 Thanks very much for joining us this evening. We're delighted to have you at our latest YPN discussion. My name is Darren Mayardian of the chair of the YPN here at the Institute. This evening we're joined by a great lineup of speakers, experts and commentators to share their views and some of the impacts that COVID-19 is having on the economy, on arts and culture, and on sport. The format for this evening is going to go as follows. We'll begin with some opening questions to our panelists. They'll each give initial responses about five or seven minutes or so. We'll then move on to a bit of a discussion between ourselves and then we'll open it up to the floor. If you want to get involved in the discussion, please do so using the Zoom Q&A function. And also if you want to get involved in discussion on Twitter, you can do so using the handle at IEA. We're going to record the full session this evening and then throw it up on our YouTube afterwards so you can watch back if you need to. Let me just now quickly introduce our speakers. Of course we have Ken Early, Ken is co-presenter of the second captain's podcast. He's also a columnist with the Irish Times. For those unfamiliar with the second captain's is the sports and co-deferred podcast. The second captain's world service is the third largest podcast in the world on Patreon with approximately 12,000 subscribers. Next is Nadine O'Regan. Nadine has found a presenter of My Roots Are Showing, which is an interview-based podcast focusing on arts, culture and politics. She's taken up a new and exciting role as editor of The Business Post Magazine and she's also head of podcasting with The Business Post. Throughout 2019, she's presented The Business Post's Coronavirus Ireland podcast. She's a country authority radio and she was previously presented with Phantom FM and Today FM. And lastly then we have Barra Rountry, Barra's an economist with the Economic and Social Research Institute. His work at the SRO focuses on taxation, welfare and pensions. He's been very active in examining the impact that COVID-19 has had on unemployment, consumption and tax in Ireland. In 2020, Barra won the prestigious Barrington Medal, which was awarded by the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. That's the SS-OI-S-OI. It's great to see an organization that has an even more complicated acronym than the OII-EA. You're all very welcome this evening. Thanks very much for taking the time to join us. And Barra, we'll start with yourself, I suppose, on the economics side of things. We've seen the economic impact of COVID-19 across all sectors, but can you talk to us maybe just in terms of this audience, its specific impact on younger people? Yeah, sure. And I might throw up a few slides just to give you, because I think much of what I'm going to say won't necessarily surprise you in terms of the crisis as disproportionately hit young adults. But I think it's the extent to which that is true that is really important. And that's something which I certainly find difficult to express in words anyway, but it's easier to express in pictures. So just to show you a little bit about, a little bit on this topic. So first up, what I want to start off by just going to outline is that the pandemic has really hit youngest workers hardest in terms of the job losses. So if we're to take those people who were in work back at the end of last year, and we're to express the number of claims there's been for the pandemic unemployment payment, that's the new job seekers payment people have been able to claim if they love work with the pandemic, you can see that, you know, that suggests that about 60% of the people's voices in kind of the start of May end of April, but 60% of 18, 19 year olds had lost their job, almost half of 20 to 24 year olds, about 27% of 25 to 34 year olds. And then for the older age groups, it's all about 22%, 21%. And, you know, I think just it's really striking just how much the brunt of this crisis in terms of job losses has fallen on younger workers. So more than 50% of those aged 18 to 24 compared to about a fifth of those over 20, over 25. So really the crisis has fallen there. And I think there's reasons to be seriously concerned about that into the longer run. And the first reason I think is that this group has been, you know, they're also hit hardest last time. And so here this isn't dated from Ireland was actually something in feature in the Financial Times this weekend, which excellent if you've been going on today, I think it was the title is the Recessionals. But essentially what it shows is that the financial crisis in the US is disproportionately affected millennials, affected everyone. But in terms of employment and earnings, which are shown there on those charts, for millennials, it fell by most of the course of the crisis relative to where you would expect their earnings to be, earnings fell by about 15% employment by about 10%. And it's taken the best part of 10 years to recover. And so we're getting back kind of to where we were, and where would you expect to be in terms of employment, not not in terms of earnings, though earnings are still about 10% lower than you would expect from millennials, less so for those from the previous one, which Generation X and Baby Booners even even, you know, they weren't as affected as much when the crisis hit, and they recovered much more quickly. So I think that kind of gives additional concern for why we should be worried about the fact that this crisis is hitting young adults so much. And the other thing in my mind that makes me particularly worried is that we just know that younger workers are more likely to be renters. Again, that's not particularly shocking, but I think here I'm just outlining what proportions of young workers in those age bands I showed you previously live and rented accommodation. And you can see for those below the age of 44, it's just much, much larger. So, you know, the youngest age group 18, 19, many of them are living at home, so it's only about 17%. But for those in their 20s in particular, you're talking about, you know, between, you know, over a third, probably an average, you take those, the 2024 and 25, you say, to 30 group together, you're talking about well over a third, living and rented accommodation. And for me, that raises particular concerns because, you know, those are people who face the highest housing costs. We know that from lots of work that's been done. And we know that those housing costs are going to remain, even if those jobs aren't coming back for a good long time. And so that's point something makes me really worried too. So to express that another way, you know, essentials, which can't be shifted, and they are primarily housing costs, but also things like groceries, they make up a much larger share of spending for renters than owner occupiers. So that's what I'm showing here on this graph. This is just the share of total expenditure made up for colored and green essentials, again, mostly groceries and housing costs. The reds bar is restricted items. So eating out, drinking out in pubs, that stuff that you can't do at the moment, or couldn't do at least up until a week or two ago, and still might be hesitant about doing. And then other is just the residual, the rest of the stuff. And you can see private renters, essentials make up almost half of all their spending. That's the same for, you know, it's a little bit less, but about the same kind of ballpark for other renters. There are people say renting local authorities or approved housing bodies. For owner occupiers, it's much smaller. It's about a third. And so for me, that raises a big issue in that simply those who have more, most likely to have lost their job and to being affected in terms of the crisis, in terms of their job, are least able to weather. They're least likely to have the highest housing costs. They also have the least stocks of wealth to enable them to, you know, cushion out that what might