to some degree

“It’s also about ingratiating yourself, creating goodwill and essentially, to some degree, creating an implicit obligation that I’ve done something for you. It’s sort of relationship building but, in politics, that relationship building is more suspect.”

The group commissioned a poll in August, which said 67% of people support an assisted dying law to some degree in Northern Ireland.

His primary motive for writing the book, he says, was pretty simple: “I wanted to give my parents their flowers while they’re still here. All I see are these showbiz tragedy stories. My parents didn’t know what the heck they were doing, but the most important thing was they had good intentions for me. My family and I, we really had very little understanding of leverage. We were stuck in appreciation mode. And I think that’s good to some degree.”

“I’m not saying we need to be 100 percent homogeneous. I’m not saying we need to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80 percent, 90 percent white would probably be, probably the best we could hope for, to some degree.”

To some degree, the collective amnesia that seems to have occurred was a protective mechanism from the trauma of the great loss and uncertainty that sprang from COVID.