Gript Livestream, 11th of June

0:08 Hello and welcome to GRIP's weekly liveream. I am your host Fatam Gunning and today I am delighted to be joined by my colleagues Ben Scallan and Gary Kavana. Now we have quite a bit um to discuss this week but I want to start off with uh Ben. You had one of the biggest stories of the week. I think it's fair to say you had a bit of um Harris and Harris drama. Can you talk to us about what happened there? Yeah, the two Harrises that as as some people will have seen last week I published an article on grip.a about the fact that ones yakana for the last several years have been recruiting at ipass centers explicitly. They I I submitted a freedom of information request where I said I'd like to see all of the venues that

0:54 Angardia have been recruiting at since uh 2019 and could you collect all of that information for me? So they did after some back and forth and one of the things that jumped out at me was that several of the venues listed were explicitly labeled as iPass centers and they had it f filed under community outreach to a minority group for recruitment or words to that effect. And so this was clearly part of their diversity strategy. I followed up with their press office and I said, "Could you tell me a bit more about this?" and they said, "Yeah, you know, we we've never hidden this. This is something that we've been quite open about. We've put out press releases about it in the past and it's something we've been doing for a while and we want the GR to more

1:41 accurately reflect the people of the country that they serve and we think that this is a great way to go about that." So, I was interested in this. I thought that uh our readers would be interested in this. So, I went along on Monday and I asked Ga Commissioner Drew Harris if he thought that this was a good idea given that so many members of the asylum seeking pool that we have in this country who are within the IPASS system are not real asylum seeker. They're not real refugees, should I say. They're not actually going to be in the state long term. Many of them will be deported or at least they should be. And so is it really a good use of our state's resources and time to be

2:26 recruiting at these centers when we don't even know if the people we're talking to are going to be in the state six months from now. And he was totally and utterly perplexed by this. He seemed completely gobsmacked and like he had no idea. He looked at me like I had two heads and he said, you know, no, first of all, I have no knowledge that we are holding recruitment sessions. That doesn't sound right. And second of all, refugees cannot become a guard. It's it's not allowed. You have to be an EU citizen or an Irish citizen. And so, uh, that wouldn't make any sense. And then at the end of the briefing, as many people would have seen by now, his own press officer corrected him because there are several criteria. You have you have to be a refugee. So, you actually have to have been granted refugee

3:13 status. So, if you're merely an asylum seeker, you cannot become a guarder. is true uh because you your status is indeterminate but as long as the state has said yeah you're a real refugee you can then go on to become a member of Angardashia and also if you've just lived in the state for a certain duration of time uh that also is a factor so anyway long story short I then asked taught us to Simon Harris if he thought that this was appropriate or a good idea and he said that it wasn't for the reason I just mentioned you know we don't know the status of these people so why are we wasting our time trying to get them to consider a career in ungarddes economy when it might not even be relevant. So anyway, yeah, it's caused quite a bit of a stir. The commissioner was there getting grilled in an erotus committee just last night

3:59 about this uh the there were Shinfane TDs asking him about it and he was correcting the record and clarifying his remarks. So yeah, it seems to have been of great interest to a lot of people who have been listening to it. Yeah, like it just seems to me to be a very peculiar angle to to target people who have, you know, if you're an asylum seeker, you've obviously just come to the country. Like I know there have been cases, for example, that man Kadeima Embu who was um sorry, I think I referred to him in an article as the masturbating menace. Um because he'd basically he'd basically been here for 10 years as an asylum seeker. So look, I've just said that most asylum seekers have obviously probably gotten here quite recently, but it seems like a strange thing because being a member of Angardish Yukana is an

4:46 extremely sensitive role. You know what I mean? And obviously people who come here legitimately and um are granted the right to do so do have the right to work and to earn a living. But I would question if it's appropriate to have people who might not, you know, they don't like in fairness to them, I used to live in Japan and Korea. There's no way in hell I should have been a member of the police force in either of those countries, even though I spoke the language at all because I just don't know about, you know, it's just it just seems to me to be a particularly peculiar angle to take when it comes to recruiting for that sensitive of a role. I I I'm wondering what you think about this, Gary. uh because one of the arguments that the Gard made to their credit was that the full vetting still

