What has he done

wrong? Yeah, so, well, first of all, there's been a huge fallout from this.

And I think Ed Sheeran underestimated, obviously, the artists themselves, their strength of feeling about the genocide in Palestine.

And while I agree that it's, you know, the billionaire owner of the stadium who I believe is...

Zionist sympathiser who has put out this order Ed Sheeran could have he's of such stature of such you know he's such a huge artist one of the biggest in the world why could he not have used his status to say well if you're dictating who plays with me in these stadiums I'm telling you not to do that.

But if you do that, I'll pull out as well.

You know, and he could have used that power.

Do you not accept that? Listen,

It's not just a negative, is it? I

think AI in the hands of billionaires, which it is, is not going to be positive for most people.

I'm not saying there's no uses whatsoever, but an awful lot of it is what's called slop as well.

And I think the government are trying to say tonight in the Dáil Dáil O'Brien that they provide loads of jobs.

They provide about 3,000 direct jobs, as in people working in data centres.

Obviously, other people are employed in the building of them.

But now we have an issue as well.

isn't that a good point in one sense, Ruth? Instead of giving people an energy credit now, which will be gone in two months, or let's say, or might just clear arrears, Why not use the money, if they were to be levied, to make a structural change and get our own independent source of renewable energy? It would be a far more clever use, would it not, of the money?

Too long, but notwithstanding that, is there hope then in housing?

I think, well, part of the problem is that even though planning permissions have gone up, which planning permissions aren't actual houses, obviously, they're just planning permissions, but...

A lot of them aren't affordable houses.

We've all seen anyone who looks at Daft, etc., prices are still going up.

And one of the problems is there's been a 20% drop in those figures today in social housing.

That has eased off, though, hasn't it, according to the

RTB? Well, we're still getting a lot of people contacting us, so that updates, you know, and some people can stretch it out.

But that's what we spend our time doing.

So this was very, very comprehensively defeated.

Yeah, unfortunately, you have a situation where I suppose over decades, animal rights has been like we were called a laggard by the former Taoiseach.

Leo Varadkar in terms of the rest of Europe and in terms of parts of the world.

And I think there have been attempts with the fox hunting bill and the hair coursing bill and puppy farming by other TDs and parties to really challenge this culture.

because it's not shared and supported by the population at large.

The doll is very, very far behind, and we have a really undemocratic situation where, as you said, 24 TDs voted to ban hair-coursing.

Meanwhile, 77% of the population are opposed to hair-coursing.

So therefore, it's a much safer sport than it would have been in the past.

Your reaction to hearing that the US ambassador to Ireland was at the Black Forge and indeed to what the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre had to say?

My reaction on the one hand is shock.

And then on the other, why are we surprised? Because the US regime in particular is I mean, if you look back at Trump, who welcomed Conor McGregor on St.

Patrick's Day last year, and the US President and Conor McGregor do have something in common in that they've both been found civilly liable for rape in civil cases.

And I think it is a normalising of gender-based violence and sexual violence.

I think it's a huge insult to Nikita Hand.

But I think it's very out of step.

Is this just how society does view this situation? Ruth, it doesn't seem to be the case that these types of accusations do that much harm to somebody's reputation.

Why?

So our local group, D15 with Palestine, has convened a meeting tonight at seven o'clock in the Crowne Plaza in Blanchardstown Center.

We have a great lineup of speakers.

We've Karen Gearin, an anti-apartheid striker who made such an impact with the stance that they took on apartheid.

We have, uh, Stuart Gilhooley from the Players, uh, Association, and we have Daniel Lambert from Bohemians, um, as well as Zack Hania, a Palestinian, a man who has suffered the genocide in Gaza.

What we will be talking about is how we can stop these games.

Now, we know that rumor is that the FAI are going to shift the games to a neutral venue.

Mm

Is this the right thing to do?

I'll have to exactly see what they're proposing, but to hear words like ribbon development coming back into vogue from Fine Gael is really, really dangerous because there are strong environmental reasons and there are strong financial reasons why there are limits on rural housing.

And just to say I was a member of Fingal Council for 11 years.

there's a huge rural element and I was aware of the rural housing policy.

So, for example, you can build on rural land if you have a, in Fingal, if you have a connection with farming, if you have a strong connection to rural, you know, activities.

And then there were other ways that you could get a home in rural clusters and rural villages for other criteria.

But the idea of one-off housing It was estimated by the Housing Commission it costs tens of thousands.

It's just a slight relaxation rule.

is... 875,000 jobs is all you have to understand, isn't

it? There isn't that many jobs from the data centre industry.

The first thing to say is, rather than being, you know, looked up to around Europe, Ireland is now being used as a warning throughout Europe.

So I saw articles in The Guardian where Ireland is being held up as don't go in this direction.

The idea that households with 320,000 households in arrears in their electricity Our pain for data centres is absolutely shameful that we are subsidising, you know, multinational companies, massive tech companies that are, you know, have billionaires at the head of them.

It's also deeply anti environmentally sound policy.

To be eating up electricity, to be eating up water in that way.

There are those surveys and we are in those top echelons of results, aren't we?

Ruth.

Yeah, I had a meeting two weeks ago in my own area and a woman, I'm so sorry Alison as well, a woman was crying at the meeting because her son has been home for two years out of school because they can't cater for him in school and she's waiting on a special school place.

This issue of a lack of special schools is becoming a real problem as well as secondary places and this is about systemic and historic neglect and underfunding of neurodivergent children.

disabled children, and it's parents again and again who've had to campaign.

We had to do two years ago in our area where people, you know, had huge posters and pictures of their children who were looking for the school places.