Read the report HERE

Your host is Brian O'Neill, and his guests are:

Dr. Michael McKenna - A Belfast GP

Prof. Ciaran O'Neill - A Economist from Queen's University Belfast

Michael Donnelly -  a facilitator with Future Search who works on helping groups address complex problems in society

You can follow Dominic on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Domsball

In this episode, we discuss how the pandemic is changing on we live, work and play. We discuss trends like work from home, as well as how this affects the future of our towns and cities.

Why did the Democrats underperform? Ruarai highlights a split between moderates blaming poor messaging for lost seats (Shane gives the example of 'defund the police' which went ricocheting all over), left says bottom-up campaigning was inconsistent.

What can our politicians in Northern Ireland learn? Well, you'll have to listen to the end. You can get it here via podcasts under the new title Slugger's Politics Plus wherever you get your quality podcasts. 

• Governments are hooked on a systematic approach which assumes society remains as simple as it once was. This results in what Ed calls the 'end stage fallacy': ie, the naive assumption that government does not suffer a long decay between conception and the reality of deployment.
• Ed says that what we need is a more systemic approach, which requires if anything a more relaxed approach to problem solving in which you wider the boundaries of the thing you're trying to fix and the framework in order to the greater context in which it sits.
• Finding wider and more resilient solutions that are fit for a future that is both fast in arrival and departure means bringing the electorate into the deal between major electoral events. It also means employing a disciplined pluralism to see what works and doesn't before scaling up.

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.

In it we cover:

• In Northern Ireland, we spend too much time thinking about how things were in the past, too much time discussing things now and how they are, and too little time planning for a future and which is arriving at a far greater speed than most of us can keep up.
• Most quickly of all work is changing. More people are shifting to remote working, which means, one more people are going to be able to work wherever they want, and two, if they are going to work wherever they want they are going to need the kinds of infrastructure that facilitates that.
• This, Shane argues, that as well as a job creation strategy we ought to have a people attraction strategy, bringing in high-value individuals from wherever in the world they want to come from. Think of them like seeds for a whole series of journeys we have yet to imagine going on.

If you would like to get involved in #TheReset with Ulster Bank either as an individual or as part of an organisation, please do get in touch by emailing us at editor@sluggerotoole.com with an idea for inclusion in a range of articles or events over September and October.

In the meantime, you can catch up on Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your quality podcasts.

But in it, 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...

In it we cover...

• Our response in the spring was pretty normal to a previously unknown threat: the panic buying of food and toilet roll was the instinctive response you might expect to fulfil the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But we also discovered that our communities have the agency to protect themselves.

• As things change we need clear messaging, not just from the centre but we also need to translate those guidelines into more culturally specific circumstances like sport, weddings and funerals. To do that well we must start bringing together epidemiologists, mental health and behavioural scientists.

• Maintaining well being is crucial. So we need to think about our diet, our levels of activity (which can help with reducing the stress of living in uncertain circumstances and get us back into a position where we can calmly go about doing the more regulated problem solving that everyday life brings.

Throughout Siobhan stresses the necessity of developing "pack leaders" at every level of society, who can model the sort of behaviour we need to see in others, not just from the top down. Sport, education and even leisure activities can play a huge role in maintaining individual well being.   

Above all, we need to respect and appeal to the intelligence and integrity of two much talked about populations, our young people and the elderly many of whom are very resilient and who are looking for their own agency in and through this crisis. 

If you would like to get involved in #TheReset with Ulster Bank either as an individual or as part of an organisation, please do get in touch by emailing us at editor@sluggerotoole.com with an idea for inclusion in a range of articles or events over September and October.

In the meantime, you can catch up on Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your quality podcasts.

• 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 approaches to fighting the Covid crisis, but there are no golden bullets. Some think the Fortress New Zealand approach works but their economic contraction in the second quarter was similar to Italy's and Belgium's.
• If there is a sliver of good news from an Irish point of view it is that world trade did not contract by as much as expected. The Republic's substantial pharmaceutical industry ensured that they were the only European country to increase exports in the first half of 2020.

