IRELAND'S EDGE

In this episode, Ireland’s Edge host Chris Kissane explores the past, present and future of spoken word poetry in Ireland with two of its most exciting and original practitioners, FeliSpeaks and Dyrt .  Felicia Olusanya, known as FeliSpeaks, is changing the face of poetry in Ireland. A Nigerian-Irish poet from Longford, she began performing at poetry slams and spoken word events while a stude...

‘What is creativity, what is the process of creativity?’ Sinéad O’Sullivan is an aerospace engineer from Armagh who worked on the planning for human missions to Mars at NASA. She’s also worked at Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management where she has applied chaos and complexity theories to everything from tech startups to music, a focus that reflects her interest in creativity...

In 2017, the writer Mark O’Connell published a book about the transhumanist movement, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. Encountering an extraordinary set of people keen to use technology to push the human body past its physical and mortal limits, Mark explored the scientific and ethical questions behind a quest to...

What can we make of a language that has 32 words for field? Writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan encountered the remarkable richness of the Irish language as a young child, and his grandmother Sighle was determined that he would learn to speak it in the place where it was the common language of daily life. This was Muiríoch in the west Kerry Gaeltacht, where Manchán spent his childhood holidays in...

The Covid-19 pandemic led to months of school and university closures that forced young people, and their parents and teachers, to adapt to different ways of learning. Despite enormous effort, patience, and creativity, cracks have shown. More than a century on from Pádraig Pearse's famous call for a more progressive and holistic approach to education, rigid exams and entrenched inequalities still...

Once referred to as a ‘performing historian’ Rhiannon Giddens is a musician from Greensboro, North Carolina whose career has ranged from folk to country, blues to gospel, opera to R&B. Her old-time string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops have received 6 Grammy nominations, winning in 2010 for their album Genuine Negro Jig. In 2017 Rhiannon received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant for ‘re...

Supreme court justices can often seem remote and mysterious, cloaked by their position and their commitments to impartiality. But recent controversies over judicial behaviour, appointments and independence have reminded us that judges are never removed from the societies they serve.  In Poland, Britain, and the United States, supreme courts have found themselves at the centre of bitter politi...

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