be a year or two years, who knows, shock. And so that's something that makes me quite worried. And so I just want to kind of, I think I'm knitting that all together. I think, you know, the reason that economists particularly are so worried now about job losses is that there's a really big body of evidence that's merged, and that's 20 years or so, that's shown that job losses have these scarring effects, what they're called, on later life outcomes. So it's not just that, you know, people may be losing their job or tend to be in bad situations, and that's why they lost their job. This is, if you look at the effect of recessions, where a load of people lose their job at the same time, or a factory closes down, and you trace through what happens to these people when they lose their jobs, we know that their earnings, employment, and education are going to be much lower up for, you know, 10, 20 years after that there's really long run impacts on average for people who lose their jobs, but not only just that. Even in terms of criminal convictions, there's been evidence to suggest that, you know, if you leave school when times are bad and there aren't any jobs around, you're far more likely to be charged with a crime in the future. Also divorce, you're far more likely to end the divorce. So these things matter, losing your jobs matter. Other reason I think this matters is because I think it's really likely to exacerbate existing inequalities, all sorts of existing ones, but the one that I want to just kind of pick up on before finishing is wealth. So we know home ownership rates have plummeted for young adults, and I'm not really again sure that we kind of quite realize the extent to which that's true. So for those who are aged 25 to 34, back in 1991, 68% of them owned their own house through mortgage or outright. That's fallen to 30% by more than half, so it's kind of absolutely collapsed in terms of home ownership. And that really matters just to link back to kind of what I've been showing you, in that owner-occupiers face those lower housing costs. They're also less likely to have been affected by a job loss or pay cut. And that means they're more likely to be able to be in a position where they continue accumulating wealth over the next year or two. We know from stats that the central bank can put out and others that deposits in banks around Ireland are going up. People, those who have money are saving it because they've not been really suspended off. There's whole swathes of the economy that are shut down. So given that I think what we're likely to see at the end of this crisis is both an increase in intergenerational wealth inequality in terms of those people who are lucky enough to be in positions that own their own house. They're going to have accumulated more assets and more wealth, whereas those who aren't are going to have still been paying rent through it. And there's quite a lot of people who are very far away from being closed owning a house. And so even if property prices fell a bit, it doesn't really matter. They're not that close to it. So I think it has a real potential to open up that intergenerational divide, which was existing before. But also I think it has a potential to open up to exacerbate even within a generation. There are those people, such as myself, who haven't, our job hasn't really been affected so much by this crisis. We're still able to work from home. We're able to remote work. There's lots of people who aren't in that position. And I think they're the people who are really going to bear the brunt of this crisis. And given the effects that we know, that again job losses have on people, I'd be very concerned about that. Not to round it off by cementing the economists' role as the Disney of science. But the thing that actually makes me most of what we've seen in terms of data coming out in recent weeks is one from the CSO. And that shows that young adults have actually gone from being the most likely to report high overall life satisfaction at 50% of them two years ago in the last survey that was done to the least likely, only 10% of them. And kind of, you know, when you look at what's going on, it's not really kind of surprising that's happening. And I think people kind of know it, but that does really raise questions about what are we going to do about it? And what are the consequences of this if we don't do something to address it? So I'll leave it there on a kind of a dismal note, but I think hopefully not to start it off too depressing, Stephen. Thanks, Barra. Yeah, well I can't get much more impressed than that, I'd say. You know, lovely, lovely nice up-beats start to the evening. Nadine, you've the you've the rescue now after Barra. Coming to you from the... I don't know where to go from that. Honestly, I mean that's such a great summation of where we're at really clear and really crystallized for me. That central point which is that the people that are already wealthy and that are already in a particular demographic will continue to be wealthy and continue to sort of get their way through this sort of COVID crisis era. It's been really difficult to watch on and see how people in their 20s are suffering. They're suffering actually from loss of opportunity. Loss of the capacity to be themselves. Like I talk to people all the time who are in different professions like acting, theatre, music. There's so many bands out there who are on the cusp of, you know, they've just signed deals and they sign deals with record labels in the last a year or two. This was going to be their year, their album was going to come out. There are debut authors whose books either emerge in the middle of the pandemic and the bookshops were closed and nobody heard, nobody read their books or their books have been delayed until 2021. I was talking to a books publicist today and she said that autumn is going to be busier than ever for them because they have a lot of books now and that may sound like a very positive situation. Oh, there's tons of books coming out in autumn and the bookshops will be open. The reality is for people that those little authors who were going to try and make it in the sort of spring months, which is the month, these are the months where debut authors generally speaking are given a bit of a chance, they're going to be squashed by the big autumn books, the Christmas bestsellers. So you won't hear about them particularly because if you do go into a bookshop or you do order online, you'll buy that author who has that big book out in October, November that you want to buy for your dad for Christmas or you want to buy it for yourself and those are the kind of authors that will continue to do well. And of course we're looking at a situation where theaters are closed and we're trying to reopen, we're seeing a lot of obviously virtual theater and then there's productions. For example, I did an interview with Ed Guiney from Elements and Elements are the production house who would have brought you like really big award-winning films like Room for example, Emma Donahue's Room but also Normal People which was such a huge hit and RTE but one of the things that Ed said was that they finished the production of Normal People by the skin of their teeth and they were supposed to be going into production for Conversations with Friends which is Sally Rooney's other book or first book and if you think about it, so many of the scenes like how would they manage with social distancing, how would they block the scenes, how would any of it be possible. So you know there are an awful lot of productions that will be halted and then there are books that are optioned that you know at any one time Elements has about 30 books on its slate that may or may not go into production and probably every year maybe two or three of those books could go into production and now this is just again this huge sort of cessation of activity is what we're seeing and at the same time we have a new government, we have