Una and Andrea's United Ireland

Struggling with convincing older family members or friends to cocoon? Una chats with psychotherapist Sarah Gilligan about tactics for having compassionate, effective chats with people over 70 who may be struggling to stick to the stringent rules outlined by the Irish authorities. This is for anyone having frustrating phonecalls, or overcome with worry about the potential behaviours of people they love and feel compelled to protect. Some super useful advice here!

As a huge portion of the world's population is existing under lockdown conditions, many personal freedoms have been sacrificed for public health. But there is increasing concern in various countries about the impact of lockdown culture on civil liberties. This week, Andrea speaks with Liam Herrick, the executive director of the ICCL about Ireland's new rules, and Una talks to a leading anti-corruption campaigner in Hungary about how covid-19 is intersecting with Viktor Orbán's desire for power and control. Also the Corona Correction and urban wildlife, things to do virtually this week in Ireland (or anywhere), and the impact of covid-news-overload.

Andrea talks about the journey she's been on as a small business owner trying to cope since Coronavirus struck.

Una and Andrea are back together (remotely) to talk about about behaving ourselves! Not really, but we are interested in the massive role behavioural science plays in containing the pandemic and keeping people safe. We're joined by behavioural scientist Pete Lunn from the ESRI who co-authored the working document 'Using behavioural science to help fight the coronavirus' to discuss the science of collective action, how isolation will impact us, and how leadership impacts a population's intake of information. Also, a certain fighting man is getting in the sea, there's LOADS to do virtually this week on Andrea's new virtual social guide, and our President wrote a poem! Sound.

coping noun The top, typically curved or sloping, course of a brick or stone wall. How novel that the first definition of coping we came across is talking about a curve. Our collective priority right now is to flatten the curve and can we just say, what a great job our caretaker government, frontline medical staff, retail staff who are keeping shelves stocked and indeed the people of Ireland are doing right now to try and control this virus. But whilst we’re all trying to do the right thing to have the best impact, there is so much collective anxiety, panic and fear. So many tears. The need to take to bed to deal with the trauma we’re feeling. And that’s ok – what’s happening right now is extraordinary. It’s not business as usual. coping verb Coping means to invest one's own conscious effort, to solve personal and interpersonal problems, in order to try to master, minimize or tolerate stress and conflict. So how do we cope? While we try to cope with the logistics of recording a podcast together but a

Two of the main themes to come out of the recent Coronavirus outbreak are fear and contagion, things that have been front and centre in the queer community for so long. So we reached out to Adam Shanley from HIV Ireland on the subject of U equals U - Undetectable equals Untransmittable. This is something that’s spoken about quite regularly in queer communities but maybe not as top of mind in more mainstream society. We wanted to approach this in relation to the stigma, fear and panic that surrounds HIV and how we can learn from the historical and ongoing focus on their reduction, especially as we see these behaviours unfold with Corona. All the usual news (both current affairs and JLo related), Get In The Sea, Fave Bits and Tuna Chicken Rolls also enclosed.

The middle of Ireland currently resembles Waterworld due to flooding which has been causing chaos for homeowners, businesses and farmers. In this episode we wanted to get to the bottom of why this is happening, whether the precautions and flood defences currently in place are adequate and what can be done moving forward. We’re joined by Breandán Anraoi MacGabhann, a lecturer in geography at University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College and a Green Party Executive Committee member to answer these q’s. We also have the King of Westmeath, Bressie, in studio as our county rep. Fave bits and Get In the Sea’s as usj.

Remember that ad for Tracker Mortgages? "I don't know what a tracker mortgage is. I don't know how to save money on my car insurance." Well that's how we feel about REITs. And given our current homeless crisis and the fact that Ires Reit is the largest private landlord in the State, we wanted to remedy that situation and get to the bottom of the benefits and downfalls involved with REITs. So we brought Sean Keyes, Finance Correspondent at The Currency in to the studio to give us the full lowdown. As well as getting the lowdown on what's going on with JLo this week and some Getting in the Sea around International Women's Day shenanigans.

We're back on our county buzz. The Kingdom of Kerry is our county this week, and we're examining the case of Elizabeth Coppin, as the UN Committee on Torture permits her case against Ireland to be heard. Leading lawyer on the case Dr. Maeve O'Rourke breaks down the legal context of the case, and the author of Republic of Shame, Caelainn Hogan joins us in studio to give us some context about a history that keeps coming back to haunt the present day. Are we finally getting to a point where Ireland can confront this dark part of our past, and will survivors of institutional abuse get justice? Also on the pod, Kerry county rep Molly King, government formation drama, Andrea's legendary county facts, a JLo update, and much more.

