Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

When the Irish football team was drawn against Israel last week, many people in Ireland immediately hoped the game wouldn’t happen.Instead as the days have passed, the game seems more likely not less. On Free State today we look at what has stopped Israel being banned from sport while Russia have been. Dion wonders what a boycott would achieve and explains how Uefa and Fifa have failed to act.Joe disagrees and calls on the Ireland team to represent the Irish people and take a stand.

David McCloskey says he was once a clandestine journalist. Another way of putting it is that he once worked for the CIA.McCloskey is now a spy novelist. His first book took readers inside the CIA, now he is exploring Mossad, Israel and Iran in his new novel The Persian.On Free State, he talks about the shadow war between Israel and Iran.He explains what has happened to agencies like the CIA under Trump and why as more true Trump believers are appointed, the demand is not for truthful intelligence. They do not just believe what they see, they only see what they believe.

‘Doors open at the Watergate’. Those words in June 1972 signalled a break in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Building. They were picked up on a police scanner by a reporter at the Washington Post. They began a chain of events which would eventually bring down a president. Last week the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, of Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham, laid off a third of its staff. The paper that stood up to the White House and took down a president now has an owner in Jeff Bezos who can’t do enough to be a supplicant.On Free State today we look at how democracy dies in the darkness. We explore how history has a lesson for what happens when oligarchs and authoritarians come together and why it isn’t only democracy that ultimately dies.

When Gregory Campbell approached President Connolly in Derry last week, what was the purpose of his intervention?Was he trying to make a good faith case for Protestant and unionist people in Derry or was he just throwing some red meat to his base?On Free State today Dion and Joe look at the life and times of Gregory Campbell.Dion and Joe argue about the merits of his argument and whether who is saying it matters.Joe explains how progressive unionism has been denied oxygen while Dion offers Gregory Campbell an invitation to come dance with him in Ireland - or at least south Dublin.

In Ireland, we like to think that the class system is something that dominates Britain. But it shapes this country too.RTE’s new comedy drama These Sacred Vows is a series which challenges what we believe about class, identity and religion in Ireland in 2026.On Free State today, the show’s creator John Butler talks about what he wanted to say in the series about the middle class, the priesthood and homosexuality.He explains how he was only now able to write comfortably as a gay man about Ireland and he talks with Dion about their own school days and the oppressive culture of the time. They also consider the new conformity. They wonder what has really changed and ask what it tells us about the country when the religion of old has now been replaced with saunas.

In the House of Commons, Keir Starmer said that Peter Mandelson had ‘betrayed our country, our parliament and my party’.But what was that betrayal and who was actually complicit?On Free State today we look at the rise and fall of Peter Mandelson. We explain why the election of a football mascot monkey as mayor in Hartlepool was an early sign of who Mandelson was. We explain how Mandelson worked to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and advance a corporate agenda where New Labour would be ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.We also examine the link between Starmer’s right hand man Cork’s Morgan McSweeney and Mandelson. In the House of Commons Starmer said ‘if I knew then what I know now, Mandelson would never have been anywhere near government.’We show how it was impossible not to know who Peter Mandelson was. Only more details have been revealed.