In this episode, cohosts John and Martin dive into the world of Olympic shot putting with their guest, Eric Favors, an athlete representing Ireland. Born and raised in Rockland County, New York, with a rich Irish heritage, Eric shares his journey from trying various sports to specializing in track and field. He discusses the intricacies of shot put…

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 busines…

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 opportuni…

Michael Meade spent over 20 years on Wall Street and then stepped away from the pressured world of high finance to do something totally different. Some, in his circumstances, may have opted for plenty of time on the golf course and cracking open a few brews, that’s not the kind of person Michael Meade is. Intrigued by a visit to Ireland, Michael wa…

As Chief Executive of the Western Development Commission (WDC), Allan Mulrooney is a tireless advocate for the Western Region of Ireland, promoting social and economic development for the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon, Galway, and Clare. Why go west? Allan points to the region's mix of the old and the new, how it fosters a wo…

In the first of our “Irish Libations” series, we welcome Michael McKillop, who branched out from the 36-year-old Glens of Antrim Potatoes business to launch Glens of Antrim Distillery with its Lir line of Irish Whiskeys, amidst bucolic surroundings in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. We get a professional’s view of the growing, shipping, and marketing…

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…

The proud possessor of three masters degrees and two doctorates, Michael Flavin is a Reader in Global Education in the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London. He is the author of two books on technology enhanced learning, two on nineteenth-century literature, and two novels. The first of these, One Small Step, tells the tale of a Birmin…

I call then Garchs - types who have unconscionable wealth, wiling to subvert democracy to accumulate more. The word oligarch is used by academics, but that doesn't sound sinister enough to me for those whose only purpose is to accumulate immense wealth and power at the expense of the other 99.9%By Martin Nutty

When we last talked with Dan Mulhall, he was Ireland’s Ambassador to the United Stares. Since then, he retired after a 44-year career in diplomacy, but he’s been busier than ever as we learn in this check-in episode with Martin Nutty focused on his new book on W. B. Yeats. Recent invitations to New York University, Cambridge, and Harvard, provided …

With a computer programming background and an instinct for reporting, Malachy Browne is on the vanguard of a new form of data-driven news coverage that is revitalizing journalism. Co-founder and enterprise director of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, Malachy is pioneering the use of digital sleuthing, collecting and analyzing troves o…

Ted Smyth, former diplomat and C-Suite and current President of the Advisory Board of Glucksman Ireland House NYU, joins Martin Nutty for a discussion on Irish and American politics. What does the recent November 2023 American mid term election presage for 2024? How differing are the American and Irish views on Gaza? How should we understand the re…

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 Murde…

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 wit…

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 teach…

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 a…

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…

John Merrigan and Danielle Morgan – aka fatdan productions – take a break between rehearsals to tell us about their lives, their love and their latest play (with music): “Brendan, Son Of Dublin.” Theirs is a journey that takes us from Dublin and Tipperary to London and Liverpool via Dubai, from working a life surrounded by books and theatre to the …

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…

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 arch…

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 unfl…

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 lif…

The fact that Twitter is a mess is not news or a surprise. The transition to a new "X" logo and the elimination of the blue bird is just another exercise in Elon Musk's narcissism. Join me as talk about the pros and cons for migrating towards a decentralized social media and avoid the ever increasing madness that is now X…

London-born artist Emma O’Rourke uses her own personal archive – and those of other people and institutions – to negotiate that most Irish of concerns: memory and remembrance. Whether sourcing family photos, the recollections of strangers or museum artefacts, her abstractions are both warm and bold. We talk about the effects of interpreting memory …

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 t…

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 skeletal remains of those animals, since that is all that usually remains …

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-…

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. Sh…

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…

Declan McSweeney has over twenty five years experience as a local correspondent and writer on either side of the water. As a journalist with the Offaly Express he covered the disappearance – still unsolved – of Fiona Pender, before working both with the Romford Recorder and as a freelance columnist across England. He tells of the changes in regiona…

By John Lee & Martin Nutty

The Untilled Field (1903) is a volume of short stories by George Moore. Chapter one, In The Clay, features the story of a Dublin sculptor whose work has been destroyed. Who is to blame and what has caused this unprovoked destruction? About The Author - from the Dictionary of Irish Biography George Augustus Moore (1852 - 1933), novelist, critic, mem…

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…

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…

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 …

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 furl…

Journalist, Media Consultant, Producer and Podcaster, Mick Ord is a legend among the broadcast press of Merseyside. A former head of BBC Radio Merseyside, he has covered such events as Heysel, Hillsborough, the Warrington bomb and Liverpool’s successful bid for Capital of Culture. He was NUJ Regional Journalist of the Year in 1990 for his……

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 townhou…

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 do…

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 me…

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 Bron…

Yesterday, Twitter suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists. In Twitter’s understaffed and diminished state, no immediate reason was given for the actions. Apparently, Twitter’s decision relates to the journalists reporting on the suspension of a Twitter account named ElonJet, which tracked the movements of Elon Musk’s private pla…

Singer songwriter and family historian Ronan MacManus is the son of Ross and brother of Declan (aka Elvis Costello) but more importantly is something of a legend among the Diaspora of London and the South East, with his band Bible Code Sundays and their anthem Maybe It’s Because I’m An Irish Londoner. We talk family……

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 gettin…

Actor, writer, director, mentor, spiritual advisor, activist…the list of Chia Phoenix’s roles in life goes on and on. In her own words, she is a “Jack of All Trades, Master of All”. She brings a new and vital perspective to our podcasts as we talk about the historical and linguistic connections between the Caribbean and……

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 violini…

Bass player with the original line-up of Public Image Limited, alongside John Lydon and Keith Levene, John Wardle – dubbed “Jah Wobble” by Sid Vicious -went on to front Invaders Of The Heart, worked on the London Underground during lean years and returned to music to work with – amongst others – Brian Eno, Delores……

Five reasons behind why I'm leaving Twitter and why I think you should tooBy Martin Nutty

The only Irish Traveller to found and head a Gypsy And Traveller Exchange, Josephine (“Josie”) O’Driscoll talks visits to holocaust sites in Krakow, education, family and her hopes for community ownership among Gypsies, Romani and Travellers. Plus John Lee of Irish Stew Podcast raises author Peter Quinn onto The Plastic Pedestal…

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 Be…