a new minister handling a brief that is so long that I just keep wanting to call her the minister for fun but Catherine Martin is obviously the minister for Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Grail Talks and you could add I don't know everything else besides I mean it's like she's doing everything and for some people particularly people who care about the arts that's hard to hear because of course we want to think that the person who's being put in charge at the moment of the arts would have a portfolio that was maybe a little bit more concentrated purely on the arts as it's difficult of course for everyone who's who's also sandwiched in as part of that brief but as we know we've looked at you know this the situation around I suppose loss of opportunity but the fact is Ireland pays great lip service to its artists we regularly quote Yates, we talk about Beckett, we love James Joyce but when it comes down to it how much money do we actually give artists? We don't actually give artists very much money and then sometimes the kind of funding we do allocate to them we sort of make them jump through strange hoops to get it so it's been really interesting to note in the Covid era that there were other countries for example Germany or Scotland who have simply allocated financial resources to their artists and they've said to them make art but unfortunately what happened in Ireland some months back was artists were told to apply for one-off amounts of funding totaling around 3 000 where they would create sort of almost like social media videos of what they do so for example a musician could do a performance on Facebook and he would get his three grand but what if you were a lighting designer how can you be a lighting designer and have the theatre closed and not be able to to do your work but you can't kind of light stuff on Facebook for a video that people aren't going to pay or they're not going to give you funding for that so it felt like some people in the arts were able to apply for funding but other people weren't able to apply for funding so there's a lack of I suppose equal opportunity there for artists so I think just for me I'm really concerned I understand that of course I mean I present the coronavirus Ireland podcast I listen every day to stories of vaccines and genuine serious issues that are affecting people in this country but the one thing that I would say about the arts that we can't forget is that the arts nurtures us in terms of our mental health and well-being and if we don't have things like opportunities to go to the theatre or to take in cinema if we lose the opportunity to make art in the way that we should be able to do then that will have a substantial effect on our mental health that will create a situation where we're more likely to be depressed we're more likely to struggle in our relationships and everything is plays into the same situation which is a very long reality particularly for younger people coming up and you know finally I suppose just just coming back to what Barry was saying you know I do feel like when I look around and I I see who is suffering most in this particular COVID era I think the over 70s and the under 30s are the two demographics that I really worry for because the over 70s have huge health concerns every time they step outside the door and the under 30s they can't go in J1s they can't travel to other countries to seek out professions they can't enter into the kind of jobs that a lot of us would have been able to enter into early in our careers to get the experience to move on to better things so I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we really strongly need to look both at the arts and particularly the under 30s because you know this is the beginning of what could be a really difficult time for people in terms of their mental health and that may have very long lasting repercussions for them so I would be very worried it is bleak it is bleak it is bleak two or four speakers painting a very bleak picture Ken and if we move on maybe just to specific topic for you maybe just focusing on football you know we saw lots of competing self-interests come into play when it came to the return of football and you know television money sporting integrity what have you made of how it's sort of returned from me to be playing host doors and how do you think it's going to sort of pan out as in terms of squashing this season and then starting the next season well the football across most of Europe is now sort of back up and running and not as normal obviously because there's no fans at the games and almost all the leagues and Ireland hasn't restarted yet July 31st I think it's the it's the start I mean what happened was although in some countries for instance France and the Netherlands it's been cancelled all together until next season they made that decision at the end of April sort of at the peak of the just after maybe the peak of the the crisis in those countries in terms of deaths and hospitalizations and so on and much of the annoyance I think of a lot of the clubs in those countries who felt that maybe a bit more time event Germany was the country that sort of led the return because they had managed the situation a little bit better than some of the other larger countries and then once they were playing football it sort of seemed as though well you know we can do this we can do this too so the other major league Spain England Italy eventually followed suit and really the thing that the main reason why they're all back even though there are no fans there and so on is is the need to fulfill television contracts the need to deliver television content which is what they get paid for I mean in Ireland it's been a different case you know as the TV money is comparatively negligible so gate receipts are in which bigger share of revenue if you don't have fans you don't have an economically viable league so it's taken longer to sort out you know how are we going to actually pay for this when it returns the actual return itself was quite controversial like there was a debate initially over the kind of morality of of this you know is it right to be playing football in the pandemic people are dying there's the issue of the safety of the players there's the issue of whether the players are equally at risk are players from certain ethnic groups more at risk is the question of the justice of the voting scarce testing resources to testing footballers that in order to be able to play matches and so on and then also the more football specific question of whether it was right to play the game without supporters you know this the slogan being football without fans is nothing is you know it's it's like a kind of an ultra slogan and you know the fans are obviously the people who give this meaning who provide the atmosphere the excitement the sense that that this is something important they're also the ones who pay for everything so how can you really play this game without those people there the answer is it turns out that football will happily go on without fans if that is the only way to collect the tv money people have been watching it on tv even though it's been bad some games have had record audiences you know they have fake noise i mean it turns out that most people prefer fake noise most people even though it's horrible would rather have a fake comforting familiar soundscape than the real empty alienating one that that people at a game are actually hearing i mean in terms of what's actually been different about the game since it's since it's returned you know there are minor technical points which are of no interest you know you don't have lots of angry people shouting at the players so you know you've seen a slightly more patient slightly less hurried, calmer, more composed type of game the biggest difference the the only really significant difference has been the sudden politicization of the game i mean it's not so you know politics has always