Irish Stew Podcast

When Unionist leader Ian Paisley traveled from Belfast to Dublin and addressed the packed Long Room of the Trinity College Library, historian Jane Ohlmeyer was on edge. Paisley had telegraphed that he would close his remarks with Sir Edward Carson’s rallying cry “God save Ulster.” But then the former firebrand paused and added, significantly, “and the other provinces as well.” 

It wasn’t quite “God save Ireland,” but to Jane and everyone in that room, it was a step in the right direction.

That event marked the online release of the 1641 Depositions, as Jane recounts on the latest episode of the Irish Stew podcast. Used for centuries to fuel sectarian hatred, this controversial collection of testimonies on alleged atrocities was released in the spirit of furthering the peace process.

“In the wrong hands, history can be a very dangerous political weapon,” Jane acknowledged, “but in the right hands, actually, history can do good.”

Jane is the Erasmus Smith Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and the author of Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World, a fresh, original interpretation of Ireland's engagement with the English and other European empires.

“Wherever there’s an empire, you’ll find an Irish person,” she says, and her stories prove it, from Irish traders who worked at the mouth of the Amazon to Irish soldiers in Tangier who spoke a language the English couldn’t follow.

But Jane points out that while Ireland suffered under English imperialism, “Irish people become actively engaged in that imperial system, some of them with great gusto, but the majority simply because they don’t have economic opportunities at home.” 

And many Irish looked beyond the British Empire for opportunity.

“The Irish are trans-imperial,” she explains. “They hop from empire to empire,” prospering in the service of Spain, France, Denmark, and Russia. She tells of how Irish rubber barons brutalized Peru’s indigenous people, but notes it was Roger Casement, another Irishman, who exposed their abuses.

A true citizen of Global Ireland, she was born in Zambia and arrived in Belfast as the Troubles began. Watching both sides of the sectarian divide wield history for their purposes she found herself drawn to the study of the 17th century, when England began its imperial project in Ireland.

She reflects on how far Irishness has come since her student days in Scotland, when she was called a “bogtrotter,” saying, “Here we are, 25 years later, to be Irish is one of the sexiest things you can be.”

She talks about the TV series From That Small Island screened by RTÉ and PBS and her VOICES project recovering the lives of ordinary Irish women. She also credits actor Stephen Rea for pointing her towards the Brian Friel play that inspired the opening chapter of Making Empire.

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JANE OHLMEYER

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  • Trinity
  • VOICES
  • Personal

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 30; Total Episode Count: 171

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Almost five years ago, sean-nós singer and native Irish speaker MacDara Ó Conaola gave Irish Stew a tour of Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands. Since then he has moved to the mainland, worked two very different jobs, taken a slice of Irish culture to Italy, and come home again.

For our 170th episode, Martin catches up with MacDara back on the island, still as passionate about the language as ever. “I keep telling younger people, and just anybody really, that Irish can open a lot of doors,” he says, “and it’s a very positive thing.”

The conversation covers his year as an Irish language officer in Ennis, County Clare, and the story of Clare’s lost Gaeltacht, where the last native speaker died only in 1996. His work there launched Irish language events and projects that are still running.

While MacDara's role as a language officer was satisfying, he wanted to spend less time in the office and more time rubbing shoulders with people. So he moved on to Bunratty Castle and Folk Park, where he had his own cottage as the Irish language and sean-nós singing interpreter. He calls it “the nicest job I ever had.” There he got visitors from Alabama and Connecticut talking to each other, and met Jason Alexander and Jimmy Kimmel along the way. 

When his time at Bunratty came to an end last winter, MacDara went looking for his next project, and found it in Verona, Italy. A cold email to Tocatì, a festival of street games that features a different guest country each year, led to Ireland taking the spotlight this September, with a delegation of about 200 sportspeople, musicians, craftspeople and Irish speakers from the Gaeltacht. 

His advice for anyone learning Irish is hopeful: speak it at home, starting with the youngest. “They’re not judging you,” he says.

