I look forward to be speaking at the @ire_solar conference on 18th June, where I will be focusing on the challenges of ensuring everyone can access affordable energy, including older persons and people on lower incomes.

📰 “Failure and Learning in Policy Innovation” is a new paper by Philipp Trein, University of Lausanne, published as part of a new Policy Innovation Ideas series on PublicPolicy.ie. This paper argues that policy failure frequently serves as a precondition for innovation in the public sector, due to voter myopia, blame avoidance, and the ill-structured nature of policy problems. Drawing on the Innovator's Dilemma framework and Switzerland's Electronic Health Record case, it shows how failure creates the political conditions necessary for reform. publicpolicy.ie/policy-innov… #innovation #policy

‘Stay in Control of your money’ – that’s the message of a new awareness drive to increase understanding of financial abuse. The initiative led by Safeguarding Ireland aims to highlight the many things which people can do to ‘stay in control’. View the resources at: safeguardingireland.org/stay…

Europe 2050 project. The traditional rules of trade do not apply anymore. How should Europe think about trade? This is the question taken up by Alan Wolff, a former deputy director general of the WTO. Very much in the spirit of a coalition of the willing. Most of the world still wants to play by rules, if not the same ones as in the past. Given its size, Europe can be the central player of this group and take leadership of the world trading system. Alan discusses in detail how it should be done. cepr.org/publications/europe…

There is still time to register for this week's Inspiring Policy Innovation Webinar "Designing institutions for designing policy" by Prof B. Guy Peters. 🗓️ 7th May 2026 🕐 3-4pm You can register here: ucd-ie.zoom.us/webinar/regis… #UCD #Webinar #Policymaking

Here’s two stories side-by-side in @thejournal_ie As the climate crisis worsens, we can’t keep subsidising Ireland’s fossil fuel consumption. We need to do so much more to reduce emissions. Yet the recent protests were all for cheaper fossil fuels. Where’s the climate protest?

Not one but two ageist photos used by @rtenews @rte for this article and podcast. You’d think that the national broadcaster would be aware of the existence of age friendly images that don’t reduce older adults to mobility aids or wrinkled hands. #ageism rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/042…

An important discussion of FASD. Podcast with Liam Curran. thesecurestartpodcast.buzzsp…

💡 Join our upcoming GIRSI Masterclass! Details are below: Presenter: Dr Shuang Su Date: Thursday, 23rd April 2026 Time: 10am – 12:30pm Location: A201, Hannah Sheehy Building This masterclass offers a practical introduction to the methods for turning survey questions into reliable measures (scale development). Designed for researchers across disciplines, the session is structured in two parts: Theory and Application. In the first hour, we will cover the core logic of latent variables and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)--understanding why and how survey items group together. In the second hour, we will transition to hands-on application using JASP (a free, user-friendly statistical software). Participants will be guided through a practical exercise to run an EFA, interpret factor loadings, and assess scale reliability (Cronbach's Alpha/McDonald's Omega). This session is suitable for beginners and those looking to refresh their skills in survey analysis. No prior experience with JASP is required Register here: forms.gle/bs2cYk7r1uWYzJARA or use the QR in the image below. #JASP #Research #Masterclass

The enshittification of Ireland and the hollowing out of our institutions is the single largest threat to Irish civil society and prosperity. In this damning piece, I'm going into more detail about the graph I posted yesterday: why it's happening in Ireland, why the way we're thinking about the protests is entirely wrong, and what this means for our collective governance. Link to the article is below!

The protests in Ireland are not about just fuel! They are about the distance between Ireland on this graph and every other modern and developed economy. Ireland is second wealthiest but gets waaaaay less than any other country for that wealth. By a golden mile. That visual gap in this graph? That’s what people are protesting. It’s a lack of infrastructure and the everyday enshittification of services, the economy, and the additional difficulty of trying to live, relative to peers in any other country. It also highlights why people don’t get uniformly listened to! - because there is no government architecture to engage meaningfully across this huge gap. That gap is a three hour drive to work in traffic, a 14 month wait for an MRI, buses that don’t arrive, trains that don’t exist, schools that have no places for your kids, houses that are unaffordable, pubs that close before midnight, €12 sandwiches, expensive fuel. People feel this gap, even if they can’t explain it precisely. And that builds into resentment, and ultimately protest. Fuel just happened to be the next thing that could be pointed to, today.

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks. The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people. ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher. My Take The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing. I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all. Hedgie🤗 nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

It’s a good idea and was my experience in Scotland. But will the Minister address Ireland’s funding deficit for third level relative to comparable countries? And why not also reform the Leaving Cert if it’s a problematic “cauldron”? @ifut @lawlessj rte.ie/news/education/2026/0…

Our next Geary Seminar will take place next Tuesday, 7th April at 1pm in the Geary Seminar room (B003/004). We will welcome Dermot Coates, Chief Economist Dept of Enterprise and Employment, to present on “Property Prices and Housing Affordability in Ireland, 1975-2025”. Lunch will be provided. We look forward to seeing you there! 😃 #UCD #GearySeminar

Tesla received billions in government loans, tax credits and subsidies, making Elon Musk the world's richest person. The public? No equity stake, no profit-sharing, no guarantee of affordable access. My working paper with @rodrikdani has now been published in Industrial and Corporate Change. It explores the conditionalities—profit-sharing, reinvestment requirements, knowledge transfer—that can ensure industrial policy delivers public value, not just private wealth. [LINK IN NEXT POST]

The chair of the Adaptation Committee said that if governments had heeded their warnings in the past and implemented just a proportion of them in full, the country would "not be in the mess it is now". rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/040… via @rte

All four Leap card validators are out of service at Parnell. @Luas

Our next Geary Seminar will take place next Tuesday, 31st March at 1pm in the Geary Seminar room (B003/004). We will welcome Assoc Prof Kevin Denny, UCD School of Economics, to present on “The effects of crime victimization on mental health & subjective well-being: a partial identification approach using ESS data”. Lunch will be provided. We look forward to seeing you there! 😃 #UCD #GearySeminar

A great thinker. RIP. apnews.com/article/juergen-h…

Some of my thoughts on taxation. tasc.ie/blog/2026/03/10/a-de…