been absent from football so i mean football particularly in england has always been part of a kind of ongoing culture war traditionally it's been an easy way for right wing media to demonize a successful young working-class man you know look at how these trash spend their money and the soldiers should be getting footballers wages you know that kind of thing and so when the pandemic showed everything down and it should be noted actually in england the the league cancelled itself before the government made the decision you know the league was ahead of the government the league eventually was like you know we can't do this a matter of ourselves got coronavirus this is crazy they haven't told us to stop but we feel like we have to so they did within a couple of weeks he had the health secretary in the uk matt hancock saying you know footballers need to stop with money to help pay for the nhs um you know a weird intervention from him but it's always sort of been popular to sort of point the finger at them and say oh they got too much money and you know they're they're mainly young working-class guys they did eventually come forward with an initiative called players together um part of which is supporting or or payments to the nhs but by the time this league resumed it was a couple of weeks after the killing of george floyd obviously you had these massive protests in full swing um all over europe all over the united states and the players decided that they wanted to show their support for black lives matter and so we've seen since the players since the premier league came back we've seen players are wearing black lives matter logos on their on their kit and at the beginning of every game they've been taking the knee you know they've the whistle goes and all the players take the knee you know some of them are giving the race fists salute and this is a really radical change for a league that has always tried to be you know blindly apolitical above like above and beyond politics in order to not to alienate any possible customers i mean of course it actually represents a very specific politics the premier league you know it's it's like nakedly capitalistic it's sort of globally oriented it generates huge wealth which then gets divided in massively unequal ways and does all this it's sort of a model of this kind of thinking it's like well of course things go that way i mean how old shouldn't be why you know why why should the the lower you know within the actual premier league itself there's a certain equality of distribution because they do still recognize at some level that like the bottom teams have to have some money uh or you're gonna have a league which is of no interest to anyone to watch but that's you know that's what the league kind of represents the point is that they haven't allowed players previously to to demonstrate to express political views before um you know on occasions when players have done that they've been fined and now obviously since since this has been happening on this mass scale at every game this organized way there has been a media backlash to this you've got some of the media and you guys saying you know Black Lives Matter and Marxist revolutionaries and Black Lives Matter anti-Semitic and then more generally you know sports and politics shouldn't mix echoing this similar kind of culture where you've had the United States you know this sort of shut up and dribble you know saying you know why i turn on sport i want to watch sport i don't be lectured but you know you know the the issue actually come up in a in a parliamentary hearing where the chief executive of the Premier League was was being questioned by these MPs and he was getting kind of uncomfortable and he was saying stuff like look you know we're we're in favor of like the sentiment Black Lives Matter you know like you know obviously we're for that you know while trying to it appears sort of sidestep or back away from some of the more specific political aims you know like defund the police we're not sure you know no it's not anywhere the police you know this kind of stuff so you can see the league already is thinking you know we're we're we feel like we're on ten eyes here but it's difficult for them as far as i can see to to roll back from an initiative that has come from the players you know it's the what we've seen the the lesson i guess it's the players and many of the coaches are more progressive than the administrators and the media i guess you know which which is reflecting i suppose the generational divide that's become pretty evident in UK politics over the last few years you know you haven't you haven't seen i'm not aware of anyone in the in the Premier League say who's been saying oh you know i don't want to wear a mask you know masks are you know but what's all this about masks you know it hasn't happened like they've just been saying well of course you know we'll reduce the chances of infection i mean not all allow them wear the mask with no sticking out but you know i haven't seen anyone make a point of saying oh this is ridiculous my freedoms you know you know in terms of the long-term effects of of this it's hard to it's hard to really predict but it is it's impossible to see how the Premier League can now object in principle to political expressions and complications therefore seem likely to arise you know as as people say there are things and you know will the return of fans then play a part in this you know you can see you might have seen James McClain the Irish player complaining this week that no one showed him any solidarity when when he was being abused for being Irish and so on and so without getting into the the particular merits of McClain's case there i think it is clear that the abuse for him that he suffered over years does reflect a reactionary current in the in the support there you know it reacts it reflects this you know not everybody going to football match in England is of is of the same mind as say the players appear to be on the issue of Black Lives Matter it'll be interesting to see that just how the fans then interact with this as they come back and you know longer term just just to wrap up i don't it's obviously hasn't been good for the the sports the the nothing about this has been good this long layoff this undignified rush back the kind of it's so blatantly being a money grabbing exercise you know the sort of the football without fans is nothing but like you know actually we're still going to do it um the fake crowd noise the the big empty stadiums like the sense that the sense when you watch these games that you're wasting your life in a very you know in a very real sense it's like why am i doing this what's gone wrong in my life that has resulted in me watching this nonsense is there nothing better i could be doing you know and i think lots of people are kind of being confronted with that decision and and maybe thinking well there are other ways i can spend my weekend you know like the story of football particularly the Premier League over the last 30 years has been like uninterrupted success growth almost uninterrupted a couple little speed bumps but generally speaking the direction of travel has been upwards and fast but you know nothing grows like that forever and you do wonder um you do wonder how there if if this period and some of the things that have happened are going to do some some long-term damage i don't necessarily mean the the i don't mean the political aspects um in in the united states for instance you'll get lots of conservatives who will say well you know i don't watch it anymore because of politics you know it's it's it's ruined everything i don't i don't agree with that i actually find it makes it a lot more interesting in fact it makes them if anything more interesting as a as a spectacle but you know in america you've got the example of baseball a sport that has declined a sport that everybody used to play and that sort of forgot its audience a bit the