Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

How have Donegal got themselves in this mess? Has Jim McGuinness’s obsession with Kerry blinded him to the other threats. On Free State today, Joe examines why some counties accumulate All Irelands and others fail, while Dion surprises him with his knowledge of Roscommon’s football history. Joe and Dion also look at how the Belfast Riots happened.  For months the PSNI were warned that houses...

The World Cup has begun but will there ever be a tournament like Mexico '86 dominated by Diego Maradona? On Free State today, Dion talks to David Arrowsmith about his book on Maradona, the impulses that drove Maradona and how he escaped from poverty but could never escape the sense of being an outsider. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Belfast has burned this week. The horrific knife attack on Monday night shocked everyone. But nobody was surprised by what came next. In Belfast, In Glasgow and around Britain, people came out on the street. Some were there to protest, others were there to intimidate. In Belfast, the intimidation took over. On Free State today, Joe and Dion consider the riots in Belfast and whether there is a diff...

The FAI have decided to move Ireland’s game against Israel to a neutral venue. But is this a pragmatic move or another attempt to avoid making a principled decision? On Free State today Joe and Dion talk to Sinead Gibney of the Social Democrats about why this is a cop out.  Would there be consequences for Ireland if they refused to play the game or would it lead to others following? Sinead Gi...

John Kampfner doesn’t believe there is a better way, he believes there is only one way for western democracies to survive. On Free State today he talks about what democracies have to do to survive. They - we - are drinking in the last chance saloon he says. He explains why there has to be a reckoning and why so many politicians do not have the capability to change. He speaks about his new book Bra...

Have you been watching Love Island? As part of his deep research for the podcast, Dion has and on today’s Free State he shares his concerns about Fitzy and the world he has walked in to. Joe encouraged Dion to watch it but hasn’t done so himself but he marvels at the Love Island universe and what it contains. Yet it is the universe of the late great Frank McGuigan that holds his attention. Joe rec...

Aziz Abu Sarah’s older brother Tayseer was like a father to him. Azis was ten years old when his brother died after he had been tortured and beaten in an Israeli jail. Aziz says his brother’s death sent him to his own prison where all he wanted was revenge. Maoz Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on October 7th. A couple of days later, he and his family released a message. “For the death of our p...

Sally Hayden is a fearless journalist. She has covered war and conflict around the world. She lives in Lebanon where, early in her new book, she notes that ‘in the past fortnight, Israel has killed more than one thousand people’. Her book opens with a quote from Elon Musk: ‘The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy.’ On Free State today Sally Hayden explains her journey to dispro...

What do Sinn Fein stand for? What do they believe? And do the other left wing parties believe they believe it? On Free State Joe and Dion look at the state of Sinn Fein following the recent by-elections. Does it tell us something about the scrutiny Sinn Fein are under that there is more analysis of them than of Fianna Fáil which got a comically low vote? Dion and Joe disagree about what Sinn Féin’...

What do great art and great sport have in common? Why do the moments that transport us to another dimension in sport and art have such power? On Free State today, Dion reflects on the spiritual experience of seeing Paul Simon and Joe reflects on writing Kerry off. What does the game between the All Ireland champions and Donegal tell us about the summer to come? And what does it tell us about Jack...

On today’s Free State, Dion talks to Louise Brangan about The Fallen, her book about the Magdalene Laundries and what they tell us about Ireland, then and now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you feel like lower value human capital or do you believe you should be on Love Island?  Who declares who is of value and who isn’t? Will the future belong to those who refuse to be defined by what the tech overlords decide they should be?  On Free State we look at how the climate emergency is being accelerated by data centres and why nobody has the will to stop them.  And we pro...

Bertie Ahern says he rejects ‘racism in all its forms’. So what is it if not racism when a former Taoiseach says ‘we can’t be taking in people from Congo and all these places’? On Free State today we ask how do you talk about immigration and not get mistaken for a racist? Is it best not to say things that a racist might say to begin with? Ahern defended himself by saying ‘I don’t think there is an...

When Israel’s contestant in the Eurovision appeared on stage in Vienna on Tuesday night, a lone voice shouted ‘stop, stop the genocide.’ The Israeli contestant kept singing and nothing stopped. On Free State today we look at why the Eurovision became a key part of Israel’s propaganda war. We examine the money that was spent ensuring Israel’s entries got votes and we ask why.  We also look at...

There was a huge response to last week’s episode on Universal Basic Income. On Free State, Dion and Joe look at the arguments made in the emails and comments. But as they go through the comments, the atmosphere changes and Free State reaches another crossroads… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A study after the covid pandemic established that in care homes controlled by private equity firms the death rate was more than 50 per cent higher than in other homes. On Free State today we look at how private equity is capitalism cannibalising itself. Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class, is on with us to talk about how this happened, how governments retreated from the public realm and left...

More than 60 per cent of Irish jobs are in positions highly exposed to the threat from AI. So what do we do in the face of this threat? Give everyone free money. On Free State today we look at universal basic income and how it could transform lives. How does it work and why would it be profound? And why does the opposition to this sound like the opposition to every other great transformations in s...

What does Ireland in 1926 tell us about Ireland today? What do absences tell us about the lives we live whether it is in Ireland a hundred years ago or at a graduation in Gaza today? On Free State, Joe and Dion look at loss and absence. They examine the emotion that can pack a punch from a hundred years ago and the lives that are ripped apart today Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i...

It would be harder, Jamie Bartlett says, to open a sandwich shop in Dublin than to release a large language model of near infinite power into general public use. On Free State, Bartlett talks about his new book on how to talk to AI and what we are doing when we hand agency to a personality type that is drawing from the worst of impulses. How do we protect ourselves? Is the only winning move n...

What does the world look like when the world has turned away? On Free State today we ask about the loss of faith that will echo through the generations following the genocide in Gaza. We examine how leaders failed and are left taking comfort in the circus of a visit from a king to the court of Donald Trump. We also wonder how far someone can let themselves go that they don't iron their shoelaces....

“I’m getting in touch because I’ve written the attached open letter as a serving Garda,” this email was one of many we received since Sinead O’Sullivan came on the podcast.  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” it continued, “but I felt I had to say something given how things are going. I wrote it out of a genuine sense of frustration with the direction the country seems to be heading...

“The bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute.” These were the words of the hangman who took Roger Casement to the scaffold in Pentonville Prison in 1916. Roger Casement’s final years were lived in pursuit of Irish independence. But was he a driver of rebellion or a hopeless romantic whose brainwaves did more harm than good?  On Free State today, Rory Carroll talks about his book A Re...

What allows a manager to bring a group with them? What is it? How do they possess it and what happens when they lose it? On Free State today, Joe and Dion look at how managers fall to earth and consider how Ger Brennan can make it work as Dublin manager. They look at the power and control Alex Ferguson had and what happens when a manager becomes toxic and indiscipline spreads. They also consider t...

When Sinead O'Sullivan created a graph which she believed illustrated the problems in Ireland, she hadn't realised what would happen next. She found herself in the middle of an argument about data with many including Leo Varadkar. It raged over what Ireland did and didn't do well. But did it highlight the real problem in Ireland today? A defensiveness from the establishment which could be seen in...

As a young Roy Keane headed on the train to Dublin from Cork for a coaching course, he saw some railway workers toiling by the track. ‘Look at them fuckers out there and they’re going like the hammers,’ he said. ‘I have to make it as a footballer.’ On Free State today we look at what drives a man like Roy Keane and how is the boy the father of the man? Dave Hannigan, author of We Need to Talk Abou...