5:33 applies and that if somebody applies to join on gardia whether they're a refugee or an Irish person or whoever they are still vetted they look into the person's background and so on to make sure that they're of good character but I would be dubious that they would be able to do adequate vetting of people who are refugees who come from some war torn third world country. What kind of real vetting can you do on that earlier part of their life? I'm I'm not sure that that's adequate, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they have some mechanism for accounting for that. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Well, I think that that really depends on how they handle things internally. And one of the problems we've had with the guards in relation to this kind of stuff is the

6:18 guards are largely immune from FOI responses or requests. So it's very difficult to figure out exactly how the guards are actually doing these things internally. But as you said, you would expect there would be sometimes extreme difficulties with figuring out is this person who they say they are, where did they come from exactly and how the guards are doing their and that makes me wonder, you know, to what extent is this basically just a PR and a DEI exercise that no one actually gets through because they can't pass the vetting or to what extent are these people actually going into the system? But I think that there's kind of two underlying things that I think are quite important here. One is that when we talk about asylum seekers and people coming to Ireland and it seems like the majority of people who

7:04 come to Ireland are economic migrants and without making any kind of moral judgment on that they're people who are coming here for financial reasons and one of the things this government or the previous government in his wisdom did was made it substantially easier for asylum seekers who are still being processed to apply to work in this country. I think they reduced it down to you can apply for the right to work after five months. rather than having to get through the entire process. And that's obviously going to be a draw on people. So I think this stuff all kind of ties into that where it kind of ties to a promotion of effectively false asylum seekers. But the thing I I find quite interesting when we hear Drew Harris say that he doesn't know anything about this is I would suspect that this is coming from the GA HR directive or the um you know

7:50 the people and development section of it. Now that is head headed by a woman called Cook. Now Cook was the head of HR in the PSNI until about 2021. I understand she worked for Harris before that and that Harris kind of brought her over. So if Harris isn't familiar with this, it's she's the most likely person to have pushed for this or to put it in place. Now, we can't know that for certain because we just don't know that information, but that would seem reasonable considering she heads their HR department and their development office. So, how is it that we have something like this which is very sensitive um politically even and also because you know there's a question of of vetting and things like that which is most likely being pushed by the person

8:36 that he brought in personally and yet he has no understanding that it's happening. like you think even just generally Drew Harris should understand how the guards are recruiting people and yet you've had recent stories on on this but also in in sort of the mosques that have been well known in security circles for a period of time as of interest shall we say the sort of things that you you might question why the guards would think it would be appropriate to go there and to to try and hire from these places and to be honest it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense This seems like something that's been done by someone who has no understanding of the actual ground they're standing on. Yeah. I mean, this this this entails a little bit of mind readading on my

9:21 part. I obviously don't know how he felt, but did either of you get the impression from watching his reaction that he thought recruiting in IP pass centers and recruiting refugees into the Guardi was a ridiculous idea. He had a sort of a demeanor where he almost seemed to be saying the the the subtext to me seemed to be like, "Why would we do that? So that would be crazy. Of course, we're not doing that." Like what what kind of lunatic would think that was a good idea? He didn't say those words, but that's the vibe I got. And so no doubt he went back to his office and was told, "Actually, Drew, we've been doing this for years." And he probably spat out his coffee. You know, it it seems like he probably understands even implicitly that this is not really a sensible way to go about running a law

10:06 enforcement organization. I mean, it kind of ties into some of the other stuff we've seen happen with the guards as well, like the massive amount of like um diversity officers and things like that that we've seen pop up in the guards over the last kind of years. They're focusing much more on these areas. But just from kind of Drew Harris's reaction, I I think your reading was right. He looked legitimately kind of baffled at the idea that this would be happening. And I wonder if as he comes to the end of his term or actually I mean he should be gone by now. He's just kind of lost kind of control of where the organization is going in certain things. Um but again I mean you know the guards are are blackbox like it's very difficult to figure out what's going on internally. Occasionally you'll hear things from

10:51 serving members, but it's always off the record and and you know, you're not going to get anything from the press office. So to a certain extent, you basically, as you probably know, you try and tip around the edges to try and get stuff at FOI that they'll actually, and other than that, they're basically impossible to deal with. I I mean this I don't I don't want to put them on blast too hard, but as you know, Gary, because I was corresponding with you about this earlier in the month, uh people might be interested to know that I applied to receive this information by FOI and they finally came back and gave it to me in an absolutely illeible form. It was like they had taken the documents, printed them off, and then really badly

