Episodes

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 na...

Our latest global Irish conversation goes behind the scenes of the globe’s most significant international organization, the United Nations, courtesy of Ireland’s Ambassador to the UN, Fergal Mythen. He didn’t rise to one of Ireland’s most significant diplomatic postings without an impressive diplomatic career behind him. Fergal has worked on Irish-Canadian, Irish-Latin American, Irish-Caribbean, and Irish-British Affairs, including Brexit. He was on the European Community monitoring mission to...

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,...

Join us as we pick up the conversation with Doug Devaney who interviewed us last fall on The Plastic Podcasts. A talented podcaster, Doug’s also an actor, writer, journalist, and self-proclaimed "songster, funster, punster, hamster." In this episode we delve into the core concept of The Plastic Podcasts, which centers around the notion that “we all come from somewhere else.” Doug explores Irish diaspora narratives in England by engaging in lively discussions with actors, activists, artists...

For Dublin’s own David Clinch, media is serious business. He’s been working on the front lines of innovative journalism and the complete overhaul of the news business for the past 30 years. He jokes that he’s been called “the Zelig of the media,” an “accidental journalist” popping up in key roles at the companies driving the changing media landscape, including ITN News in London, CNN where he helped manage the CNN International Desk in Atlanta and pioneered the use of social media for internati...

For Richard Donavan running the grueling 26.2 miles of the Boston Marathon was only a way to stretch his legs before getting up the next morning to run across America…for the second time. Running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days sounds impossible, so he did it in under five. Richard is also the first person to run marathons at both the North and South Poles and now lures other likeminded athletes to join him in some of Earth’s most extreme endurance races, including the North...

For over 25 years Manachán Magan has been at the forefront of Irish cultural affairs. He first rose to public attention with the 1996 launch of Irish language television now known as TG4. Together with his brother Ruán, Manachán produced a ground breaking series of television programs exploring indigenous cultures across the globe Since those early days, Manachán continues to drive the cultural conversation through multiple mediums. He has proved to be an accomplished journalist, theatrical p...

From “The Island of Malta and the Ireland of Malta,” Malta’s Ambassador to Ireland tells Irish Stew of the unexpected connections between the island nations of Ireland and Malta, especially for his hometown of Floriana. Ambassador Giovanni Buttigieg traces the Irish connection back to an 1895 visit to Floriana by an Irish Cardinal who went to Rome to advocate for the sainthood of one of their own, and a 1905 football match when the Royal Dublin Fusiliers gave the Floriana side their green and...

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 ...

He’s the quintessential New York Irish cop who rose up through the ranks from walking a beat to becoming a highly-ranked detective. He’s also a respected leader of New York’s Irish American community and a man at the center of a major controversy playing out now in New York as the American Irish Historical Society’s irreplaceable Beaux-Arts townhouse home on Fifth Avenue in New York City was put up for sale. Brian always seems to be in the middle of it all, from his roots amidst a big Irish fam...

Growing up with one foot in Dublin and the other in Cork, Michael “Mick” Mellamphy now has a foot in Ireland and one in New York, where he’s in starring in Ronán Noone’s The Smuggler at the Irish Repertory Theatre, part of the Origin Theatre’s 1st Irish Festival he curated, on stages around NYC for Jan. & Feb. 2023. And he still made time to sit down with us a couple of hours before The Smuggler’s final dress rehearsal before opening night a few hours later. But as well known as Mick is in the...

Veteran diplomat and C Suite executive, Ted Smyth, joins Martin Nutty, on The Stew for the third time. With the conclusion of the final election of the US Midterm election season, it seemed like a good time to take the political temperature of not just the United States, but also of Northern Ireland and the Western European democracies. Ted is a member of the Irish Americans for Biden committee and has a thoughtful take and matters political which spans both sides of the Atlantic. Join Ted and ...

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...

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 ...

Gregory Harrington has stayed busy since our initial episode back in February 2022. Since that conversation, the accomplished violinist released a recording titled Gregory Harrington: Live From The Irish Repertory Join Martin Nutty as he chats with Gregory about the risks of recording beloved traditional Irish tunes as a classically trained violinist. Learn how Gregory approaches the recording of music outside classical repertoire and how he approaches the challenge of bringing something fresh ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 b...

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...

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 ...

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 Dubli...

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 l...

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...