Luckily, along with @3000Versts, we didn’t try to predict how the Brexit story was going to work out in the days following our get together to record Episode 3 of our podcast on Wednesday.

We’ve both kept an eye on the de Souza case over the past couple of years and still don’t see why someone puts hubris before husband. The issue has been prolonged because the obvious remedy is refused, because someone has a point to make.

Meanwhile, hubris is an entire economy if we are to look at recent IMF reports and note stories that perhaps haven’t made the headlines over recent years. The ‘low tax’ Irish economy is essentially parasitical, sucking in spreadsheet entires that effectively deny tax takes in big economies such as France, Germany and the UK. More on that in previous article below, but global businesses with funds ‘resting in Irish accounts’ is not on such a scale that it can’t be ignored indefinitely – and isn’t.

As if the OECD plans on global tax taking a direct pop at the Irish economic model (and others such as Netherlands and Luxembourg) but the more puzzling threat is in what might just be the final aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and EU. No backstop, but also the UK (as a whole) no longer within the Customs Union, which means East West trade between the Republic and  UK will be subject to all customs and regulatory checks lest there be a threat to the precious Single Market. Not sure that one has been thought through entirely, though we’ll have to wait for the detail….

The Irish economy as a model for Northern Ireland’s future? 

Much of the chatter around the anti-Brexit voices in Northern Ireland, has been around the notion that Northern Ireland will benefit from the “all-Ireland” economy closely alined to the EU.

The all-Ireland economy is a nationalist fiction. It conflates the geography of the island or Ireland with some notion of an integrated economy. That doesn’t stand up to any exploration of facts.

Read more… »

Just before meeting @3000Versts to record our second podcast effort, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party announced he was leaving his role in due course. We consider whether the UUP has any driving sense of purpose.

On lack of purpose we turned to the subject of the Rabble Alliance in Westminster, all powered up and nowhere to go?

We’re at the end of national Party Conference season and there has been one big issue, barely mentioned in the news reports or election pitches, though certainly prominent at the fringe of Conservative Party Conference.

Together with @3000Versts  a new podcast has been created, PoliticalOD because the world needs another podcast (?) and there is always room for a Unionist voice – though we’ll range out of Northern Ireland with a wider and more worldly perspective from time to time. We’ll be local, thinking global.

What else would the first effort be about except “backstop or go”, and whether from the extensive preview of the story of David Cameron by David Cameron enables us to make a determination as to whether he is political ‘Hero or Villain’.

Still ‘experimental’. Think a word or two isn’t quite what was intended here and there – lesson one, no spellcheck. Plus we deliberately aimed at a ‘short’ podcast, 15-20 minutes; almost.

Have a listen. The podcast will also be tweeted out @3000Versts and @thedissenter. Let us know what you think, or join the conversation. Civil discourse only, or Mr Block will intervene.