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The Current Transcript for March 19, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Deeply apologize again to our people, everyone around me who's been hurt, suffered damage.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Another entertainment hero with a worldwide following, apologising for sexual misconduct and the abuse and exploitation of women. This time it's a scandal unfolding in South Korea. It's taken down for popular K-pop stars, a musical phenomenon worth billions, featuring bands with clear-cut images whose successes are in lockstep with Korean government ambitions. And it has ignited what was a tepid MeToo movement in South Korea, forcing conversations the nation has not been willing to have. In half an hour we're looking at the implications. Also today, she was in Belfast, a widow in her mid 30s, raising 10 children in subsidized housing, the day that a group of masked men and women came to her door. Her children never saw her again.

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VOICE: There were children of Jean McConville who for years wondered if maybe she was alive. Maybe she'd gotten amnesia and wound up in another country and they held out hope for that, which is a terribly cruel thing.

AMT: It would take decades before the IRA admitted to murdering Jean McConville and longer still to expose the threads connecting Jean McConville to another woman in Belfast, the IRA's first female combat, Dolours Price. At a time when the lines between Ireland and Northern Ireland are finally calm, Patrick Radden Keefe unearths a raw bit of their long conflict known as The Troubles, just as a plan called Brexit threatens to churn up emotions along that border again. Here him in an hour. But before we get to any of that.

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VOICE: The stress test on mortgages is causing people to either lose their homes or they can't get into the home that they need. All of 2018, 20 per cent less mortgages coming from young people.

AMT: With a generation across the nation unable to afford houses, we're asking why today's federal budget should do about it. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Bill Morneau expected to address housing affordability in budget but what measures will work?

Guests: Murtaza Haider, John Pasalis

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[Music]

VOICE: So you're telling me I can't afford hardwood? What about the yard and the two car garage, could I get a loan from the bank still? What's ten per cent of 1.5 mill? A lot. Maybe I could crowdsource a little cash from a kickstart. This chart says I can't afford it in a rich part. No one ever told me getting property was this hard. Look, if I save for the rest of my life at the rate that I'm earning I wouldn't come close. In the 80s my dad bought a house and a car, I'll be 80 when I can get those. My mom's always calling like why you still renting, I hate to see.

AMT: Just a sampling from a music video produced last year by our colleagues at CBC comedy. Of course the problem the song highlights the challenge millennial's space trying to get into the country's major housing markets is not funny and it is just one of the issues the federal government is expected to address today when the Finance Minister Bill Morneau unveils his latest budget. Housing affordability is a key concern for many Canadians especially millennials and first time buyers. It is reported to be a key platform of this budget and abacus dad a poll conducted last October found that over six in 10 Canadians between the ages of 18 and thirty eight to see it as a top priority. And it is no wonder according to RBC economics the ability to buy an affordable home has not been this difficult in about 30 years since about 1990. Here is what some young Vancouverites have to say about homeownership.

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VOICE 1: Hi I'm David and I'm 34. We just bought in October and we had been saving and investing. My wife who was my high school sweetheart that's only relevant for this because it was someone who I was in partnership with. In that sense to get that amount of money and stuff together it took us that long to get organized and it's grand. But yeah it's it's a crush and I don't know how it is reasonable to expect people to do that because we had lots of luck along the way and still it took us this long.

VOICE 2: I'm Sarah Patterson, I'm 20. I think I hope I'll be able to own a home but I don't think it will happen in like five maybe. I think it's very far off in the future when I speak to my periods and things. The stocks seem to think it is achievable for young people I think like clueless like they say things like all that. I bought my first 24 year old light was in the 70s, like it's not the same. So I think most young people have just kind of accepted their fate, which is sad.

VOICE 3: My name's Stephanie. I'm 27. And I've actually never considered buying a home because it's just never been a realistic option or part of my life financially. I know one friend in my entire group of friends which is many who might be able to afford a home one day in BC, lower mainland. think it's important for people in our society to have at least the option of having a home because if you don't, you are far less likely to have children. You're less likely to contribute to this society the you're in.

AMT: Well there you go. So what can Ottawa do? What should Ottawa do to help make it easier for Canadians to afford a home. That's the question we're asking today. Murtaza Haider is an associate professor of real estate management at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. John Pasails is president of Realosophy Realty Inc. Brokerage. They're both in our Toronto studio. Hello and welcome.

MURTAZA HAIDER: Thank you.

JOHN PASALIS: Good morning.

AMT: Murtaza Haider what strikes you in the voices you just heard?

MH: I think the millennials are concerned that the younger generations are concerned about what the future holds for them. It's not just housing for them it's a difficult situation for them primarily because they're also part of the gig economy where their jobs are not the way the jobs were 25 30 years ago. So more of full time jobs not earning living wages and still living with the parents. And at the same time you saw or we saw an acceleration of housing prices during 2016 15 maybe 2017 to some extent and it has caused some concern. And then other regulatory changes that have come since then including the stress test and the foreign homebuyers tax graded environment where if you do not have equity and that's most of the millennials then it becomes increasingly difficult to get into the market.

AMT: And we know Vancouver and Toronto are the most expensive markets. What's it like in the rest of the country?

MH: So it's different across the country. For example Calgary and Edmonton are quite different in the sense that the economic conditions were different especially with the resource economy going down. So the real push that you see of the pressure you see for affordability it's more of a trial in a very good story. You for example the second largest real estate market in Canada is Montreal and you don't have that kind of pressures.

AMT: Okay well John Pasalis, what challenges do you see millennials facing as they try to enter the housing market?

JP: Really I mean affordability I mean we're kind of looking at some data recently I mean what struck me is that you know that the neighborhood that we live in Brooklyn is my office and likely will and for the price that you know one bedroom plus den candled is what six hundred plus thousand and you know six or seven years ago for that price first time buyers were getting a three bedroom semi-detached home with parking right. So you think about kind of a difference in just six or seven years. You know the difference between buying sort of a longer term three bedroom homevs. a one plus then condo. I think this is the tension that a lot of younger buyers are feeling. You know I'm spending as much money do I want to stay here for five to 10 years because if you're buying real estate it should be a long term purchase.

AMT: And that's really emblematic. That's one from a neighborhood Leslieville, that's what you're seeing. How does that affect the rental market when you have that increase?