audience aged and the same with the audience of football has aged and now it's a sport that's really only popular in in you know retirement villages and nursing homes that's that's what happens when you take your eye off the ball for for a couple of years things went fast so um yeah i'm not saying everything's at that at that point yet but it has been pretty traumatic few months thank you very much for that um we're just there's a couple of questions coming in already if you just want to keep submitting them through we'll get to them just want to do a little bit of a chat now and i suppose can't picking up on the sporting point that you were just touching upon is you know the european championships the euros final was supposed to be something gone and it was going to be the first european championships that happened all over europe and rather than having a dedicated house country mean of all the years for that to be the plan that's still the plan as far as i understand it for next year how do you how do you see that going obviously it's very hard to predict us and you know teams traveling all over europe for an international tournament next summer the plan has always been a really bad plan i mean the plan was never a plan you know the the only reason they had to go with this plan was that they couldn't get anybody to actually host this tournament you know they were trying to look they first of all they've increased the size of the tournament to 24 teams from 16 24 teams there used to be 18 teams you know so he really you know eight was maybe too small 16 was it seemed like enough but they've boosted to 24 now you've got a tournament that's so big you know you can afford to host it you know Germany France that's it you know i mean that you know the turkey was kind of looking at well are we interested in this you know they were like well they ended up saying well why don't we just have it everywhere uh we can fly around you know there won't be any problem with that you know we live after all in the age of air travel we live in the age of the age of chigar travel of planes just blasting around everywhere leaving you know vapor trails across the skies crisscrossing the skies of europe to go to football matches you know back who why don't we have matches in back who why don't we why don't we fly wales supporters thousands of miles out to back who to watch a european championships match this hands you know obviously it was a terrible idea but you know this time last year it looked like it was going to be a terrible idea just because it was so grotesque in terms of like people's sort of sense that maybe climate change is going to be a problem you know for us like maybe this is kind of maybe this is really insane what we're doing here maybe it's like how like how do we everything this was a good idea but in in fact it's a bad idea because well well we all know why so it got cancelled and it's it's it's supposed to happen next tune but you know who can like no one knows no knows what's gonna happen they'll try and they'll try and squeeze it in because there's a lot of money riding on it you know they've they've they've sold the tv the contracts the same way as the leagues have it's the same problem so they need to have the the tournament vote whether they're going to be able to have it no nobody knows yet and barra just like herself i mean you obviously painted a bit of a bleak picture in the on the economics sort of things and there's much talk no one knows bleak as kens as it turned out but yeah i don't know kens a bit bleak or again you know got progressive because we went on and in terms of the geloy stimulus what what what do you think of that i mean obviously the uk you know we we look across the water all the time and see what they're up to and they've they've done a big sort of stimulus package and that's got the different sectors in oil and talking how do you expect the geloy stimulus to go and what areas do you think need to break yeah so we probably look across the narrow water too too often and not far enough across to the larger waters either to our west or east enough but get you know it looks like there's going to be some announcements next week who knows how big they're going to be um there's a real issue of should you be stimulating the economy at this point or should you just be still trying to protect people's incomes um so it's not clear that it's necessarily the right time they might call it a stimulus but who knows if it is or isn't but you know there's there's there's real uncertainty about that like you know one of the issues things that's been talked about one of the things that they did over in the uk was to give people think 50 percent off take no not takeaways 50 percent off eating out in restaurants um but I mean that's kind of precisely exactly the type of thing that we're not really sure is it all right yet and is that the type of thing we should be encouraging at that point or should we be saving that up for some future points in a few months times and just focusing on protecting people's incomes it I mean it is a tricky one because there is no right answer um and everything so uncertain but uh to the extent that what what can we do I mean there's there is probably more that can be done to support the incomes of people or to target just both incomes borders in better ways so at the moment it's quite broad brush and they made a quite broad brush because they wanted to get the money out there and get out there quick and they did that very well I mean actually if you want to compare us to kind of across the wall on that front you know we announced our wage subsidy we announced our pandemic and employment payments after the British government have announced theirs and we got to pay much quicker a few weeks beforehand so you know there was a virtue to doing that but now we're in a position where okay if you are worried about targeting then maybe there are certain groups you want to focus on and in my mind the clear group that you want to focus on is renters and that you know that's really going to think become an issue in the coming months there might have been a build-up of barriers um but in part I think that's likely to be down to the fact that you have people who are on the pandemic and employment payment but as that as level of that come down then I think you are into a situation where you need to try focus forward towards people in the US and renters are in your group that that stand out on that front for me anyway and the Dean you mentioned you know in particular looking at other countries you mentioned Germany's approach to supporting artists I mean is there anything in particular that you think that artists are looking for out of this package and you know that that long ministry that you mentioned and that Catra Martin's now in charge of you know what prospects and hopes do you have for for the deliverance and and and supports for artists well I think there's a perception that at the moment organizations are being supported over artists so for example the arts council you know continues and and some of the the bigger organizations that have always gotten their funding they are getting funding to continue and it's their job to sort of distribute the funding if you like and that's sometimes a little bit uncomfortable for some artists to see and because you know artists who for example have always applied for funding some artists are really good at applying for funding and they're maybe not actually that popular I hate to say this but I mean that's still they're not something they're not worthy in their own way but maybe they're really really good at applying for funding okay and then there are other artists who are authors or musicians or you know people that whose names you would know right who play wheelins who who publish books that you love and who are on less than 20 grand a year you know they're on the lower income but they didn't apply for funding because maybe