Irish Stew Podcast

In this episode, cohosts John and Martin dive into the world of Olympic shot putting with their guest, Eric Favors, an athlete representing Ireland. Born and raised in Rockland County, New York, with a rich Irish heritage, Eric shares his journey from trying various sports to specializing in track and field. He discusses the intricacies of shot put, a sport that demands not just brute strength but...

Irish Stew goes to Canada for a most “Global Irish Nation Conversation” with Jackie Gilna, who’s been Irish in Dublin, Spain, the Netherlands, and now she's Irish in Canada's capital, Ottawa. And through a new venture, she's Irish all around the world. Jackie launched We Are Global Irish this year to showcase Irish innovation, connect Irish businesses and organizations globally, dri...

Settle in for a spirited episode of Irish Stew with two pioneering women in the Irish spirits industry, Alice Carroll--the proud Limerick distiller and co-founder of Foxes Bow Whiskey, and Maura Clare--the Queen of Poitín and creator of the Smuggling Nun brand. They swap notes on their journey into the spirits business, the challenges and opportunities of operating in traditionally male-dominated...

Michael Meade spent over 20 years on Wall Street and then stepped away from the pressured world of high finance to do something totally different. Some, in his circumstances, may have opted for plenty of time on the golf course and cracking open a few brews, that’s not the kind of person Michael Meade is.   Intrigued by a visit to Ireland, Michael wanted to build a business that would connect to h...

As Chief Executive of the Western Development Commission (WDC), Allan Mulrooney is a tireless advocate for the Western Region of Ireland, promoting social and economic development for the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon, Galway, and Clare. Why go west? Allan points to the region's mix of the old and the new, how it fosters a work-life balance,  the contrast of beautiful n...

In the first of our “Irish Libations” series, we welcome Michael McKillop, who branched out from the 36-year-old Glens of Antrim Potatoes business to launch Glens of Antrim Distillery with its Lir line of Irish Whiskeys, amidst bucolic surroundings in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. We get a professional’s view of the growing, shipping, and marketing of Ireland’s favorite crop, and how his company i...

Launching Season Six, we go behind the scenes of the woman-strong Irish film Lies We Tell, a brooding tale of angels and demons, light and shadow, manners and mores, family secrets and family crimes, which The Guardian called “a tightly laced, elegantly cut gothic period drama.” A total rethinking of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1864 novel Uncle Silas, the film centers on Maud Ruthyn, brilliant...

When we last talked with Dan Mulhall, he was Ireland’s Ambassador to the United Stares. Since then, he retired after a 44-year career in diplomacy, but he’s been busier than ever as we learn in this check-in episode with Martin Nutty focused on his new book on W. B. Yeats. Recent invitations to New York University, Cambridge, and Harvard, provided opportunities to engage with students and pursue r...

With a computer programming background and an instinct for reporting, Malachy Browne is on the vanguard of a new form of data-driven news coverage that is revitalizing journalism. Co-founder and enterprise director of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, Malachy is pioneering the use of digital sleuthing, collecting and analyzing troves of video and audio, satellite images and other data...

Ted Smyth, former diplomat and C-Suite and current President of the Advisory Board of Glucksman Ireland House NYU,  joins Martin Nutty for a discussion on Irish and American politics. What does the recent November 2023 American mid term election presage for 2024?  How differing are the American and Irish views on Gaza?  How should we understand the recent Dublin riots and the relationship between...

Fin Dwyer of Irish History Podcasts pays a return visit to Irish Stew. We last hosted Fin two years ago .  Since then, Fin has continued to fascinate his listeners with in depth episodes on a broad range of Irish History topics.  Despite this frenetic pace, Fin has found time to publish a book titled:  A Lethal Legacy - A History of Ireland in 18 Murders . We'll be talking about two cases det...

Join us in a westward journey to the Irish enclaves of Butte, Montana and on to a chicken coop on Maryland’s Eastern Shore as Marybeth Shea guides us along little-known paths of Irish migration and through little understood profession of technical communications. She describes herself as a humanist and cites her Catholic education, specifically with the Jesuits, as foundational to her worldview an...

