Slugger O'Toole

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.

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 fact is some way short of the sort of near-total lockdown we had in Spring.

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 [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.

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...

• 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.

One of the key reasons for having the Reset 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...

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. 

Steve Bradley is a regeneration consultant, you can follow him on Twitter. Steve is a very popular writer on Slugger with some of his posts getting over 40k readers, you can view an archive of his posts here.

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

Do we need a re-set in our democratic culture? We often tie ourselves in knots thinking that Northern Ireland is an exception to the rest of the world, but this week's guest on #CargoOfBricks Richard Wilson's experience is much broader and he thinks politicians are falling far short of current needs.

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 [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 Cargo of Bricks and In Conversation and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your quality podcasts.

In today's Cargo of Bricks, I speak to Ali FitzGibbon and discover how the long slow and steady bottom-up development of Northern Ireland's cultural industries over the last thirty years provided the backbone for the recent big payoffs from TV and film, but which has yet to see any peace dividend...

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. 

Series two, episode 1 opens with an introduction to #TheReset, a joint project between Slugger O'Toole and Ulster Bank.

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 [email protected] with an idea for inclusion in a range of articles or events over September and October. 

David Rooney is a Professor in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen's University Belfast.

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. 

Tim Attwood was an SDLP councillor and party worker who knew John Hume well. In this podcast we discuss the life of John Hume and his legacy.