In the meantime, you can catch up on Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your quality podcasts.

So this week I spoke to Professor of Education Tony Gallagher, to get his take on what that means in practice...

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 shows that a third of nongraduates and a 1/5 of graduates commonly find jobs in areas most directly affected the Covid lockdown.
• This huge economic risk being shouldered by young people contrasts enormously with how the most serious health risks lie with older people. As such, there is a risk of polarisation as the mediation to protect public health pushes intolerable burdens on those leaving school. 
• Not all young people will be hit equally, poorer education leavers in general are hardest hit. We need a much more strategic view of education as a whole to enable politicians and social policy makers to develop ways to come to a shared and shareable view of what's needed. 

In this podcast, we discuss the future of Derry and the Northwest. In particular, we discuss:

• The future of Ulster University in Derry or lack thereof
• The potential for an independent University
• How Covid-19 will affect Derry, in particular, fewer people having to commute to Belfast for work
• The potential for Derry to become a green city by reducing car travel in the city
• How Derry will need to rely on more bottom-up redevelopment

In it we cover...

• Our Victorian ideas of how representative democracy works are being outrun by a connected electorate which is losing its patience with politicians who don't know how to listen. Accordingly, trust across political identities and ideologies of left and right is falling. 
• Politicians need humility in order to balance the top-down flow of information and data from experts and simultaneously engage communities from the bottom up in order to resist the temptation to be definitive at a time when no one has the right answers to hand,. 
• Engagement is not about technology, but how you use it. Communities are more stable than politics representatives need a long, not a short game. New platforms afford opportunities for using enabling language and open questions to bring issues to ordinary people in a digestible way.
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If you would like to get involved in #TheReset, either as an individual or as part of an organisation, please do get in touch by emailing us at editor@sluggerotoole.com with an idea for inclusion in a range of articles or events over September and October.

In the meantime, you can catch up Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your quality podcasts.

In it we cover...

• The Covid lockdown's withdrawal of vast numbers of people from the workforce has shown just how crucial culture and the arts are to us. But the pipeline behind NetFlix, the BBC, and even the National Theatre in London and the Abbey in Dublin has halted, and creators are not getting paid.
• Local companies export new and very different accounts of life in Northern Ireland from the more negative ones the world has been used to hearing from us through news and current affairs. How do we maintain those connections when travel is more limited than before. 
• More generally let's review what work is, and how we pay for it. The current basic income support regime was designed for full-employment. Portfolio work in the unsubsidised cultural industries left many ineligible for government support during Covid, and unable to pay their mortgages. 

And after a brief break after the first series of the Cargo Of Bricks, we start the second series in partnership with Ulster Bank and a brief introduction from Richard Ramsey to the Reset Project, where we find ourselves viz a viz the Covid crisis, and how you might get involved in #TheReset.

In it he covers...

• How politicians need to take heart from their ability to work under the pressure of the crisis and change things that needed changing, now to take urgent but unpopular decisions and actually see their popularity rise as a result. And how leadership has come from right across the field.
• During the debt crisis of 2008/9 Northern Ireland experienced the deepest and the longest recession of any part of the UK. We needed a conversation then, which subsequently failed to happen. The contraction this time is three times larger. We can no longer duck that conversation.
• If our elderly are on the frontline of the health emergency, our young people are on the frontline of the economic emergency. Youth employment is set to rise to unprecedently levels. He urges us all to wake up, throw off our 'capture' by the status quo, and find new ways to mitigate those effects.

The crisis has revealed many of the underlying conditions that have been holding Northern Ireland back. Serious deficits in infrastructure, the highest rate of unqualified students leaving school, and the longest health waiting lists in the UK. Few of us want to return to that status quo.

If you would like to get involved in #TheReset, either as an individual or as part of an organisation, please do get in touch by emailing us at editor@sluggerotoole.com with an idea for inclusion in a range of articles or events over September and October. 

In this podcast, we chat about improvements in battery technology and how this will affect the growth of electric cars. We also discuss Hydrogen as a fuel source for transport. 