JP: Yeah. And what's happening now is I mean it's hard to get in as a home buyer. Rentals are booming at very expensive rents once through the roof. I mean it costs over 2000 dollars to rent a one bedroom condo downtown now. And what we find with a lot of millennials is that there's a tension and you know there's a big when we look at the condo boom downtown a lot of this has been a lifestyle shift. You know people preferring to be walking distance or working close to work. And you know there are certain options for a first time buyer to buy houses but they're not in the quarry you know they have to be a 30 minute commute from downtown. Many of them it's a struggle trying to decide is it worth it for me to kind of move that far out of the city?

AMT: But when we talk about affordable housing, we're talking about condos as well. We're not solely talking about single family homes.

JP: Yeah absolutely and that's what most younger millennial buyers have been buying the or market has been the hardest segment of the market in the GTA. Prices fell in 2017 in low rise so and something them primarily in the New York region and the amount of fire but it didn't fall in the Common Market. It just kept going up.

AMT: And so that's another issue of trying to get affordable housing because condos come with condo fees that are sometimes the size of what you pay for rent, on top of a mortage.

JP: Of course and the challenge now is that condos are particularly affordable. I mean they're less expensive but you know.

AMT: That's not the same thing.

JP: It's not the same thing as affordable.

AMT: Well okay I've got another clip here. The federal finance minister is expected to include some things to address this in today's budget I want you to hear from Heather Scofield. She is the economics columnist for The Toronto Star. She cautions it won't be easy for him to strike the right balance.

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VOICE: It's a bit of a tricky thing to solve though because we are just barely out of the clear in terms of a housing bubble in some of the country's major markets. So he has to move quite carefully to not exacerbate housing conditions by doing anything that would really encourage the market prices to go back up again, at the same time trying to help the people that are having trouble buying houses.

AMT: So Murtaza Haider, what specific measures do you think it should take to look at this.

MH: So housing prices do affect affordability, but the ability to pay your monthly mortgage service charges, that's the real thing that people look at. You know you can look at prices but you look at can you afford to buy in with the mortgage. So the or for example the RBC research that you referred to showed that the prices increase affordability worsened but the also worsened the affordability also worsened because of the stress test and the impact of both the increase in prices and distressed us. Remind us what the stress test says the stress test is it is a requirement about the fee, the regulator that if you are a new if you're renewing the market or getting a mortgage you have to qualify 200 basis point to 2 percent more than the contracted rate if you would getting a mortgage letter 3 percent you have to qualify for 5 percent. So RBC has done a great job of showing that the stress test has increased the affordability bar as much as the Bard through to increase in prices in other words it is tougher to borrow a lot of money right now. Increasingly tougher for the government has to do is to figure out whether they would like to maintain the state had a score because that is an option for them or do realize that maybe it's time to create an environment where the borrowing becomes easier, especially for those who do not have equity. One of the things they can do is to consider increasing the length of the mortgage. So the CMC insured mortgages I think are now down to 25 years, you cannot get a longer mortgage.

AMT: That's right, they used to be as high as 40.

MH: As high as 40, which was not a good date idea, I think. So 40 was too high. I think bringing it back to 30 years woill provide some buffer to households who were at the margin could have borrowed but because of the stress stress and other regulatory interventions can not buy. And this would allow them to have a 30 years was a norm in the past it's not that it wasn't the case and asking for it people are asking for something extraordinary but then that provides you especially those at the margin with some savings but not being able to qualify to be able to qualify with a 30 year mortgage which they wouldn't be able to qualify under 25 years. So that's one. The other thing is to have a look at stress test. So it's a 200 basis points right. The question is is it the right number, like why not 400 basis points, right.

AMT: Right. Are they are they actually judging your income correctly when they say you don't make enough money to borrow that money? That what they're saying right now.

MH: Exactly. So if you raise the interest rate your income becomes less valuable for a big ticket purchase.

AMT: Okay, so let me play a clip here. This is Tom Davidoff. He is the director of the Centre for Urban Economics and Eeal Estate at the School of Business atUBC. He thinks the stress test is a good thing.

[sc

VOICE: Home prices can fall. People can find themselves under water. If they borrow too large a fraction of the value of their home at wrong time in the cycle, we certainly saw that in the U.S. in the 2000s and letting people borrow more possibly than they may be able to pay back, you run the risk of pushing prices up farther than they ought to go.

AMT: John Pasalis, you're in the real estate business and a lot of your colleagues are lobbying for changes to that stress test. What do you think of what he just said?

JP: I agree completely. I mean I think the stress tests are probably one of the best things that governments do. I mean when we think about how we got to where we are which is overvalued housing markets especially in Tehran or Vancouver are housing bubble say I mean a lot of these things happen when credit is to lose someone it's very easy to borrow money and that's pretty much what brought us here. And the reason the cheatee right now hasn't really seen much price growth in two years. Prices have been pretty stable because it's harder to get money. And I think it's you know it's important right now on the sort of this late stage of the housing stock or one of the problems in the Bank of Canada and our bank regulators have said is the biggest risk is that people are really over leveraged right we know that some people because of the stress test end up going to third party lenders and borrow even more money at worse rates so that's I agree and I think that's a place where there is room to change this trust. So that's an issue a lot of times when people are refinancing their mortgage on their existing home and 100 per cent I think they do need to relax because that's creating more risk in economy. So I think people are refinancing or homes should have a few more options when it comes to shopping around mortgages.

AMT: Murtaza Haider, I want to ask you about something else. A lot of this is about the supply of affordable housing, the actual number of houses that are available. Of units that are available. A recent RBC report said the main issue is on the supply side. How do you increase that?

MH: So supply is the main issue really. Like for example in Toronto, the city of Toronto, you see that houses have been built, but there's mostly in high rises condominiums. I think less than 15 to 20 percent of the stock that we've built in the last three years was low rise. Everything else is high rise. So that creates a problem. People want to filled with families would like to be in the house not necessarily a single family detached old maybe townhouse rowhouse a semi-detached but that kind of housing is not being built so what the governments have to do are to use of government. It's mostly more and more importantly the local government municipal government is to encourage builders to not to discourage them not to bear barriers to the development process. So there have been reports that show that cities with the high or higher increase in prices not just in Canada but in UK and in the US are also the cities with the screen more stringent land use regulations and barriers to development that has to that has to be streamlined so that people not the developers should not spend three to five to ten years trying to get a site plan approved.

