P ..read more

This week University staff are on strike across the UK. I talked to  Professor Dominic Bryan from Queen’s University Belfast about the reasons for the University Strike Action. We also talk about the increasing commercialisation of education. The two main issues are: Pensions: this is the usual story of being asked to contribute more to their pension scheme but getting less out of it when they retire. Pay: they are looking a 12% pay rise. When you consider that inflation is running at 10% this is only a 2% increase in real terms. We also talk about the increasing commercialisation of Univ ..read more

Powered by RedCircle The Slugger Podcast is back! In this episode, we are looking at the State of the State report which surveys the attitudes and opinions of sector leaders and the public about how they think things are going in the UK. we speak with Ed Roddis, Head of Public Sector Research and Marie Doyle, Partner at Deloitte This report is published by Deloitte, which surveys these attitudes every year. The research includes a survey by Ipsos UK of 5,813 UK adults aged 16-75, including 445 from Northern Ireland, between 2nd and 20th September, as well as in-depth interviews with leade ..read more

She was waiting for me, sitting at a picnic table in the dappled shade of a silver birch, its leaves delicately coloured the new green of spring that we’d both come to value and love. Gravel crackled and scrunched beneath the soles of my shoes as I walked the final few yards along the path to meet her and I could feel the first real warmth of a May sun seeping through my jacket and deep into my back. It was a fine day to have a birthday. Hers and mine. It was the last one that we would spend together. I gave her a hug, feeling the genuine affection of friendship reciprocated in her embrace and ..read more

Ed Straw has been in and around government and state led projects for a large part of his later working life. He has also been involved with the UK Labour Party using his trained engineer’s eye to look at how things work. His new book throws new light on the problem of poor “government agency”. Powered by RedCircle In it we cover: Governments are hooked on a systematic approach which assumes society remains as simple as it once was. This results in what Ed calls an end-state fallacy: ie, the assumption that government does not suffer a long decay between conception and deployment. Feedba ..read more

Today I spoke with my old friend and Lagan College alumnus Shane Greer, who now owns and publishes Campaigns and Elections Magazine and lives and works in Washington DC about whether in order for Northern Ireland to get a good reset we need to think more globally, not to mention bigly. The main impetus for the start of the discussion was his recent Reset essay on what he sees as a live opportunity to exploit the new home working arrangements rapidly being put in place bring well-heeled consumers from wherever they are in the world into the Northern Ireland economy. Powered by RedCircle In it w ..read more

Now today’s Cargo of Bricks with Siobhan O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s mental health champion was recorded before this morning’s announcement of a four-week circuit breaker lockdown, which in reality is some way short of the near-total lockdown we had in Spring. But in today’s podcast, we cover what we have learned so far and what are the issues that come with facing the uncertainty of a second wave and trying to balance a number of factors external to the core concern of slowing down the spread of the virus… Powered by RedCircle In it we cover… Our response in the spring was pretty normal to a ..read more

In today’s Cargo of Bricks, we take our first look at how the southern economy is coping with the shocks to the labour market in particular. With my guest Dan O’Brien, chief economist at the IIEA in Dublin we cover… Powered by RedCircle It is absolutely impossible to read too far into the success or failure of what amounts to ‘the biggest social policy or political experiment in decades’. Government is able to hold to it’s massive intervention in the labour market for now, but in 6 to 9 months it could get ‘hairy’ We are far from understanding the effectiveness of different countries approach ..read more

One of the key reasons for having #TheReset project in a space like Slugger is to look behind the headlines and try to assay the effects of the Covid emergency, not just in health, but in other key areas of life. As we prepare for a second wave, the effects on those leaving education are acute. So this week I spoke to Professor of Education Tony Gallagher, to get his take on what that means in practice… Powered by RedCircle In it we cover… After 2008 young people who left education in the year of the crash are still faring worse than either the class ahead or the one after. A recent survey sh ..read more