they didn't believe in it or maybe they thought they could manage on their own but because they didn't they're now not within this bracket of this kind of coterie who had applied for funding and the government have said okay these people that applied for funding they're going to get their funding even if they don't do that festival or if they don't deliver this thing in quite the way that we thought they were going to and there's this whole suite of artists who are outside that bracket who are very genuine artists who are really talented who didn't use the kind of that safety net of the arts council and I think there probably is a problematic divide between these two types of people these this within the bracket arts council people and the outside the bracket the the bands who you're excited about you know there was an article in The Sunday Times last weekend which described how much money a band called The Fontaines DC who who just about to release their second album were paying themselves you know from their from their collective income per year and it was really really small and you know the the article was a tiny bit like I don't know snare is probably the wrong word but it you're pointing out somebody's income when you don't earn terribly much and you're a popular band like it's it shouldn't be I don't I don't think it's terribly fair and lots of respects uh because it doesn't reflect how people view the band or or the love and affection they have for the band or the band's artistic merit uh so to some extent I think we need to look at how we structure um how we pay people what germany have done in scotland is they they're literally allowing people to apply to continue to be artists and they trust them there's a community there and there's a sense of trust they say go and do your thing and and we believe you know and I know that's a big leap to take particularly for a small country like Ireland uh but you know they have increased funding there was a 25 million increase in Ireland but it pales by comparison to the funding increase that's been the case in other countries and for a country as I've said the punch is above its waist artistically I think we could stand to do more and I hope the new minister will will want to do more Brilliant, can you just come back to yourself on a point you raised about the sort of politicization of sport um you know you mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement I mean one thing I'll just be interested to get your view on is you know that that movement and sort of football's um appreciation of the movement and and drawing attention to it has come when we've seen like really apparent uh instance of racism I mean the Wilfrid Zaha messages the Ian Wright messages the David McGoldrick messages for example I mean what you make of the sort of the contrast between what the sport is doing and what's happening with online abuse Sorry I was on mute uh the I mean obviously those things are they're are really terrible uh they're not really I mean did you see that they had arrested a 12 year old for the Zaha I think it was a Zaha case was some 12 year old yeah similar Kerry actually the the guy who was doing the Ian Wright one was on your teenager yeah and I mean there again like that this this there's a kind of an element of farce to that as well you know like you're talking about 12 year old like what he's written is disgusting like God knows you know how does it how does the 12 year old end up sending this to to a football player at the same time like what do you achieve by arresting a 12 year old you know what I mean it's I don't know like I mean I think that all that all that they can do in football really I mean these these things sort of reflect the wider society football is kind of a small and unrepresentative microcosm of that and all they can do is really is sort of show a lead you know if they're like well this is what we think we should stand for I mean for years and years they haven't been allowed to stand for anything and they haven't been expected to and anybody who's kind of I mean it's not long since Graeme LaSau was it was famous in football it was a famous fact and a ludicrous like a kind of a can you believe that fact that Graeme LaSau you what what is it about Graeme LaSau that he read which newspaper the Guardian he read the Guardian the fact that Graeme LaSau read the Guardian was like this well you know who does he think he is you know he's he's like you know the professor like is reading the Guardian that was the sort of general tone sort of surrounding these these guys so there wasn't really you know they might occasionally say well you know I've up Tory because the tax is lower I don't want to pay tax that was kind of the level of things and obviously that's that's sort of changed quite a lot I mean I think that's a sort of a generational change you can see just just younger people now I think a lot more engaged with a lot of these things there's seems to be a lot more at stake I think then there was sort of in the late 1990s you know I mean there seems to be a lot more you know up for grabs there's a real flux here and also people have the means of expression and and also I guess the pressure to to take a position on things you know what I mean like it's not it's not just it's not simply that you can say things it's like well if you're not saying it why why you not what do you think what no are you not going to use your platform for good you know this kind of thing so it's not just these these sort of 12 year olds writing horrible racist messages you have like a kind of a previously a public you know publishing or broadcasting power that that previously only you had to speak to the media the media had that power they controlled access to that and you know they they sort of mocked anyone who did something crazy like read The Guardian you know what I mean whereas now like Raheem Sterling as he did in December 2019 can directly attack the Daily Mail to an audience which is larger than the readership of the Daily Mail and he can analyze their coverage of something that he's done compared to or it wasn't it wasn't him actually that he chose he chose a black player and a white player in the Man City U teams it was a similar story I think they both like bought a house or some kind of present for their family maybe it was they bought a house or something and in in one case the white player was like oh you know isn't this great like you're what a great lad and the other case was oh this is flash maybe it was a car or something I can't remember exactly and and he was pointing this out but the but the point is that he could do this to like millions and millions of followers on on instagram or whatever whereas previously he just had no way of doing it he might have been sitting there going this really annoys me but he he'd have no way of saying it to to the wider world so and so I guess this sort of change was always you know once once that sort of power became dispersed and the media lost its monopoly you know monopoly sort of control over who gets to speak to the audience then this was this was this change was then always going to follow right thanks for that and just a couple of questions coming in we suppose one of the first questions that came in Barrow was directed to herself it's from Alice and she asks is there any hope for a sessionals um yes well no um there is but I think what more worries me is that it's very difficult to remedy or rewrite some of these things once that they happen so for example like we know some colleagues mined on research investigating what works and what doesn't of of the kind of the the active labor market programs or the training programs that we spend money on and we spent a lot of money on programs that we know don't improve the outcomes of people around them so you know the community employment scheme for example a great scheme provides lots of social good but does very little in terms of the the getting