Irish Stew Podcast John Lee & Martin Nutty

So why learn Irish?

"Studies have shown that learning your native language, learning any language, but especially your ancestral tongue, brings feelings of comfort and freedom. And especially when considering our past and our heritage, learning Irish is very revealing and very healing," says our latest guest Mollie Guidera, the Irish language teacher for Global Ireland.

She grew up “with Irish in her ears all the time” and gave her first Irish lesson at age seven to a visiting American cousin. And even though her Irish language school expelled her for uttering one sentence of English, her love for the language grew.
 
She’s taught over 6,000 students Irish online for a decade, currently through her engaging online global Irish language school simply named Irish with Mollie, a “blossoming community of worldwide Irish speakers, people from every background, every age, and just people who love Irish and are willing it forward.”

Add co-host John Lee to the student roster--he registered after finding Mollie on Instagram and TikTok. With about 150,000 social media followers, she’s a leading Irish language influencer, spreading awareness of Irish in refreshing new ways.

“We're hearing the echoes of our parents and grandparents and Irish writers in the Irish sounds and in the syntax and in the words themselves. It is such a tender and humorous language, replete with poetry and magic. It brings to life so many funny and quirky kinds of realizations and revelations.”

Join us for an episode of Irish language “realizations and revelations” with Múinteoir Mollie.

Links
WebsiteInstagramTikTokIn the Irish Times 

Join us as we travel from Ireland all the way to New Zealand to explore a vision of Ireland from centuries ago in our conversation with Brian O’Sullivan.

He’s an author, cultural researcher, strategic analyst, and founder of Irish Imbas, the only Irish publisher specializing in fiction and non-fiction based on the ancient Irish cultural knowledge and belief patterns of authentic Irish mythology.

Hailing from West Cork, Brian lived in the UK and France before following his heart to New Zealand which he finds “a bit more like Ireland, more comfortable, like a comfortable shoe.” From this distant vantage point, he’s writing fiction that brings to life the Iron Age Ireland of Fionn mac Cumhaill, Liath Luachra, other legends from Ireland's deep past.

His Beara Trilogy, Fionn mac Cumhaill Series; and Irish Woman Warrior Series turn ancient Irish cultural concepts into page-turning tales of action, adventure, blood, passion, and conflict.

“You can't have a real sort of sense of where you are if you don't understand the context of how you got there in the first place. If you get your head around the history and the cultural belief systems, you’ll get a much better perspective on where you are and where you could go in the future,” he says.

For his Seamus Plug, Brian hopes you’ll try his popular Liath Luachra series and watch for his work-in-progress to teach what mythology is, what it isn't, and how it can be personally relevant.

Links:
LinkedIn

Irish ImbasWebsiteBeara TrilogyFionn mac Cumhaill SeriesIrish Women Warrior (Liath Luachra) SeriesTwitterFacebook

A Trinity College graduate in economics and politics, he represented Irish business abroad, led The Ireland Funds for almost two decades, and now Kingsley Aikins combines his fervor for networking and diaspora engagement in the mission of The Networking Institute. 
“Kinger,” as he’s known to his friends, talks of how rugby became his global passport and the lucky break that landed him in Sydney, Australia to represent Enterprise Ireland and the Industrial Development Authority (IDA). Finding he “didn’t know a sinner” in the Southern Hemisphere, he started what has become one of the largest Irish business networking organizations in the world, and how that initiative helped him network his way into leading the groundbreaking diaspora initiative that became The Ireland Funds.
 Now his Networking Institute is helping people network their way to their full potential and nations from India to Nigeria to tap the power of their diasporas.
His “Seamus Plug” is a call to action for Ireland to position itself “as an absolute center of excellence for diaspora engagements, the epicenter for this subject around the world¸ the thought leader in this space.”
Join us for a warm, witty, quotable, and thought-provoking conversation with networking and diaspora thought leader, Kingsley Aikins. 
Links
Kingsley Aikins
LinkedInTwitterThe Networking institute
WebsiteTwitterInstagramLinkedIn