11:36 scanned them to the point where like I've got perfectly good eyesight. I don't need glasses or anything. But you're there squinting. You can barely read what it is. It's blurry. It's smudged. You're like, "What the hell am I looking at?" And so I had to ask them and say, "This is unacceptable. You need to give me a better copy." The the FOI officer on the phone, he said, "No, you're right. It is unacceptable. You know, I I take your point. We'll get back to you on that." And then it was weeks I was waiting to get the actual legible copy to even be able to do the story in the first place, which is technically in breach of the rules because you're supposed to give me the documentation within a certain time frame and giving it to me in a form that I can't consume. And by the way, even when they gave it to me then, it wasn't even they gave it to me in loads of different parts where it was legible,

12:21 but it was split into a whole load of documents that you weren't even able to search. you know, if you do a control F, you can usually look for keywords and find exactly what you want. So, I'm not I'm not saying they did this intentionally, but it was almost as if you were trying to make it as inaccessible as possible. I'm not saying that is the case, but I'm just saying if you tried to make it inaccessible, you couldn't have done a much better job. So, yeah, that's that's the joys of being a journalist and dealing with stories like this. Yeah, I mean, you're right about that. And I remember you sending me over a document and me just go that's that's absolutely unacceptable. Get them, you know, we get them to fix this. But I have in general actually had fairly good relationships with the the GA FOI people. The only problem with them is that just lot of

13:07 place where like no, you can't have anything on that. But I suppose one of the kind of interesting things that comes off this and you were kind of bringing up the point of are the security concerns with um with vetting these people. I think you could also ask the question of when you have people coming into the guards who are foreign nationals and have only just moved to this country and have unknown links back to their their home states. Is that a security issue? like are is there a concern then that these people are going to be given sensitive information or have access to sensitive information and that we should actually be concerned about that and I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying should we be concerned about the amount of high level people who have come in from other

13:54 countries into the guards I mean you have Joe Harris famously from the PSNI Cook is from the PSNI the uh deputy commissioner uh Shauna Coxin she's from Toronto I think um and That's not all of them. That's just the ones who come to mind. And you would think there is there are some legitimate security questions there. Not to cast any aspirations on those people, but just with the general concept that you can bring in people who are not historically tied to the Irish police force or the Irish nation and give them access to the highest levels of sensitive information. And that is not even not an issue, but nearly unquestionable. Yeah. really the only I I can think of a handful of uh politicians we had who had

14:41 the courage to point out that it was kind of ridiculous that we would appoint such a senior uh a figure as a non-national but um yeah know it was not really something that people wanted to bring up because as you say you don't want to cast dispersions on any individuals you don't know I I don't know anything about you know this individual or that individual or their individual character it's more just the principle of the thing And actually on the topic of Shauna Coxin, you might be interested in this Fatima, this is a video which will be dropping later today. So everybody here can have a sneak preview that at the same briefing we I asked another question later in the exchange which we haven't posted yet. It's going out shortly where I asked Drew Harris about this new report on the

15:28 policing strategy that they're going to have for the next couple of years. And in it, it talks about all of these ultra woke ideas which refuse to die like unconscious bias. They're talking about how they need increased diversity within the police so that they can uh avoid unconscious biases towards different identity groups and communities and so on. And for those who don't know, many of us will be familiar with this, but if you're not, what they mean by unconscious bias is that you, as an Irish person, let's say, are subtly subconsciously racist or bigoted towards gay people or foreigners or whoever. And

16:14 you might not even be aware of it. You might think, "Oh, no. I'm not racist. I'm not homophobic or whatever." but deepseated within your core because of cultural factors and so on. You just have this sort of sub subtle animosity and so therefore you can't be trusted to police those communities fairly and that's why we need more guardi from every different type of identity group to try and avoid this. This is effectively the the subtext of what's being said. So I asked Drew Harris and I said is this not a gross insult to ordinary members of Angardia? are you not insinuating that they're all a pack of racists who can't be trusted to do their jobs? And he immediately deferred it to Shauna Coxin. He says, I believe

17:00 Miss Coxin will will have a response for you on that. And she said, uh, I don't know why that's in the report. I don't know the rationale behind it. That wasn't that was written by this commission or this bureau. They put it together and they made a recommendation and this is a common practice for many police forces around the world. They've been implementing these kinds of policies. So you would have to ask them why that's there. I I can't talk talk to the the rationale behind it which was kind of absurd because it was a Q&A about the report. It was there we were launching this report that the Guard unveiled and they said if you have any questions as members of the media you can ask us and we'll be happy to answer it. And then I ask her and she goes what the hell are you asking me for? Ask them. So, but the whole the whole idea

