Women Episodes

This episode of Irish Stew features an in-depth discussion with Dr. Elizabeth Stack, the Executive Director of the American Irish Historical Society (AIHS). Dr. Stack discusses her journey from Listowel, County Kerry, to her academic career in history and her role in developing the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany and revitalizing the AIHS. Recorded at the AIHS's historic Fifth Avenue headquarters in New York, the conversation delves into the importance of preserving Irish American histo...

Vibrant Vivienne Sayers O'Callaghan is an Irish Gen Z entrepreneur, Irish language and culture advocate, and NYC social media influencer rapidly rising to the “top of the heap” as Frank Sinatra croons in “New York, New York.” Viv mixes lively chronicles of her New York adventures with spoon-sized servings of the Irish language and Irish culture, a formula which has earned her almost 40K Instagram followers while her 153K TikTok followers have given her posts over 2.3M likes! Originally from rura...

Writer, performer, and force of nature, born Morag Prunty, but best known by her pen name Kate Kerrigan whisks us from London where she grew up with an Irish identity to Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way where she’s living with an English accent. In this episode, Kate spins tales of idyllic childhood summers in Mayo, the dynamics of being Irish in England during the turbulent 70s and 80s, her challenges in navigating the complex terrain of her Irish identity, and her late-in-life recognition of the ob...

Irish Stew goes to Canada for a most “Global Irish Nation Conversation” with Jackie Gilna, who’s been Irish in Dublin, Spain, the Netherlands, and now she's Irish in Canada's capital, Ottawa. And through a new venture, she's Irish all around the world. Jackie launched We Are Global Irish this year to showcase Irish innovation, connect Irish businesses and organizations globally, drive opportunities to and from the island of Ireland, and to engage the Irish diaspora and anyone with an affinity fo...

Settle in for a spirited episode of Irish Stew with two pioneering women in the Irish spirits industry, Alice Carroll--the proud Limerick distiller and co-founder of Foxes Bow Whiskey, and Maura Clare--the Queen of Poitín and creator of the Smuggling Nun brand. They swap notes on their journey into the spirits business, the challenges and opportunities of operating in traditionally male-dominated sectors, their innovative approaches to reviving and reshaping perceptions around Irish Whiskey and ...

Launching Season Six, we go behind the scenes of the woman-strong Irish film Lies We Tell, a brooding tale of angels and demons, light and shadow, manners and mores, family secrets and family crimes, which The Guardian called “a tightly laced, elegantly cut gothic period drama.” A total rethinking of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1864 novel Uncle Silas, the film centers on Maud Ruthyn, brilliantly portrayed by the rising young star Agnes O’Casey, great-granddaughter of the playwright, Sean O'C...

Join us in a westward journey to the Irish enclaves of Butte, Montana and on to a chicken coop on Maryland’s Eastern Shore as Marybeth Shea guides us along little-known paths of Irish migration and through little understood profession of technical communications. She describes herself as a humanist and cites her Catholic education, specifically with the Jesuits, as foundational to her worldview and her career. She’s now a professor of English in the Professional Writing Program at the University...

So why learn Irish? "Studies have shown that learning your native language, learning any language, but especially your ancestral tongue, brings feelings of comfort and freedom. And especially when considering our past and our heritage, learning Irish is very revealing and very healing," says our latest guest Mollie Guidera, the Irish language teacher for Global Ireland. She grew up “with Irish in her ears all the time” and gave her first Irish lesson at age seven to a visiting American cousin. A...

In this Global Irish conversation, we search for the true origins of Western Civilization with a most global of guests, Naoíse Mac Sweeney, author of The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives . Her father is from Cork City, her mother is Malaysian Chinese, she grew up in London, studied the Greek and Roman world, and is a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna. And to make her even more global, her husband is from Malta, which we visited in our episode with Malta’s ambass...

Growing up in The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Jane Ferguson spent most of her life reporting on the global troubles in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Afghanistan, reporting for CNN International, Al Jazeera, PBS Newshour , The New Yorker and other outlets, always finding the human stories in inhuman wars and all revealed in her unflinching new memoir No Ordinary Assignment . The least surprising part of her memoir is when she wins the George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and an Alf...

Our Global Irish conversation with award-winning author Jane Delury centers on her second novel Hedge, a bildungsroman of an Irish American woman in her forties named Maude pursuing a career in the esoteric field of garden history, looking for clues in the past under the mounting challenges of the present. The theme of bringing a garden back to life threads through this novel of marital strains, infidelity, family secrets, personal discovery, endurance, and perseverance. Along the way, Jane leav...

