Slugger O'Toole

David McCann talks with Ed Roddis and Marie Doyle from Deloitte about the 2025 State of the State Report in Northern Ireland.

Read the report HERE

David McCann talks with Ed Roddis and Marie Doyle from Deloitte about the 2024 State of the State Report in Northern Ireland.

David McCann and Peter Donaghy look at how the proposed new constituency boundaries could impact the next election results in Northern Ireland

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?

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

In this episode, Brian O'Neill talks 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.

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

In this episode of the Slugger podcast, we speak with Ed Roddis, Head of Public Sector Research, and Marie Doyle, Partner at Deloitte about the latest State of the State Report.

Greg Keeffe is an academic and urban designer with over 30 years experience in sustainability, energy use and its impact on the design of built form and urban space. He is Professor of Sustainable Architecture and Director of Research at Queens University School of Architecture, Belfast, UK.

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.

In this episode of the Slugger podcast we speak with Ed Roddis, Head of Public Sector Research and Marie Doyle, Director at Deloitte about the latest State of the State Report. We chatted about attitudes toward the health service, the protocol and confidence in the Executive.

Here's our wrap up session with Ruarai and Shane reflecting on the lessons that might be drawn from the US elections for politicians and political parties in Northern Ireland, particularly in the more down-ballot races where money was tighter. 

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. 

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".

• 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.