Already nearly 50% of the electricity generated in Northern Ireland comes from renewable sources and this figure will continue to rise. We discuss new ways of generating electric such as anaerobic digestion and energy from waste. This mix of energy sources provides a challenge to the grid of how to manage it all. There are practical issues like a lot of renewable energy is generated in the West of NI, but it is mostly used in the Belfast area. We need to improve the transmission network as well as reconsider projects like the interconnector. 

Pandemics affect city design, desire lines, how industrialisation compartmentalised life, people who enjoy their jobs like working from home, the importance of boredom, over protected kids, why cars kill cities, driverless cars, the future of the office and much more...

In Northern Ireland we certainly have elections (three of them last year alone). But after twenty years plus of on/off institutions politics there's a growing gap between the people and the political machines which appoint them to look after their interests.

Who saw the 2019 Alliance surge coming? Mick had a notion three years ago something was coming. But Professor Pete Shirlow tells me he saw evidence building within social science over the last ten years, but the bigger parties had become too insular to take it seriously.

An insularity that means the DUP staunch social conservatism is now actively alienating young Protestants, whilst Sinn Féin's belief in the demography as a means of unification is undermined by the fact that identity amongst the young is far more fluid than its ever been.

Mick is off for a few weeks now, but he'll be back in September with a new series of #CargoOfBricks. In the meantime, catch up Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

For Barry Mac, as he is known these days, punk was a 'coming-out' more than 'shell shock' period, in which he learned he had a talent for writing and entertaining through the sheer exuberance and the torching of any notion of the right way of doing things.

After punk died, he worked in the Oldpark library (where he had "once learned to read, and therefore write") before moving to London for a journalism course at City University. Four years later he was editor of the big insurgent title of that era, Smash Hits.

Throughout his career, Barry played a key role in some of the biggest magazine titles in the world, including being the founding editor of Empire Magazine.  The rest, as they say, is history, much of which you'll find in this week's edition of #CargoOfBricks...

See you next week. In the meantime, the best way to keep up with Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation, is to subscribe to Slugger on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.

In the podcast we chat about the changes to the workplace from Covid 19.

In the free-flowing conversation which follows she talks about...

• Although, she began defiantly anti lockdown, 'when the orders came' she quickly complied. Then, it seem to her, the world seemed to fill out with people who seem knew exactly what the right answer to Covid was, in deep contrast to her own growing sense of 'not knowing' and which quickly enveloped most European governments, including the UK and Ireland. 
• On her daily walk she began to learn poetry, starting with Davies' classic lines "we have no time to stop and stare". Slowing down, in St James' Park she became embroiled in the micro-politics of the wildfowl there. She met the hawk handler who showed her the kestrels nesting on Nelson's Column. In an otherwise empty London, people smiled, and made friends.  
• What began to fade was the shrillness of the media commentary and her normal life, "filled with politics, and 'now' and urgency and rush". If not listening to poetry it was podcast on bigger themes, and unexpected subjected. Confronted with genuine complexity and not actually knowing, she watched the media get more hysterical and gotcha journalism. 

She also mentions bumping into the first Black Lives Matter protest in London on the way back from visiting a friend and the sheer joy in the young protestors at being together in a just cause and how the lockdown has been quietly stealing our quality of life and storing up issues around mental health. 

So that's that. See you when I will be talking to retired publisher Barry McIlheney talking about his journey from Belfast's punk scene in the late 70s to the centre of London's pop culture.

You can subscribe to Cargo of Bricks, Slugger TV, and our other podcasts on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts or Spotify, where you can also catch up on previous Covid related episodes with the likes of Ian Parsley, Graham Brownlow and Tina McKenzie.  

In it Willie tells us:

• In the early 80s, with high-interest rates as governments tried to get inflation under control, the business was getting crushed on cost and prices. With IDA support, they looked for a joint venture with a US company "with deep pockets".
• In a short time, they went from 400 employees to 3000, with six or seven plants in Donegal and two in Derry, producing a million teeshirts a week and 400,000 sweatshirts by adapting to new high volume tech and Fruit of the Loom's model.
• Expansion of a yarn mill on the Derry side was the result of pressure from direct rule Minister Richard Needham and John Hume, commercial pressure from the US head office, and suspension of planning for IDB sponsored projects.

