On a wet October Saturday over forty years ago a greyhound finished a race at Mullingar race track. The event was to turn Irish gambling upside down. Based in the small Irish towns of Listowel and Abbeyfeale, a quiet local betting coup in the days leading up the race saw bookies faced with paying out odds of almost a thousand to one. (2020)

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Sam Millar’s life reads like pure fiction. After joining the IRA as a teenager, he spent years on the notorious blanket protest in Northern Ireland. He later admitted to taking part in a massive, seven million dollar armed robbery in the US before starting a new life as a writer of award winning crime novels. (2020)

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Helen Oxenham is getting a medal from the Queen of England – although Helen doesn’t have much time for the Queen. It’s for her work with victims of domestic violence in Australia. How did a woman, born in Cork and raised in Crumlin, Dublin end up there? Partly because of two men – both German – one she loved and one she came to despise. (2020)

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Two 15-year old Dublin girls were mitching, drinking and shoplifting. Then they hear a group of handsome men singing - with shaved heads and saffron robes. Hare Krishnas. The girls decide to join them – for the men and the free food - but soon they are hooked on the strict life and become Hare Krishna nuns. But the dream sours. (2020)

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Shane Healy has gone the distance in life. After spending years in an orphanage as a child, he travelled widely before hitch-hiking around the US, where he discovered he was a naturally talented athlete. It took more than that to get him to the 1996 Olympics where he ran for Ireland. Now after years away from the sport, Shane is back. (2020)

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In 1972, a group of Irish protest riders gate crashed the Olympic Games road cycling race in Munich, Germany. They’d hatched a secret plan to scupper the official Irish Olympic cycling team. But events at the Games threw their own plans into chaos. Almost 50 years later a family is still trying to recapture a lost Olympic dream. (2020)

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In 1981, heroin took hold of certain parts of Dublin. It changed everything for the communities it was affected by. The impact of addiction on the people there was devastating. But these communities weren’t going to just take it and the people decided to fight back against the dealers. (2020)

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He was cheered on an open-topped bus through Dublin. Then he was homeless and jobless. He swept floors and slept on a campbed in the National Stadium. He stole his passport to flee Cuba - had a lucky meeting with a Shaolin monk, who saved him – met three Mayomen, who helped keep him safe - and now he teaches yoga to prisoners. Some life. (2020)

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Felix Gretarsson lost both his arms in a work accident in Iceland in 1998. In the years that followed, his life spiralled into an abyss as he lost his health, status, relationship and sense of identity. After turning his life around, Felix now lives in France, where he’s waiting to receive the world’s first full double arm transplant. (2020)

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Conor Walsh was a minimalist piano composer from Co. Mayo, whose musical career was just beginning when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 2016 aged 36. Within days of his burial, Conor's sister found 37 unpublished tracks on his laptop, and so began his family’s journey to release his posthumous debut album, The Lucid. (2020)

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