17:46 seems to me to be quite ridiculous because the whole point of application of the law is that it's colorless. So, I understand completely. Look, I'm in the courts a lot and a lot of people coming before the courts do require interpreters because their English level isn't such that they can understand the charges against them. Um, but you know, if for the law to be applied, it doesn't need to have like it doesn't need to wear a turban. It doesn't need to, you know what I mean? It's like the law is the law. It doesn't matter where you're from. It doesn't matter what religion you are. If you're in Ireland, you are subject to Irish laws as they are written on the statute books. That's the end of the story. I I think one thing actually unconscious bias training particularly, they're right that this has become increasingly kind of prevalent. Although I would say actually more five years ago than now because

18:34 initially it was sold as this basically your people are racist and they don't know they're racist so they have to be deprogrammed. And then when they started looking into it more, most of the research found that it actually did nothing to improve things. And there's some really interesting research that actually says it takes people who aren't racist and makes them kind of racist because now all of their interactions with people of different colors and cultures, they feed through this kind of prism of am I being racist? And then they start treating those people differently. So it it turns up a lot in state boards or reports that we see where it be recommended for some NGO or um you know some state board or something and I always just send them the same question of what research do you have that this will make things

19:20 better and are you aware of the research that says it may actually make your people more racist and no one ever does any work on it. They just unthinkingly put it in because there's a certain strain of thought that says this is popular and therefore good. like it's a good thing and uh we you know we don't need to ask about what it's actually doing. I think one of the other um stories that Ben you were going to discuss with us is the circumstances around the Carlo shooting incident. Yeah, that that's a that's a relatively new development now only in the last few hours. Last night there was an Arotus committee meeting and obviously many of us are familiar with the the tragedy that happened in Carlo a couple of weeks ago now where a young man went into a

20:08 shopping center opened fire with a gun uh before ultimately uh he his his own life was ended and uh no nobody else was hurt. I think a young girl tripped and uh had sustained a very minor injury in the panic as everybody was fleeing the scene because shots were being fired but nobody else nobody but him was hit in the in the process and so the uh GA commissioner Drew Harris was there and he was talking about this. I'm wondering Gary you you might be more across the fine details of exactly what was said. I don't want to uh misquote anybody. Yeah. So what we had was we had Alan Kelly um whose sources inside the GI have historically been absolutely top tier. Some of the stuff he's managed to raise

20:54 in the rockus about the conduct of higherups in the GI or certain operations. So he he certainly has some people who are very deeply involved in the GI who are comfortable talking to him about these things. So Drew Harris was was in the Arctis and basically Alan Kelly started asking questions about this young man and um where exactly he got that gun or where he had gotten the guns. So you might have mentioned this Ben, but I missed it. He was in this this chap Evan Fitzgerald was in court last year on firearm offenses and there Alan Kelly was basically questioning it looked like the chap had tried to buy guns on the dark web and had gotten guns and Alan Kelly basically said did the guards provide him with those guns and

21:41 it was a very clear line of questioning of basically had the guards in order you for some reason basically armed this guy and then charged him with the offense. Um, and the commissioner was extremely uncomfortable with that line of questioning. Um, because you know, anything like that, there's always a question of, well, is this fair? Is this enttrapment basically? Um, but this sort of thing does happen. It usually happens in relation to organized crime, anti-terrorism motives, but in this case, the guy doesn't seem to, or at least we don't know he has any connection to those things. to be honest, he just seems like, you know, maybe he was a bit weird or had kind of a focus on firearms,

22:26 but nothing we've seen so far about him other than the fact I suppose he shot up a shopping center, indicated any harm. And even there, he didn't, you know, he didn't target anyone other than himself. So, I think there there's a question now of how exactly, you know, did the guard supply this guy with firearms? How exactly did he come to their attention? And what exactly were they doing? was it appropriate in this um in this sense? And basically we got no answers from the commission on that other than answers that were so specifically worded that it sounded like yeah we may have given them guns but I'm absolutely not going to admit that right now cuz I mean we have we don't know what happened in this instance. We can't say that this is what's going on, but

