And Dave, how did you start out? Where did the passion

come from? I suppose like in Belfast, they would say I was a bit of a, like a nepo baby.

Like, so my dad was a photographer during the troubles and he would have taken like kind of iconic pictures during the troubles.

And I suppose like around, I left school at about 16.

And I was always into like art and all forms of it, like graffiti, like all that sort of, I was skateboarding, all that kind of, I was really into that sort of thing.

And my dad was like, maybe just to keep me on the straight and narrow, was like, do you want to come take some photos with me? And do you want to come in? I'll bring you in.

Like he was working in the Belfast Telegraph, so he could bring me in.

was it was mad it was you know when you can feel danger and you can kind of it has that vibe were you ever in that type of situation David anything like that

What percentage of the Bible is presented from the perspective of women?

Well, I was going to say about 1.1% of the dialogue in the Bible comes from women who have a name.

And that's usually a woman that has a book named after them like Ruth or Esther.

If you take those out, well, full stop.

If you take the Bible as a whole, Men outnumber women by massive amounts.

Women without a name who are just, you know, so-and-so's concubine, so-and-so's wife, outnumber women with a name.

And what you're left with is about 49 women out of 3,070 characters in the Bible who actually have a name and have a voice.

Oh no.

How did those two backgrounds mesh during this collaboration?

beautifully in a word those five stories that we tell in the very beginning that really is just the opening of the book we could have told every woman's story from the bible and we also considered telling lilith's story because we both are big fans of lilith but we had to stay on target and don't let mission creep drag everything in we stayed strictly focused on the bible we had a whole wish list okay we want to talk about women's property we want to talk about virginity menstruation The list went on and on and on.

And also talking about how, yeah, that's all the Old Testament.

New Testament's no better.

It's not like Jesus came down, oh, forget all that evil stuff.

Now we've got Jesus and he's full of love and he loves women.

Like, no, he's just as bad if he existed at all.

How do you distinguish recovering a plausible... woman from simply creating a sympathetic counter myth? And how much does that distinction even matter for what the book is trying to accomplish?

It must be Is it harder than not, depending on what place you go around the country, to tick those

two boxes? But what's rare is wonderful.

And S. Martin is very rare.

We've just come from Galway City and Circus Gibraltar traditionally for 23 of its 25 years used to visit Salt Hill on the prom every year until we found out 18 months ago.

three months maybe before our annual visit, that they were no longer going to give the site.

And Galway City Council, for example, despite circuses being part of the National Individuary of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and we're protected under UNESCO, councils are really supposed to support us and provide us with sites as an important part of the tapestry of the cultural heritage of Ireland, and they don't.

So Galway City Council seem to be able for example we've just come from Galway provide sites for everybody else and every other type of event but can't provide a site for traditional circus and we're very very lucky kind of like here in Ennis where Galway Racecourse you know a private operator came to our rescue last year and gave us a site it's a wonderful site you can drive there you can park But it's miles out of town, you

Are you always on, you know, do you have like talent scouts kind of out there and about or do you do like, you know, like the Argentinian couple get in touch with you because the name is known and say, hey, we'd like to try out for the circus?

I'm wondering maybe if you could give the audience a little bit more context on IMEDS and I suppose the impact it might have on customers as well.

So it's a long-standing project that we've done in partnership with our members, with Insurance Ireland, the Department of Transport and Gardaí.

And the first phase, which covered all private motor vehicles, was delivered to all frontline Gardaí at the start of 2024.

Essentially, what we've done is we've built up the insurance picture and the driver picture of all vehicles in Ireland in two phases, private motor, which is a little bit easier to do because they're one-to-one and then we also have a national fleet database to capture fleet policies and which probably many of your listeners will be familiar with what you do is you you buy a number of seats you say well i want 10 or 20 policies and then the fleet owners allowed dynamically change those as fleets come on and all our vehicles come on and off the fleet rather and you know we have a solution where the vehicle owners can maintain those fleets so Before IMID was rolled out back in 22, when we last conducted an exercise where we clashed our figures against the Department of Transport, private motor vehicles were at a high of 8.3% of vehicles were uninsured.

