Episodes

Fin Dwyer of Irish History Podcasts pays a return visit to Irish Stew. We last hosted Fin two years ago. Since then, Fin has continued to fascinate his listeners with in depth episodes on a broad range of Irish History topics. Despite this frenetic pace, Fin has found time to publish a book titled: A Lethal Legacy - A History of Ireland in 18 Murders. We'll be talking about two cases detailed in the book and what they can tell us about how Ireland has changed over the past 200 years. We'll also...

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 Universi...

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....

Join us as we travel from Ireland all the way to New Zealand to explore a vision of Ireland from centuries ago in our conversation with Brian O’Sullivan. He’s an author, cultural researcher, strategic analyst, and founder of Irish Imbas, the only Irish publisher specializing in fiction and non-fiction based on the ancient Irish cultural knowledge and belief patterns of authentic Irish mythology. Hailing from West Cork, Brian lived in the UK and France before following his heart to New Zealand ...

A Trinity College graduate in economics and politics, he represented Irish business abroad, led The Ireland Funds for almost two decades, and now Kingsley Aikins combines his fervor for networking and diaspora engagement in the mission of The Networking Institute. “Kinger,” as he’s known to his friends, talks of how rugby became his global passport and the lucky break that landed him in Sydney, Australia to represent Enterprise Ireland and the Industrial Development Authority (IDA). Finding h...

From New Jersey to Sligo, Wales, London, Germany, to touring the globe and then to New York, Roger Clark stamps his passport as a leading citizen of the Global Irish Nation. And to millions around the world, he is an icon. An actor, filmmaker, voiceover artist of over 150 audiobooks, Roger’s claim to global fame is his performance-capture portrayal of the cowboy antihero Arthur Morgan in the massively popular action-adventure video game, five years in the making, Red Dead Redemption 2, a.k...

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 amba...

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 Al...

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 lea...

Join us on a stroll along North Circular Road from Phoenix Park to the Dublin Docklands with our guide Luke McManus, the documentary filmmaker of the award-winning North Circular which opens in New York City on July 28th. Rendered in graphic black & white over a soundtrack of local North Circular musicians, the film gives voice to narratives from the history of the city and nation, from colonialism to mental health, from women’s liberation to the battle to save the legendary folk revival venue ...

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 ...