AMT: So some of that also means if you have a lot, you may be want to build two smaller houses on it. It's really hard to do.

MH: So then there are these land use restrictions where they say that you can not intensify, so the yellow belt kind of conversation in Toronto and Vancouver perhaps. So you have to have a flexible resume encouraging and enabling more supply of land at the same time you have to be looking at the supply of new housing. It's not just based on land you look at the workforce. We also run into trouble when we are building let's add 300,000 homes under construction in Ontario. At that time new construction is difficult to build because all the trades are already engaged in all the available land are already engaged and built. So the three tiers of government more importantly the provincial government and the local governments have to act because they have more leverage in their control to increase the supply the supply of housing especially housing starts are not encouraging. They're not reciprocating reflecting the level of increase in prices if the price increase. We should be building more and that has not happened in the last three years.

AMT: I want to play another clip from David, the man from Vancouver. He and his partner were finally able to buy a townhouse after saving four years. He believes what's called the speculation or vacancy tax that was introduced in B.C. helped make their purchase possible.

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VOICE: I actually am of the opinion that some of the measures to discourage the type of commodity that are houses from being an investment vehicle has been helpful. For example there is a home vacancy tax so you need to prove that this is my main home and I live in it. And if you can prove that or is there something that suggests that youre just trying to make some dollars it has nothing to do with the fact that its home. Well then you get taxed on that taxation is always a good thing especially if it is helping correct something of a market. The market doesn't have a morality, it doesn't give a crap. So you do need these types of rules when you're talking about something like a home.

AMT: John Pasalis, the Ontario government has asked brought in that non-resident speculation tax. Is this a good thing?

JP: It's definitely a good thing. I mean it helped cool the market. I mean it's not to the same degree as what the B.C. government has done, so it hasn't had as big of an effect, but I do think that measures that the B.C. government has done are the right ones. I mean at the end of the day should be for people living in and you know more and more around the world not just in Tehran or Vancouver that are being used as safety deposit boxes.

AMT: In fact New York is just about to put a big tax on people buying these multimillion dollar penthouses and they don't live there.

JP: Absolutely and Paris has and a lot of other cities have it because it's again, it's a risk kind of in the municipalities that people are investing in it and I think those measures are the right ones.

AMT: And what do you think Murtaza?

JP: I don't know. I'm sort of conflicted on it. For example now the regulations are such that even if you're a Canadian living in Ontario, you have to pay extra taxes to own something in British Columbia. That's what has happened. So it creates like it's sort of diminishes your citizenship because of and not to underestimate the challenges in B.C., but at the end of the day you have to realize prices have to move in step with the incomes. We are always focused on prices. We never look at incomes. What is going on with the economy that people's incomes are not rising and that is not a debate.

AMT: Well and you bring it right back to jobs. If there is steady employment, if there's something that allows people's stability, they are more likely to be able to buy a home.

MH: Exactly, like in Vancouver, why Vancouver incomes are not increasing. Why the economy's structure is not changed so that people are able to earn more to pay for it. The other thing that event did was a good thing is that let's say you have committed reforms through your properties the municipality allowed for those property owners to combine themselves and then approach a builder or a developer to say you can buy all these Ford take them down and build eight or 10 more homes. So that helped increase the intensification of neighbourhoods which means more supply in already build areas where the prices were high and it helps moderate prices. So we need to entertain all such ideas.

AMT: I just, you know we're talking mostly about millennials. We're almost out of time, but they are not only the people talking the most about affordable housing. They are also coming up to be the largest group of eligible voters in the coming election. So it's not really a surprise that government is expected to highlight these issues, but beyond that, homeownership, why is homeownership so important?

JP: I mean I think it's important for a lot of people because you know especially when you think about when people buy homes a lot of times it's just during big life events you know they're getting married or they have a kid or laughing too. And I think for a lot of people they just want a long permanent place to live and raise a family and then kind of grow roots and I do think it's emotional for a lot of people and I think it's just financial. But I do think part of it is of course sort of this long term idea that they're investing you know into an asset into their future as well.

AMT: Do you see this as an election issue?

MH: They are. They may be the largest eligible group, but they're not as good as going out and voting. The millennials and younger people do not vote at the same rate as older cohort. But at the same time you have to realize there is demographics to it. There's a demographic reality. That the millennials are not, they're just pushing things out a bit. Having children, doing other, having full time jobs later. So that's part of.

AMT: Okay well we'll see how many get out to vote this time too. Thanks both of you for joining me on this. Murtaza Haider, associate professor of real estate management at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson. Jim Pasalis, president of Realosophy Realty Inc. Brokerage. Stay with us. This is The Current. The news is next and then we're back.

[Music: Theme]

The K-pop sex scandal reveals a 'disgusting' practice of sharing spy cam 'porn': journalist

Guests: Elise Hu, Jenna Gibson

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come. Back in 1972, the IRA abducted Jean McConville, a mother of 10, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Her disappearance would become one of the most notorious unsolved murders during the decades of unrest there, until perhaps now. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, a writer for The New Yorker says he knows who pulled the trigger. I will speak to him in half an hour. But first, K-pop pops.

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Song from K-pop band, Big Bang.

AMT: Sounds from Big Bang, one of the biggest bands in K-pop, South Korea's pop music scene. The members of Big Bang are known for their catchy songs and their clean cut image. Now one of them has been forced to quit the band after being arrested for allegedly supplying sex workers to protect prospective business investors and another K-pop singer is under investigation for allegedly filming his sexual partners without their knowledge or consent and then sharing the videos in group chats with other K-pop stars. Two more male K-pop stars have now stepped down because of the scandal. The South Korean president has ordered an investigation. The sex scandal has implications far beyond the country's domestic music industry. K-pop has grown into a powerful cultural export for South Korea worth billions of dollars and the government considers it a tool to exert its influence and its so-called soft power around the world. Elise Hu is a correspondent with National Public Radio. She was the founding bureau chief of NPR's office in Seoul, South Korea. And we've reached her in Washington D.C. today. Hi.

ELISE HU: Hi there. Good morning.

AMT: So before we go any further, just remind us how big the overall K-pop scene is in North America as well.