We've got that down to 4.2%.

So it's effectively halved.

We have a little bit further to go on the non-private commercial side because of those complexities around fleet policies.

I suppose more broadly, be useful to understand how you think AI and technology is going to impact, I suppose, your work day to day.

Yeah.

I don't know how that works in practice.

Like, it's not very neighbourly in one sense.

Look, I would appeal to people's kind of, when these things happen, no matter what it is, yeah, look, it's not ideal.

It is what it is.

And we do have to kind of, I suppose, try and make sure that the water supply is protected and things like that and not be wasteful with it in a general sense.

But I would echo that.

For the little spell that we do get.

Because otherwise, I would have heard your thesis much sooner than just a few months ago.

Right.

And again, I am by far, far from the first person that's said this.

I mean, there's still third century and second century critics of Christianity whose arguments still hold up even today, you know, a thousand plus years later.

And it's good that you put a... that consensus in air quotes because when you talked about the whole field of biblical studies, most of that is religiously affiliated.

Most biblical scholars are religiously affiliated.

Most universities, teaching academy, anything that offers any sort of Jesus, New Testament, any sort of study like that, the majority of those are religiously affiliated.

In a

Okay.

The one in the Bible that we get, the most worst person you can imagine, or we can talk about the real person who, whose name was not Jezebel, by the way.

It's not even [laughs] her real name.

Ethbaal, um, who was not only a real person, and you can't say that about a lot of people in the Old Testament, but, um, she, her family, her husband's family, their dynasty, they were the, the first royal family that put Yahweh on the map as a god.

Before them, Yahweh's just one more storm god worshiped by the ancient, uh, Judeans and the ancient Israelites and, uh, Samaritans.

Um, so the ironies just start dog piling so fast.

Jehu, who wiped them all out, killed them, in the Bible he's this, he's God's guy, he's God's hero doing all this.

Yeah

What exactly is continuous vehicle coverage, David?

Good morning, Anton.

So what continuous vehicle coverage is, you know, essentially at the moment in Ireland, it's not an offence to own an uninsured vehicle.

It's only an offence to drive it.

And that's out of step.

with the system used in most countries across europe and we want to update the system in ireland to ensure that all registered vehicles those that are active on our roads are uninsured unless they've been formally taken off the road it would also assist the guardi and have the initial focus of enforcement moving from you know being policing led where they have to catch the drivers in the act to be administrative led and we the we saw a real step change anton in in um 2024, when we introduced the Irish Motor Insurance Database, which did bring the level of uninsured vehicles down to about 6.7% in Ireland.

But that's plateaued now in 2025, based on the research that we've launched today.

Why am I being forced to insure something that can't cause anybody a danger?

So was it public transport all the way for you, so?

No, well...

Like, not really.

So I had to, like, just beg lifts off people.

And it was actually Cormac that hooked me up.

And Cormac's in, like, this collective in Austria of, like, small nations who all ski together.

Do you know, because, like, Ireland don't have many and there might be other small nations.

so did you get a chance obviously we don't we don't really have any Irish luge athletes this year so did you get a chance to kind of say okay I really want to go and photograph this event how did you decide where you wanted to go when the Irish athletes weren't there

David, is this due to an increase in incidents or are the numbers down to a better form of detection?

a better form of detection.

So this report marks the two-year anniversary of our rollout of the Irish Motor Insurance Database to the Gardaí, to the front lines in the Gardaí.

So they can very quickly use this database with automatic number plate recognition cameras in their road policing cars and in many, many mobile devices that have been rolled out to all of the front lines.

So in a matter of seconds, they can detect whether or not a car is insured or not.

So it's been a real game changer for We saw a big step forward in 24 and 25 with this new technology.

It strikes me that even if detection has improved, if we are seeing 19,000 detected in a single year, that would suggest that the underlying total numbers of people who are driving uninsured must be significantly greater than that.

You're absolutely right, Anton.