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Showing posts with label Podcast review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Podcast review. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a podcast for Being Human.

★★★★★

While out canvassing for Catherine Connolly in the Irish Presidential campaign a woman approached, offering to help the team. 

That was how I met Molly Smith. After a brief introduction we set out to rap doors and distribute leaflets while bantering along the route. It came up in conversation that Molly hosted a podcast called Healing Gals. Being a regular podcast reviewer for Being Human, my ears pricked, my curiosity stirred.

Into its sixth season, Healing Gals seeks to explore the trauma and challenges that women endure in life, while at the same time trying to devise workable solutions grounded in lived experience, so that gals may heal. Fiercely critical of ‘the Patriarchy’ - which will diminish its lure for misogynists - it is certainly no call to castrate men but is definitely one to emasculate the negative power that males often use to subjugate the women they seek to dominate.

Molly Smyth’s easy-going chatter and engagements with her guests, many of them friends – in the first season she interviews her mum – detracts nothing from the gravitas she brings to Healing Gals.

The podcast is a frank, at times an uncomfortably candid exercise, given the cruelty women have experienced - often at the hands of abusive partners – but the point Molly Smyth is making is that women need to stand up and simple refuse to take it. Part of this healing process is developing the mettle to openly discuss experiences without shame. Indeed, shame is the core theme of the opening episode in the first season.

This is not the work of some starry-eyed idealist. A Drogheda woman, Molly Smyth knows her subject well and is practical about the advice she offers. And while it might not have been her intention, many men stand to gain from engaging with her work. There is huge number of coping strategies on offer that ranges across the sexes.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Healing Gals

Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a podcast for Being Human.


The North’s nationalist community would not be considered as a hospitable repository for news or commentary deposited by the Daily Telegraph.

Throughout the violent Northern conflict that raged or simmered for the best part of three decades, the Daily Telegraph was viewed as a stanchion of British officialdom, colloquially referred to as the Daily Torygraph. It had never earned a reputation for searching under every stone, preferring instead to place stones over the graves of the many British army colonels and generals it glowingly obituarised, burying beneath the stone’s weight a candid account of the role of senior British military in the North.

Season Three of Bed of Lies has broken the mould. With Cara McGoogan narrating and Mick Brown fact checking Conflict takes the listener into the murky murderous world of British intelligence operations.

Broadcast ahead of the Kenova Report, Conflict raised both anticipation and scepticism about what Jon Boutcher’s team might reveal. One of its core themes is that Freddie Scappaticci, the agent known as Stakeknife, is only a small window on a much larger espionage world where the rule of law became displaced by the rule of law enforcement.

Conflict interviews an expansive body of state and non-state actors who played a violent hand during the North’s turbulence. Most tellingly, the candour with which some of the legacy investigators spoke will cause earache for those directing the British intelligence community. Their agencies had dirty hands in a dirty war.

In earlier seasons of Bed of Lies Cara McGoogan had exposed a scandal involving British police emotional and sexual exploitation of the agents they were handling, as well as calling out the behaviour of the NHS during the infected blood controversy.

As the violence of the conflict recedes into the distance, the reverberations are no longer from the bomb blasts and gun fire of republican and loyalist activists but pulsate from the shock waves at revelations about those who claimed to be working to stop such actions. With Conflict the sound of J’Accuse emanates from the most unlikely of sources.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Bed Of Lies 🪶 Conflict

Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a podcast for Being Human.

★★★★★

After more than two decades of commanding headlines, Stakeknife fatigue shows little sign of making an appearance. It goes quiet for a while but information retrieval gives it a new lease of life, allowing it to force its way back to the top of the news agenda

When outed in 2003 as a British spy at the heart of the IRA' Internal Security Department, tasked ironically with rooting out British spies within the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Stakeknife,  proved the catalyst for a bizarre act of collusion between the IRA's former P O'Neill and the North's Lord Chief Justice. Both worked to the same end - preventing details of Scappaticci's homicidal role emerging into the public domain. 

Twenty one years after initially being exposed, and within months of Stakeknife's death, Mark Horgan took a deep dive into the murky waters with their dangerous undercurrents. There are a lot of dark secrets that many powerful people wish to remain concealed. 

Having had phenomenal success with his first deep dive podcast, an investigation into the life and crimes of swimming coach George Gibney, Mark Horgan set out with equal determination on his next quest. I was happy to be interviewed by him, having being to the fore in 2003 in questioning both Scappaticci and the cover up. 

