IRELAND'S EDGE

Ireland is enjoying an unprecedented boom in corporate tax receipts, with tens of millions from multinationals and the tech and pharmaceutical sectors helping to create a huge government budget surplus. While the government predicts that its annual surplus will rise to an incredible 20 billion euros in the next few years, some of that boom will certainly be temporary as corporate giants shift thei...

Trans people continue to face discrimination and demonisation with their real lives and experiences too often ignored by a public debate fuelled by toxic myths and hatred. The writer and journalist Shon Faye’s bestselling book The Transgender Issue argues that we have been having the wrong conversation by making trans people seen but not heard, and that trans justice is justice for all. At Ireland...

Our rural and coastal communities are facing great environmental and economic challenges. The dominance of industrial agriculture and the threat of climate change have forced many to reflect on how we can both preserve and create sustainable ways of life. On today’s episode we meet some of the inspiring people working on fascinating local projects on the Dingle Peninsula, Co Kerry asking, "what fu...

Brexit, the housing crisis and the covid pandemic have all presented challenges to Ireland’s economy and public finances in recent years. Overseeing the Government's financial response has been Fine Gael TD Paschal Donohoe who served as Minister for Finance from 2017 until late last year, and is now Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. Donohoe has also taken a leading role in the Europ...

Earlier this month at least 86 men, women and children drowned off the coast of Calabria trying to seek refuge in Italy. In the last decade tens of thousands of refugees and migrants have died in the Mediterranean, creating what Pope Francis has called Europe's largest graveyard. Attempts by European’s governments to turn the continent into ‘fortress Europe’ have created a humanitarian catastrophe...

With environmental and economic pressures squeezing those who grow, process and cook our food, how can we think creatively about building a fairer and more sustainable future for food and farming in Ireland, and how do the traditional arts and folk customs play a role in this? Cúán Greene is a chef who has worked in some of the world’s finest fine dining restaurants and now edits the Omós digest,...

How do we make sense of geopolitical upheaval?  The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted radical changes in international affairs but the nature of a new global political order is far from clear; with complex crises of energy and food security bubbling under shifts of strategic power alliances. John Kampfner has covered international  politics for more than 35 years....

"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today is a neo-colonial war, it’s an attempt to restore their imperial geopolitical blueprint" - Olesya Zdorovetska  On this episode, the Home Font of the Russian invasion of Ukrainians in Ireland. Just over a year ago, Russia launched an imperialist invasion of Ukraine. The brutal effects of Russian aggression have forced millions of Ukrainian refugees...

What is the price of holding power to account?  Carole Cadwalladr won the Orwell prize for her investigation of the shadowy role of data and donors in the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Her reporting on the damaging influence of big tech and big money in  our democracies has won her admirers and enemies all around the world. Since her last appearance at Ireland’s Edge in 2019 she has fought a landm...

On today’s episode, is there hope in the atom? We live in an energy crisis, with environmental catastrophe and war questioning our reliance on fossil fuels. Nuclear power was once the great green hope, but decades of concerns about accidents and radioactive waste have turned much of Europe off.   But were those concerns overblown, and have they blinded us to a vital source of clean energy? In...

What a year it has been! From pandemic, to war, to political upheaval, the news just never seemed to stop in 2022. On today's special episode we take a step back to reflect on it all with two of Ireland’s most engaging journalists, Séamas O'Reilly of the Observer and Irish Examiner, and Aoife Moore, political correspondent with the Sunday Times and Irish journalist of the year 2021. In front of a...

"Being Irish now is the thing" One of Ireland’s most exciting voices right now is Sello, who has been making waves at home and abroad with his infectious mix of rap and trad samples that he calls ‘Gaelic drill’. Hailing from Clondalkin in southwest Dublin, Sello has been collaborating with traditional musician and producer AyoMax to produce a unique sound that’s brand new but also rooted in Irelan...

