Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

Eoin McNamee received a message when his new novel The Bureau was published telling him it was the book he was ‘born to write’.This is not a trite phrase. This is a book about living and dying in the north and how so many people who came into the orbit of McNamee’s father died. Eoin McNamee is our guest on Free State today to tell his story. It is the story of his father too, a complex and complicated personality who, after he was struck off as a solicitor, set up the first Bureau de Change on the border in 1982.He talks about his father’s recklessness and men like Dominic McGlinchey. He speaks too about the Troubles and the toll it took on people in terms of life, liberty and morality.

When Jon Trigg was sent to Northern Ireland as a young officer, he was going to war. It wasn’t the Troubles or a conflict but a war.Trigg served his tour of duty in 1993 and moved on, but, unusually he returned, not as a soldier but as a writer.In an extraordinary conversation today, Jon Trigg talks to Joe and Dion about his new book on the IRA in Derry. Joe and Jon speak frankly, and sometimes with tension, about the conflict, but also recall the figures from the IRA they both knew.He tells of his difficulty in getting former IRA men to trust him and where they found common ground. Jon recalls too the decisions that led to the Paratroopers moving into Derry on Bloody Sunday and the massacre that followed.

When is a cocaine spoon not a cocaine spoon? When is a tissue a wrap of an illegal substance?On Free State today look at how a story spreads online as it did over the weekend when Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz were filmed on a train going to Kyiv. Soon the idea that drug paraphernalia was in the carriage took hold online.  The story was dismissed as fantasy and Russian propaganda but does it demonstrate something more profound: a severe distrust in what people have been asked to believe in the west?Dion doesn’t think so and he rants at Joe about the story. But is he just a gullible centrist or is Joe in danger of falling for the craziest online fantasies?

Lisa Harding’s stunning new book The Wildelings is set in a fictional university in Dublin. On Free State today, Lisa talks to us about her own time at Trinity in the 90s, when students would be rated on their looks. She talks to Dion about the male gaze and their shared experiences of drink and how when she became an actress she turned to tequila to take the edge off her anxiety.

Since we launched the podcast, we have never been afraid to ask the big questions. This has sometimes come at a cost but that is the way it has to be. Today we ask one of the questions that will define this generation: what is a skort?On Free State, Joe and Dion wonder why this issue which should be so simply resolved in favour of women in sport became so complicated and laced with bullshit. There are working groups and committees working to resolve the issue going forward to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.More importantly, what does it tell us about the world today and its obsession with triviality that the skort takes up so much airtime?

"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." On October 25 2023, novelist Omar El Akkad posted this message on X.On Free State today Omar El Akkad joins Joe and Dionto talk about how the world looked away. His magisterial new book One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This details the complicity of the west. Gaza is enduring a famine and Israel maintains a blockade where children’s hunger is a weapon of war and an instrument of monumental cruelty. Omar’s voice is a compelling and necessary counterpoint.

Rosita Sweetman wanted to change the world. Like many of her generation, she was inspired by the civil rights movement in the US. She became a founder of the women’s liberation movement in Ireland. She was fearless and it was fun.But her life wasn’t. On Free State today Rosita Sweetman talks about her new memoir Girl With A Fork In A World of Soup. She tells us about having to divorce her family and the extraordinary scene when at a family meeting, her sisters were asked by a psychiatrist if any of them had slept with her ex husband.

"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” a man once said, When it has come to the pursuit of Kneecap, the ridiculousness has extended far beyond the British public to its media and politicians too. It has reached the Irish political class and media as well.Kneecap have apologised to the families of murdered MPs but still they are pursued by those lost in what Philip Roth called the “ecstasy of sanctimony”.On Free State, Joe and Dion ask what does it tell us about the ability to comment freely in the modern world? At a time when n it seems critical to be able to speak out, it is under constant threat.Dion also recalls a GAA road trip while Joe explains why he considers Jesus Christ a role model.

Micheál Martin has called on Kneecap ‘to urgently clarify’ their views on Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as killing Tory MPs. Why? How is society served by the Taoiseach involving himself in this confected outrage?On Free State today Joe and Dion look at the hysteria surrounding Kneecap since their Coachella appearance and their statements in support of Palestine.While some might believe they are just experiencing the usual backlash from the establishment to any anarchic act, the attempt to silence them is in fact part of something more insidious. The response to the Louis Theroux documentary is part of the same motivation. But is the truth about Gaza, the West Bank and Israel no longer something that can be silenced?