The episode features three of MacDara’s songs: Caisleán A’ tSléibhe; The Love Token, title track of his 2006 album; and Fadó Fadó, recorded with his children, Seán and Michelle.

LINKS

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MACDARA Ó CONAOLA

• Original Irish Stew Episode (December 2021)
• Irish Vibes on TikTok
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• Music on Spotify
• Fadó Fadó on Bandcamp

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 29; Total Episode Count: 170

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The Today Show spotlighted Irish tourism last week in the U.S., but now it’s Irish Stew’s turn to tell the tale to its global audience through the eyes of Stephen Cotter, managing director of CIE Tours International, a company with over 90 years of history bringing people to experience Ireland and beyond.

With cohost John Lee flying solo this time, the episode explores CIE Tours’ unlikely origins in the International Eucharistic Congress of 1932, the dynamics of its Irish Government ownership, its impressive international scale and reach, why it’s expanded beyond Ireland’s shores, the “secret sauce” that keeps visitors coming back, the off-the-beaten-track experiences it’s offering, Stephen’s photo op with the Micheál Martin that made national news, and why the tourism industry has such a hold on him.

"The business just grabs you. There's never a dull moment," he says, reflecting on such non-dull moments like economic downturns and the COVID pandemic. “Every few years, you have something that's going to knock you back. There's always a challenge that keeps it exciting."

In a high-tech world, Stephen cherishes CIE’s high-touch moments. “What I like most about it is when I meet our customers. We’re just so privileged and so honored to work in a business that’s putting a smile on our customers’ faces.”

He knows he has an excellent product to sell in Ireland and all the CIE Tours destinations with a strong slate of tours on offer for each, but to him it’s the guides, not the itineraries, which keeps people coming back to CIE Tours. 

“The biggest value on our trips is what the driver and the tour guide add to the experience. That is our ‘secret sauce,’ the crew working in all our destinations--Italy, Iceland Scotland, Spain and in Ireland,” he says. “You would not believe the testimonials that we get back. People just fall in love with the crew.”

The episode explores Stephen’s Dundalk boyhood, his early business experience bidding at Belfast furniture auctions, and a marriage proposal involving a lamb in Sligo. 

And in a tourism-centric episode, it’s not surprising that the conversation might begin with the Burren, but it’s the bovine slant to the opening that’s unexpected. 

"If you'd said to me 10 years ago, I'm going to be talking about cattle, no-fence collars and GPS, I would have said you were mad," he says of a CIE Tours sustainability initiative. The program facilitates cattle-grazing on the Burren’s winter uplands, which suppresses unwanted plant species from taking over and encourages the region's rare flowers to return each spring, which also encourages the return of tourists. Additionally, the relative ease of managing cattle remotely through GPS collars is helping keep young farmers in business bymaking grazing on this marginal land viable.

And what business conversation today doesn’t touch on AI? While embracing AI’s efficiencies, Stephen says, "People like people. Hopefully in my lifetime, that's never replaced by any AI computer or AI bot."

LINKS

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CIE TOURS

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• Media Partner: IrishCentral

Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 28; Total Episode Count: 169

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It don't mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Fortunately, the latest Irish Stew guest has that swing. He’s transatlantic Irish jazz singer Austin O’Brien, out of Malahide, County Dublin, where Irish Stew cohost Martin Nutty calls home,

Co-host John Lee saw that this Irish jazz artist was playing at a New York outpost of the Malahide bar Gibney’s. he contacted Austin who invited him out to New Jersey for his recording session at the legendary Van Gelder Studio, where some of the greatest jazz albums were recorded.

In this episode the globetrotting crooner looks back to his Irish roots, saying, “I grew up in a very Irish family. There were like eight boys and two girls. And my granny had a shop, and they lived on Francis Street, which is like the belly button of the Liberties,"

In this episode he recalls his challenges pursuing music. "I was very shy, timid, and dyslexic, so I felt insecure, I can't write music. I actually hear music like a picture. I can hear and see a finished song just from an idea,” he says.