In Stakeknife, Horgan interviews many people. Often the listener can hear his footsteps as he crunches through the streets of West Belfast.

A riveting production, where the listener is spoiled for choice, for the shiver effect it is hard to go past episode 2, detailing the 1979 killing of Michael Kearney, wrongly accused by the IRA leadership of being an informer, something it has since put right by exonerating Kearney. 

Horgan accompanies Michael's brother Seamus to the spot where Michael, on his knees and bound, said his prayers before an executioner's bullet entered his brain.

A powerful and poignant exploration of Britain's dirty war.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Cover 🪶 Stakeknife

Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a podcast for Being Human.
I first met Garrett Mullan at a meeting in Dublin organised by those on the Irish Left opposed to Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine.

The same evening the type of intolerance Putin seems to draw on for moral support in his attack against those of a different nationality was gathering at Dublin’s East Wall intent on preventing refugees taking up temporary accommodation in the locality. For some it was business as usual, for others it was the chance to kickstart political careers.

When he invited me to take part in his M1 Podcast to discuss the Disney series Say Nothing, I readily agreed. Up until that point I had been unaware of his project. The podcase is billed as ‘stories and features of interest to those of you living up and down and in and around the MI between Dublin and Louth.’ It seemed a great idea for tapping into the local scene.

It gets even better. Garrett Mullan is an astute researcher who knows how to plough a fertile field and serve up quality produce to his listeners. Since last year he has put out 26 podcasts, with topics as diverse as the experiences of a refugee from Russia living in Santry, and another who fled Syria. At one point he even broaches the suggestion that there are too many cricket clubs in Fingal. Along with election coverage the M1 Podcast delves into topics like the type of League of Ireland soccer teams those along the motorway might follow. As a Drogheda United fan about to leave the house for tonight’s President’s Cup clash with Shelbourne at Toka Park, that pressed all my buttons.

Given the far-right theme it seems fitting that the series should home in on Balbriggan’s Hampton Hall which used to host Hitler Youth Summer Camps. Metaphorically, those in attendance just grew old and moved to East Wall!!

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

M1 Podcast

Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a podcast for Being Human.

Podcasts as competitors to books, offering a form of auditory reading, can leave a listener spoiled for choice. A top draw current affairs contender has to be The News Agents.

Since Being Human last went to press, significant changes have occurred in the British political landscape. A new government and Prime Minister are in place. The Conservative Party was hammered in the July general election as it faced a tsunami of resentment at its perceived misgovernment.

Arguably, the Conservative Party implosion was set in motion by the behaviour not of the Tory Prime minister ousted by Starmer, Rishi Sunak, but by two previous incumbents of the highest office in the land, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Their endeavours bequeathed Sunak a government of such rotten wood that nothing useful could be carved from it.

Of the two, Truss managed a meagre 49 days in Number 10, the shortest incumbency of any prime minister since 1721 when the office was first created.

The News Agents interviewed the author of a recent book Truss At Ten: How Not To Be Prime Minister. Anthony Seldon has produced biographies on all British PMs since John Major and is widely regarded as the leading authority in the genre.

Truss, an ardent admirer of Reagan and Thatcher and their free-market monetarist policies, on being elected Prime Minister quickly moved to craft an austerity package aimed at cutting a 72 billion sterling deficit.

While claiming his book had many revelations the most striking according to Seldon was the fiasco around the Truss emergency budget which saw civil servants produce a list of options, one of which included the NHS jettisoning its cancer treatment. A true believer who worshipped at the altar of unbridled capital, Truss continuously shouting ‘we have got to find the cuts’, so frightened her officials into suspecting she might intend wielding the scalpel against the most ill of citizens, they came up with an alternative plan.

Humanism, if it is to mean anything, must aim to protect human beings from such tender monetarist mercies.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

The News Agents Podcast

Anthony McIntyre  ✒ reviews a political podcast for Being Human. 

A columnist with the British daily, The Guardian, and author of four books including best sellers, Chavs and The Establishment, Owen Jones also maintains an informative podcast. 

Since October 7 last year when the Qassam Brigades of Hamas launched their armed assault on Israel, Jones has sharply focused on what many believe is an ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Jones, once physically assaulted because of his gay lifestyle, is nothing short of a harsh critic of the Israeli government, forensically pulling together evidence to support his frequent assertions that the country’s far right government is responsible for the mass murder of Palestinian civilians. He trenchantly denounces what he asserts is a calculated policy of starvation.