This is an audio version of Una's longread on the narratives and reasons for the #GE2020 vote. The written version is on our Patreon page. Please subscribe to United Ireland on Patreon to support our work. www.patreon.com/unitedireland

After a wild weekend, a historical election, and a period of heightened discourse, it's time to take a breath and figure out what all of this means. In this episode, we step away from the intense conversations and decompress. This election has thrown up so many issues around identity, history, class, and discontent, and now it's time to start talking about all of those things. Let's have discussions that are led with empathy, confront our past in a responsible and smart way, and use the skills we have amassed as a nation over the past decade to put ourselves in other people's shoes and move forward. The times, they are a changin', so let's start to understand and feel what that change means and navigate our hope and our discomfort. Onwards!

Should you vote all the way down the ballot? Should you give a candidate a preference even if they're in bits? What's a quota? How does a surplus get distributed? How did we end up with this voting system? Get ready to nerd out with our special How Does My Vote Work episode. We headed out to UCD to talk to an unsung hero of Irish democracy, political scientist Professor David Farrell. In this episode, David answers your questions about voting, our voting system, how the count works, and more.

It was presumed this election would be overshadowed by the Green Wave. This hasn't been the case. And where it has, it has been supported by quite an urban demographic and green policies have really been seen as an issue by rural, farming dependent Ireland. We talk to pal of the pod Saoirse McHugh about the challenges rural Irish communities are faced with to try and engage with the Green Wave and provides some of the solutions for why going green can actually be of benefit to farmers and why the conversation around climate change in Ireland doesn't have to be reduced to the size of the national herd.

As we examine how voter sentiment may potentially alter the landscape of Irish politics this weekend, what that sentiment boils down to is not just change, but radical change, and change that is directed towards what can be broadly described as the left, although we absolutely know that the traditional binaries by which we measure and describe the ideological spectrum of politics keep shifting and have changed a lot in recent years. There’s one particular journalist whose trademark is speaking truth to power, interrogating corruption, making establishment politicians cower in fear, and more broadly a journalist who is steered by a sense of equality, fairness and justice in Irish society. We knew that this was the man we wanted to be talking to this week about what is actually now happening in Irish society, the context, the causes, and the potential outcome. We’re delighted to welcome in studio Vincent Browne.

What would it take to make the cities of Ireland into urban utopias? We're joined by Labour candidate Rebecca Moynihan to imagine the possibilities and realities of what could be for our main municipalities. Throw in a look over the previous week of campaigning and polls, as well as our fave bits and this week's contender to Get in The Sea and finally top off with an absolute Tuna Chicken Roll.

Ireland currently has a gaping hole when it comes to regulating online campaigning. We talk to Liz Carolan who is behind the Fair Play Pledge about online campaigning, why we need an Electoral Commission, who’s spending what online, and more. As we release this recently recorded episode, Liz has just released news of a breach of Facebook political advertising policies by Renua. The ads, which were running under the radar of being flagged as political advertising, contained dog-whistle anti-immigration messaging and highlight the fact that we just don’t know what anyone is seeing online. This is an important episode with a woman who is doing incredibly important work.

“tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” Oscar Wilde Culture always seems to be seen as a nice to do and is always first for the chop - even though we rely on it for export; tourism; mental health; employment; damn, culture is a reason to be alive. It shapes the type of world we live in. Without it, what …..is the meaning of life? And in elections, we shouldn’t be pleading for the very fundamentals of being alive, we should be voting for the type of society we want to live in. But even in putting together this episode, it felt like we were putting together a fluffy episode when the issues of the day and of the election are (rightly) housing and health. So how do we make culture a priority issue for voters and ensure it’s fron

More and more young women we speak to appear to be voting for Sinn Féin. Is this a sentiment the broader political and media establishment has overlooked? What explains the Sinn Féin surge? In this bonus episode, we chat about what we think is behind Sinn Féin's rising popularity in the polls, and whether or not it'll make a difference as #GE2020 progresses. Plus, we take a straw poll at Andrea's nail bar in Dublin to hear what young women there think about Sinn Féin.

As the general election campaign took off, the horrific murder of a teenager brought organised crime into sharp focus as an election issue. In this episode, we discuss crime and punishment, and how political parties approach the issue. We talk to Marcus Keane from the Ana Liffey Drug Project about drug policy, and Social Democrats candidate for Dublin Central, Gary Gannon, joins us in studio to discuss tackling the causes of crime, rather than just the end result. Also in this episode, we bring you our first Voter's Voice - a young, professional, Dublin renter - and we digest the campaign news and bring Get In The Sea to GE2020.

It's election campaign time, which means for the next month Una and Andrea will be covering the general election, but a little differently to everyone else. No doses, no debates, no clickbait. We want to talk about big ideas and issues. We kick off our first election special with the king of campaign ephemera: Alan Kinsella of Irish Election Literature. Alan is in the studio to discuss the semantics of sloganeering. Also on the pod, we outline how we're covering the election and why. There's also devastation in UI HQ over J-Lo's Oscar snub, and Andrea tackles certain tech company tweets, which is extra dangerous ever since she took up axe-throwing.