Fenton-Otool in Dublin, welcome back.

You have made a brilliant career watching Ireland, your home country, transform itself.

It's Catholic culture, its vanishing population, its frail economy, into something very modern and profoundly different.

I wonder, you've covered our country so well this year, do you see something

of a transformation that's comparable in the United States? I think I do in some ways.

You know, the process of transformation that you mentioned in Ireland was not a smooth, one-way ticket, you know. It seemed to be going

very well in the 1960s and 1970s. But a lot of what's happened in America now reminds me a bit

of what happened in Ireland in the 1980s. So there's a sort of promise of change and most people

sort of broadly buy into it, which you could say, I suppose most Americans, you know, the

majorities were there for Barack Obama, for example. And a sense that, you know, America was on

the way to becoming reasonably comfortable with itself as this remarkable

multicultural incredibly diverse energetic society. And what happened in Ireland in the

1980s was that things started to go wrong economically. The sort of motor of change started

to slow down. And you got really very strong reaction, right? So people

started saying, hold on, let's put on the brakes. I don't like the way things are going. Can we go back

to the way things used to be? Now, what they mean by the way things used to be is usually they've

filtered out all the nasty stuff about the way things used to be is usually they've filtered out all the nasty stuff about the way things used to be,

and they've imagined for themselves a kind of nostalgic version of that.

And I think this is happening in America.

You know, you can kind of see Trump's appeal.

Most important word in MAGA, you know, is the last one. Again, you know,

the idea of going back, the idea that there was some kind of ideal America, which he and only

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