How can a kneecap bone change the history of Ireland? We answer that question during our conversation with Dr. Ruth Carden, a paleo zoologist with a particular interest in the animals that roamed Ireland over the last 50,000 years. Ruth's research focuses particularly on the skeleteal remains of those animals, since that is all that usually remains after the passage of time. Find out what Ruth can learn from a single bone and how adavanced laboratory analysis can yield multiple clues on the nat...

When Seamus Heaney wrote, “Walk on air, against your better judgement,” he could have been writing about Pauline Turley. From Newry to New York, Pauline has paired hard work with serendipity to arrive at her pivotal role charting the impressive trajectory on New York’s Irish Arts Center from a cramped tenement building to its expansive new home. She tells of how winning the Green Card lottery led this Trinity College Drama and Theatre Studies grad to depart for New York on something of a lark, o...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Barbara Walsh started her career in Galway as a newspaper photographer and has gone on to work for newspapers and magazines in Florida, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. While at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune , Barbara reported on the notorious murderer William Horton Jr. and Massachusetts’ flawed prison furlough system, a series that played a crucial role in the U.S. Presidential election where George H. W. Bush defeated Massachusetts governor Michael Du...

In a way we’ve been teasing this episode since our first, as we’ve treated you to a wee taste of Rosa Nutty’s music at the opening of every Irish Stew episode. Now we go beyond the snippet and follow Rosa through the emotional landscape she travels in song. Her first album after a five-year absence from the recording studio, World So Blue is getting rave reviews, like this from The Irish Times : “Now she’s back with a long-in-gestation debut album that weaves a kind of spell that will calm the j...

In times past, the Irish language (Gaelic) was thought by some to be a mark of backwardness. In this episode, husband and wife team, Colm Bairéad and Cleona Ní Chrualaoi reveal how Ireland's native tongue provided entrée to the world of movie-making leading ultimately to the creation of An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl), Ireland's nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. While there are a number of hurdles to jump before the final five Oscar nominees are announced, there is little d...

Our 49th episode features one of our most global of guests–Deirdre Ryan, a world class athlete who competed for Ireland on the global stage and who is now raising the bar for Irish food. Born in County Dublin, Deirdre studied business and Italian, then worked, studied and trained in Milan. To train and work in Germany, she learned to speak German and she’d go on to work in Belgium, Switzerland, and the UK before returning to Ireland full time. Along the way, she soared to new heights rolling bac...

From a dairy farm in County Offaly to the C-Suite in a global branding agency, her university days in Ulster during The Troubles, her internship with Enterprise Ireland that brought her to New York, her work bringing foreign direct investment and thousands of jobs to Ireland, her MBA from Harvard Business School, her rise in the world of marketers where she is regularly named one of the profession’s most influential global voices, her launch of a #GlobalIrish movement built on the hashtag #Weari...

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 of...

Growing up in a Dublin home with no TV, Aedín turned to books, reading them aloud, drawing out the characters, and letting the words wash over her, which is how at age ten she managed to read James Joyce’s intimidating novel Ulysses . She was drawn to the rhythms and music in the words of the great writers, no surprise coming from a home with her avid reader mother and her father, Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains. But she’d feel the lure of the stage and after early acting experiences in Dublin s...

Our conversation with the warm and welcoming Elaine Ní Bhraonáin takes us from her childhood in South County, Dublin, to New York’s lively Irish scene, to bucolic Ballymoney on the north Wexford coast where she and her husband raise their three healthy children after three difficult pregnancies. She talks about being raised in a home where the paternal language was Irish and the maternal tongue was English, growing up as an Irish language “geek” who would earn B.A. and M.A. degrees in Irish lang...

Liza Donnelly: New Yorker Cartoonist & “Very Funny Ladies” Irish Stew’s favorite cartoonist is back to tell you about her just-published book, V ery 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 women ...

In this episode, we reach for the stars with Irish American astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman, a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions and 159 days in orbit on the International Space Station (ISS). Cady says she’s one-quarter Irish on both sides, but that it adds up to much more than half. When not exploring outer space, she’s exploring Irish music on the flute and tin whistle, even playing with the Chieftains. On St. Patrick’s Day, she live-streamed her playing a tin whistle from Paddy Moloney and an...

Despite growing up with no TV in a rural upstate hamlet, Kristen Shaughnessy would go on to become a fixture in New York TV news as reporter and anchor with the 24-hour news station New York 1. Kristen was on the frontlines of the non-stop news coverage of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and she takes us back to the grim reality that emerged that fateful day, sharing poignant details and discussing the journalistic challenges of reporting on this unprecedented tragedy. We talk about th...