Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan

Leinster House today was filled with sympathy for Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport Patrick O’Donovan who took ill during an EU presidency meeting in Limerick on Tuesday.

On today’s podcast Hugh speaks to Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy and political correspondent Jack Horgan-Jones about the mood in the Dáil.

Fellow politicians “understand the stresses and challenges” of the job, Pat said.

They also discuss today’s public sector strike and the likelihood of another next Wednesday.

“Both sides have staked out their territory” said Pat.

“The government has shown its willing to let people go out on strike, the unions have shown their prepared to go on strike” he added.

Unions say the threat of larger scale walk outs in the dispute over the public sector pay deal aren’t off the table.

Jack Horgan-Jones said “generationally no one in politics or the unions has dealt with something of this scale before”.

He added, ”though we haven’t reached the point of confronting what a full scale public sector and civil service walk out would look like and the disruption it would cause”.

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In less than a month US voters will get a chance to express their feelings about the direction of the country in elections for seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. While president Donald Trump is not on the ballot, his unpopularity is weighing his party down. Polls show a "blue wave" looks likely, with Democrats favoured to win back the House and possibly the Senate. But many races are still very close. Washington correspondent Keith Duggan has been visiting some of the key battlegrounds to find out about the candidates and the issues.

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Pat Leahy and Harry McGee join Hugh Linehan to look back on the week in politics:

• The fallout from Budget 2027 has been minimal, save for Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan’s eleventh-hour decision to cut State subvention to RTÉ by €20 million. Having seen his department pre-budget demands not being met, the Minister warned that the Government – not just his department - “will renege on the three-year funding deal agreed with RTÉ in July 2024”.

• Unlike O’Donovan, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers saw his political capital augment this week. It took a giveaway budget of €8.5bn to avoid putting anyone’s nose seriously out of joint, but at least he kept to the 6 per cent spending margin for 2027.

• Public sector pay demands will see industrial action rather than negotiations in the short-term but perhaps the Government and the unions will sit down and talk before both sides become entrenched.

• And once lobbied by property developers like Johnny Ronan, former minister Simon Coveney now lobbies on his behalf. Ronan is redeveloping the former Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend with up to 3,800 apartments planned. Dublin City Council are now urging Coveney to honour affordable housing plans for the site, drawn up while he was housing minister.

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Ireland is politically and economically stable, as Simon Harris pointed out in his Budget speech yesterday. But keeping it that way is getting more expensive. Increased capital spending, increased day-to-day spending, tax cuts - yesterday’s Budget delivered the lot. Is this sustainable, with our reliance on multinational tax receipts? Or wise, with our healthy level of economic growth? To look at the big picture, Hugh and Pat are joined by Barra Roantree of Trinity College Dublin.

Barra Roantree is an Assistant Professor in Economics at TCD.

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Last year Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor co-authored an essay in The Guardian with a provocative title: The Rise of End Times Fascism. In it they argued that a new alliance was emerging on the political right, made up of Christian fundamentalists, Silicon Valley billionaires and hardline ethnonationalists, bound together by a vision of the end of the world as we know it in which only they would survive.

That essay has now become a book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.

On today’s podcast Klein and Taylor talk to Hugh Linehan about their thesis and why they believe the term fascism is justified. What do they believe unites believers in the Rapture, cynical tech oligarchs and the far right? And how should the rest of us fight back against those whom Klein and Taylor call “traitors to creation”?

Naomi Klein is the author of many books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and Doppelgänger. Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors which emerged out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and author of The Age of Insecurity.

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The mood music around Leinster House this week is one of “nashing teeth” ahead of what’s expected to be a difficult budget announcement on Tuesday.

On today’s podcast, Hugh speaks to our political correspondents Jack Horgan-Jones and Cormac McQuinn who describe a “cold hard reality” that may be to come as government ministers feel they may not get the money they were hoping for.

And its understood Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers has been “frosty” with cabinet colleagues asking for more money for their departments.

All this under the shadow of overrun budgets in education and health, and a failure to agree a public sector pay deal which threatens industrial action the likes of which we haven’t seen for 17 years.

We also ask how the row over an Orange Order parade permitted down the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road in Co. Armagh lays bare the political divisions which have been “frozen in time” since the Belfast Agreement in 1998.

And we pay tribute to our esteemed colleague and parliamentary sketch writer Miriam Lord who retired this week.

Plus, the panel picks their favourite Irish Times pieces of the week; A shift to the right in European politics; Mark Zuckerbergs cash gift to a GAA club in Waterford; and the fallout over Ireland’s nations league clash against Israel.

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Sinn Fein emerged from 2020's general election in pole position to challenge Fine Gael and Fianna Fail and potentially take power next time around. That didn't happen, with support ebbing away as a series of events, both internal and external, shook the party's confidence. That's the picture painted by Siobhán Fenton, a journalist who worked in Sinn Féin's press office from 2020 to 2024, in her book Ourselves Alone.

Hugh interviews Siobhán about why she joined Sinn Fein and what she learned about the inner workings of a cross-border party. They look back on a series of missteps made by the party and its leader Mary Lou McDonald, including the response to the 2023 Dublin riot and McDonald's gaffe when speaking to Pat Leahy on Inside Politics about reducing the price of houses.

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Today anxiety over how the digital world has evolved is greater than ever. Trust in information found online is low, the business models driving tech platforms reward outrage over wellbeing and vast power lies in the hands of a few oligarchs. The arrival of AI may bring even greater problems. But what can be done?

On today's podcast Hugh interviews Mark Little about his book The Last Good Day on the Internet. Little is a former RTÉ correspondent, the founder of Storyful and co-founder with Aine Kerr of Kinzen. He has also had roles with Twitter and Spotify.

Part memoir, part work of philosophy, part rethinking of how the internet has developed over the last 20 years, Little's thoughtful book prescribes some solutions for our current predicaments.

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Pat Leahy and Cormac McQuinn join Hugh Linehan to look back on the week in politics:

• In the first Irish Times national poll since February, the lack of movement in party support points to an electorate not wholly enamoured by the incumbent Government but not exactly enthused about the alternatives either.

• One of the big contradictions arising from the poll is around the question of a united Ireland. A clear majority of 68 per cent feel the Government should begin preparations for possible Irish unity, but only a small minority of voters would consider changes such as a new Irish flag, national anthem or joining the Commonwealth to make a united Ireland more acceptable to northern unionists.

• The poll also reveals what voters want in Budget 2027 – with the cost of energy and home heating the top priority ahead of next month’s budget.

• And there is nothing like a premature sports capital grant announcement to stir animosity within the Coalition.

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Chinese leader Xi Jinping lands in Washington later this evening for a three-day state visit, his first to Washington since 2015. The Trump White House is rolling out the red carpet and laying on the full ceremonial treatment for a leader who currently still faces American tariffs, sanctions and export controls. Irish Times China correspondent Dennis Staunton joins Hugh from Hong Kong to explain what both men want out of the meeting and what it will tell us about the balance of power between the world's two superpowers. They also talk about the race for AI supremacy and China's economic challenges.

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