Like many artists Austin felt the pull of Paris where he now lives. “At clubs in Paris people come to dance, here in New York people come to sit and listen. It's like they say, if you can sing in Paris, you can sing anywhere,” he joked.

He recounts an almost mystical experience he had performing there in one of those clubs.

"I was singing in a very famous club in Paris called the Caveau de la Huchette and I could feel a mistake coming, Then it was like my dad was behind me, and he went, ‘you're going to be okay’ and I was able to get through it.” It’s a bittersweet memory for Austin as his father never heard him sing professionally. “He was meant to come to a concert but he died a couple of weeks before,” he says.

Following the footsteps of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, and more jazz legends to record at the Van Gelder Studio was career highlight.

"My drummer, Jonathan, says,’ hallowed ground, we're in Disneyland for a jazzman.’ The studio has stayed the same since 1959. They bow to nobody," he says.

Austin shares another heartfelt personal goal, to bring jazz and other kinds of live music into public school systems where there is need. Four times he’s brought his programs of live jazz and Irish music with Dave Brown mixed with motivational messages to the Cordero Community School in Hamilton, NJ and is now building a team to develop the funding sources and organization needed to make the program grow, with schools in Englewood, NJ showing strong interest in this outreach.

Jazz may not mean a thing if it ain’t got a thing, but what does it mean to Austin?

"I found out jazz is not a music, it's a culture, and that it's not how you play it, but how you interpret it"

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AUSTIN O'BRIEN

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VAN GELDER STUDIO

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GIBNEY'S NEW YORK (our hosts for this episode)

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• Media Partner: IrishCentral

Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 27; Total Episode Count: 168

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It don't mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Fortunately, the latest Irish Stew guest has that swing. He’s transatlantic Irish jazz singer Austin O’Brien, out of Malahide, County Dublin, where Irish Stew cohost Martin Nutty calls home,

Co-host John Lee saw that this Irish jazz artist was playing at a New York outpost of the Malahide bar Gibney’s. he contacted Austin who invited him out to New Jersey for his recording session at the legendary Van Gelder Studio, where some of the greatest jazz albums were recorded.

In this episode the globetrotting crooner looks back to his Irish roots, saying, “I grew up in a very Irish family. There were like eight boys and two girls. And my granny had a shop, and they lived on Francis Street, which is like the belly button of the Liberties,"

In this episode he recalls his challenges pursuing music. "I was very shy, timid, and dyslexic, so I felt insecure. I actually hear music like a picture. I can hear and see a finished song just from an idea,” he says.

Like many artists Austin felt the pull of Paris where he now lives. “At clubs in Paris people come to dance, here in New York people come to sit and listen. It's like they say, if you can sing in Paris, you can sing anywhere,” he joked.

He recounts an almost mystical experience he had performing there in one of those clubs.

"I was singing in a very famous club in Paris called the Caveau de la Huchette and I could feel a mistake coming, Then it was like my dad was behind me, and he went, ‘you're going to be okay’ and I was able to get through it.” It’s a bittersweet memory for Austin as his father never heard him sing professionally. “He was meant to come to a concert but he died a couple of weeks before,” he says.

Following the footsteps of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, and more jazz legends to record at the Van Gelder Studio was career highlight.

"My drummer, Jonathan, says,’ hallowed ground, we're in Disneyland for a jazzman.’ The studio has stayed the same since 1959. They bow to nobody," he says.

Austin shares another heartfelt personal goal, to bring jazz and other kinds of live music into public school systems where there is need. Four times he’s brought his programs of live jazz and Irish music with Dave Brown mixed with motivational messages to the Cordero Community School in Hamilton, NJ and is now building a team to develop the funding sources and organization needed to make the program grow, with schools in Englewood, NJ showing strong interest in this outreach.

Jazz may not mean a thing if it ain’t got a thing, but what does it mean to Austin?

