Irish Stew Podcast

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...

For Richard Donavan running the grueling 26.2 miles of the Boston Marathon was only a way to stretch his legs before getting up the next morning to run across America…for the second time. Running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days sounds impossible, so he did it in under five. Richard is also the first person to run marathons at both the North and South Poles and now lures other lik...

For over 25 years Manachán Magan has been at the forefront of Irish cultural affairs. He first rose to public attention with the 1996 launch of Irish language television now known as TG4. Together with his brother Ruán, Manachán produced a ground breaking series of television programs exploring indigenous cultures across the globe Since those early days, Manachán continues to drive the cultural co...

From “The Island of Malta and the Ireland of Malta,” Malta’s Ambassador to Ireland tells Irish Stew of the unexpected connections between the island nations of Ireland and Malta, especially for his hometown of Floriana. Ambassador Giovanni Buttigieg traces the Irish connection back to an 1895 visit to Floriana by an Irish Cardinal who went to Rome to advocate for the sainthood of one of their own,...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Barbara Walsh started her career in Galway as a newspaper photographer and has gone on to work for newspapers and magazines in Florida, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.   While at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune , Barbara reported on the notorious murderer William Horton Jr. and Massachusetts’ flawed prison furlough system, a series that played a crucial rol...

He’s the quintessential New York Irish cop who rose up through the ranks from walking a beat to becoming a highly-ranked detective. He’s also a respected leader of New York’s Irish American community and a man at the center of a major controversy playing out now in New York as the American Irish Historical Society’s irreplaceable Beaux-Arts townhouse home on Fifth Avenue in New York City was put u...

Growing up with one foot in Dublin and the other in Cork, Michael “Mick” Mellamphy now has a foot in Ireland and one in New York, where he’s in starring in Ronán Noone’s The Smuggler at the Irish Repertory Theatre, part of the Origin Theatre’s 1st Irish Festival he curated, on stages around NYC for Jan. & Feb. 2023. And he still made time to sit down with us a couple of hours before The Smuggl...

Veteran diplomat and C Suite executive, Ted Smyth, joins Martin Nutty, on The Stew for the third time. With the conclusion of the final election of the US Midterm election season, it seemed like a good time to take the political temperature of not just the United States, but also of Northern Ireland and the Western European democracies. Ted is a member of the Irish Americans for Biden committee an...

Speechwriter, novelist, essayist, and now memoirist Peter Quinn returns to Irish Stew to share tales from his home borough of New York City and beyond, captured in his new book, Cross Bronx: A Writing Life. Join us as Peter spins stories from his rise up through Irish American middle-class respectability in New York’s northernmost borough, The Bronx, which Quinn describes as “a small-scale Yugosla...

In a way we’ve been teasing this episode since our first, as we’ve treated you to a wee taste of Rosa Nutty’s music at the opening of every Irish Stew episode. Now we go beyond the snippet and follow Rosa through the emotional landscape she travels in song. Her first album after a five-year absence from the recording studio, World So Blue is getting rave reviews, like this from The Irish Times : “...

Gregory Harrington has stayed busy since our initial episode back in February 2022. Since that  conversation, the accomplished violinist  released a recording titled Gregory Harrington: Live From The Irish Repertory Join Martin Nutty as he chats with Gregory about the risks of recording beloved traditional  Irish tunes as a classically trained violinist. Learn how Gregory approaches the recording...

In times past, the Irish language (Gaelic) was thought by some to be a mark of backwardness. In this episode, husband and wife team, Colm Bairéad and Cleona Ní Chrualaoi reveal how Ireland's native tongue provided entrée to the world of movie-making leading ultimately to the creation of An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl), Ireland's nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Whi...

Our 50th episode comes to you on the most ancient of Irish holidays - Halloween or Oíche Shamhna ( eee-ha how-na ) in Irish/Gaelic. It is the night that celebrates the transition from the old to the new Celtic year. That transition point, between the present and the past, was a space where the Celts believed the spirits or pucaí ( pook-ee ) of the past roamed. Halloween seems a particularly approp...

Our 49th episode features one of our most global of guests–Deirdre Ryan, a world class athlete who competed for Ireland on the global stage and who is now raising the bar for Irish food. Born in County Dublin, Deirdre studied business and Italian, then worked, studied and trained in Milan. To train and work in Germany, she learned to speak German and she’d go on to work in Belgium, Switzerland, an...

From a dairy farm in County Offaly to the C-Suite in a global branding agency, her university days in Ulster during The Troubles, her internship with Enterprise Ireland that brought her to New York, her work bringing foreign direct investment and thousands of jobs to Ireland, her MBA from Harvard Business School, her rise in the world of marketers where she is regularly named one of the profession...

It wasn’t planned this way, but we recorded our episode with writer Brian McDonald on Sept. 11, a date that looms large in his new book Five Flights Up, which traces the Irish American story of four generations of the Feehan family in the Fire Department of New York, the FDNY, a story which would tragically culminate with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. From the days just after the...