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cover art for Exile On Main Street: Rosie Schaap the New Yorker who found happiness in an Antrim village

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

Exile On Main Street: Rosie Schaap the New Yorker who found happiness in an Antrim village

Ep. 210

Rosie Schaap grew up leading the archetypal New Yorker lifestyle. Her mother was impossibly glamorous and her father was a sportswriter who befriended a young boxer on the way to the Rome Olympics and stayed friends with him all his life. That boxer was Muhammad Ali. Among Rosie’s most cherished possessions is a picture taken by the legendary photographer Carl Fischer with Ali in a safari suit tenderly looking down at her. The picture is now in her Antrim home. On Free State today Rosie Schaap tells the story of how a New York girl ended up in Glenarm following the death of her first husband from a rare form of cancer. Rosie was just 39. She talks about how she found in Ireland a way of talking about death she hadn’t experienced in New York. She explains how a fascination with Roger Casement led her to Antrim and then to Glenarm where she made a new life and found love again. Rosie also provides some startling revelations about Joe’s Harry Potter life at St Pat’s Armagh.


Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning is a Gold Hat Production in association with SwanMcG.


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