people back into the labor market which is it's you know supposed purpose it's probably not its actual purpose now but it's what we kind of you know we we mark it down as one of our active labor market policies similarly the back to education allowance actually there's been you know research on and that which shows it's not particularly effective but on the other hand there are there are things that we do know that work and it's worth hopefully maybe expanding them or maybe they do offer some opportunities so for example that the post-leaving course is you know we you know the amount of space in the media that's dedicated to talking about the leaving start would sicken you any day of the week but in particular I think when that goes on when you know not everyone by any means goes goes on to higher level but also that you know further education can do so much and does so much and we know that it is very effective and yes you know it doesn't get any of the coverage that that that higher education does so I think you know there is scope for things like that and you know if we are to do things like retrofit homes to make them warmer or less leaky in terms of heat maybe there is scope for being able to retrain people from from areas outside of that but it's going to be a long and arduous and difficult task and we don't have the best tools available at the moment and we're going to it's going to be really challenging to ensure that we do get those in place. Brilliant and Nadine the question directly to you is from Fiona and he asks what's being a favorite artist the output of the pandemic crisis and do you have any good book recommendations? Guys I've been reading yeah there's so many good books at the moment I'm in the middle of the new John Boyne book which is out in a couple of weeks and I've also been reading for nonfiction the Mary Trump book which is she's the niece of Donald and she's taken it upon herself a pre-election to write this book she's also a clinical the psychologist so she's she's giving us kind of the inside of Donald Trump's brain as as revealed by a member of his actual family and it's very interesting actually in the prologue she says essentially that prior to him becoming president first time around the whole family took a decision not to talk about him because they just thought you know family loyalty and all that but now they're like oh my god somebody must speak so she's decided to break her silence so that book came out just well I got a copy of it just in the last few days so but in terms of books that I have read over the pandemic period in terms of novels well the debut by Nisha Dolan exciting times is great it's very in the vein of Sally Rooney if you're into Sally Rooney I'd highly recommend it there's a book called My Dark Vanessa which is a really fascinating take on the Lolita Nabokov's tale because it actually completely I suppose brings us to the the very it sort of throws up what a problematic book that actually is which of course something that we've come to realize over years but it takes the story of a very a young girl who was abused by her teacher at school but didn't categorize it or see it as that and is now an adult and is still struggling to deal with what happened to her as a younger person and it is one of the best written books of the year I started reading it and could not you know couldn't tear myself away from it it's just a really really absorbing sometimes difficult but ultimately absolutely mesmerizing novel and then Karolina Donahue the new the Irish author has a new book a Degney book now but it's coming out in August in paperback and it's called scenes of the graphic nature and it's really good to study for friendship in Ireland and there's so many more gods but if you're talking about Black Lives Matters Movement there's a book called Such a Fun Age which is by an author my name is Kylie Reed and she is just fantastic the book is the story of a young black babysitter who brings her charge to a supermarket and gets apprehended by security guards there because they think that she's kidnapped a child and she explains to them that this is in fact the child that she's babysitting but they're having absolutely none of it and the book kind of on schools from there it's it's really brilliant but yeah just in terms of albums then the new Fontaine's DC album is brilliant it's coming out at the end of the month also what else Moza Sumney if you like kind of a soul r&b electronica absolutely brilliant there's a band whose name i always get wrong and i'm going to give it a try um but i put the words in the wrong order they're called rolling coastal blackouts fever or else rolling blackouts coastal fever anyway they're amazing they sound like the smith but for the modern day like they're a Melbourne band and they've just released their second album i could go on there's loads of recommendations there i'm really interested to hear to read that uh trump book i think it'd be really interesting yeah another question that's come in from on is and just the thing about lockdown in general that you know people have used the lockdown as a time for reflection and they've come back with sort of new perspectives and approaches to their work just this is a question across the board for everybody what's that what you can is there anything that you've sort of picked up from the lockdown and that would change your approach to how you've how you how you do your work um you don't really need an office i mean it's handy to have one but it's quite expensive to have one as well so do you need one um so that's that's one thing i mean i don't know like it has been i also feel like a bit sort of um burned out at this point like i kind of feel like i don't know i mean the first the first month of it was just kind of very anxious time couldn't really you know it didn't really sort of concentrate on much or you know nadine's there i'd like talking about all these books and stuff and i found i just couldn't read anything apart from just like i couldn't really cherish yeah it's unbelievable and okay so that obviously changed um and that's kind of just like settled into this boring routine i mean i'm gonna you know complain about it being boring like which is i speak from a position of privilege that it isn't more worrying than it is but it's it's you know it's it's a bit of a grind like it's kind of like oh what are you doing here this is like i don't know so this this is not very helpful thought thoughts to anyone i should have just stopped talking out to the office point actually just on the point of reflection on new ways of doing things for me when we all had to start working from home in march i i just i like to be busy and i i'm really interested in health so i started the podcast um the coronavirus island podcast and i have essentially kind of a studio set up at home in a way because just from my background and radio and from podcasting generally but i remember i rang our health editor mitchell and i was like season let's do like a daily podcast about health and just talk to people and get information out and the funny thing was um it provided such a great structure i think for both of us like starting our day to to accumulate knowledge to bring it to a public like i've we've released 60 podcasts from march to now you know and at one point we were doing it daily you know every single day seven days of the week i honestly think that as much as anything else uh for me it was a way of of putting my need to understand this era into into a format that i love which is audio and podcasting so it hopefully gave other people something but it actually i think gave also a lot as well you know i think that what i found out actually was i'm i'm just not good at like sitting at home uh you know twiddling with homes like if i couldn't i couldn't read like like kind of saying like i really struggled with a book i'd open a book and i just i couldn't focus but for some reason i found audio quite