EH: Well it's been growing ever since the mid 90s when it first came out and that was originally in Asia and it really spread. After the explosion of PSY's Gangnam style, that has really made K-pop far far more global. I don't have the numbers on how many billions of dollars it makes as an industry itself, but you can see through the influence of groups such as Beach, had the number or the number two and three albums on the Billboard charts in the western world last year that this industry has become a huge and hugely influential. Not just in Asia, but worldwide.

AMT: So how did this scandal start?

EH: It all started with the investigation of a club in which this Big Bang member, Seungri is involved. He's an investor in a club and through the investigation of the club Seungri, police allege that he was involved in brokering prostitutes essentially sending messages to foreign investors Hey we should find you girls that quote unquote give easy. And so from there this investigation then implicated a second star Junjun Yahel who is a thing or who came up in a reality show. American Idol style reality competition is not only a big thing but also now an actor and host as well. N what's going on. Are these twin inter awa cases them implicated pulley's or the possibility of pollice collusion and sort of going easy. Not just the club but also big names and keep up stars. So yesterday the news out of South Korea is that the moon Jaylene administration which the presidential administration is now going to investigate three different things at once essentially what's going on at the club and salary of Big Bang. First of all and then also what's going on with Junjun Young and the possibility of numerous you know um text groups in which not only work or sex being talked about but videos or hidden camera videos of women. Becky was having sex with were being shared on this chair at that's the second thing going on. And then thirdly whether police have been essentially going easy on actors and singers and the industry and in general as sex crimes have been going on.

AMT: I'm interested a little more. Tell me a little bit more about Seungri. Like he's been called I think the Great Gatsby of K-pop. Who is he?

EH: That's right, he's the youngest member of this band Big Bang and Big Bang is the group that ya'll were playing a little bit ago in the intro there. It is part of a group that now is so big and that Big Bang song when you just played actually was played on the DMC. So as part of a propaganda effort against North Korea to sort of spread Western art now whether I should say but you know capitalist ideals in North Korea. So along the border when there was more tension going on between North Korea and South Korea. South Korea's government would officially play Big Bang across the border. So Suri is a member of that group. They were formed in 2005 or 2006 and before. Yes and yes we should mention is not involved because a lot of BTS fans have given me feedback to make sure that we keep out of this, but Big Bang before BTS was the biggest boy group in South Korea and well-known around the world.

AMT: And so you make the point that the government was using some of that you know to blast that across the demilitarized zone to North Korea. How else has the South Korean government been using this industry to build its own image?

EH: Well K-pop is a big part of the wave. It's known as the wave or Korean cool. This notion that Asia's and not say Japanese culture or Chinese culture any more. Japanese culture was very big you know in the 80s and 90s as their economy was really growing. Now you know a lot of people ask about Korean food and Korean skincare and Korean drama and Korean music which is K-pop. And so you know the South Korean government doesn't necessarily explicitly support it but it does a lot of things like supporting k kind conventions around the world. Old age bands are exposed to more compact groups than artists. It also obviously uses the k pop music in a lot of events and has a lot of capable artists at play in our narrations for example or the government Cultural Ministry which is which also has an involvement in embassies and consulates around the world often sponsor events that then continue to promote the groups that come out of industry and so South Korean industry and government are just close anyway because of the way the economy came up. And now K-pop is such a successful export that it just has a lot of government backing and support that's not necessarily in government investment directly.

AMT: Elise, your Skype connection keeps breaking up. So I'm going to introduce our next guest and while we talk to her just a little bit, we're going to call you back on a landine and keep you in this conversation. Jenna Gibson is listening in. She's a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. She focuses on Korean politics and writes about Korea for the diplomat. She's in Chicago. Hi Jenna.

JENNA GIBSON: Hi, good morning. How are you?

AMT: Well I'm wondering what you've been thinking as you watch this scandal unfold.

JG: Yeah it's been a really crazy week. I'll have to say as both someone who follows Korean politics and society and as someone who's been a fan of K-pop for a long time. This is really unprecedented not only the scale of the scandal that we're seeing just the number of people who are you are involved and continue to come out as part of this group. And we don't know if there may be more people who were involved. But then on the other the response people have really stood up and said these things are not okay even among fans. People are disavowing these particular men who have committed these crimes. So it's been a really really big competition within the fandom this last week or so.

AMT: And Elise was making the point of that, that sort of that interconnectedness with government. Internationally where do you see the influence of this genre?

JG: Yeah I absolutely think it's especially in the last few years you know even just the last year or so it's gone crazy. The fact that you see mainstream TV shows in the U.S. and CIS for example mentions NCT, a K-pop boy band that had just recently been on the AMA's red carpet. I mean the list goes on. BTS of course has gone on Ellen. They went on the Graham Norton show in the U.K. It's just it's become so mainstream. It's kind of crazy to see as someone who has like I said been a fan for a while and you saw things like Gangnam Style coming out and having a mainstream impact, but it was a little bit different cause it was kind of a novelty like what is this you know crazy guy doing this horse dance. But now K-pop is really taken seriously and people are seeing the influence its massive fanbbase has, not only online, but also you know in terms of selling out huge concert venues.

AMT: Yeah we should point out it's a multi billion dollar industry all around.

JG: Absolutely.

AMT: Yeah. You know you make the point that the reaction of the fans that they're saying this is not okay. I've got a little clip here from the streets of Seoul. Let's listen to that.

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VOICE 1: Not everything's been brought to light, but with regards to our nation's entertainment industry, I think this scandal will be a major turning point in many ways. For instance the issue of feminism has been on the rise and finally active investigations are taking place. These illegal spy cam cases keep getting exposed. I think this scandal reveals the current state of women's rights.

VOICE 2: It's not enough to just retire, of course he should retire, but he should also be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I hope Seungri's downfall makes other celebrities realize they are not above the law.

VOICE 3: This happens quite a lot among people now. It wasn't a big issue then, but because he got caught, this is a big issue. But I think this already should have been a big issue and we definitely should have been aware of it.

AMT: Elise Hu, we have you back now on a phone line. We just heard a reference to illegal spy cam cases. How are hidden cameras being used in South Korea right now?

