The ClearOut

Dara ain't gonna lie - this was a monster effort to produce! A little recital with his wife, an unexpected but most welcome interview with his daughter, and a new story for the season that's in it, all pulled together on the day of the episode. And done while sick. So it's a bit rough in patches, but the sincerity of effort comes through. If you're looking for polish, go to the household aisle! Da...

In this Christmas shopping list of an episode, Dara has a look at the festive season through the lens of Christmases past. He also considers the pressure people are put under to partake of all things yule. He reads two seasonal poems, one from Robert Louis Stevenson and one from Robert Frost, both of which evoke something bucolic and poignant. He also includes a Christmas story he wrote last year...

In this episode Dara has a flea in his ear about what he sees as the shortage of social and political ideas to cater for a world that is outrunning itself. Before getting into that he takes a moment to breathe with you, the listener. He follows that with an apology of sorts for last week's half-baked episode. He also shares the reaction of his wife and daughter to meeting the new addition to Hasht...

In this pinball machine of an episode, Dara bounces all over the place and is none the wiser at the end of it whether things held together. He starts with strange bodies in 1983's Terms of Endearment before sharing some information about positive brain chemicals that he gleaned from social media. From there he reveals a surprise he has planned for his wife and daughter, who are returning home afte...

In this episode Dara discusses the importance of tone. Considering tone as the ultimate mood setter, he looks at it in the context of movies, public ceremonies and vocations. He also considers tone in the auditory sense, recognising it as a vibration, and recalls how thrilled he was as a child to hear and feel the rumble of the engine of the car ferry that he travelled on several times on journeys...

In this episode Dara finds himself concerned about the upcoming FIFA world cup in Qatar. What blind eyes were turned and what palms greased to award the tournament to such an unlikely host nation? Footballers heading to the competition want to express their reservations about human rights abuses and the exploitation of workers, but FIFA wants them to 'stick to football'. In explaining why that inf...

A mental health-focused episode partly inspired by Blindboy Boatclub's ongoing commitment to sharing his own mental health and wellness journey. A free rolling, some might say freefalling, edition of the tell has Dara reflecting on his university days and the persona he leaned into then. The context is identity and authenticity and what face we show the world. Dara discusses his recent tendency to...

In this free-roaming episode, Dara attempts to thread the needle from poor mental health to perceived male incompetence and on to a celebration of non-toxic men. The launch pad is an account of some very recent mental health challenges that Dara had to face. As part of his recovery he listened to some psychology and counselling podcasts which, though very helpful and informative, perpetuated a cer...

After semi-bingeing on Netflix documentaries set in the USA, Dara has some chewy meat to digest in the areas of race, beauty, identity, representation, status and opportunity. The retail clothing companies Abercrombie & Fitch and And1 promoted expressions of whiteness and blackness respectively in their bids to dominate their chosen markets. They each enjoyed enormous success before pushback,...

In this episode, Dara wades into the murky waters of the discourse around transgender identity and language, and who is or isn't a woman. The focal point for the discussion is the recent Twitter row that erupted in the wake of Graham Norton's framing of cancel culture, the support he got from Billy Bragg, and the anger it inspired in JK Rowling. Looking at the history of the apparent controversy,...

In this episode Dara assesses the recently-released Marilyn Monroe biopic, 'Blonde'. Written and directed by Andew Dominik, and based on the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates book of the same name, the film has been widely panned by critics and Marilyn fans, but Dara found a lot to recommend in the performance as Marilyn of Ana de Armas. He argues that de Armas imbues her characterisation with such sympathy...

In this tonally-light episode, Dara weaves a thread through 4 apparently unconnected words to create (what he hopes is) meaningful content. As they like to say on Sesame Street, "today's letter is 'H'. What begins with 'H'?" Well, 'hipster' begins with 'H' and Dara has a look at why hipsters bug him so much, a feeling he has had since he was very young. He reckons the answer has something to do wi...

