The Women's Podcast

For years now, campaigners and activists have been calling on the government to prevent records compiled by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes from being sealed for 30 years. Proposed legislation related to the commission’s records, the Records Bill, was brought forward by Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman and the debate continues this week in Dail. Organisations such...

The 15th of October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Each year, to mark the day, a global wave of light is created through the lighting of candles by parents who have lost a baby through miscarriage, stillbirth or in infancy. It is estimated that one in four pregnancies ends this way and yet there is still a silence and taboo that surrounds the subject. In this episode, Irish Times pa...

You’ve probably heard of the 400 Welcomes campaign, an all-female campaign group, made up of doctors, teachers, writers, community and social care workers and musicians . One of the women behind the campaign is Caoimhe Butterly, a human rights campaigner who has been fighting for justice all over the world for most of her adult life. Originally from Dublin, she was inspired by her parents to look...

In 1984, Majella Moynihan was a fresh faced young garda recruit when she gave birth to a baby boy. Charged with breaching An Garda Siochana disciplinary rules - for having premarital sex with another guard and for becoming pregnant and having a child while unmarried - she was pressured to give up her baby for adoption or face dismissal. It forced her into a decision that would have devastating imp...

Who knows when we'll get to lose ourselves in the darkness of a cinema again? But when we do all of us at The Women's Podcast are urging you to go and see a wonderful Irish film called Herself which tells the story of a brutalised single mother Sandra and her dream to build her own house where she and her two small daughters can be safe. The story of the film was written by Dubliner Clare Dunne wh...

The most fabulous and famous family dynasty in Britain and Ireland during the 1920s were the grand-daughters of the first Lord Iveagh also known as the Glorious Guinness Girls. The glamour, the drama and the secrets are explored in fiction by writer Emily Hourican who spoke to Kathy Sheridan about her new novel The Glorious Guinness Girls. Hourican talks about the inspiration for the book, her geo...

On the podcast today we have skin expert Jennifer Rock who aswell as talking about her new book The Skin Nerd Philosophy, deals with all your pandemic skin problems and delves into looking after this most important organ every day of the year. We are also very excited to bring you details of season 2 of our Big Night In. From this Saturday October 3rd we'll be back on zoom to bring you conversatio...

Last April, which seems a hundred years ago now, we spoke to Dr Catherine Motherway, consultant anaesthetist at University Hospital Limerick and former President of the Intensive Care Society of Ireland. In this episode, Roisin Ingle catches up with her to find out Dr Motherway's views on Level 3, life on the frontline, societal compliance with covid restrictions and her hopes and fears as we face...

Cork author Louise O'Neill joined Roisin Ingle on the podcast to talk about her latest novel After The Silence. The book marks a departure for O'Neill in that it's a thriller but what hasn't changed is the uncompromising, gently probing voice of the writer of novels such as Asking For It which on publication became a national talking point. In After The Silence, set on a small Island off the coast...

There is a lot of confusion and covid-weariness swirling around at the moment so we thought we'd bring you an episode that will divert, intrigue and definitely distract you. Jenny Keane is an holistic sex expert and yoga teacher who runs hugely popular online workshops teaching people to explore their sexuality and enhance sexual pleasure. Her path to an empowering form of sex education began when...

There are hundreds of books out at the moment so it's difficult as an author these days, when people are reading more than ever, to stand out from the crowd. One writer who has managed to do that with her terrifying novel The Nothing Man is Catherine Ryan Howard, the Cork woman who has won a devoted army of fans with her always original and often disturbing books. This latest one is a riveting rea...

When we've asked you what subjects you'd like us to discuss on the podcast, menopause is often mentioned. One listener who got in touch was Helen Kirwan who talks to Roisin Ingle on the latest episode. Helen is going through peri-menopause and has found some of the symptoms stressful and difficult. She talks honestly about coping at this seismic time in a woman's life, while we get some expert adv...

Our last Book Club took place months ago, early in Lockdown, so we are delighted that in this show Ann Ingle, Bernice Harrison and Niamh Towey are back to discuss our latest read. The book under discussion is Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld, a political fantasy that imagines what life would have been like for Hillary Clinton had she turned down Bill Clinton's proposal of marriage. So it's a what if no...

