The Women's Podcast

In today's podcast, journalist, author and podcaster Sophie White talks to Róisín Ingle about her debut novel, Filter This, in which she peels back the social media mask that many people wear to disguise what’s really going on in their lives. Following her comments about candidate selection this week, Fianna Fail Councillor and General Election candidate Lisa McDonald discusses her belief that the...

Nunchi is a guiding principle of Korean life, considered essential for survival, happiness and success. Roughly translating as self-awareness, Nunchi is the art of a reading a room and using that knowledge for the good of everyone in it. Korean-American author Euny Hong has written the ultimate guide to this secret skill, The Power of Nunchi. In today's show, she talks to Róisín about good and bad...

On today’s podcast: Kathy speaks to the District Attorney of Suffolk County in Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins, who is the first woman to hold that particular office and also the first woman of colour to be appointed as a DA across the whole of Massachusetts Commonwealth. Rollins was in Dublin ahead of her appearance at the Kennedy Summer School in Co. Wexford this weekend. They talk about her land...

Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books have sold over a million copies and creator, Paul Howard, is both adored by fans and revered by critics as the greatest satirist of this generation. In the latest Ross book – Schmidt Happens – women take centre stage. Ross’s wife has just given birth to a baby that isn’t his, his son has walked out on his wife-to-be and his own mother is threatening revenge on Ross for a...

Just over a century ago, Trinity College Dublin admitted its first female student. This year, the 400-year-old university reached another milestone: it has elected its first ever all-female line-up of officers across both the students’ and graduate students’ unions. On this week's show, Kathy talks to president and vice-president of the graduate students’ union respectively, Shaz Oye and Gisèle Sc...

On today’s show, Rachel Flaherty chats to Irish journalist Jenny McQuaile about her powerful documentary Straight/Curve - starring Tess Holliday & Iskra Lawrence. Jenny talks about the body image crisis affecting women & girls worldwide and why we need a more diverse range of role models in the fashion industry and the media. Straight/Curve: http://www.straightcurvefilm.com/Plus: Bernice Harrison...

On today’s podcast – Bernice Harrison talks to the half-Irish half-French author Moira Fowley-Doyle about her third novel for young adults, All The Bad Apples, which tells the stories of a line of women doomed to follow in their ancestor’s footsteps and have their lives turned upside-down at 17.Later, Jennifer Ryan speaks to the British author Emma Jane Unsworth, whose hugely successful book about...

Kathy Sheridan talks drag queens, the Irish lesbian scene and the biggest LGBTQ+ party to bring the summer to a close, Love Sensation, with Cormac Cashman, Lisa Connell and Victoria Secret. Plus: “The world was charmed when she was around"- Rachel DeLoache Williams talks to us about her book, My Friend Anna, telling the explosive true story of Anna 'Delvey' Sorokin, the fake German heiress who foo...

Is catcalling really a problem? Some people might consider it complimentary, but for many women and girls it’s anything but. Often catcalling and other forms of street harassment can actually be quite frightening. A 2015 Dublin City Council report into sexual harassment in Dublin, for example, showed that sexual harassment is a frequent and distressing occurrence for women and girls and that for m...

In this episode Irish Times journalists Polly Dennison and Roisin Ingle talk to host Kathy Sheridan about Donald Trump’s racism and the four congresswomen of colour who have stood up to him. Known now as The Squad they are Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Polly also tells us about Zara’s polka dot dress o...

In a momentous week for Northern Ireland with MPs in Westminster voting to extend abortion and same sex marriage rights to the North, we talk to Danielle Roberts from Alliance for Choice about what happens next. Róisín Ingle also talks to Anne O'Leary CEO of Vodafone Ireland and domestic abuse survivor and campaigner Emma Murphy about Bright Sky Ireland a groundbreaking app to support people in ab...

This episode features two authors one Danish and one Irish: Sofie Hagen is a London-based Danish comedian and fat acceptance campaigner. She has been starting conversations all over the place with her new book ‘Happy Fat: Taking up space in a world that wants to shrink you’. Sofie talked to Roisin Ingle about fatphobia and about why she is on a mission to change the way people talk to and about fa...