In this episode, Dara doesn't think he's going to talk about Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who was killed in police custody in Iran in recent weeks, but that's what he does end up doing. He questions the strength of a faith that feels it has to police itself so viciously. He argues that when religious teaching becomes dogma, it weaponises itself and betrays an inherent insecurity. Dara nails his...

In this episode Dara talks about the importance of cultivating resilience and positivity, especially in a world that appears to be falling apart at the seams. He discusses the idea of understanding the potential of our response to be a stabilising element in the reality in which we find ourselves. Looking at the aspects of life that we may find confronting or triggering or overwhelming, Dara argue...

In this week's episode Dara reflects on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II last week and examines his own feelings about the extraordinarily long reign of the deceased monarch. He looks at the fractious history between Ireland and Britain and pays particular attention to the different identities on either side of the Irish Sea and how very different levels of historical experience and education inf...

In this choc-a-bloc inteview, Dara enjoys being taken to art school by the accomplished illustrator and sculptor, Alan Clarke. Alan and Dara were in primary school together a million years ago and this is their first time to sit down for a proper chat since then. Alan discusses growing up in an artistic household before commencing a degree in architecture upon leaving school. From there he followe...

What if we were all made by a toymaker and that toymaker set our internal tempo? Would that explain why some of us are so anxious while others remain calm? Is it possible that we all have a base setting that dictates how we interact with the world? Dara argues that the Digital Age, with its inundation of technology and devices and information platforms, has accelerated our propensity for anxiety....

In this episode Dara looks at two English sportsmen - the boxer Anthony Joshua and the cricketer Ben Stokes - and their recent public displays of personal crisis and compromised mental health. He lauds them for their candour and for their ability to face the public with their vulnerability showing. Dara discusses the pressure that many of us feel to present a functional and successful face to the...

In this episode, Dara finds himself stirred up after watching Trainwreck, the Netflix documentary series about the ill-fated Woodstock festival of 1999, an event that went off the rails for a variety of reasons, not least among them the driving motives of the organisers, one of whom was Michael Lang, who was behind the original festival 30 years earlier. Before revisiting the key factors of what w...

After watching Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman, a film hailed upon its release in 1978 as a groundbreaking feminist text, and celebrated for the central performance of Jill Clayburgh as a cheated-on spouse, Dara wonders about the legacy of strong female characters on screen and asks who of today's actresses best represents ideas of female power and strength. It is essentially a question about f...

Dara presents an interview with his friend Sean Whitehill. Sean is a dedicated traveller and artist, among other things. He talks about what travelling means to him and what some of his favourite places are. Sean turns his travel experiences into beautifully hand-drawn and hand-coloured mandalas which capture the travel moments and memories that have meant the most to him. They ask the question -...

Dara is thinking about imprints, specifically the ones left on us in our formative years. He argues that our sense of wellness is very much connected to how successfully we negotiate or accommodate those imprints in our adult selves. He shares some scenarios from his own childhood to try to illustrate his point, including watching The Muppet Show in a bar while a fight broke out above his 8-year-o...

In this episode, Dara discusses some hot potatoes that are being passed from hand to hand in Hashtag Blessed. Beyonce's new album art raises some concern, as does Marilyn Monroe's appearance on the screen on Dara and his daughter's scheduled movie night. Are these icons of female beauty and performance actually problematic? Is there a radically different experience in how they are perceived by men...

In this episode, Dara takes a deep dive into two very different on-screen depictions of what the French call 'amour fou', or 'mad love'. 1986's Betty Blue (37.2 Le Matin) and Hitchcock's 1958 classic 'Vertigo' are the two texts in question. Dara recalls the impact of Betty Blue on his 18-year-old self and how it's sexual frankness was a mind-altering experience in terms of what he felt movies coul...

Dara presents the second of two parts of an in-depth interview with author, artist, and abuse survivor, Aisling Creegan. Aisling grew up in the 1970s as the youngest child of a large Dublin family, but hers was a harrowing childhood that played out in a chaotic and violent household. Alcoholism, one ailing parent, and the other with severe mental health problems meant the young Aisling was never s...