Slugger O'Toole

Greg Keeffe is Head of the School of Natural and Built Environment. He is an academic and urban designer with 25 years experience. In this podcast we chat over a wide range of topics:

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...

Originally from the Ormeau Road in Belfast, Michael McCoy has lived in Japan for the past 30 years where he works as an executive coach. In this conversation we discuss growing up in Belfast in the 1970's as well as getting his take on Brexit and what we need to do to stimulate the local economy.

Rosa Luxemburg once observed that without all the components of democracy (elections, unrestricted free press and assembly, and free struggle of opinion), "public life gradually falls asleep, and a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy direct and rule".

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.

Open wide, this week I chat with Dr David Suitor who has been a dentist in Belfast for over 17 years. We chat about the general state of dentistry in Nothern Ireland as well as the specific challenges of Covid-19. 

This week's guest, Barry McIlheney, grew up in Oldpark in North Belfast and became singer (or as he puts it, 'chief shouter in front') in a punk band with a bunch of school mates (including Davy McClarnon who's still about today) called Shock Treatment.

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.

Slugger's deputy editor David McCann discusses the campaign to extend the franchise for the Irish Presidency with Naomi O'Leary (Europe correspondent for The Irish Times and host of The Irish Passport Podcast) and Ben Kelly (from the Votes for Irish Citizens Abroad (VICA) campaign). Remotely recorded and edited by Alan Meban (@alaninbelfast).

John is a fellow in the Centre for evidence and social innovation and a sociology lecturer School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queens University Belfast

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

Episode Eight of #CargoOfBricks is with Dublin born, London based historian, a public commentator on both Irish and British politics and prolific crime writer Ruth Dudley Edwards. Initially a lockdown sceptic, I was curious to hear how she had managed what was probably the oddest period of disruption in our post-war lives, and how life changed for her.

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.  

Episode Seven of #CargoOfBricks, is with Willie McCarter a man who brought Fruit of the Loom in from the US to expand his family business at a time when the Troubles were at their height and brought skilled jobs to both sides of the border.

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.

In this podcast, I chat with Adam Turkington. Adam is a veteran of the arts scene who is best known as the Director of Culture Night in Belfast. He has since moved on to start his own company Seedhead Arts. 

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