From New Jersey to Sligo, Wales, London, Germany, to touring the globe and then to New York, Roger Clark stamps his passport as a leading citizen of the Global Irish Nation.
And to millions around the world, he is an icon.
An actor, filmmaker, voiceover artist of over 150 audiobooks, Roger’s claim to global fame is his performance-capture portrayal of the cowboy antihero Arthur Morgan in the massively popular action-adventure video game, five years in the making, Red Dead Redemption 2, a.k.a. RDR2.
Roger takes us into the increasingly sophisticated world of gaming, why performance capture is so much more than just voiceover, the challenges of a 2,000-page script, and why he feels his RDR2 experience was more like being on stage than in a film, how video gaming now dwarfs the film industry, and the cult celebrity status he now enjoys as the alter-ego of Arthur Morgan.
“It's a real privilege to be able to have such a large, appreciative audience for something that you've done. I still pinch myself up and down both arms now and I'm very, very grateful,” Roger said.
But there’s a lot more to Roger Clark than one iconic role. His short film Hazardous is on YouTube, he’s in rehearsals for A Man for all Seasons in the role of Henry the Eighth, and on Mon., Oct. 30 he’ll headline New York’s Origin Theatre Gala as the winner of the George C. Heslin Artistic Leadership Award for his outstanding work in the theatre, film, and motion capture industries.
Wouldn’t Arthur Morgan be proud.
Links:
Origin Theatre Gala ticketsIMDBInstagramX/TwitterYouTubeCameoDamn Handy Indigogo

In this Global Irish conversation, we search for the true origins of Western Civilization with a most global of guests, Naoíse Mac Sweeney, author of The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives. 
Her father is from Cork City, her mother is Malaysian Chinese, she grew up in London, studied the Greek and Roman world, and is a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna. And to make her even more global, her husband is from Malta, which we visited in our episode with Malta’s ambassador to Ireland, Giovanni Buttigeig.
She tells of how both Greek and Irish mythology pulled her into the ancient world, through the lure of the ancient Greek diaspora communities, her fascination with Troy, and her growing realization that “Western Civilization”—the concept of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times—is really a figment of our collective imagination.
In The West, our award-winning guest thoroughly debunks that figment through the stories of fourteen figures who each played a role in the creation of the Western idea—from Herodotus, a mixed-race migrant, to Phylis Wheatley, an enslaved African American who became a literary sensation. From these narratives, a more nuanced, expansive, and intriguing view of the West emerges.
Naoíse wraps up Irish Stew with the most unexpected “Seamus Plug” to date, which got your co-hosts thinking of approaching Dunnes Stores for sponsorship.
And we’ll happily endorse her comment early in the conversation, when she said, “part of the joy of following Irish Stew is to hear the origin stories of so many people in the diaspora.”
Links:
The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives Smithsonian Magazine:  “The Myth of the ‘Dark Ages’ Ignores How Classical Traditions Flourished Around the World,”  University of Vienna: Naoise Mac SweeneySeamus Plug: Dunnes Strores, Helen James plates

Growing up in The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Jane Ferguson spent most of her life reporting on the global troubles in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Afghanistan, reporting for CNN International, Al Jazeera, PBS Newshour, The New Yorker and other outlets, always finding the human stories in inhuman wars and all revealed in her unflinching new memoir No Ordinary Assignment.
The least surprising part of her memoir is when she wins the George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award for her stellar reporting.
Jane takes us back to her young “hillbilly” childhood in County Armagh, growing up in a rural Protestant farming family, where security checkpoints along the roads and military helicopters in the skies was for her, normalcy.
She escaped this normalcy through the pages of National Geographic, running her fingers over its maps, and the inspiration on women war correspondents she saw reporting from the front lines.
Jane’s is a life lived through culture shocks, from a rustic Irish farm to a bucolic New Jersey prep school, from the ancient civilization of Yemen to the futuristic world of Dubai, from finding her tribe among the war correspondents at Kabul’s colorful Gandamack Lodge, to staying with her tribe to the bitter end in the fall of that city years later.
With fear as her ally, she wills herself into some of the most dangerous places on earth, balancing her sense of service with her ambition, looking at each conflict through non-sectarian eyes, feeling privileged to tell the human stories amid geopolitical turmoil.
She is largely off the road now, teaching at Princeton University while continuing as a PBS NewsHour - Special Correspondent and contributor for The New Yorker.
On Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023 at 7:00 pm, The National Humanities Center will host “An Evening with Jane Ferguson,” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
So much of Jane’s “beat” spun out of the tragedy of 9/11, so it was particularly meaningful that we recorded our episode with her on the anniversary of that somber day.


Links
Website:  Jane FergusonBook: No Ordinary AssignmentSeamus Plug
National Humanities Center: An Evening with Jane FergusonSocial Media 
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