Willie finished by saying that the case of setting up of transnational businesses in border areas like Donegal and Derry has never been more opportunity with the ability to access global markets through the UK and European ones through the Republic.

Meantime, see you next week. You can subscribe to Cargo of Bricks, Slugger TV, and our other podcasts on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts or Spotify.

We bounce around from Culture Night to the 12th, from Universal Basic Income to 20 sided dice.

• At the crux of the book, anger is one of the most powerful agencies within politics just now. It takes two forms: moral anger as in the witness of injustice and an improving agent within society and the second which acts as a tribal identity regulator.

• As mainstream politicians have 'biased upwards', listening to the voices of the elite, rather than the poor, angry, frustrated, or distressed. Populism has moved into that gap to give such folks a public voice. And meaningful policy choice gets lost.

• However, Governments can redistribute wealth to those who don't have it and use targeted low-interest rate loans to enable the private sector to drive an ambitious Green New Deal and enable governments to regenerate our starved public services.
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Much food for thought for the new Irish government. Get a copy, preferably from your local bookshop (like No Alibis Books in Belfast) or, if you really have to, Hive, Amazon or some other online space.

If you are (still) really passionate about democratic politics, you'll enjoy this very important book. Meantime, see you next week. You can subscribe to Cargo of Bricks, Slugger TV, and our other podcasts on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts or Spotify.

Subjects included:

• The fact that there was no time to plan for the massive disruption that lockdown would bring, that businesses had some big decisions to make without a lot of guidance from government in London or Belfast. It was a leap into the unknown.
• But working from home has forced a radical rethink of how her business operates. Outputs became the key focus, and as outputs held up people relaxed. And new rules were brought into to protect the tricky work/life for people working at home.
• In terms of politics, COVID has made people more flexible in their thinking. They are willing to trust politicians to show similar leadership on Brexit, and to take tough decisions in health and schools to free up cash for investment elsewhere.  

The main points we cover: 

• The ideologically committed Greens have take harder line in the framing of the draft programme than either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, making their more distinctive and is harder for their two larger coalition partners to usurp and claim as their own.
• WAs Sinn Féin take on, for the first time, the constitutional role as leader of the opposition, will come a challenge to develop an even greater pallet of solution based, and a need to get on top of internal operational matters that have drawn poor publicity in the past.
• In an era of "two Taoisigh", will Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar's 'spikey pragmatism' see them through? Nothing tests a government like 'events dear boy, events'. And what will happen to the first when he steps down from the top office?

In it, we dissect:

• How Ireland's swing from right to left, illustrated by the collapse in the Fine Gael vote and Sinn Féin's unanticipated great leap forward, has nullified Micheál Martin's long-held ambition to lead a non-SF, left-leaning coalition government.
• The political purgatory now facing the two traditional enemies of the southern state as they face up to the possibility that they may never see power again if they don't do the last thing many of their activists want to see and govern together.
• And through all of this despite taking his party to the unprecedented success of 12 Dail seats the Greens leader, Eamon Ryan faces a last-minute defenestration as leader by his deputy, Catherine Martin, who is also the party's chief negotiator. 

Some of the themes we talked about include:

• Rise of internet-based giants like Amazon poses huge business case challenges for local retail calling into question its capacity to continue providing services to local communities, leading to downward pressure on commercial rents...
• Northern Ireland's economy remains disproportionately reliant on low waged and low skilled workers who are suffering disproportionately during the crisis by taking on higher health risks and a more uncertain future.
• Belfast, not Derry, is the outlier in terms of economic performance, so the recovery plan must invest long term ambitions to overturn demographic and geographic imbalances through early years learning, clean budget planning, and infrastructure.

In it we cover:

• How Northern Ireland was lucky to get Stormont back to work on time
• How the UK's and the Republic's efforts compare with the approaches of other European countries
• Why honesty in the shortcomings of our initial responses is key to learning how to better respond to a second wave.