In The News

This episode was originally published in March 2026.

Stephen McCullagh (36) thought he had created a cast iron alibi for himself when he planned the murder of his pregnant girlfriend Natalie McNally (32) in December 2022.

An avid gamer he was, he claimed, at home playing a video game live at the time she was killed. But as the PSNI was able to prove, he had in fact pre-recorded hours of himself playing the game. Police found that when he hit “play”, he set off to his girlfriend's house in Armagh where he savagely murdered her.

The case against McCullagh was built on circumstantial evidence, so for Natalie’s devastated family, conviction was not certain.

Seanín Graham is Northern Correspondent of The Irish Times and she was in court in Belfast for the trial.

She tells In the News she has never before witnessed such emotional scenes in court as when the guilty verdict was handed down on Monday.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon and Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode was originally published in March 2026.

If you got an invoice you’d been waiting for from your builder for work done, you’d get ready to pay it, wouldn’t you?

And if, a couple minutes after that, you got another invoice from the builder saying that actually he’d made a mistake and he’d given you the wrong bank details, you’d think nothing of it and proceed to pay.

Well that’s exactly what the reader who contacts our consumer affairs correspondent Conor Pope did. She sent the requested €30,000 to her builder and thought nothing more of it – until a week later when her builder contacted her politely wondering if where the payments was.

She is tech savvy, has been made aware through her work about all kinds of fraud, and is cautious by nature yet she had been the victim of payment redirection fraud – also known as invoice fraud.

Conor Pope came into the studio to explain how this scam worked and why this particular case should be a lesson to everyone who believes invoice scams are only targeted at big business.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Staff at Oberstown Children Detention Campus are set to strike again on Tuesday the 25th of August.

It will be their fourth work stoppage this summer over plans to expand the capacity of the north Dublin facility for young offenders.

Members of the Fórsa trade union have already taken to the picket line this week in a protest relating to staffing levels, saying they’re “running on fumes.”

While acknowledging that management have made progress in hiring 11 new staff, they believe recent high profile events, such as wrong-way motorway driving, will further heap pressure to find beds for teenagers in trouble with the law.

Workers are concerned that inadequate staff ratios will undermine their safety, particularly in light of a spate of serious assaults on the campus last summer.

One social care worker told Irish Times work correspondent Emmet Malone these “young people often present with challenging and difficult behaviour; they’re only in Oberstown as a last resort and we regularly find ourselves in difficult, sometimes dangerous situations ... If we don’t have enough staff to operate the unit safely, properly and adequately, the young people we work with on a daily basis are suffering too.”

But if management are engaging with the union, why are staff still planning to strike on Tuesday? What are the sticking points and what might draw this dispute to a close?
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On Monday evening, thousands of people took to the streets of central London to attend a vigil in memory of Jason Arday. The former Cambridge professor was found dead in his home just days earlier - at the age of 41. In his final days Arday - who was Black and autistic - was at the centre of a global media storm.

Initially over allegations of plagiarism in his previous academic work and claims relating to his personal life, it morphed into a controversy relating to racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion employment practices, and press harassment. As a result, he resigned from his role as professor of sociology at the prestigious university.

In his resignation letter, he told colleagues he no longer wished to feel like he was living “under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of his life was subject to public examination and judgement”. But the media frenzy didn’t end there. Coverage about Cambridge's youngest ever Black professor continued.

Now public figures and friends of Arday are demanding a public inquiry into the press attention he received before his death. A petition has already secured more than 90,000 signatures.

In today’s episode, Aideen Finnegan is joined by Irish Times writer and columnist Hugh Linehan to talk about the media storm surrounding Arday and the public outcry following his death.
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Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey have signed a mutual defence pact that "echoes Nato’s article 5 in saying they will treat an attack on one as an attack on all". But will they? What does the pact mean for US leadership in the region, for the Iran war and for global security? We ask Denis Staunton. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.