Winners and Sinners

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk, with Ciara.

Winners, and sinners. On The Hard Shoulder.

Ciara Kelly (0:38)

And you are very welcome to that part of the week that is winners and sinners. And this week, we are joined by Off the Balls, Cameron Hill and Saoirse Hanley, feature writer with The Irish Indo. You're both very welcome to Winners and Sinners, where we of course look back with a few twists. Saoirse, let's come to you first.

Who or what is your winner of the week?

Saoirse Hanley (0:58)

My winner is kind of a who and a what. We've got the Democrats in the US. So obviously there was the midterm elections on Tuesday night, so we would have woken up to Wednesday morning here for a lot of the news.

And regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, I just think there was a really, unless you're very, very, very, very, very, very, very fond of the Republicans, there was just a lot of good news to wake up to Wednesday morning. In terms of, for once you had this real, real variation of winners. So people won across the House, across the Senate. We had governors in states. You had states turning blue that haven't turned blue. I think Kansas had its first Democratic governor since before The Wizard of Oz came out, 1932, which is practically unfathomable.

Shane Colman (1:37)

Which of course, invites the joke, they're not in Kansas anymore.

Ciara Kelly (1:40)

They're not in Kansas anymore.

Saoirse Hanley (1:42)

Telling you, there's been all kinds of political tornadoes happening on that side of the world. But I just wanted to run through a few of like the firsts. Cause I think that is what was particularly kind of good coming out of that. That's, you know, kind of what I mean by when I say, regardless of what your personal politics are, I think acknowledging a lot of first time people being in these positions, I do think that's really exciting. You had the first black female governor in all of the US, Keisha Lance Bottoms, you have Abdel Al-Sayed, the first Muslim in the US Senate, the first Muslim person in the US Senate in the US. In Texas and California, they elected their first Latino and Latina governors. You had Deb Haaland, the first Native American governor. And then you had Byron Donnells, the first black governor in Florida, among others. These were all firsts of just kind of unfathomable in some ways. You're looking at that and you're thinking, how has it not been any other, you know, like black female governor in all of the US before? It's kind of crazy. But things like that, for once, to wake up to news like that in the US was really refreshing because in the last couple of years, you wake up to news from the US and it's never good news. It's always like, oh, there's been a new war started. There's new tariffs to look forward to. There's something else you have to worry about. There's some other bill that has been enshrined in something in a state for years and years, has just been upturned. All of these things. And it was just nice to wake up and take a bit of a sigh of relief.

Shane Colman (2:59)

You know what, the first that really shocked me was Chris Pappas becoming the first openly gay male US Senator. Yes, another one. When I heard that I went, that surely cannot be true.

Ciara Kelly (3:12)

As in you thought there would have by now certainly been other gay senators.

Saoirse Hanley (3:16)

Yeah.

Shane Colman (3:17)

I couldn't get my head around that.

Saoirse Hanley (3:18)

What a seismic thing to happen on a random Tuesday evening.

Ciara Kelly (3:22)

Letitia Lansbottom, her great-grandfather was a slave in Georgia. And so she came down through that whole legacy of slavery in the deep south. And she was talking about, I heard her speak, and she was saying that when she was six years of age, she used to drive by the governor's mansion and look and say, I'd love to go in there. She didn't even really know what a governor was. She said, I'd love to visit that lovely big house. And now, of course, she lives in it, which was, I'm sure, an incredible turn around for the fate of young black women in Georgia who go back a few generations and their life choices would have been incredibly limited.

And indeed, some of them would have been slaves and all of that. So it was there was some very powerful changes, I think, that came about, I think you're right.