23:11 it is not unprecedented that in certain countries in the West, we've seen cases where law enforcement agencies I infiltrate or in an undercover capacity will try to nudge people towards doing something illegal with the purpose of then arresting them later. So, we saw in the US, I believe there was a kidnapping plot with for uh I believe it was Gretchen Whitmer and there were these kind of right-wing fanatics who were going to kidnap her and they all got arrested and so on. But after that transpired, it came to light

23:57 that they had kind of been pushed towards that. Not by the way, none of this absolves people of individual responsibility. unless you're kind of an unstable lunatic, you're not exactly going to be enticed to kidnap a politician. So, I think they clearly are responsible for their own actions. But it's just to say that uh you know we know that there have been instances I I mean there was a report I did a couple of years ago about how German police were in the process of creating neo-Nazi and jihadist propaganda from anonymous accounts so that they could suck in people who were going down those rabbit holes and then monitor them or bust them later. So you pose as some

24:42 kind of Nazi terrorist guy and then when some young fellow says, "Oh, I kind of like your ideas." Then you go, "Aha, we got them." You know, that kind of a way. So, uh, this was and they they said they had a whole program within the German police where they the the the officers who were doing this had to be monitored regularly and receive therapy to ensure that they weren't actually becoming radicalized by because if you're there posting extremist content all day, there's a risk that that seeps into your mind and then the the police officer themselves become compromised. So, they had to try and keep an eye on that. Anyway, mental stuff. So, I'm not saying any of that is happening here at all. There's zero evidence of that. But I'm just saying

25:29 that's not like the most outlandish thing in the world. Things like that have happened in other jurisdictions. No. And I mean I mean the UK police were famous for for overstepping the bounds in relation to this kind of thing. They had the spy cop scandal. I think the reviews into which are still ongoing. But I mean there you saw undercover members of the police have children with members of protest groups that they were trying to infiltrate. Just crazy over the line stuff here. I think I think he was charged with two other people with firearm offenses in March of last year and then this seems to be a follow on to it. And obviously the guards are going to face questions about this. Now, I mean, the guards may say, you know, we legitimately thought he was a danger and therefore we acted on this because he

26:14 was looking for firearms. He was doing whatever. So, we stepped in and he was rightfully rightfully charged and this is a tragedy following on from that. But, you know, that's not our fault. We we had to do something. Where I think they may run into trouble there is my understanding is that when um Fitzgerald went for bail on those firearm offenses, the guards did not push back against it and said they had no issue with bail. So if he's dangerous enough that you have to do something like this, why is he not so dangerous that he should be kept off the streets? And it seems like it's it seems like it's just a very strange case, but I would suspect Kelly won't drop this. As I said, Kelly sources within the guards tend to be extremely solid and the mere fact that someone

27:01 leaked this to Kelly would probably indicate that there may have been internal concerns about this and about whether or not it was appropriate. But we'll say it may come out that it it was entirely fine. I will say one thing I found particularly interesting myself is they there has been a review of this from the body that replaced G-S and Pizru. Yeah. And that review has already been completed. Now this is a new body so maybe it works differently than GOC. GOC did not get things done in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Particularly where there was complicated questions or there's question there even if this was entirely appropriate but he was given guns by the guards. There's going to be a lot of of necessity to look at how that happened the policies in place and yet they've

27:49 come back within weeks and said actually there's no place to answer here at all. And I think Kelly himself has said that's a like these things can take years. How did this one get done in what two weeks? Yeah. Yeah. There's one other topic I'd like to bring in if I may and that is the um there's a bill coming before the Shannid this week. It's um it's called it what it is. Um, and if you haven't heard about that, it is a group of activists um, spearheaded by Senator Eileen Flynn who are campaigning to have the term child pornography removed from the Child Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation Act. Um, and I was speaking to Dr. Maggie Brennan who is um a DCU

28:35 academic and has done over 20 years of work with preventative measures um in relation to child sex abuse material which you know it I spoke to her last Friday and it was probably one of the most horrible but also one of the most important conversations I've ever had in my life. Um because she told me and if anyone wants more details that report is on grip. I published it last Friday after I spoke to her. But uh she her with within her advocacy she says that referring to images of children being sexually abused as child pornography creates a false sense of equivalence with adult content which you know obviously is not always