Malcolm X once called the media 'the most powerful entity on earth', with 'the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent'. Social media, 'fake news', and political and corporate propaganda have all shaken trust in the news media, while disinformation about vaccinations and climate change have revealed limits to its power to inform. Christopher Kissane speaks with leading figures ab...

Once regarded as breakthrough drugs in the treatment of a wide range of psychiatric illnesses and addictive conditions, psychedelics were the subject of a major moral panic in the sixties because of their counter cultural associations. Research and treatment centres were shut down and the drugs relegated to Class A illegal substances. The last ten years have seen renewed and growing interest and r...

Critically acclaimed auteur Gaika speaks with Síobhra Quinlan about his work with GKZ, Nine Nights Collective, The Spectacular Empire, and his NFT collection in collaboration with Voice, ‘Live From War Island.’ In considering technology as a tool to be ethically and creatively harnessed by the artist, how can such a tool be leveraged for liberation, empowerment and expression by both the individua...

The use of data has become one of this century's most contentious legal and moral issues. But while the GDPR was designed to give citizens control of their own personal data in a world of Big Tech and intrusive states, issues from police surveillance to the "right to be forgotten" have shown how such control can have unintended social consequences. Christopher Kissane speaks with Dr David Kenny ,...

On this episode, time to COP on: can the world still avoid climate change catastrophe? In the past year both wildfires, floods, and droughts have highlighted the perilous state of the global environment, and the destabilising effects of man-made climate change. The last seven years are the warmest since modern records began, and unprecedented extreme weather has been wreaking havoc across the glob...

Writer Séamas O'Reilly 's 'Remembering Ireland' project satirised our national obsession with historical memory, and the layers of distortion behind the question 'Do you remember this?’. As he became a father for the first time, Séamas explored his own memories in his memoir 'Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?', reflecting on how his own father had raised 11 children after losing the love of his life. The me...

Editor of the Guardian U.S John Mulholland reflects on an extraordinary few years in American news and considers the challenging road ahead. In December 2021 he sat down with Ireland's Edge Curator Muireann Kelliher and discussed the dark legacy of the Trump presidency, voter suppression, climate injustice, and one of the most significant events in American public life, the killing of George Floyd...

‘What we saw happening around us was essentially death by a thousand cuts to Dublin’ The results of Irish housing policy have created a crisis that reaches into every community and region in the country. It increasingly blights the lives of multiple generations. It undermines and conflicts with many other national priorities and strategies. How has it got to this point and what will it take to ame...

We live in an age of fake news and social media, propaganda and conspiracy theories. From politics to pandemic, science to history, our public debates are increasingly divided between alternative versions of the world around us. In such febrile times, how can we go about distinguishing true from false, fact from fiction? Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College...

On this episode, Traversing the Uncanny Valley: how do we navigate the wild and wonderful world of the internet? Roisin Kiberd is the author of The Disconnect: A Personal Journey through the Internet, which asks how we live now in a world that we increasingly experience online. The last year of remote working, learning and socialising have only further emphasised how the boundaries between the int...

On this episode, What We Know Now: why did different truths dominate at different times of the Covid-19 pandemic? From hand washing and sanitising to ventilation and vaccination, medical knowledge and public health advice have changed considerably over the course of the last 18 months. Yet even as we have learned more, outdated advice and habits have persisted. So did the science fail us, or did w...

Morgan McIntyre from Belfast and Gemma Doherty from Derry met as students at Trinity College, Dublin, and formed the duo ‘Saint Sister’. Their debut album, The Shape of Silence, was nominated for both the Choice Music Prize and the Northern Irish Music Prize in 2018. That year, in the run-up to the referendum to repeal Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion, they wrote a song called ‘Manchester...

“It’s the society first, and the economy comes afterwards” On this episode, View From A Rock: what does the world’s turbulent political economy look like from our little island on the edge of the Atlantic? Stephen Kinsella is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Limerick. He is Chief Economics Writer for The Currency, and as a columnist with the Sunday Business Post was twice name...