EH: Oh it's pretty bad. So tiny cameras that can be the size of lipstick containers or lighters are hidden in public places like subway stations, but also in highly private places like dressing rooms and bathrooms. And this is without the knowledge of the women who are being filmed of course, getting all sorts of footage of women in private acts, but the most common kind that's traded online and shared online and sometimes profitted off of online is footage of women having sex, in the middle of sex acts. And this is often not only without the womabn who's being filmed, the target of the spy cam's consent, but sometimes without their knowledge. We are Internet users in general trade. This video is in and it's distributed as a kind of natural porn. It's disgusting, of course. And women, it's been going on for years. And women last year have started to really rise up against it. There were two street protest,s. One of them was 22000 people in the streets protesting against law enforcement's essentially uneven treatment of spy cam porn cases and accusation is what these women say and that protest against spy cam porn was the largest women's rally in South Korean history.

AMT: Jenna Gibson, where does this story fit in to South Korea's MeToo conversation then?

JG: Yeah I mean MeToo personally I think that with the exception of the United States where this movement started originally, South Korea has really been the largest country to take up the mantle of MeToo based off major politicians, actors, directors, who have been accused and who have stepped down and even been convicted of crimes since MeToo started last year in South Korea. So I think starting in around January last year when MeToo really started picking up and then in the summer in the fall this spiking protest as police mentioned started picking up as well. And so it's been a snowballing effect. Women are taking all these issues like police that have been happening for a long time. It that you know have kind of flown under the radar that women weren't taken seriously when they you know stood up and said that these things were have been happening. And so the fact that all of these conversations are happening more and more and more. And then you have a very prominent person puts quite doing these exact things. I think this is one of the reasons why we're seeing such a harsh response because this isn't any conversation anymore and women are finally saying enough is enough.

AMT: And wasn't there an actress who, there was an actress who suicided, I guess about 10 years ago and she left a note saying her entertainment agency had forced her to have sex with 30 people of its choosing.

JG: Yeah it's a really you know obviously it's a really horrible and tragic case and it's actually come up a lot in the last week not only because of some obvious you know potential similar theme to what the current scandal but also because the investigation had been reopened last year into her case to see if any of those allegations in the note had been true. So the police actually had already been looking into her case a little bit. The deadline the statute of limitations to look into those things was I believe this week or it's coming up very soon. And so a lot of fans within the keep up we and having seen this scandal and having you know been brought this case everybody's attention were actually distributing a petition an official petition to extend the timeline for that investigation and make sure that you know her case is investigated properly and that you know anything that did indeed happen you know there can be justice for that. So I believe as part of mingin announcement the president after his announcement that he's going to investigate all these things I believe he also said that he's going to continue our lives and continue investigating her case as well. So I do think this is a great example of how you know maybe it's about these three form men who have that stuff down in the last week, but it's really transitioning into a broader conversation about women in South Korea and the things that they're no longer going to put up with it.

AMT: Elise, in the midst of this, what about the female K-pop groups? How are they reacting? How are they being affected by this?

EH: That's a good question. I haven't heard much out of the girl groups and that's because we've been explicit, you know exclusively focusing on what's going on with the investigations of who's actually accused. But there have been several in the past you know the context of this is that women in K-pop often trainees, so people without much power, have come forward with some accusations and they quickly got away somehow they've even been earlier have either been wounded or because the investigation didn't go anywhere. The women essentially were shamed about it. They couldn't speak or speak up. And so what we're hoping for, or what South Korean women are hoping for, is a shift -- a shift in the conversation to where women are believed, and that their place in society is more on even par, because the larger, larger societal context of this here is that South Korea remains a place where men's place in society is assumed, and the woman's place in society has to be earned. And that puts them on an uneven footing from the start.

AMT: So could this be a tipping point in Korean society, Elise?

EH: If depends on how it goes, right. That's a thorny question because there's so much, there's so much power, right. This is a real institutional and systemic issue. And so there's so much power right now that remains in the hands of the management agencies and I don't know whether that can change from a few investigations even if these men do have to face penalties. But one thing that we have seen with MeToo is that when companies actually act against sexual harassment, when law enforcement act against sexual crimes, then that does help to allow for more women to feel like they can be heard and speak up. So that is something that we have seen as Jenna mentioned over the last year or two years in South Korea.

AMT: So Jenna, what do you think could this be real change happening?

JG: Yeah I think I would call it the first of I hope many. I think if we look back and see some serious changes you know in the next five 10 years we will really kind of look back and see this as the first tipping point or the first moment. Is really it depends on how things go from here because you know obviously these particular men have a lot of power and I cannot say that they aren't but the people with the real power in the industry are not necessarily the singers themselves but you know the private industry the bureaucracy is the systems that enforce these things. So I think unless they're serious you know efforts to change the system as a whole and to have these conversations about what's going to be okay and not okay how do we act. You know as a company when we find out that these things have been happening among our employers. Like those conversations I don't think have happened yet. It's really those things that need to change from the bottom up, not just in the K-pop industry, but you know across society in South Korea and honestly around the world.

AMT: Yeah. It's interesting though really when you talk about the power, Elise, I mean the government has identified itself so closely with this industry and helped it so much. President Moon insisting on an investigation I guess is significant as well then.

EH: Yeah it's certainly a start and then not only has he insisted on an investigation, but also top ministers are involved in a panel now that are going to get time to dedicate the top levels of power of the government to these particular cases. It all started with a night club and so you have essentially the federal government looking in on what started as a quite a local case, but because its implications are so broad, everybody's involved.

AMT: Jenna, I guess when you were looking at politics, you weren't expecting the politics to head to the music industry.

JG: Yeah, you know I think you've really hit on a good point, which is that the K-pop industry is kind of tied to Korean politics in a really interesting way, especially because you know whether explicitly or not it does show an image of Korea abroad and people who are looking at K-pop, you know, fans and non-fans alike, do connect K-pop with Korea. It's in the name, Korean pop music. So I think it is really important when you're looking at Korean politics and in society and especially the image of Korea abroad. I think the government does take this very seriously and to Elise's point, they're really investing and making sure that this isn't something that tarnishes that image.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you both for weighing in on this.

EH: Thank you.

JG: Absolutely.

AMT: That is Jenna Gibson, PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, focusing on Korean politics. She is in Chicago. Elise Hu is a correspondent with NPR. She was the founding bureau chief of NPR's office in Seoul, South Korea. We reached her in Washington D.C. This is the K-pop female group, Miss A and their double single calling out men who try to shame women with the song, "Bad girl, Good Girl."