easy uh so that was that was a relief and i think actually in terms of ways of doing doing things differently from now on i've just realized i like as long as i've got some sort of focus i don't need an office at all i just need to be enthused and energized for what i'm doing and once i've got that and once i've gave myself the ability to have the equipment to create something then i'm happy you know but i think it's about finding that and i think for people who have that barrier you know like i was just lucky that i had bought the equipment but for a lot of people are now separated separated from their equipment you know they can't do the thing they love because they can't get into a studio or they can't get onto a stage or if they're an athlete they can't go and do some of the stuff that they were doing in terms of training so it's just really hard yeah no she's great to hear that boat boats and even ken had the same thing you're not being able to read i think the first time first book i got around to actually being able to read was one on the spanish flu in 1918 so that was the first one that i actually managed and that took me about two months to get onto but yeah i had the exact same thing i couldn't concentrate on anything that wasn't kind of intensity related to how many people have been hospitalized that day or the economic impacts and again it was very privileged to be able to have clouded that energy and diverted attention into doing stuff on that whereas really i can't imagine well i can't imagine but i think you can see what the results are for probably the vast majority of people who don't have that outlet and whose lives have been just suspended and put on the holes and i think that's precisely one of the reasons why all this is so hard and there being some kind of end point in in sight or some kind of relaxing of things inside is so important yeah yeah and just um nearly finished up now last 40 minutes ken just want to pick you up on something you were saying about sort of the masks and you know it's not a political issue here people are just wearing them because the health professions are telling us to do it whereas we saw only this week i think you know Donald Trump was wearing a mask and it was all this sort of clamour to congratulate him on the fact he was wearing a mask what do you sort of make of the differences of approach you know between europe and the united states and and even you know trod brazil into that mix as well of the approach to the pandemic and how have you seen that i i had a loss to explain it you know it's just like i'm absolutely a lot i mean with in the case of trumpet i would say it's just simply that he thought wearing a mask would make him look weak you know i'm gonna look like a bitch if i wear a mask i think that was literally his thought process so i'm not going to do it and eventually it's like like we have 15 000 infections in a day in florida or something like please put a mask on like this is actually really important now so he kind of eventually and obviously then once he did once he does people are like oh of course you know he's always been in favor of masks you know he was on a mask before anybody you know so okay that's trying to what what's scary more scary than that i find has been the uk and what's going on there just is really strange like i i can't work out anymore you know who's i just can't really figure out why anyone would necessarily be against this i mean i haven't seen any good reasons for it uh it's just crazy like it's just i'm not i know i'm not i'm not contributing much here i'm just saying this is i i do not get it i don't understand i mean here here it strikes me the government has made a bit of a mess of it here because i mean i don't think it's been controversial in the sense that i don't i haven't seen any organized group of people say we're not wearing a mask for you know because for some crazy political reason like it's it's the tyrannical imposition of the government to demand that we do this how do they i haven't seen that i'm sure there's like you know is it not to do with the fact that like the government didn't originally the who did not say that wearing a mask should be mandatory and because they didn't issue that advice governments around the world were hesitant to issue that advice but but in addition because of the lack of personal protective equipment around the world people were worried governments were worried that if they did issue the advice to wear a mask even after the point of the who said actually you should wear a mask they were worried that all the the pp wouldn't be going to nurses or doctors or people in kind of immediate risk zones but that people would be stockpiling and very wealthy people might be stockpiling so there's been this kind of flip-flopping on the issue which is partly to be fair to to the government um to do with first off the who but but then also this this more um i guess subtle concern if you like but if they had pushed this directive out really early on in proceedings what would have happened to the nurses and the doctors um you know i was amazed i don't know did you see that thing where hobby city that donated um event and i was like you know this is like a tv soap has a working kind of equipment and they didn't do it earlier and what um but you know there was just like to be fair to everyone concerned like i i do think that ireland with the exception of the nursing homes which to be honest was was it's just it's it's been really hard to to square if you take away our statistics our general statistics um are one thing but then if you just look at the nursing homes on their own we we really let ourselves and the country down in that respect i believe um but in terms of like general health advice over the past few months i think it has uh been to our good that avicelia vraker as is a medical doctor or was um and for me i feel more protected by being by living in ireland than i would have i mean there's so many of the countries that i'm very glad i'm not in currently and obviously america is you know anywhere in the states is is is just so horrific at the moment and for people who have people in the states it's hard to think about um but yeah i mean i i'm not going to say that like we're perfect that we have done exceptionally well but i do feel um quite protected and i think the mask issue is a fraught one for reasons that go beyond the obvious in relation to the government just just on that i suppose as someone who lived in the uk for six years and managed to start planning and plotting the exit once brexit kind of revealed the true madness that was kind of going on there uh very much on board with the great to be in ireland for this whole thing but i i think in in a way that the real difficult decisions are to come at that like for the last few months it's been kind of you know there's been bits and places where we've kind of gone wrong and or could have done things differently or there was choices for me but it's really in the coming months and hopefully not years but probably years ahead that the real choices start to come come into play and there's you know maybe it's kind of it's i wouldn't like to be in the position of having to make those choices i'm certainly cribbing on from the the sidelines about them but it's it really isn't from now on that i think the big choices and decisions get to be made rather and rather than kind of when the public health emergency is so stark and that's that's going to make the next few months and years both interesting and very tiring brilliant okay look we'll we'll finish up there just at a clock now and just like to thank all of you for joining us and there's really great discussions good questions that came in so thanks again and just to say we'll finish up now for the month of august with our ypn and we'll be back in september with more events i'll just keep an eye on your emails for that thanks everyone again and take care everybody