29:21 consensual but I think there is that there is that expectation that when you're consuming pornography that fe features adults that it is like a consensual act which can obviously can never be the case where a child is involved. So that is coming before the the Shannid I believe today. Um and yeah I have seen a lot of stir online where you know I think I think there is um a bit of disgust in general at images of children sometimes you know being raped until they die being refus being um referred to as pornography. I mean I I I get the intention behind these sort of things. I think the people fundamentally have good intentions. I think they're all like quite misguided for a couple of reasons. One, because

30:06 that's what people call it. You can't legislate the average person to say, "Well, it's actually child sexual abuse material." That's not going to happen. And that language is already used in a lot of official publications anyway because they've bought kind of that reasoning for it. But I think also when we we talk about some comparison to adult pornography, it is actually kind of important to remember that this material is produced for a reason. But calling a child sexual abuse material kind of removes the actual reason this exists and the financial and commercial and sexual interest behind it, which is for sexual gratification. It's designed as pornography. So, I actually I I think this is one of those well-meaning things which actually strips a lot of the the

30:52 the negativity from it. It should it should be considered pornography because that's what it's created for for a very particular subset of people who find it sexually engaging. I I don't think we should dress that up. I think that's what it is and it should be treated like that. And that doesn't mean, you know, I I don't I don't share this concern that, you know, it stigmatizes adult pornography. I I just I I think it's pretty horrifying when you realize the scale of some of this stuff in the sense that there was recently a Europole operation that took place internationally. your pole coordinated. Obviously, local domestic law enforcement agencies were the ones primarily with the boots on the ground, but uh this it was to bust a major

31:38 uh international child pornography hub on the dark web, which is basically uh I I forget the exact figures off the top of my head, but we have an article about it on grip if if people want to take a look. uh that it it they had thousands of videos, unique videos and thousands of hours of content. And this site in terms of its traffic had millions of users, you know, like there there was a huge demand for it. And obviously, we all know there's sick people. We all know there's reprehensible monsters and sickos in the world, but the the amount of traffic that was going here and the

32:24 amount of content that existed in this depraved space was really shocking. You think of it as like, oh yeah, some some infinite decimally small group of freaks in a basement who we need to root out. But yeah, and you know, when you're dealing with the the entire globe, uh, yeah, it's a rather prolific and horrifying problem. I mean, forget about the entire globe. I mean, when I was speaking to Dr. Brennan, she said that in the course of her work, she had access to law enforcement tools, which basically shows you a map of the IP addresses where child sex abuse material is actively being downloaded at that at that specific moment in time. and she said that Ireland was covered in red dots. Ireland, just Ireland. Um, and

33:11 just to address what you said there, Gary, she told me that the survivors the the survivors of this kind of abuse that she has worked with feel uncomfortable with the term pornography being used to describe it. And um one of one of the other points she made was that and this is true because I've seen this um happen in person that when judges are presiding over cases where somebody is found in produ in possession of child sex abuse material for example there was a case recently um where a man was given a suspended sentence and the the content that he was consuming was described as you know a teenage girl engaging in a sex act with an adult male. And that just tells me nothing. That tells the

33:58 judge nothing, you know. So judges are passing sentences based and they don't know exactly what was done to this child. I think that's, you know, I think it's very legitimate to to call attention to that issue. Yeah. I mean that that part of it I think is is actually kind of a separate issue though. I mean, that's a question of procedure and and how judges deal with this kind of internally on how people who have been sexually abused feel about it. Frankly, I'm not sure there's a way of describing this is going to make them feel terribly comfortable with it. And I think, you know, I think, as I said, I think moving in the direction these people want to move in sanitizes it. It doesn't destigmatize it. It sanitizes it. And we should

34:45 always remember why this material is created because the act happens for one reason and then the propagation of it is for commercial and sexual reasons. Like there are people who make money off this. It is a commercial product to them. And I think the current naming highlights that that this is actually done for money. Um and I mean to say that something is is child sexual abuse material. Okay. Well, why and someone says, "Oh, someone was watching child sexual abuse material. What does that mean? What were they doing with it? Were someone watching child pornography, you got a pretty good idea what they were doing with it? She actually told me that there are people in Ireland who are commissioning the sexual abuse of kids in the Philippines. So, they're they're here. Um, she described it. She said

