Gary Lineker, the Mayo footballers and the mechanics of change
When Keir Starmer said Britain risked becoming an ‘island of strangers’, in whose interests was he speaking?When Gary Lineker left the BBC, was it because he unwittingly shared an antisemitic post - which he subsequently apologised for - or because he had been outspoken on the genocide in Gaza?On Free State today Dion and Joe look at how the world is ordered and what needs to change. They examine how inequality is now hardwired into systems and ask what can be done about it.Joe also has a story of inequality of his own and naturally it involves the Mayo footballers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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47:49
Who by Fire - Living and dying on the border with the great Eoin McNamee
Eoin McNamee received a message when his new novel The Bureau was published telling him it was the book he was ‘born to write’.This is not a trite phrase. This is a book about living and dying in the north and how so many people who came into the orbit of McNamee’s father died. Eoin McNamee is our guest on Free State today to tell his story. It is the story of his father too, a complex and complicated personality who, after he was struck off as a solicitor, set up the first Bureau de Change on the border in 1982.He talks about his father’s recklessness and men like Dominic McGlinchey. He speaks too about the Troubles and the toll it took on people in terms of life, liberty and morality. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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52:21
Go on home British soldier, go on home - The IRA & me, with Captain Jonathan Trigg of the Royal Anglian Regiment
When Jon Trigg was sent to Northern Ireland as a young officer, he was going to war. It wasn’t the Troubles or a conflict but a war.Trigg served his tour of duty in 1993 and moved on, but, unusually he returned, not as a soldier but as a writer.In an extraordinary conversation today, Jon Trigg talks to Joe and Dion about his new book on the IRA in Derry. Joe and Jon speak frankly, and sometimes with tension, about the conflict, but also recall the figures from the IRA they both knew.He tells of his difficulty in getting former IRA men to trust him and where they found common ground. Jon recalls too the decisions that led to the Paratroopers moving into Derry on Bloody Sunday and the massacre that followed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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53:16
Cocaine Nights on the Kyiv Express (feat Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and the German guy)
When is a cocaine spoon not a cocaine spoon? When is a tissue a wrap of an illegal substance?On Free State today look at how a story spreads online as it did over the weekend when Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz were filmed on a train going to Kyiv. Soon the idea that drug paraphernalia was in the carriage took hold online. The story was dismissed as fantasy and Russian propaganda but does it demonstrate something more profound: a severe distrust in what people have been asked to believe in the west?Dion doesn’t think so and he rants at Joe about the story. But is he just a gullible centrist or is Joe in danger of falling for the craziest online fantasies? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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38:19
Where The Wildelings Are. Writer Lisa Harding on surviving Trinity College, anxiety and the Male Gaze
Lisa Harding’s stunning new book The Wildelings is set in a fictional university in Dublin. On Free State today, Lisa talks to us about her own time at Trinity in the 90s, when students would be rated on their looks. She talks to Dion about the male gaze and their shared experiences of drink and how when she became an actress she turned to tequila to take the edge off her anxiety. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Free State is a podcast for the curious that stimulates, provokes, challenges and entertains, while never taking itself too seriously. Free State covers topics from sport to politics, love to loss, the human condition and how to fix the world, with guests from across the planet including Nigerian princes, former Prime Ministers, ex convicts, footballers, boxers and extraordinary people from every walk of life. Free State is presented by Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning. Brolly is a barrister, an original thinker with a fascinating backstory, who donated a kidney to a stranger and then led a crusade to transform organ donation on the island of Ireland, and Fanning is an award-winning interviewer and author. They are not motivational gurus or life coaches. They will never try to sell you a penis scented candle. They are two people from very different worlds, with one core belief uniting them - this is not a high performance podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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