The Women's Podcast

Raw, tired, angry and emotional. That’s how our guests on today’s podcast feel. It’s as they attempt to digest the government-commissioned report from the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes released this week. It found a shocking number of deaths and widespread abuses at religious institutions for unmarried mothers and their children in this country. Set up in 2015 following re...

Author and podcaster Caroline Foran took the world by storm in 2016 with the release of her best selling self-help book, Owning It: Your Bullsh*t-Free Guide to Living with Anxiety. Now, she’s back with her third book Naked: Ten Truths to Change Your Life, which challenges readers to explore, embrace and expose their vulnerability. From realising that you’ll never really have it all figured out to...

In our first book club of 2021, Róisín, Ann Ingle, Bernice Harrison and Niamh Towey discuss Untamed, a memoir by American author Glennon Doyle. This is Doyle’s third memoir, which follows on from her two previous best sellers, Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior. Untamed is the story of how Doyle left her troublesome marriage, fell head over heels in love with soccer star Abby Wambach, found her in...

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the future is never certain. But with a number of vaccines against Covid-19 on the way, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Last year we learned how to live in a pandemic, somehow managing to keep the show on the road in ways we never thought were possible before. We learned that, for many of us, working from home is possible. We found ways to ke...

At the start of 2020, as we began a new decade, we were caught up with news stories about the Australian bushfires, the seemingly never-ending Brexit talks, a then-looming Irish general election, and students from 72 schools around the country began opening time capsules sealed in 1996 containing their hopes and dreams for 2020. How many of them could have guessed what lay ahead? Bubbling away in...

The time has finally come to say goodbye to 2020. But before we bid adieu to the longest year on record, we want to take you on a journey back through the last twelve months of The Women’s Podcast. The year 2020 will not just be remembered for the pandemic, it will also be remembered for the global Black Lives Matter movement, the historic US election result and the scandal around the sealing of t...

In this special festive episode, we’re bringing you a story written by Maeve Binchy, first published in The Irish Times on Saturday, December 29th, 1984. Read by Róisín Ingle, the story captures the beautiful ordinariness of everyday life, the fuss and excitement of the holidays and the place of a woman at the head of her family. With true emotional tugs and important lessons to be learned, we hop...

Emma Gannon is a writer, broadcaster and podcaster who is best known for her podcast Ctrl Alt Delete and Sunday Times Bestselling business book The Multi-Hyphen Method. In 2020 she published her debut novel, Olive, in which she explores the lives of four female friends whose paths diverge after a close-knit college experience. The book’s protagonist is the titular Olive, whose first-person narrati...

Over the past year, the sale of puppies in Ireland has increased by over 200%. It’s no surprise that during these difficult times with lockdown restrictions still in place, people have opened their hearts and homes to new four-legged friends. However, many do not realise that by buying dogs online, they could be unknowingly contributing to Ireland’s illegal puppy trade. In today’s episode, Róisín...

We’ve reassembled our book club one last time before we bid adieu to 2020, to have a chat about the books they got lost in this year. Ann Ingle, Niamh Towey and Bernice Harrison join Róisín to recommend some great reads that you might consider gifting to your nearest and dearest this Christmas and to drop a few not-so-subtle hints about the books they hope to find under the tree for themselves on...

In 2020, Irish musician Sharon Shannon was due to travel the world celebrating her 30th anniversary in the music industry. However, Covid as we know, scuppered everyone's plans. Making the most of her time in lockdown, the Clare native, set about writing and recording a brand new album called The Reckoning. It features over a dozen remote collaborations from artists in locations across the globe....

Somali-Irish activist Ifrah Ahmed is one of the world's foremost campaigners against Female Genital Mutilation. Ahmed came to Ireland in 2006 after fleeing her war-torn home country and during a medical examination it was found that she had suffered terrible trauma as a result of FGM. A founding member of the United Youth of Ireland, she has been gender adviser to the prime minister of Somalia and...

This year marks the fifth anniversary of a pivotal moment in Irish cultural history. In November 2015, the Waking the Feminists movement emerged in response to decades of underrepresentation for women in Irish theatre and performance practice. In today’s episode, Róisín Ingle is joined by Lian Bell and Sarah Durcan, the two powerhouses behind the campaign which began on social media, gained tracti...