He has also been forthright in his condemnation and repudiation of the October 7 attacks. Describing them as an unjustifiable sadistic atrocity. At the same time, he flags up the 248 deaths of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank at the hands of the IDF and Israeli settlers in the nine months of 2023 prior to the invasion. The point he makes is that context in the Occupied Territories is often ignored by much of the Western media.

Once described by the Financial Times as Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘most important media cheerleader’, it is hardly startling to find that he is so critical of Keir Starmer’s position on Gaza. Yet, he points not to Starmer’s hostility to Corbyn but to the recent endorsement by the current Labour Party leader of an Israeli plan to deprive the civilian population of Gaza of electricity and water – prohibited under international law.

In one of his more recent podcasts Jones takes a deep dive into the Flour massacre, leaving his listeners in no doubt that the 100 plus deaths were not the result of a stampede for food.

Harrowing but essential listening.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

The Owen Jones Podcast

Christopher Owens  ✍ was at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast on 23-March-2024 to listen toa live podcast delving into the world of loyalism.


A wet and drizzly Saturday night in Belfast. A scenario I’m all too familiar with and one that, if you allowed it, would prevent you from doing or attending anything of note. And with the Shrapnel Podcast doing a live recording, there is no excuse for laziness.

Advertised as sold out, the audience are an eclectic bunch, some of whom look around the room quite a bit. Not in a nosy manner but more along the lines of realising that they’re not the only ones who have such interests and finding relief in that.

The following took to the stage:

🖼 Sam McIlwaine and Gareth Mulvenna (Shrapnel Podcast hosts)

🖼 Davy Adams (former Ulster Democratic Party spokesperson)

🖼 Emma Shaw (founder/CEO of the Phoenix Education Centre)

🖼 Beano Niblock (playwright/author)


Beginning the talk by asking how each member of the panel would define loyalism, Davy is quick to point out that he doesn’t consider himself as either a loyalist or unionist anymore as he no longer has time for tribal loyalties, so his allegiances lie with his family and his community. Beano takes a different approach by saying that he would still consider himself a unionist but more of an orphaned one and that, once upon a time, the term he would have used was working class loyalist, but it doesn’t mean the same to him as it did in 1971.

Emma uses these moments to illustrate her belief that loyalism is a broad church but one that is based on family and service to the community and one that has been maligned over the years not just through a hostile media but also from mainstream unionist politicians who were all too happy to goad loyalists into doing their dirty work. The end result of this, according to Emma, is a belief that young people from loyalist backgrounds are disadvantaged educationally and in the job market.

This leads to Davy declaring that the term ‘loyalist’ was created by unionist politicians to differentiate between ‘respectable’ unionism and loyalism (although Sam emphasises that people have to take responsibility for their own actions), thus anyone who raised their head above the parapet were swiftly disowned and castigated as Lundys. Beano notes that this fractured unionism sends out a variety of mixed messaging (who do you vote for, what do they deliver) which makes it difficult to have a united front and, although Emma defends the right for voters to have choice, Davy and Sam bring up the fact that if there was one PUL party, how would it cater to those (like Sam) who would see themselves as left wing?

From a nationalist perspective, this diverse/fractured (whichever term you want to use) perspective can be frustrating as it means that if you ask three unionists/loyalists about their views, you’ll get three differing views back. Sam correctly identified some social issues that are divisive (same sex marriage, abortion) but you can also add the status of Northern Ireland as well: is it as British as Finchley or is it something else entirely? With nationalism/republicanism, there are of course similar debates, but the key is that the end result is Ireland being free from British rule. As pointed out by Enoch Powell 40 odd years ago, the ambiguous nature of relations between NI and Britain has never been truly resolved by unionists/loyalists and, to some, this uncertainty can seem like goalpost moving at times. So it’s great to see the panel openly discussing some of these angles.

Moving onto culture, Beano points out that many loyalists feel that Gaelic culture is being elevated and imposed upon them. Although Davy responds to this with derision by asking why anyone would feel threatened by Gaelic culture (especially when it was kept alive by Irish Presbyterians), Emma manages to tease out the nuances in the debate by discussing the GAA pitch in East Belfast and how resources have been allocated to it over other initiatives which could help the people of the East improve their lot in life via education or employment. She is keen to stress that she has no problem with people wanting to join the GAA or learn to speak Irish, but the perception that these projects have had a substantial amount of money thrown at them because they tick the boxes of what funders are looking for is one that has annoyed the local community.