Dublin songwriter Ruth-Anne Cunningham chats to Róisín about her incredible career which took with a bang when she won the ASCAP Songwriters ‘Best Pop Song’ award for a song she wrote when she was 19. Since then she has written a string of hits for the likes of Britney Spears, One Direction and John Legend, but in the last two years she has been focusing on her own singing career. Ruth-Anne has ju...

On today's show Róisín talks to number one bestselling author Karin Slaughter. Karin, who has sold over 35 million copies of her books, was in Ireland recently for the Murder One Festival’s Midsummer series of talks – a visit which coincided with the publication of her new novel, The Last Widow. In this podcast she talks to Róisín about the violence in her books, how she likes to divide the gore e...

This week, two 14-year-old boys were convicted of the murder of schoolgirl Ana Kriégel on May 14th 2018. Irish Times Crime Correspondent Conor Gallagher was in court for the duration of the trial. He talks to Róisín about the trial and about Ana Kriégel, the beautiful young girl who was brutally murdered aged just 14.Later: Róisín speaks to Orla O’Connor, director of the National Women’s Council o...

In today’s show, Roisin Ingle speaks to the Irish-Nigerian journalist, author and academic Emma Dabiri about her book Don’t Touch My Hair. The book is about the history of black people’s hair and for Emma, this story begins with an upbringing in Ireland where her hair was a “constant source of deep, deep shame”. Emma, who lives in London, talks to Róisín about growing up in inner city Dublin, why...

In her latest book, Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists, Joan Smith writes that the violence perpetrated by men against women – whether it is sexual, physical, psychological, or all of the above – creates terror but is not recognised as a form of terrorism. In today's podcast she speaks to Kathy about how this link was identified decades ago, but never acted upon. Later: Ró...

Award-winning Irish Times reporter Rosita Boland has been enthralled by travel ever since gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean near her childhood home. In the last 30 years she has visited some of the most remote parts of the globe carrying little more than a battered rucksack and a diary. Now she has written a book about some of the stories from those adventures, Elsewhere. She shares some of them wi...

France will host the Fifa Women's World Cup for the first time when the tournament kicks off tomorrow – Friday 7th June. Ireland and Arsenal footballer Louise Quinn tells Róisín who to look out for. Also today: Irish Times business journalist Laura Slattery on sexist advertising, the Spice Girls and the French Open. Plus: At their AGM this week, the National Women’s Council of Ireland brought toge...

As a nine-year-old girl, French author Adélaïde Bon was raped by a stranger in the stairwell of the affluent Parisian block of flats where she lived. Now her memoir, The Little Girl on the Ice Floe, has been translated into English, telling the story of the rape she suffered that day and the self-harm and self-hatred that followed. Most movingly, though, it captures the way Adélaïde’s pain was hid...

What is rewilding? Well, it’s an adventure that exists somewhere between a holistic retreat in the wilderness and an uncivilised summer school, designed to re-kindle our connection to our untamed nature. On today's show Róisín talks to Carol McInerney a movement therapist and meditation teacher, Siobhan de Paor, a poet and performance artist, and Kathy Scott of the Trailblzery, about Solstice, a o...

Executive Director of Oxfam International Winnie Byanyima talks to the Women's Podcast about her early life growing up in Uganda during the regime of Idi Amin, her activism at university which led her to flee to England, the role she played in writing the country’s constitution and her work on global gender inequality. Ms Byanyima has just begun her second term as Executive Director of Oxfam Inter...

This time last year we were gearing up for May 25th, the date of the referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment. It was a momentous time, so today the Women’s Podcast looks back, forward and outward. This episode focuses on what has happened in Ireland in the past year and what needs to happen next. It also looks at the situation in Northern Ireland where abortion is still illegal, the United States w...

On today's show, Kathy talks to acrobats Molly Keczan and Glory Dearling - AKA The Silver Starlets – about how they got into their line of work, what it's like to be women street performers and their participation in the Laya Healthcare City Spectacular, which returns to Dublin and Cork this July. Later: Róisín meets architect and interior designer Denise O’Connor, who runs her own design consulta...

566 out of a total of 1,960 candidates running in next week’s local elections are women. That’s 29 per cent and marks an increase of more 100 on the 2014 local elections – or just shy of 22 per cent. So, progress is being made, but is it happening quickly enough? Kathy talks to Women for Election chief executive, Ciairín de Búis. Later: We meet three more women who are entering politics for the fi...