Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

The 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act prohibited betting on baseball, basketball, American football and most other sports in nearly every US state.In 2018, the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional, opening up America to a stampede of betting.On Free State today we look at how the gambling industry achieved such prominence and how they made gamblers feel that the problem wasn’t them it was you. With tens of billions being bet on the World Cup and prediction markets like Polymarket allowing people to take a position on everything, we wonder where it will end?

‘I have come to sell a product called soccer.’ The former FIFA president Joao Havelange announced himself in 1974 with these words. They have been the model for the expansionist, grasping FIFA that has existed to this day.But maybe what matters was not the product but everything but the product?On Free State today we look at why the World Cup matters and why it might be everything that Donald Trump’s America is not.From David Clifford and Kerry to Messi and Argentina, sport is what it is because of the communities that are brought together.Could it be that as America experiences the World Cup, they see that the world is a better place than their leaders want them to believe?

In Power Ballad, Rick, played by Paul Rudd, a washed-up wedding singer, and Danny, a fading boy band star, bond over music and a late-night jam session. On Free State today, old friends Dion and Peter McDonald, co-writer and co-start of Power Ballad, discuss their own late night escapades, Peter's time in the theatre and and his extraordinary time working with the legendary Robert Altman.

There are no atheists in the foxholes and in the darkness of the night there is nobody who won’t find consolation in the World Cup.On Free State today Joe talks about his own World Cup journey. Joe and Dion look at why the tournament captivates and what it tells us about communities as opposed to the leaders of those communities.At a time when Elon Musk had become the world’s first trillionaire, we look at the hatred he is trying to foment. And we look at the story of Palestine Action and what it tells us the authoritarian direction of the world today.

How have Donegal got themselves in this mess? Has Jim McGuinness’s obsession with Kerry blinded him to the other threats.On Free State today, Joe examines why some counties accumulate All Irelands and others fail, while Dion surprises him with his knowledge of Roscommon’s football history.Joe and Dion also look at how the Belfast Riots happened. For months the PSNI were warned that houses were being identified and that people were stockpiling food for fear their homes would be attacked but according to reports nothing was done.‘My daughter was crying, saying she doesn’t want to die,’ one father said of the terror his family endured during the riots.Why has this happened and what is the hypocrisy at the heart of loyalism that allows this hate to prosper?

The World Cup has begun but will there ever be a tournament like Mexico '86 dominated by Diego Maradona? On Free State today, Dion talks to David Arrowsmith about his book on Maradona, the impulses that drove Maradona and how he escaped from poverty but could never escape the sense of being an outsider.