I have to admit, this is a very interesting angle that I had not considered before. Anyone who is familiar with the gymnastics and conformity that is required when applying for funding will be all too aware of what is being discussed here. We have also seen how such rigid conformity has led to ridiculous situations where students of Asian descent are being denied places in universities (despite scoring highly in tests) because of diversity quotas.

Emma reveals that, in the school where she is on the Board of Governors, there are over 20 languages spoken by the pupils (which, in theory, would make it an integrated school) but because it is classed as a state school, it is not entitled to funding from the IEF (Integrated Education Fund). She also brings up Lagan College (the first integrated school in the country) and, tying it back to her views on funding, points out that although the College likes to advertise itself as being oversubscribed (with the implication that people are fighting to get into the school) the reality is that several schools in the East have closed (such as Orangefield High School and Lisnasharragh High). So not only is it not a surprise that Lagan has high levels of applications, but that kids in the area have to be bussed out to other schools due to these closures.

Sadly, this is true. In 2015, the Belfast Telegraph revealed that:

…seven children from east Belfast had not been able to get a place at a local secondary. They were forced to travel either across the city to Breda Academy, which would mean two different buses, or go outside Belfast to Dundonald or Newtownards.

While there is an argument to be made that offering alternative environments for children to be educated is a good thing, this should be at the behest of the parents and the pupil themselves.

This moved into (what has been described as) the myth that Protestant youth weren’t interested in education, which everyone on the panel greatly dispute. Davy reminisces how education was very much drilled into him from a young age while Emma reveals that, as part of her PhD, she surveyed various primary and post-primary schools in Protestant areas and found that 98% of those she engaged with made it clear that they were very much encouraged by their parents and teachers to succeed in education.

Going to the Q&A section, my question about the possibility of loyalism becoming a populist movement (similar to what we’ve seen in the USA and, to a lesser extent, the south) is greeted with scepticism by Emma, noting that it would take a singular figure to unite the warring elements within unionism/loyalism (i.e. a Trump like figure). Davy describes populism as a threat to democracy (which, although I can see where he’s coming from, I’m not 100% sure I agree with him).

I am glad to say that the discussion on stage tonight was robust, intricate, level-headed, questioning and diverse. Each panellist represented a different strand within loyalism and weren’t afraid to ask each other difficult questions or tease out scenarios where they felt issues of class were far more relevant than loyalism (such as housing, education and employment) a very welcome approach and much more in the spirit of cross-community than a lot of the funding bodies set up to deal with such issues.

Amazing, the things you can find in your city if you venture out on a wet and drizzly Saturday night.


Listen to the Shrapnel Podcast here.

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.

Loyalism 🔴 Alternative Voices — Shrapnel Podcast Live

Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a secular podcast for Being Human.


Most humanists, I imagine, subscribe to the Carl Sagan principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” As a statement there seems no reason for viewing it as deeply insightful, being pretty much a common-sense observation. What can often make it less than straightforward, giving rise to lethal consequences, is the thorny matter of what constitutes evidence.

In my home library there sits a brace of books sharing a common theme: why people often have an unshakeable belief in things for which there is little or no evidence.

Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer and How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World in their own ways seek to identity the reasons humans are driven to believe that for which there is no evidence.

This is what makes the podcast Growing Up Fundie a fruitful exploration of lives interweaved with the evidence for no evidence!!

The host claims not to have been brought up Fundie at all, pointing out that hers was a Baptist household. Yet, with so much Baptist belief rooted in Calvinism, many in the humanist world might struggle to see the difference.

Growing Up Fundie bills itself as:

A podcast analyzing the true life experiences of everyday people who grew up fundamentalist, orthodox, or within any other strictly religious environment, and the impact (positive or negative) that this upbringing had on who they are today.

Running from December 2021 the project sets out to understand the impact that strict religions have on the lives of their adherents. It is not an endeavour that has as its mission the pouring of scorn on weird religious beliefs but seeks to explore why people hold them in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. The host Sydney Davis Jr, who also runs the YouTube channel Humorous Humanists, while being a standup comedian, is perhaps not the best ringmaster when it comes to excluding mockery from the gig. Many of her guests are from the world of comedy. Well worth a listen to for flavour is a July foray titled Godless Granny on Devoting Her Life To The Truth, Until she discovered she’d been living a lie.

Sydney Davis Jr, despite her laidback demeanour and occasional profanity serves up a very informative dish, where guests unpick topics including the double R – resurrection and rapture.

A podcast that attacks dogma and promotes the value of the answer ‘I don’t know,’ has left me knowing that I know a lot more courtesy of having listened to Growing Up Fundie. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Growing Up Fundie

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