Slugger O'Toole

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.

Today Mick spoke with his 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.

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 [email protected] 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.