The Women's Podcast

Yesterday, survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes heard from one of the members of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, when professor Mary Daly spoke publicly about the Commission’s work at an online event organised by Oxford University. To date, none of the Commission members have gone before the Oireachtas or given a press conference following the publication of its...

Why Women are Poorer than Men is the debut book from Annabelle Williams, a journalist and editor who specialises in investing, economics and consumer affairs. The book explores injustices from old-age poverty to the gendered housing crisis and illustrates how society conspires to limit women's wealth. In today’s episode, Williams joins Róisín Ingle to discuss the many reasons why women are poorer...

In this specially extended podcast, Sinead O'Connor invites us into her home to talk about her extraordinary new memoir Rememberings. Over coffee and cigarettes she talks Róisín Ingle through her traumatic childhood, her singular musical career and the liberation she found in tearing up that photo of the pope. And there's more: Prince, family bonds, nuns, shame, writing, singing, head shaving, tru...

It’s three years since the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment was passed by a landslide on May 25th 2018. Now, film directors Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy and Maeve O’Boyle are releasing their documentary, The 8th, about that defining moment in Irish history. With footage gathered over a three-year period, The 8th brings us voices from both sides of the referendum campaign. It takes us behind...

The inspiration for Fíona Scarlett’s debut novel came to her just over three years ago while scrolling through Twitter. The schoolteacher turned author happened across a tweet by a paediatric palliative care doctor, in which he had listed what his young patients said they would miss the most when they died. Using their answers as a springboard, Scarlett immediately opened up her laptop and wrote w...

When the trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme was released late last year, it was immediately met with widespread criticism, not only for its delusional depictions of modern Irish life, but for its dodgy Irish accents and over the top Paddywhackery. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, the film is based on his play Outside Mullingar, which ran on Broadway in 2014. It stars Emily Blunt and Jami...

Today is a BIG day for us. It’s our 500th episode! We love any excuse for a party, as you know, so in lieu of being able to gather the team together for some bubbles we did a very pandemic thing and partied with our listeners over Zoom. Last Thursday evening we held a live episode of the podcast with some very special guests aged 19 to 81, who shared their feelings on ageing and becoming Older & B...

Hollie McNish writes about so much of what it means to be a woman. In her latest book, Slug… and other things I’ve been told to hate, she writes about death and grief, growing up and periods, parenting, her relationship with her body, masturbation and lots more. The book is a mixture of poetry, prose, short stories and essays. It’s not your usual “poetry book” and it’s all the better for it. In th...

Have you ever really thought about where your clothes come from? Who makes them and what conditions are they working in? What happens to all the material waste from unwanted garments? These are the thoughts and questions that inspired Dublin fashion designer Laura Egan to launch Studio Minti, a sustainable online fashion hub & preloved clothing store. Leaving behind a career in London, Egan now se...

In 1982, Gemma Hussey became Ireland’s first female minister for education. She was appointed by Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald after winning a seat for Fine Gael in Wicklow. Her appointment caused a bit of a culture shock among several of her male fellow ministers and for five years she was the only woman in cabinet. A lifetime liberal feminist, Hussey was co-founder of the Women’s Political Associa...

Lifestyle blogs are ten a penny, but well-informed health blogs are hard to find. Siobhán Freeney’s ‘Being Dense’ is an Irish blog aiming to raise awareness around breast density, a condition that increases the risk of developing cancer, because it can lead to breast cancers being masked on mammograms. On today’s podcast, Freeney talks to Kathy Sheridan about her patient advocacy work, her own exp...

Roisin Kiberd was born in 1989, the same year that Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web. In her new book The Disconnect, Kiberd takes a look at life growing up alongside the ever-expanding, ever-evolving Internet. In these interlinked essays, she examines our dependency and obsession with the online world, the ways we are more connected than ever before, and the discon...

Until a few weeks ago, 19-year-old UCC law student Alicia O’Sullivan had never heard of Admireme.vip. The website is an 18+ subscription-only platform, which describes itself as a place to share the “most intimate and secret content”. Alicia only became familiar with it after images purporting to be her appeared on the site. Someone had stolen her identity and set up a fake profile, doctoring pict...