In today’s episode, we’re bringing you the recording from our recent Women’s Podcast Live event. On Thursday evening, in front of a very festive Zoom audience, our crack squad of Irish Times columnists presented the ultimate Christmas 2020 survival guide. Joining us on the evening was beauty reporter Laura Kennedy, who came bearing the best gift ideas this side of Bethlehem, including a pandemic t...

Rhonda Byrne shot to worldwide fame in 2006 with her massively successful film and book, The Secret. With fans like Oprah Winfrey, the book went on to sell more than 30 million copies, making Byrne a multi-millionaire. The Secret claimed to show us the path to create anything we want to be, do or have. Now Byrne has written its follow-up, The Greatest Secret, through which she hopes to help people...

In this book club podcast Róisín, Ann Ingle, Bernice Harrison and Niamh Towey discuss our latest read, Nick Hornby’s ninth novel, Just Like You. The author, known for his portrayal of the interior lives of men in books including the much loved, High Fidelity, is back with a funny age-gap love story set to a backdrop of Brexit London. In it, Hornby attempts to inhabit the point of view of a black m...

It's Food Month in The Irish Times but you might say it's been Food Month pretty much everywhere since last March when the pandemic took hold and we found ourselves spending a lot more time in our homes and particularly in our kitchens. We were delighted to welcome resident Irish Times Food Columnist Lilly Higgins back to the podcast to discuss the foods that have been keeping her and her family g...

While many of us were rightly outraged by the Government's approach to rushing through the Mother and Baby Homes Bill, and relieved by the U-turn that followed the public campaigning of survivors and human rights experts, one aspect of that story got very little attention. For black or mixed-race people born or raised in mother and baby homes and industrial schools, the abuse they received was of...

You might have seen a shocking and disturbing news story in The Irish Times this week by Kitty Holland who wrote about a cluster of suicides among young women in west Dublin last year which was linked to the housing crisis, domestic violence, social media and recreational drug use. Though the area has had a female suicide rate three times the national average since 2015, it was the deaths of eight...

In this episode, we meet Ruth Medjber the talented young music photographer who, having lost all her work due to the pandemic, found a novel and engaging way to capture the story of Ireland in Lockdown. Medjber told Roisin Ingle about why she began taking photographs of people at their front windows, to show the rich and diverse tapestry that made up the universal details of our locked down lives....

Four years ago this week, we called an Emergency Episode of this podcast to lament and analyse the ascent of racist, sexist Donald Trump to The White House. Four years later we assemble again in a slightly more hopeful mood against a backdrop of Biden possibly emerging victorious. We can't forget though that nearly 70 million voters choosing Trump again, despite or perhaps because of, his four yea...

In today's episode, Kathy Sheridan talks to broadcaster Aine Lawlor as she marks the move from anchoring RTE Radio 1's News At One to a gig she has to set the alarm much earlier for as one of the co-presenters of the flagship programme Morning Ireland. She talked to Sheridan about her long career, her passion for current affairs, her thoughts on the US Election and the importance of speaking so op...

In today’s episode, Róisín Ingle is joined by Doireann Ni Ghriofa, a talented poet and the author of an original, evocative and lyrical book called A Ghost In the Throat. This stunning debut is an exploration into Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, one of the greatest love poems of the Irish language, written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. A fluid hybrid of essay and autofiction, Ni Ghríofa weaves in her...

In this episode Kathy Sheridan talks to little person Sinéad Burke about her extraordinary activism and her new stigma-busting book Break the Mould. You'll know Burke from such accolades as appearing on the cover of Vogue (Meghan Markle chose her for the gig) and her TED talk 'Why design should include everyone'. She is a writer, academic, influencer, activist and broadcaster who has been fearless...

In today’s episode Roisin Ingle meets Galway based Erin Darcy the author of a new book called In Her Shoes which tells the stories of women left behind by the Eighth Amendment. In early 2018 Darcy created an online art project, In Her Shoes Women of the 8th to safely and anonymously share private stories of the real and devastating impact of the 8th amendment. In the five months leading up the ref...