"I found out jazz is not a music, it's a culture, and that it's not how you play it, but how you interpret it"

LINKS

CROSTON FLOOD

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• Linda Croston
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PROJECT CHILDREN

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MONAGHAN PEACE CAMPUS

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 26; Total Episode Count: 167

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Andre Archimbaud spent his life carrying three passports worth of heritage: a French surname, an Italian-American and Irish-American upbringing.  While André's Irish identity may be masked by his last name, there is little doubt about the depth of that legacy. This episode, recorded at Ryan's Daughter on the Upper East Side, traces how Archimbaud came to understand that inheritance at a deeper level.

It started years earlier at a bar in Washington Heights, where a stranger, several drinks in, turned to him and said, "You are what your mother is," invoking a mitochondrial logic Archimbaud had never considered. Two weeks of digging into his maternal line turned up a great-grandfather from Sligo and a great-great-grandmother born in Dublin. From there, U2, a 1997 road trip through Killarney, and a growing engagement with Irish radio and Irish Twitter did the rest.

Archimbaud's other education came from his father, a man who rose from a cramped East Orange apartment to sit on the US Olympic Committee, and who taught his son to network simply by being watched. "It imprinted in me the sort of how to do this," Archimbaud says, a skill that now underwrites Clearly Now Media, the digital agency he launched after nearly two decades in paid search and social advertising.

Even the agency's name has an Irish thread: a Hothouse Flowers cover of "I Can See Clearly Now," framed on his living room wall, that his fiancé pointed to when he needed a name.

Archimbaud closes on a quieter note: two days alone on Inchydoney Beach in West Cork, sun and rain and a double rainbow, that stayed with him through a season of change.

LINKS

ANDRE ARCHIMBAUD

• Clearly Now Media 
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RYAN'S DAUGHTER

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 25; Total Episode Count: 166

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Gearóid Mcdaid, known across the surfing world as G-Man, grew up twenty minutes from Mullaghmore, County Sligo's fearsome slab wave, and now holds the 2025 European shortboard title with an eye on the 2028 LA Olympics. John and Martin caught him mid-vacation in New York, tucked into Georgie's Chelsea, right under a photograph of the man himself mid-wave.

"It's a pretty cool thing that surfing's in the Olympics now," he says. Gearóid's victory at the European Championships last year did its part for the sport back home, proof, as he puts it, that Ireland has surfers who can compete with the best in the world. 

Gearóid walks us through the two lives of a pro surfer: the technical, judged world of competition, and the far riskier business of chasing 50-foot slabs at Mullaghmore, a wave made by limestone reef geology and giant North Athlantic swells. Chasing those waves takes a safety crew on jet skis and a fair amount of nerve, skills built on a childhood his surfer father set in motion, long before Mullaghmore's entered the picture.

"You're always scared," he admits, "but it's just trying to push through it and enjoy it."

He talks sponsors, wave pool training in Scotland, four straight years of injuries, and the tight-knit, fast-growing surf scene back home. "The Irish surf community's so small," he says. "Everyone knows each other that surfs."

Next up for G-Man: a video trip to France for Monster in October, then the World Championships in Peru in November, all building toward one goal. As Martin puts it, fingers crossed we'll see the Irish flag flying on a beach at the LA Olympics in 2028.

LINKS

GEARÓID MCDAID

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  • Mullaghmore in the Summer - Hurricane Erin Swell
  • Mullaghmore in the Winter - Dec 2025
• Seamus Plug: Jackdaw
  
  

GEORGIES CHELSEA (our hosts for this episode)

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POINTBREAK (this episode's featured music)

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 24; Total Episode Count: 165

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One year and a week since taking his new post, the Consul General of Ireland in New York Gerald Angley hosted the Irish Stew podcasters in his office high above Park Avenue for a behind-the-scenes look at Irish diplomacy in action while sharing his reflections on the first year on the job.

One event stands out for Gerald.

"The scale of St. Patrick's Day blew our minds,” he says. “It's 24/7 for a number of weeks."