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Song: "Bad Girl, Good Girl" by Miss A.

AMT: Stay with us. In our next half hour, we're looking back at one of the most troubling chapters of Ireland's troubles. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Northern Ireland's 'brittle peace' doesn't face up to atrocities of the past: author

Guests: Patrick Radden Keefe

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: I'm concious that there's another family at the heart of all of this and that is the family of Jean McConville. Let me be very clear. I am innocent of any involvement in any conspiracy to abduct, kill or bury Mrs. McConville. I've worked hard with others to have this injustice redressed and for the return of the bodies of others killed during the conflict.

AMT: That's Gerry Adams, the former president of Sinn Fein, the left wing political party, long associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA. It was May of 2014 when he spoke. He had just been taken in for questioning in the disappearance and murder of a woman named Jean McConville. Gerry Adams was never charged in that killing. It was one of the most spectacular crimes perpetrated during Northern Ireland's decades of extreme violence known as The Troubles. The story of Jean McConville as part of a tapestry of spies, paramilitaries, prison escapes, bombings and shootings that makes up Patrick Radden Keefe's book Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. It's also the tale of two women and the political fallout that doesn't seem to go away. Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer with The New Yorker. He joins me from New York. Hi.

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Hi.

AMT: Well let's start with Jean McConville. Who was she?

PRK: She was a mother of 10 in Belfast in 1972. She was a widow. Her husband had recently died and one night in the winter of 1972, she was at home in her apartment, which was in a housing complex in West Belfast, when a gang of people barged in and took her away.

AMT: Her kids were there.

PRK: They were. They were clinging to her legs as this gang which was, there was men and women they were masked. They had guns and they said, we just want to take your mother away for a few hours. We want to talk to her. We'll bring her back, but they never did. And the children never saw her again.

AMT: So that day in December, that night in December 1972, was it.

PRK: That was it. And the kids initially had no idea what had happened or they stayed in the apartment thinking she would come back. But ultimately they were split up and sent off to orphanages and they didn't know what became of their mother for decades and the people who came that night were members of the Provisional IRA.

AMT: Why did they believe that Jean McConville was informing to the British Army?

PRK: Well they're at that time was a war going on in Belfast and you had different paramilitary groups fighting. The British army had come in. The army did try and cultivate informants in some of these neighborhoods and people were suspicious of Jean McConville. She had been in a mixed marriage. She was a Protestant who'd married a Catholic. Initially they lived in east Belfast, which is quite Protestant and they had to leave because they were considered too Catholic for that neighborhood. They moved to West Belfast but there people were suspicious of them because she was a Protestant. Her children to this day insist that she was not an informant to this day insist that she was but it was on that basis that suspicion that they took her away and killed her.

AMT: And it was shortly before that that there had been some kind of a fire fight outside the apartments where she was living with her children and someone was pleading for help and she actually went out that night.

PRK: That's right. So her children have this very vivid recollection of one of these terrifying nights when there would be gun battles going on right outside the door in this housing project where they lived and they would actually bring their mattresses onto the floor and sleep in the middle of the apartment so as not to get hit. And one night they heard a cry from outside the door and Jean McConville went to the door and she saw a wounded British soldier and her son actually told her don't go out, don't get involved. But what she said was that some mother's son out there and she came out. She brought him a pillow and she comforted him and in the morning the soldier was gone and someone had scrawled in paint, the words "Brit lover" across her door.

AMT: And the kids say that everybody stayed away from them after that.

PRK: They do. So this was a terrifying time in Belfast and what the children remember was really being shunned not just by their neighbors, but actually by the Catholic Church which was aware that there was an apartment full of children who you know apparently had no parents. Nobody stepped in to intervene and take care of them.

AMT: And this is a very complicated story and you take us through a tapestry of events. So I'm going to jump to the chase and come back. Her body was discovered eventually long after. How?

PRK: So in 2003, so 31 years after she disappeared, a man was walking along a beach in the Republic of Ireland, when he saw some bones sticking out of the sand. There had been a storm recently and so there had been some erosion and these bones had churned up out of the ground and they discovered a skull with a single bullet hole in the back of it and they ended up determining that this was the remains of Jean McConville.

AMT: And how did they know?

PRK: So ultimately they did DNA tests, but before they came to that phase they had discovered some clothing that these bones were swaddled in and they brought some of Jean McConville's children who were now adults with children of their own into a police station. And her son Archie who had been 16 when she disappeared, he came in and the idea was that he was going to look at the clothes and identify them, but he found in the moment that he couldn't bring himself to. He just couldn't look at them. Instead he asked a question. So Jean McConville's children remember her always having a diaper pin, pinned to her clothes, they called it a nappy pin, a blue nappy pin because as you can imagine with 10 kids, somebody is always missing a button. She always needed it for some repair or other. And so Archie said to the police officer, I don't want look at the clothes, but can you tell me is there a nappy pin and there was.

AMT: And they knew.

PRK: And they knew.

AMT: What happened to the children after she disappeared and never came back?

PRK: Well initially in a heartbreaking turn they insisted on staying in the apartment because they were convinced she would come back and they needed to be there when she did. But she didn't. And eventually the state stepped in and the kids said look if you're going to put us into homes at least put us all together and they didn't do this put them up. And they sent them to different orphanages and some terrible things happened some of these orphanages were quite predatory environments and some children were further victimized in some of those places and the kids ended up going up and having families of their own and always wondering what had happened to their mother. They had an inkling that the IRA was involved and eventually as the peace process got underway in the 1990s they started finally speaking out and saying we need answers.

AMT: I want to ask a little bit more about Gerry Adams and his role with the provisional Irish Republican Army during the armed struggle. What was it?

PRK: Well Adams is a bit of an enigma. And if you talk to people who were in the IRA during those years they will all tell you the same story which is that this was a guy who was a commander in the Belfast IRA in the early 1970s. He had many people reporting to him in the kind of chain of command of the IRA. He was giving orders should people go out and carry out operations but at a certain point Adam started to insist that he had only ever been a politician that he was in the political wing Sinn Fein which ended up becoming the direct political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland today. So he denied that he'd been in the IRA. And this paradox is really at the heart of the Adams persona to this day because he continues to deny that he was ever a member of the IRA. But I interviewed plenty of people who served underneath him in the IRA and can recall very vividly those years.