Alexandra Heminsley is a best selling author, journalist and broadcaster. Her latest memoir Some Body to Love is an open-hearted exploration into body image, identity and family life. In the book, Heminsley shares her experiences of IVF, pregnancy and sexual assault, all of which have had a profound effect on her own sense of self. She also details the breakdown of her marriage, following her then...

If you’ve ever passed the GPO on Dublin’s O’Connell Street on a Friday evening, you’re very likely to have seen the Muslim Sisters of Éire (MSOE) hard at work. The group is a grassroots, non-profit, all-female organisation, established in 2010 to promote integration and social inclusion, and to provide support services to the most vulnerable. Every Friday night at their soup kitchen in Dublin city...

In this book club episode, Róisín, Ann Ingle, Bernice Harrison and Niamh Towey discuss Acts of Desperation, the debut novel from Waterford writer Megan Nolan. The book focuses on a turbulent relationship between the unnamed narrator and the “exceptionally beautiful” Ciaran, a half-Danish poet. Their intense love affair begins at a gallery launch, with our narrator pondering “Is it possible to love...

In today’s episode we are delving deep into the ‘manosphere’ with English feminist writer and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project Laura Bates. The ‘manosphere’ relates to a collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting masculinity, hostility towards women and strong opposition to feminism. In her ground-breaking new book, Men Who Hate Women, Bates goes undercover to expose these vas...

Sue Rainsford handed in the final manuscript of her novel Redder Days on the 14th of March 2020, the same day that Irish schools and colleges closed their doors due to Covid-19. It was remarkable timing, given the (now all too familiar) pandemic theme running through her book. Set in a world wracked by climate change, Redder Days tells the story of a survivalist cult who seek to escape a mysteriou...

Have you ever felt like your brain is fuzzy, that you just can't seem to focus on the task in hand, or you have trouble finding the right word in a sentence? If the answer is yes, then you may be one of the many people - and most often it is women - who has experienced brain fog. In her new book, Beating Brain Fog: Your 30-day Plan to Think Faster, Sharper, Better, neuroscientist and health psycho...

This Wednesday March 31st marks International Transgender Day of Visibility. It's an annual event celebrating transgender and non-binary people which also aims to raise awareness of discrimination of this community worldwide.. In today’s episode, Róisín Ingle is joined by two trans women Allie O'Rourke and Becky Cheatle, winners of the Virgin Media Discovers Short Film Competition and a prize of 3...

The UK government has intervened to compel the introduction of full abortion services in Northern Ireland due to a lack of progress on the issue by politicians there. Almost a year after abortion was officially decriminalised in Northern Ireland, women there are still being forced to travel to Britain for terminations. Cara Sanquest is an Irish woman living in London who set up the London Irish Ab...

Melissa Rice is what you might describe as an unexpected addict. Growing up in a happy family in Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, Rice excelled in school and later qualified as a primary school teacher. Discovering alcohol in her early teens, she used it as a form of escapism, a route to confidence and sociability. But by the time she had reached her early twenties, her relationship with alc...

The murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in London prompted thousands of women to share stories about fearing for their personal safety and the modifications they make to their behaviour in order to feel safe. That collective trauma has spilled out on social media and elsewhere all over the world. On Tuesday, a socially distanced peaceful 'Reclaim the Streets' protest organised by ROSA was held in...

Acts of Desperation is the darkly funny debut novel from Waterford writer Megan Nolan. Set in Dublin, it tells the story of an intense love affair between the narrator and her boyfriend Ciaran, a half-Danish poet. Their dysfunctional relationship plays out over the pages and lends itself to the question: why do women stay with toxic men? Nolan began writing the book while in Athens in 2016 and com...

The disappearance of Sarah Everard in London and the subsequent discovery of a body in woodland by police searching for her, has got many of us talking about the everyday fear that women experience when it comes to being alone in public. Ms Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, went missing after leaving a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, at about 9pm on March 3rd. The Met Police ann...