Female genital mutilation is a practice that, according to the World Health Organisation, has affected 200 million women and girls alive today. Today’s guest, author and anti-FGM campaigner Nimko Ali is on a mission to end this worldwide by 2030. In her new book, What We’re Told Not to Talk About (But We’re Going to Anyway): Women’s Voices from East London to Ethiopia, Ali shares her own personal...

It’s been a long time coming, but this week the kids are finally going back to school. For many, it will be a welcome return to normality and routine, but it may bring about some challenges too. In this episode, Róisín Ingle speaks to Irish Times parenting columnist and mother of seven Jen Hogan, who is juggling four different start times and coming to terms with a whole new set of rules and regul...

Cancer is life changing in many ways, but our guest this week found that her devastating diagnosis in 2017 set her off on a new career path. Georgie Crawford, mother of one, lives with her husband Jamie in Dublin and is the host of the hugely successful The Good Glow podcast. She started the podcast as she struggled to come to terms with her cancer diagnosis and treatment and found that talking to...

After six months of a global pandemic we needed some good news so this episode features Mimi Wilcox, a young filmmaker from Chicago who after a whirlwind weekend romance in her home town with an Irish man decided to visit him in Ireland for five days. The only problem was, Leo Varadkar announced Lockdown the day she arrived. Air travel was cancelled and Mimi was stuck in Ireland with David Michael...

The Artist’s Way was first published in 1991 by screenwriter and teacher Julia Cameron. A classic guide to creativity, the book has sold over five million copies and has recently been redesigned and relaunched for a new generation. Hailed by celebrities such as Alicia Keys, Russell Brand and Reece Witherspoon, it’s key ideas include Morning Pages, a daily ritual designed to declutter the mind, and...

By age sixty-four, Jenni Murray's weight had become a disability. The broadcaster and author avoided the scales, wore a uniform of baggy black clothes and refused to make connections between her weight and health issues. A successful author and the host of BBC Woman’s Hour, Murray appeared to have it all, but in private she lived with a growing fear that she wouldn’t even make it to seventy. In th...

The last Big Night In of our first season took place on Zoom last Saturday night with author, literary historian and playwright Emma Donoghue. The Room-author joined us from her home in Ontario, Canada where she lives with her partner and two teenage children. Donoghue has just released The Pull of the Stars, a novel set 100 years ago in Dublin during The Great Flu. The pandemic setting was a comp...

Yoga has had an excellent pandemic. There's been a boom in online classes and even President Michael D Higgins was still getting his downward dog on in the Áras during Lockdown. So it's the perfect time for a free online yoga festival and in this episode we talk to Cathy Pearson, the woman behind the Celtic Woodland Yoga Festival, a three day gathering for people who love yoga or who are just yoga...

In this episode Roisin Ingle talks to Susannah Dickey, the author of a stunning debut novel Tennis Lessons which is set in Northern Ireland and follows a young woman as she struggles to find her place in the world. Dickey is an award-winning poet from Derry but her new novel shows her gift for the longer novel form. She has written a fantastic book containing rich dialogue and a gritty, authentic...

On today's episode, we are talking about life, death and grief in the time of Covid-19. This is a fraught issue, not just for those who've lost loved ones to the virus but for those with friends or relations that died during this very strange time of socially distanced funerals where numbers are severely limited. Roisin Ingle spoke to Orla Keegan at The Irish Hospice Foundation’s Bereavement Suppo...

In this episode, Roisin Ingle talked to Green Party Councillor Hazel Chu who has just been elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, only the 9th woman in the city's history to take on the role. On a Zoom call from her new home the Mansion House in Dawson Street, Chu told Ingle why being the first person of colour in the role is important and reflects the rich diversity of the city. She spoke about her experi...

For many women the Spring and Summer of 2020 will always be the time when their much anticipated weddings were prevented from happening because of the pandemic. While not exactly life or death, there’s no getting away from the fact that the cancellation of these special and meticulously planned days were a cause of disappointment for everyone involved. In this episode, two almost-brides author Lau...