AMT: And it's worth mentioning that he was in the news for years as a spokesperson as the leader of Sinn Fein always making that distinction. It was against the law in Britain to actually put him on the air. They used to have an actor play him to actually say the words he said. So they weren't actually putting his voice on the air.

PRK: Yeah it was a strange interlude where that was happening. So they didn't want his voice. I think in part because of a fear that and you heard his voice in that clip he's very seductive. He has this baritone. He's very charismatic, but he was out there advocating for for violence for acts of terrorism. And I think that there was a fear by the British particularly by Margaret Thatcher that unless you muzzled Adams somehow, these ideas might become contagious.

AMT: And so he has denied having any role in the kidnapping and killing of Jean McConville. What do you think of that?

PRK: Oh I don't buy it for a second and I think I pretty comprehensively substantiate in the book that in fact Gerry Adams gave the order to do this. But the interesting thing about disappearing someone which is a familiar concept from other conflicts it only happened about 16 times during the Troubles is that it didn't happen by accident and the troubles the IRA did this on purpose it was a policy they were very hierarchical organization so a decision was made to do this and I make the case based on testimony from people who worked for him that it was Gerry Adams who made this decision.

AMT: And because she was disappeared they didn't find her body for years because normally what they would do if they found someone who had gone against them is they would kill them and leave them on a street right. It would be a message to people.

PRK: Yeah. They used the bodies of the dead in this way which is itself an awful form of propaganda and social control. But at least gives the families a body to bury and a grave where they can go and mourn and the pretentiousness of disappearing someone is that you leave the family in a purgatory they just don't know. There were children of Jean Macandrew who for years wondered if maybe she was alive maybe she'd gotten amnesia and wound up in another country and they held out hope for that which is a terribly cruel thing when you think about it.

AMT: Now Boston College played an important role in Gerry Adams being taken in for questioning. Why?

PRK: So after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 ended the troubles. Boston College wanted to commemorate this period in some way and they recognized that there had been a real culture of silence during those decades. My book is called Say Nothing. It comes from Seamus Heaney poem, Whatever you say, say nothing. And there was a culture in which people just didn't talk about the terrible things that had happened. So Boston College set up a secret oral history archive in which paramilitaries from both sides could come in and really give Frank reminiscences. Hours and hours of them on tape about the things that they'd done during the troubles on the understanding that those would not be released until after their deaths and a number of people came in and talked about the killing of Jean McConville. And in fact a number of people suggested in these interviews that Gerry Adams might have had something to do with it and word leaked out about this and when that happened the police in Northern Ireland thought well if there's this archive on the other side of an ocean linking Gerry Adams, a man that they still hate it from the troubles to this murder we'd like to get our hands on it. So they ended up subpoenaing the archive. They ended up arresting Gerry Adams and questioning him for four days, but then releasing him without charges because I think this is an old cold case. It's almost 50 years old. There's no physical evidence. It would be very hard to prosecute him for this crime.

AMT: The IRA issued a statement in 1999 saying Jean McConville had admitted to being an informant for the British army before she was killed. The family still denies that. What do you make of that statement?

PRK: Well I to be perfectly honest with you, I don't know the truth and I'm a reporter and I've tried to told this story in a compelling way. But what I won't do is kind of lean out beyond where the facts go. And so what I've tried to do is present the facts on one side and on the other and let the reader draw their own conclusions. I will say one thing which is a point that our children have made which is that when the IRA interrogated people that tended to torture them. And so the fact that somebody confessed to what they were being accused of under interrogation in which they were being tortured does not to me feel necessarily like it resolves the question of whether or not they did the thing.

AMT: This is really the story of two women. There is a young Irish Republican member, IRA member, volunteer named Dolours Price. Who is she? Who was she?

PRK: Well Dolours Price was actually the way that I came to the story in the first place because she died in 2013 and I read and was really fascinated by an obituary of her. She grew up in are in an IRA family in Belfast. The IRA went back on both sides in her family and she joined the IRA in the early 1970s. She was the first woman to serve as a frontline soldier for the IRA out there doing missions conducting bombing raids. She bombed the Old Bailey. She went to jail. She went on a hunger strike. She had a very dramatic life and in her final year she was dealing with a great deal of trauma about some of the things she'd done when she was a young woman and she started to speak up. She gave an interview to that Boston College project, but she also gave interviews to the press. And one thing that she acknowledged having played a role then was the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. The story that Dolours Price had talked publicly before she died was that she had driven Jean McConville over the border. This is one of the things she did. Dolours worked for a secret unit of the IRA called the Unknowns and they did a lot of dirty work. They reported directly to Gerry Adams. And one of the things that Dolours did, one of the off all jobs she had was to take people who were going to be killed and disappeared down across the border into the Republic of Ireland, which is often where people were court martialed and executed and buried. And so she had acknowledged driving Jean McConville in her death. What I hadn't known until I got far enough in my research for the book is that the local team that was supposed to kill Jean McConville couldn't bring themselves to do it. Perhaps because she was a woman or a mother of 10 or they knew that because she was a widow, if they killed her they'd be orphaning 10 children. And so they had to send back for reinforcements from Belfast to actually carry out this final act. And Dolours Price was one of the three people who came to do it.

AMT: Dolours Price says later that she didn't know that Jean was the mother of 10 kids.

PRK: She does and I guess I have to take her word for that. I think that she wrestled in her final years. She was you know she had issues with drugs and alcohol and and really severe PTSD. And I think that she was tortured by some of the things she'd done as a very young woman. she was barely out of her teens at the height of the struggle.

AMT: So do we know who actually shot Jean?

PRK: Yes. This is something that I discovered in the course of my research for the book somewhat to my surprise was the identity of the person who pulled the trigger and it was a as you can imagine a significant decision for me to publish the name of this person who is still alive and not been identified before. But I was a hundred percent certain and I did the reporting to back it up and no arrests have been made. It's the same thing as with Adams. I mean it's tough to prosecute these types of crimes now. They're so old, but I'm a journalist, not a prosecutor. So I think I've established the truth.

