Irish Stew Podcast

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...

In this episode, we reach for the stars with Irish American astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman, a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions and 159 days in orbit on the International Space Station (ISS). Cady says she’s one-quarter Irish on both sides, but that it adds up to much more than half. When not exploring outer space, she’s exploring Irish music on the flute and tin whistle, even playing with the Chi...

From Carnegie Hall to Lambeau Field, Gregory Harrington elevates the Global Irish Nation Conversation through his music. Born in Dublin, based in New York City, he is redefining the classical violin virtuoso for the 21st century, pairing his expressive lyricism, tonal beauty, and impeccable musicianship with his uncanny ability to transform film scores, jazz standards, rock and pop music into comp...

In this episode we explore the “roots” and “routes” of the Irish diaspora for a very “Global Irish Nation Conversation” with CEO Patrick Greene and Historian-in-Residence Maurice J. Casey Ph. D. of Dublin’s EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, voted Europe’s leading tourist attraction the last three years running. Patrick shares how an apprenticeship in archeology led him into a lifelong internation...

Despite growing up with no TV in a rural upstate hamlet, Kristen Shaughnessy would go on to become a fixture in New York TV news as reporter and anchor with the 24-hour news station New York 1.  Kristen was on the frontlines of the non-stop news coverage of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and she takes us back to the grim reality that emerged that fateful day, sharing poignant details an...

Born in the Irish America hotbed of Buffalo, New   York, Jennifer Petoff lives in Dublin now. Following a career that has taken unexpected twists. A holder of a Ph. D. in Chemistry from Stanford University, we talk about women in STEM and how Jennifer made her way to Dublin, where she works in the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) field. Jennifer is also one of four editors of Site Reliability En...

On this serving of Irish Stew, we travel from Manhattan (pop. 1.6 M) to Inisheer (pop. 250) to explore the sights, sounds, haunting landscape, natural history, and vibrant culture of the Aran Islands with our affable tour guide—Irish language advocate and sean-nós singer, MacDara Ó Conaola. MacDara guides us over the common ground all three of the Aran Islands share, what makes each one distinct,...

Through her work on the award-winning The Coastal Atlas of Ireland and on harvesting the power of ocean winds, our guest Val Cummins is a compelling advocate for embracing the potential off Ireland’s shores.  Just named the best Irish-published book of the year, and weighing in at a hefty 10 pounds/4.5 kilos, The Coastal Atlas of Ireland is an unprecedented exploration of Ireland’s coastline and a...

Colin Broderick likes to tell stories, needs to tell them, be they dark, dank, and dangerous, be they bright, affirming, and knowing.  It’s all there in his new film A Bend in the River , his highly personal tale of a writer returning to his native County Tyrone still in the shadows of “The Troubles,” confronting the life and loves he left behind and writing as if his life depended on it, with box...

Clare McGee wears multiple hats, most notably as a principal of Innovate-NI , a management consulting company established 2016 in Derry, Northern Ireland. Along with cofounder Dr. Barney Toal , the company focuses on small business development, entrepreneurship, digital and social innovation projects. Clare is also a cofounder of AwakenHub , a social enterprise organization whose mission is to lev...

For Paul Finnegan it all goes back to his hometown of Galway City, “a small city but I refuse to call it a town” he says and a “crucible of many great things,” notwithstanding its reputation for being “where ambition goes to die.” But Paul explains why, despite his love for “The City of Tribes,” he traded “one great city for another'' and moved from Galway City to New York City, where he...

How much of our history would remain buried if not for a few intrepid explorers of the past?  In this episode we explore little known Irish diaspora stories buried in cemeteries over 1,300 miles apart in Colorado and Georgia. Drawing on his research of an abandoned cemetery high in the Rocky Mountains, historian Prof. Jim Walsh tells the tale of the Irish miners who migrated to work hard and die y...

Natalie Nugent O’Shea takes us from St. Paul, Minnesota, around the world with Riverdance, to Dublin to start a family, and then back home to St. Paul where she’d co-found a home for Irish arts and culture in the Midwest, the Celtic Junction Arts Center. She tells us of her arm’s-length relationship to Ireland until moonlighting as a lighting designer for a touring production of Riverdance, fallin...

WASSUP? Season III of Irish Stew is WASSUP! We launch with an episode on the Irish ad man responsible for the memorable Budweiser commercial that had people around the world shouting WASSUP--Vinny Warren. Vinny takes you from his native Galway to London, New York, Boston and finally Chicago, relates why his time as a bartender would later prove so valuable, how being a Central Park carriage driver...

Emer Rocke gives an insider’s perspective on the lives of those most global of Irish citizens, the people of Ireland’s diplomatic corps. The Deputy Ambassador of Ireland to the United States at time of the interview, now Director of U.S. and Canadian Relations, Emer discusses the rewards and challenges of the diplomatic life, how Ireland punches above its weight in the international arena, why oth...

Janet Behan carries on the family tradition of creativity in both her acting and writing. The London-born daughter of Dublin-born playwright Brian Behan & Celia Behan, great niece of the songwriter Peadar Kearney (author of Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish National Anthem), and niece of the writers Dominic Behan and Brendan Behan. On this serving of The Stew, she tells of a deprived but happy chil...