35:30 it's basically on every street corner. It's everywhere. Um, obviously not every single person. I'm sure that not every single person who was one of those red dots is doing this specific thing, but she said that people in Ireland are in touch with child traffickers in the Philippines. And she estimated that one in every 100 kids in the Philippines has actually been trafficked in in some specific way related to um sexual abuse that they are in touch with these traffickers and they are commissioning the rape of a specific child. they, you know, it's it's like, God, forgive me for using this, but it's like going into a restaurant being like, "Yeah, I want that fish." And that's what they're doing to children. There was um there was a quite interesting story

36:16 about Pornhub actually recently, and it was basically about how they were treating underage sex videos and and the amount of them that were on the site and it was unbelievable numbers, and it looked like quite lax moderation of them. It's like it's not difficult to find this material. It's which means that it's it's probably produced in large quantities and from what I've heard you are right that a lot of it is produced in the third world basically and then exported back and that was true. I remember reading a lot of material about the pedophile information exchange in the 60s and 70s certainly the 70s and you had the same sort of thing there. there was a lot of sex terrorism and people going to third world countries for this and producing material there. So it's remained like

37:04 as technology has has increased it's obviously become more prevalent I think is is what I'm trying to say but the victims have remained usually children who are per don't have you know parents are in vulnerable situations and can basically be easily taken advantage of. That's it. why it's probably not a great thing that TUSA keeps losing those children. Losing children, not a great idea. uh the vast majority of whom are international protection applicants who are unaccompanied which is another element to this that you would think I mean that I we all here on this call and I'm sure everybody watching thinks that's reprehensible that any child regardless of where they're from would

37:49 be misplaced by the state's care system particularly given that we know from reports that many of them then end up being exploited and abused used by gangs of predatory men. So the fact that there are potentially vulnerable children from third world countries who are then victimized in that way once they come here into the care of the state is shocking. But you would particularly think that the NGO sector and the media and the politicians who have made it their raise on debt to advocate on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees and so on. You would think that they would care, but we've heard very little about that since the initial reports dropped. It seems remarkable that s such

38:38 an outrageous thing would happen and nobody seems to to give a rats except the uh far right. You know, the interesting thing about those reports that highlighted some of the concerns of Tusla and children missing. My understanding is that those reports were kind of a lastditch effort by the researchers who had done the work and had tried to get Tusla and politicians interested in these failings and didn't basically didn't get any pickup. So decided, well, we'll have to, you know, we'll have to write a report, we'll have to make it public. But my understanding, I could be wrong in this, is that that was not that was that was the end of a long process of people basically not caring. The people who should have cared just didn't. Um, and I mean, TUSA is I

39:24 think if you talk to anyone who's been looking into state agencies for a while, there's a general agreement that TUSA is probably the worst organization in the state. Um, it's deeply dysfunctional. Some of the things I've heard them do to people in their care are inhumane, but they're nearly impossible to report on because so many of the people involved either have professional confidentiality requirements, but no one will go on the record and it never goes anywhere. But there's a long long history of fairly horrible stories about TUSA doing the rounds and they're extremely latigious. They are the only state agency which has ever threatened to have me jailed.

40:09 Well, can't uh you know that that was the Barbie story, was it? That was the Barbie story. Yeah. Where where we unknowingly breached a court order that we didn't know existed because it wasn't reported that there was baring order on anything that had been said. Um, but Tusla made that very very known to us and then started threatening uh I think they got up to several years imprisonment before we actually took the story down. That would have been great for your career all things considered. I wouldn't wish that on you, but you have to think long term about these things. No, I mean when they first came to us and it was like you might need to spend a month in prison, I was like that'd be good for my career. tried to spend a month in prison and then they just kept cranking up and they got to several years and I was like right that's uh

40:55 okay that's actually too much. Also by that time I was absolutely aware that anyone who wanted the story had saved an archive of it. So I was like sure I'll do what you're telling me to do. Doesn't benefit you in any way though. Oh the joys of being a journalist people. This is uh this is what what you this is what it actually entails in case you're wondering the uh the daily life of working a job like this. Slowing down the legal threats long enough that people have time to save the article. But you can never go to people and go by the way you should save the article because I I want to get around this legal ban. You just need to know to do it. Just want to thumb my nose at the state a little bit more. Uh, with that said, will we let people go

41:40 enjoy their their lunch break? I think I was just about to say that. Um, we have run overtime, but I think it was a a very good discussion. I'm happy that we did. But thank you so much, um, everyone for tuning in. We will be back next week. Um, I hope at the same time and, you know, thanks everyone. Have a great week. Hope you enjoyed. All the best. Best of luck everybody.