Gerald walks listeners through the impressive scale of his six-state consular territory of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

"That's 59 million people. That's the same population as the UK," he notes, adding that the region ranks as the world's third-largest economy in its own right.

The conversation traces Gerald’s path from a University College Dublin commerce degree and a stint at Citibank to a career in the Department of Foreign Affairs, with postings in Brussels, Paris, and London during Brexit. On landing the coveted New York job, he admits to a bold move: "I wrote a letter that said, 'I dare you not to pick me.'"

Talk turns to the perennial Irish Stew topic of diaspora engagement, where the diplomat reflects on evolving Irish American identity, saying, "We have to look at it not as purely Irish-born people, but rather people who have several identities."

He also points to what distinguishes Ireland's mission from other consulates: "We're one of the only countries that has an immigrant support fund... we need to be bigger than most of the other consulates, and we are."

As the episode wraps, Gerald provides the listeners with his must-read book recommendation and previews of the imminent launch the Green Pages, the new directory of Irish organizations in his consul region.

And what’s it like to be a Consul General in New York? Gerald quotes a predecessor in his role who said, "It’s Wall Street by day, Broadway by night!”

Links:

Gerald Angley

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Consulate General of Ireland in New York

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 23; Total Episode Count: 164

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Why doesn’t a country good enough to produce Ryanair and Stripe have a normal venture fund industry? Alan Merriman spent three years lobbying the Irish government just to be allowed to launch one, and what he ran into along the way says more about Ireland’s capital gap than most economic reports ever will.

Merriman built Elkstone from a boutique advisory firm into one of Ireland's most active venture investors, and in this conversation he's candid about what it actually took to get there. In this episode, you'll learn: 

• Why Ireland’s tax code made venture investing nearly impossible before 2022, and what it took to change it
• Why Merriman puts the quality of a founder at eighty percent of any investment decision, and what he’s really screening for
• Why Elkstone bets on the country instead of a sector, and what that says about the depth of the Irish market
• What Merriman calls “network compounding,” and his pitch for why the Irish diaspora is worth more than its checkbook

If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to build serious venture capital in a small country, or how Merriman makes the case for engaging the Irish diaspora as more than a source of sentiment, this one's worth the full listen. 

ALAN MERRIMAN LINKS

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 22; Total Episode Count: 163

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Through its ongoing “Global Irish Nation Conversation” Irish Stew is all about connecting the worldwide Irish family, so sitting down with Dr. Martin Russell, one of the world's foremost diaspora engagement strategists, felt like a meeting of kindred missions. The proud Corkonian has spent nearly two decades turning diaspora theory into practice, working with governments and communities across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Balkans, all while championing Ireland's potential to be a global leader in the field.

Hosts John Lee and Martin Nutty open with a thought-starter on the "diaspora World Cup" unfolding across North America, then trace Russell's journey from a would-be mathematician at UCC to a scholar of the Irish diaspora's role in the Northern Ireland peace process. Along the way, Russell unpacks the famous 70 million Irish worldwide figure, his four pillars of diaspora engagement, and the crucial distinction between migration and diaspora.

"Other partners come and go and that's fine. That's the nature of life. But your diaspora are a community of consistency if you do it well," Russell says, making the case to governments worldwide.

The conversation turns to Ireland's new Diaspora Strategy 2026–2030, which Russell's research helped inform, the duty of care owed to the vulnerable Irish abroad, and the threat of "diaspora fade" in Irish America. His answer? "The quick answer is don't let it happen, be active."

A masterclass in belonging from a thought leader who's incredibly bullish on the diaspora's future.

MARTIN RUSSELL LINKS

• LinkedIn
• The Diaspora Institute
• The Networking Institute

EPISODE REFERENCE LINKS

•  Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy, 2026-2030
• NY Times: Is this the diaspora World Cup?
•  EU Global Diaspora Facility 
•  Institute for Integrated Transitions

BOOKS

• Fragile Neighborhoods by Seth Kaplan
• Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by Jeffrey Cohen
• On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation  by Kim Samuel

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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 21; Total Episode Count: 162

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