So why learn Irish? "Studies have shown that learning your native language, learning any language, but especially your ancestral tongue, brings feelings of comfort and freedom. And especially when considering our past and our heritage, learning Irish is very revealing and very healing," says our latest guest Mollie Guidera, the Irish language teacher for Global Ireland. She grew up “with...

Join us as we travel from Ireland all the way to New Zealand to explore a vision of Ireland from centuries ago in our conversation with Brian O’Sullivan. He’s an author, cultural researcher, strategic analyst, and founder of Irish Imbas, the only Irish publisher specializing in fiction and non-fiction based on the ancient Irish cultural knowledge and belief patterns of authentic Irish mythology. H...

A Trinity College graduate in economics and politics, he represented Irish business abroad, led The Ireland Funds for almost two decades, and now Kingsley Aikins combines his fervor for networking and diaspora engagement in the mission of The Networking Institute.  “Kinger,” as he’s known to his friends, talks of how rugby became his global passport and the lucky break that landed him in Sydney, A...

From New Jersey to Sligo, Wales, London, Germany, to touring the globe and then to New York, Roger Clark stamps his passport as a leading citizen of the Global Irish Nation. And to millions around the world, he is an icon. An actor, filmmaker, voiceover artist of over 150 audiobooks, Roger’s claim to global fame is his performance-capture portrayal of the cowboy antihero Arthur Morgan in the massi...

In this Global Irish conversation, we search for the true origins of Western Civilization with a most global of guests, Naoíse Mac Sweeney, author of The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives .  Her father is from Cork City, her mother is Malaysian Chinese, she grew up in London, studied the Greek and Roman world, and is a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna. And to make...

Growing up in The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Jane Ferguson spent most of her life reporting on the global troubles in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Afghanistan, reporting for CNN International, Al Jazeera, PBS Newshour , The New Yorker and other outlets, always finding the human stories in inhuman wars and all revealed in her unflinching new memoir No Ordinary Assignment . The l...

Our Global Irish conversation with award-winning author Jane Delury centers on her second novel Hedge, a bildungsroman of an Irish American woman in her forties named Maude pursuing a career in the esoteric field of garden history, looking for clues in the past under the mounting challenges of the present. The theme of bringing a garden back to life threads through this novel of marital strains, i...

Join us on a stroll along North Circular Road from Phoenix Park to the Dublin Docklands with our guide Luke McManus, the documentary filmmaker of the award-winning North Circular which opens in New York City on July 28th. Rendered in graphic black & white over a soundtrack of local North Circular musicians, the film gives voice to narratives from the history of the city and nation, from coloni...

How can a kneecap bone change the history of Ireland? We answer that question during our conversation with Dr. Ruth Carden, a paleo zoologist with a particular interest in the animals that roamed Ireland over the last 50,000 years. Ruth's research focuses particularly on the skeletal remains of those animals, since that is all that usually remains after the passage of time. Find out what Ruth...

Our latest global Irish conversation goes behind the scenes of the globe’s most significant international organization, the United Nations, courtesy of Ireland’s Ambassador to the UN, Fergal Mythen. He didn’t rise to one of Ireland’s most significant diplomatic postings without an impressive diplomatic career behind him. Fergal has worked on Irish-Canadian, Irish-Latin American, Irish-Caribbean, a...

When Seamus Heaney wrote, “Walk on air, against your better judgement,”   he could have been writing about Pauline Turley. From Newry to New York, Pauline has paired hard work with serendipity to arrive at her pivotal role charting the impressive trajectory on New York’s Irish Arts Center from a cramped tenement building to its expansive new home. She tells of how winning the Green Card lottery le...

Join us as we pick up the conversation with Doug Devaney who interviewed us last fall on The Plastic Podcasts. A talented podcaster, Doug’s also an actor, writer, journalist, and self-proclaimed "songster, funster, punster, hamster." In this episode we delve into the core concept of The Plastic Podcasts, which centers around the notion that “we all come from somewhere else.” Doug explore...

For Dublin’s own David Clinch, media is serious business. He’s been working on the front lines of innovative journalism and the complete overhaul of the news business for the past 30 years. He jokes that he’s been called “the Zelig of the media,” an “accidental journalist” popping up in key roles at the companies driving the changing media landscape, including ITN News in London, CNN where he help...