First of all, Paul, can I ask you, on what basis are you calculating that €250 million annual funding gap?

Well, good morning, Susan, and it's perhaps early in the morning to be bombarding your listeners with statistics, so I'll try and make it as straightforward as possible.

The government did a unique thing back in 2022 when it published its Funding the Future document.

It acknowledged, and I think this is unique, that for the higher education sector, the sector was underfunded to the tune of just over 300 million euros every year, and it pledged to tackle that deficit.

In the four successive budgets, it has put new money into the system.

And so that narrow original deficit is now down to less than half of that, about 130 million.

But what's happened in the intervening four years? Well, good news for students is there are 9,000 more students in the system, but they are unfunded at the moment.

What's your vision for that? Is it where people would be participating in degrees in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s? Would it be online? Would it be flexible? Like, what do you want to do there should the money become available?

I, I'm guessing however much that head of state might want to say something to the president, it would be deemed inadvisable by civil servants to do so.

Hi, Shane, how are you? So I suppose, uh, this is a head of state unlike any other in terms of President Trump, and I remember, um, when I was at the first British-Irish summit in Liverpool in March of last year, it was just after Keir Starmer, our then prime minister, had gone to Washington and just before Micheál Martin, as Taoiseach, was going, and they had a sort of discussion about the issues of how you deal with President Trump when so much takes place in the public domain.

Now, this will be different, I suspect, in that I imagine, for one thing, it's a courtesy call, as we understand it, between the president and the president, so it will not be a substantial policy discussion, I guess.

And also, I imagine it will be a private discussion without cameras present, without reporters present.

So I think in a way, it would have been more of a story if it hadn't happened, given that he's going to be in Dublin, he's gonna be in the Phoenix Park.

Had the president not seen the president, I think that would have been more of a story.

I imagine the much more substantial and, and tricky discussion will be one that the Taoiseach will have at Farmleigh, but he's well used to that.

Why sh- why wouldn't we do that?" What, what's your take on that view?

What difference does that make in practical terms?

In the 1980s, when I was growing up, there was a lot of talk about a North-South divide in Britain, partly because of the economic success of the South and the sort of great austerity and the unemployment in the North.

And people have said that for the last, what, 15 years, the Labour Party has been led by someone from North London.

So someone from the North of England will make a difference.

And I think he's been at pains, after some suggesting that he was almost overplaying the Northern card, to say that he'd be a prime minister for the whole of the UK.

There's a lot of deprivation in the south-west of England and Cornwall and Devon, so I think you can sort of overdo this Northern tag, and I think he'll need to be careful not to project himself as a candidate... of the North.

A lot of Labour voters now would be sort of public sector professionals, working university graduates who would be, you know, they'd be represented in the North.

But you can't increase defence spending without increasing spending everywhere else too.

Which institution, and this is a bit binary, but which institution surprised you by working better than the critics or perhaps the public attitude suggests?

I dealt with all of them before I went to the three respective institutions as an ambassador or as a senior diplomat in my various London jobs on European and international security.

So there was no sort of great surprises.

I suppose in the UN, which was the first I went to, what I found was the sort of, it's a very sort of concentrated place, 15 member states on the Security Council, the five permanent, the 10 elected.

Basically, the three Western permanent members, I would say, particularly now Britain and France, do a lot of this legwork in terms of running some of the big resolutions and owning the files, which is a bit controversial, but there's a certain continuity value to that.

In some respect, there's a lot that you can get done in the UN and there's a lot that you can't get done.

There's a lot that you can get done because it's essentially a political organisation.

How would you as a diplomat and perhaps should the West be handling the future of Russia and engagement and relationships with Russia?

How do you find that balance within obviously not wanting to get rid of the old ways, but wanting to keep enhancing the new ways of doing things?

Yeah, absolutely.

Good question.

So two answers to that, I would say.

The first one is through customer service, whether that's acquisition or servicing your policy or making a claim.

And as I said, that's where we try and make that digital journey really transparent, clear, simple, and fast for a customer if they want to transact that way.

And you'd be surprised as well about the mixed demographic that actually does transact insurance online.

What does that mean to you to see that paying off and people buying into your story?

Oh, I am lost with love.

I first met the late Tommy Gorman, long-time RTE correspondent and latterly RTE's Northern Editor, in January 2021 amidst a chorus of farewells.

It was his leaving parties from RTE and, as it was deep in the first year of Covid, it was not only invitation only, but online only.

I was in my first few months as British Ambassador to Ireland and honoured to be paying tribute to a giant of public service broadcasting.

The screen teemed with famous faces.

Former President Mary McAleese in one little box, Tijog Micheál Martin in another.

For a politics enthusiast like me, it was like an Irish edition of ITV's Celebrity Squares.

10 or more, okay.

Yeah, it is, right.

And, and within that family, the son might still be at home.

And so he works and he contributes and maybe a daughter, et cetera.

But, you know, the primary breadwinner being the driver.

They don't earn a lot of money.

They work hard.

Then of course you can get the, coming back to the livability, you can get the drivers health insurance, sort of loan for kids education, blah, blah, blah, whatnot, right? Because if it's a must.