Irish Stew Podcast

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...

Flor MacCarthy was born in West Cork and shares memories of one of Ireland's most idyllic regions. Her childhood was one rich in the indulgence of curiosity, filled with books, history, and fueled by a Russophile father. A Trinity College degree in French and Art History led unexpectedly to a career in journalism. Flor worked for 16 years at RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster, reporting...

Growing up in a Dublin home with no TV, Aedín turned to books, reading them aloud, drawing out the characters, and letting the words wash over her, which is how at age ten she managed to read James Joyce’s intimidating novel Ulysses .  She was drawn to the rhythms and music in the words of the great writers, no surprise coming from a home with her avid reader mother and her father, Paddy Moloney o...

Our conversation with the warm and welcoming Elaine Ní Bhraonáin takes us from her childhood in South County, Dublin, to New York’s lively Irish scene, to bucolic Ballymoney on the north Wexford coast where she and her husband raise their three healthy children after three difficult pregnancies. She talks about being raised in a home where the paternal language was Irish and the maternal tongue wa...

We’re not sure what’s more impressive—that Larry Kirwan originated and co-wrote the Broadway hit Paradise Square, or that his early band with Pierce Turner was banned from the notorious New York punk rock club CBGB for being “too demonic.” Larry talks of how his unusual childhood in Wexford and his need to maneuver through different points of view--Republican vs Free State, Catholicism vs Atheism,...

Our Bloomsday episode with the engaging James Joyce scholar John McCourt takes us to Italy for the first time, specifically its outpost across the Adriatic Sea, Trieste.  “There, I can safely say I discovered James Joyce,” McCourt says of Trieste. “Having    encountered him occasionally in Ireland, I found myself in the city that had been his home for ten years.”  After earning his BA, MA, and PhD...

Our new season of Irish Stew opens with trailblazing journalist Mark Little, a former RTÉ newscaster working to make sense of social media. Coming from a family where there was a daily scrum over who got the newspaper first,  armed with “premature cynicism” and blessed with an insatiable curiosity for what made the world work, journalism beckoned and after graduating Trinity College he landed a jo...

Liza Donnelly: New Yorker Cartoonist & “Very Funny Ladies” Irish Stew’s favorite cartoonist is back to tell you about her just-published book, V ery Funny Ladies: an in-depth celebration of women cartoonists who have graced the pages of the famous magazine from the Roaring Twenties to the present day.   And you learn that somewhere between way back then and now a gender gap opened up at the ma...

We last spoke with Ted Smyth back at the start of 2021. A lot has happened in the world of politics in the intervening period. Ted’s experience on both sides of the Atlantic in the worlds of  diplomacy and  corporate life make him a thoughtful and well informed commentator on recent Irish and American developments.  Join Martin Nutty as he talks with Ted about the current state of American politic...

We first sat down with Liverpudlian, Jack Byrne back in Season 2 when we talked about his first novel: Under the Bridge. You can catch that episode here: Jack Byrne: Mystery Writer. Now Jack is back with the second installment of his Liverpool Mystery Series - Across the Water which continues the story of Paddy and Vinnie Connolly. The action moves from Liverpool to Wicklow as Vinnie traces the st...

Season III of Irish Stew concludes with our conversation with a very Global Irish citizen, Dan Mulhall, Ireland’s Ambassador to the United States and your guide to one of the classics of Irish literature through his recently published Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey . Join us as we tour the world with one of Ireland’s top diplomats as he wields Ireland’s soft power and uses Ireland’s culture to open d...