Author Episodes

Speechwriter, novelist, essayist, and now memoirist Peter Quinn returns to Irish Stew to share tales from his home borough of New York City and beyond, captured in his new book, Cross Bronx: A Writing Life. Join us as Peter spins stories from his rise up through Irish American middle-class respectability in New York’s northernmost borough, The Bronx, which Quinn describes as “a small-scale Yugoslavia. Ethnic enclaves were interspersed amid areas in which, though physically mingled; groups lived...

Our 50th episode comes to you on the most ancient of Irish holidays - Halloween or Oíche Shamhna (eee-ha how-na) in Irish/Gaelic. It is the night that celebrates the transition from the old to the new Celtic year. That transition point, between the present and the past, was a space where the Celts believed the spirits or pucaí (pook-ee) of the past roamed. Halloween seems a particularly appropriate date for us to introduce Neil Jackman, a man with an insatiable interest in Ireland's mysterious ...

It wasn’t planned this way, but we recorded our episode with writer Brian McDonald on Sept. 11, a date that looms large in his new book Five Flights Up, which traces the Irish American story of four generations of the Feehan family in the Fire Department of New York, the FDNY, a story which would tragically culminate with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. From the days just after the horse-drawn firetruck, to the devastation of the 1970s when the Bronx was burning, to the unspea...

Flor MacCarthy was born in West Cork and shares memories of one of Ireland's most idyllic regions. Her childhood was one rich in the indulgence of curiosity, filled with books, history, and fueled by a Russophile father. A Trinity College degree in French and Art History led unexpectedly to a career in journalism. Flor worked for 16 years at RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster, reporting on both domestic and international news. Following her successful career at RTE, Flor took up the position ...

We’re not sure what’s more impressive—that Larry Kirwan originated and co-wrote the Broadway hit Paradise Square, or that his early band with Pierce Turner was banned from the notorious New York punk rock club CBGB for being “too demonic.” Larry talks of how his unusual childhood in Wexford and his need to maneuver through different points of view--Republican vs Free State, Catholicism vs Atheism, Irish vs British—laid the foundation of an artistic vision that could see the world through the pr...

Our Bloomsday episode with the engaging James Joyce scholar John McCourt takes us to Italy for the first time, specifically its outpost across the Adriatic Sea, Trieste. “There, I can safely say I discovered James Joyce,” McCourt says of Trieste. “Having encountered him occasionally in Ireland, I found myself in the city that had been his home for ten years.” After earning his BA, MA, and PhD. from University College Dublin, McCourt launched an international academic career, focused mainly...

Our new season of Irish Stew opens with trailblazing journalist Mark Little, a former RTÉ newscaster working to make sense of social media. Coming from a family where there was a daily scrum over who got the newspaper first, armed with “premature cynicism” and blessed with an insatiable curiosity for what made the world work, journalism beckoned and after graduating Trinity College he landed a job with RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster. In this episode he shares stories from his “eyewitn...

Liza Donnelly: New Yorker Cartoonist & “Very Funny Ladies” Irish Stew’s favorite cartoonist is back to tell you about her just-published book, Very Funny Ladies: an in-depth celebration of women cartoonists who have graced the pages of the famous magazine from the Roaring Twenties to the present day. And you learn that somewhere between way back then and now a gender gap opened up at the magazine as women cartoonists disappeared from its pages, a gap finally bridged by Liza and two other w...

We first sat down with Liverpudlian, Jack Byrne back in Season 2 when we talked about his first novel: Under the Bridge. You can catch that episode here: Jack Byrne: Mystery Writer. Now Jack is back with the second installment of his Liverpool Mystery Series - Across the Water which continues the story of Paddy and Vinnie Connolly. The action moves from Liverpool to Wicklow as Vinnie traces the story of his long-deceased father against a backdrop of corruption and political violence. Join Mart...

Season III of Irish Stew concludes with our conversation with a very Global Irish citizen, Dan Mulhall, Ireland’s Ambassador to the United States and your guide to one of the classics of Irish literature through his recently published Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey. Join us as we tour the world with one of Ireland’s top diplomats as he wields Ireland’s soft power and uses Ireland’s culture to open doors and strengthen ties. And from one diplomatic posting to the next, he lugged one weighty to...

Colin Broderick likes to tell stories, needs to tell them, be they dark, dank, and dangerous, be they bright, affirming, and knowing. It’s all there in his new film A Bend in the River, his highly personal tale of a writer returning to his native County Tyrone still in the shadows of “The Troubles,” confronting the life and loves he left behind and writing as if his life depended on it, with boxer-turned-actor John Duddy in the title role, and featuring Kathy Kiera Clarke of Derry Girls fame....

Janet Behan carries on the family tradition of creativity in both her acting and writing. The London-born daughter of Dublin-born playwright Brian Behan & Celia Behan, great niece of the songwriter Peadar Kearney (author of Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish National Anthem), and niece of the writers Dominic Behan and Brendan Behan. On this serving of The Stew, she tells of a deprived but happy childhood “that took a bit of recovering from” and how “playing the fool” to ease family tensions led her...

Cauvery Madhavan adds Indian spices to this serving of Irish Stew as we trace her journey from Chennai, India to Sligo, Ireland, to County Kildare, and travel back with her to India to explore Irish stories there through her epic novel The Tainted. We talk of race and color in India and Ireland, the Anglo-Indians who were often more Irish than Anglo, the bonds Indian students forged with Irish revolutionaries, the dearth of spices in Sligo, the political scene in India today, how she and her fam...

With the republication of his epic novel Banished Children of Eve, the Bard of Hastings-on-Hudson Peter Quinn joins us for a sometimes serious, occasionally irreverent, always insightful look into the global Irish identity from the Irish American perspective. We follow the immigrant’s evolution from the “Paddy” of the famine Irish who washed up on U.S. shores and into Banished…to “Pat” in dogged pursuit of the American dream, to the brash urban swagger of ”Jimmy” personified by actor Jimmy Cagne...

Michael Dowling Links Website: www.michael-dowling.com After the Roof Caved In: Amazon Leading Through a Pandemic: Amazon Publisher: Simon & Schuster LinkedIn Twitter Episode Preview Episode Details Growing up in rural poverty in Co. Limerick, Michael Dowling was surrounded by a “cacophony of nos.” Fortunately for Dowling there was no better motivation than being told he couldn’t do something. That spirit and a prodigious amount of hard work propelled him through University Col...

Jack Byrne Links Under the Bridge: Amazon Publisher: Northodox Press Blog Twitter Facebook Episode Details Jack Byrne grew up in Liverpool, the son of post WWII Irish emigrants. In his first novel, Under the Bridge, Jack takes the Liverpool of his parent's era to craft an engrossing mystery featuring the post war Irish and their struggles as they try to make there way in a country that at times is hostile to their presence. We talk with Jack about his life, the challenges of writing and...

Geoff Cobb is a New York City school teacher, a blogger, a columnist and a historian with a focus on the lesser recorded histories of the personalities and neighborhoods that constitute the seething ferment that is New York City. Our conversation  focuses on Geoff's upcoming book detailing the lives of Irish New Yorkers who left a mark on the city and the state.