Cassandra Voices Podcast

adraic X. Scanlan joins Frank Armstrong to discuss his book Rot: A History of the Irish Famine, which explores the modernity of Ireland's experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans in 1845. He reveals how Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Thus, t...

American journalist Amanda Knox joins Frank Armstrong to discuss the case of English nurse Lucy Letby. Knox was herself falsely charged with murdering her roommate Meredith Kerchner in Italy in 2007 and spent four years in prison. Lucy Letby was a nurse working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester hospital. She was found guilty of murdering seven babies in her care in 2023, based primar...

For this Saint Patrick's Day episode, Luke Sheehan asked Irish-American historian and New York history expert Terry Golway to help create an overview of the Irish American experience, with a focus on post-famine migration and the infamous Tammany Hall.  Episode Credits: Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​ https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www....

For this episode we have asked our friend and contributor, Greek journalist and filmmaker, Alexis Daloumis, to sit in for an interview with Luke Sheehan about his newly released Documentary Belki Sibe. Back in 2015 Alexis travelled in northern Syria to Rojava, to join the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and soon was deployed on the frontlines as a member of the International Freedom battalion. Hi...

Fatma Akman Lehmann was born and raised in Ankara. From a young age, she was drawn to writing—a passion that later shaped her path toward journalism, politics, and civic activism. Now resident in Germany, she is the author of the Turkey: Lost in Translation Substack. Intended to cover politics and culture in a general way, the arrest of Istanbul Mayor and Presidential contender Ekrem İmamoğlu flun...

John Dillon, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin, is an Irish classicist and philosopher considered a world authority in ancient philosophy and Platonism. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1939, he returned to Ireland as a child and studied Classics at Oxford before earning a Ph. D. at UC Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley from 1969 until his appointment at Trinity in 1980, whe...

Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin's North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe's largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture.    He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore...

"The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened" It has been one year since Cassandra Voices forayed into podcasting. The guest for our podcast's first-ever episode — the extraordinary journalist Patrick Cockburn — returns to talk with Luke Sheehan through Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, and his recent writings on these wars. Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​ https://theloafingher...

In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish ambassador to Russia, Philip McDonagh, who also worked for a long period on the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. He explores the possibilities for a lasting, inclusive peace between Russia and Ukraine. He also laments the expansion of military investmen...

'My Mother (at the Time)' is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, fitting for an installment that marks the one year point since its inception. For this episode, host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy. A brilliant scholar, Healy was born to an unmarried mother and raised in fosterage with multiple families...

Part 2 of "It is Abhorrent to Me to Stage a Picture…" A Conversation with George Azar Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​ https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com   George Azar: An Introduction     George Azar was born in 1959, the descendant of Lebanese olive farmers who had set sail from Beirut a century earlier. They settled in South Philadelphia, a working-class enclave—later immortaliz...

"It is Abhorrent to Me to Stage a Picture…" A Conversation with George Azar Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​ https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com   George Azar: An Introduction     George Azar was born in 1959, the descendant of Lebanese olive farmers who had set sail from Beirut a century earlier. They settled in South Philadelphia, a working-class enclave—later immortalized in 'Roc...

As a journalist, Anya Parampil is unafraid of rattling the cage. She now writes for the Grayzone, founded by her husband Max Blumenthal in 2015, an online publication which aims to 'break through any narrative of the day that is pushing the United States' public in support of war.' Previously she worked as a producer and broadcaster, then an anchor correspondent, for Russia Today (U.S.), from whic...

Dr. Max McGuinness is a Teaching Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin. He previously taught at University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in French in 2019. His first book – published this Spring – is Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which explores how Fr...

Toby Green is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College, London and the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). He also wrote, along with Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2023). This latter work engages with the impact of lockdowns on African count...

In late 2021, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan published the hardback edition of 'Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19'. Well received by many and loathed by some, it remains the most comprehensive book on the origin of the pandemic that leans in the direction of the lab. In a debate that has neither gone away nor gotten more polite over time, there is one thing that both sides tend to agree upo...

Aficionados of the Dublin cultural scene over the past decade or two are likely to be familiar with John Cummins. Cutting a dash with a distinctive Rasputin beard and Reggae styles, John's poetic performances in the Dublin vernacular have mesmerised audiences young and old. His playful, rhyming verse always had great musicality, and it seemed a natural progression for him to begin collaborating wi...

An economist by training, Nadim Shehadi has spent his career analyzing the long, ongoing story of Lebanon. Having lived through Beirut's 'golden era' of post-WW2 prosperity, and subsequently having started out as an academic as the country suffered through civil war and occupation, Nadim has honed his voice and knowledge to become a compelling narrator of everything Lebanese. He is also adept at u...

In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected. This was i...

David Langwallner is an Irish barrister practising in the United Kingdom. A regular contributor to Cassandra Voices, he has represented defendants in criminal cases, including murder, at the highest levels of the U.K. System. He also has extensive experience of constitutional and immigration law and lectured on constitutional law and jurisprudence for sixteen years at The Honorable Society of the...

Jim Sheridan needs little introduction. His films, including 'My Left Foot' (1989), 'The Field' (1990), 'In the Name of the Father' (1993) and 'In America' (2003) have gained both critical acclaim and global audiences. It is fair to say they have helped define the Irish national character. In recent times, Sheridan has taken a keen interest in the unsolved murder of the French television producer...

Jim Sheridan needs little introduction. His films, including 'My Left Foot' (1989), 'The Field' (1990), 'In the Name of the Father' (1993) and 'In America' (2003) have gained both critical acclaim and global audiences. It is fair to say they have helped define the Irish national character. In recent times, Sheridan has taken a keen interest in the unsolved murder of the French television producer...

For 50 years Patrick Cockburn has been practicing the art of journalism with integrity and persistence: a specialist on the Middle East, he has written extensively on wars and political machinations from Beirut to Belfast and Baghdad.  Within books like 'The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession' (written with his brother Andrew), he has revealed the workings of Arab dictatorships a...