AMT: And this person, there were three of them at the grave. They had dug a grave for her. They brought her to a grave.

PRK: Yes. So they brought her to a gave that had been dugged by the local team and the story that Dolours told about this before she died was that they had one gone and they each took a shot and only one of them ended up actually hitting her. The idea was that they would somehow, they would each have a share of the blame I guess was the idea that each took a shot, but only one connected with her. Dolours claimed that she missed deliberately and again whether or not that's true I don't know, but that's the story she told.

AMT: And she turns on Gerry Adams. Why?

PRK: Well during those years those really years of the troubles that I'm writing about in the first half of my book in the 1970s. When a lot of really terrible things were happening what members of the IRA told themselves was we are going to do all of this in order to get the British out of our island. These were not people without conscience. I mean they they did have a sense that there was a larger and more all scheme in which the pretty barbaric things that they were doing would ultimately be justified. They'd be justified when they got the Brits up once and for all. And when the Good Friday Accord happened in 1998, it essentially said that the British could stay, which for Gerry Adams I mean I think many people rightly praise him as a visionary peacemaker who turned the IRA around on this, but for a lot of footsoldiers like Dolours Price, that was a painful experience because suddenly she's looking back at these things she didn't her twenties and she's saying well wait a second I did all those things because I thought that they would lead to this end which would be a united Ireland but we didn't get that. So what am I to make of these terrible things I did. And then as if to to exacerbate her sense of betrayal, Gerry Adams himself said oh well I personally was never in the IRA. So I have none of that blood on my hands and that ended up driving Dolours Price and some other footsoldiers in the IRA quite quite mad. I mean it drove them to desperation in their final years.

AMT: You really give us a story of the sort of the intrigue and the infighting of a group of people who are so dedicated to a cause that they give their lives to. They give every moment of their lives to it. Just last week we learned that a former British soldier who will be prosecuted for killing two unarmed Catholic protesters on Bloody Sunday. That was the day in January 1972, 13 people killed. It was December later that year Jean McConville disappeared. What did all of that means to the lives of some of the people you talk about? To Delours Price to Brendan Huges?

PRK: Well I think part of the dilemma for Northern Ireland is that, on the one hand, the Good Friday Agreement was this landmark deal and things are so much better now than they used to be. And if you go to Belfast today, it can feel like any other small reasonably well off bustling European city in a way that it didn't during the Troubles. It doesn't feel like a warzone. On the other hand there was no provision in that agreement for how to deal with the past. There was no truth and reconciliation process of the sort that you had in South Africa. There was no bargain about. Well wait a second. Thirty six hundred people died so who do we prosecute. How do we find out what happened. Who do we hold accountable. Do we go after the paramilitaries. Do we go after the soldiers. What about instances in which the British state colluded with paramilitaries. There was no agreement on any of that. And as a result you end up with a situation in which a lot of these atrocities are dealt with in a piecemeal manner that nobody is very happy with. So this this announcement about prosecuting the British soldier is a good example. They've just announced they're going to prosecute one parachute regiment soldier for shooting on unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday. And in one corner you have a huge outcry that they didn't prosecute more people because there were other people there that firing these shots and in fact there were people who'd given them orders who could potentially be held accountable. On the other side you have a huge outcry from people who are furious that you would prosecute just one of the soldiers any soldier for you know some people say just doing their jobs. So it's a very vexed situation and I think at least from me from the States even as an Irish American in the seven trips I made over to Belfast over the last four years, one thing that really came home to me is that it's a piece, but it's a very brittle piece.

AMT: Well you write about your own fascination with collective denial. The stories communities tell themselves in tragedies or transgressive events. That still lingers then?

PRK: It does. Absolutely. And I think that my mission in a way as an outsider and as a journalist where I have a bias for the truth and a sense that you can try and bury the past, but it won't stay buried. And so part of what I was trying to do was go and tell these stories and tease them out of people and create a record without any particular bias or agenda, but just telling the stories as I found them. And it's been a comfort for me to hear from people in Ireland and in Ireland and in England and Scotland who are reading the book because my hope was that that was what would happen. That if you had somebody come in from outside this culture and looked around and tried to make a record of what had gone on here, that could be an artifact that people engage with.

AMT: So in a way the stories of the two women and how they intersect that's emblematic of the wider troubles.

PRK: It is and my hope was to to look at these two women and really just look at this one act of violence and all the people around look at the victims but also look at the perpetrators and look at the way that a single act of violence reverberated down the decades and continues to to this day because I think that there is there is a great deal of trauma for the victims and the families of the victims. But it was important for me to capture the way in which you can check in on somebody in their early 20s at the height of the struggle doing the sort of thing checking with them again in their thirties when they're out of prison and their forties when they're married and have children of their own. And when you look back on these acts of violence they can be quite troubling.

AMT: Today you can drive right across the border from the Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland. There are fears that Brexit will bring back a hard border right there. What do you think Brexit is going to mean for that region of Ireland?

PRK: Nothing good. I'm hugely worried. I couldn't predict anything with much certainty for you and I think anybody can. The scariest thing about Brexit is the very people who voted for this thing and are orchestrating it don't seem to have any sense of what will become of it, but I don't see a plan right now that's on the table that both the UK and the EU could agree to that doesn't reonscribe in some fashion, the border between the Republic of Ireland and the north. This will become the only land border between the UK and the EU and I think this was a colossally stupid and irresponsible thing to have done. And I worry that in voting for Brexit the people of the UK forgot about the troubles. They forgot that this border for three decades was this very potent symbol that there were sandbags and soldiers on that border and there were snipers who took shots and that the IRA fought a war to erase that border and now they're going to reinscribe it. And on my good days I try not to buy into the most alarmist views that the troubles could come back. I just don't think there's the appetite for that, but on the margins I do think we will see more violence.

AMT: It was a very troubling time in history for all concerned and it's really important to read your book. Thanks for your time.

PRK: Thank you so much.

AMT: Patrick Radden Keefe. His book is Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. He joined us from New York City. That is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. John Cleese of Monty Python joins guest host Ali Hassan today. Now Patrick Radden Keefe just told us his book title Say Nothing comes from the Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney. We're going to leave you today with Seamus Heaney reading the third verse of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Clip of "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing" poem read by Seamus Heaney.

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Mar. 19, 2019 episode transcript

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