Irish History Podcast

Over the coming weeks I am taking a break from the Great Famine Series to make a mini series entitled 'Outsiders'. These podcasts will focus on people who for one reason or another lived at the peripherary of Irish society.  ...

The crumbling ruins of workhouses are one of the last visible reminders of the horrors of the Great Hunger in the Irish landscape. During the Great Famine they became home to the unwanted in Irish society. Ultimately over 300,000 people Irish people di...

This show opens with the fascinating story of communities in Mayo who resorted to piracy to survive in 1847. This is only a prelude however before we look at two pivotal events later in the year. After two years of starvation, the only electi...

This podcast continues our journey through the summer of 1847 as we reach one of the pivotal moments in the history of the Great Famine. The British government finally realise a new policy is needed in Ireland but will it help or hinder?Decisions take...

Transportation was a particularity cruel punishment. For centuries those condemned to this fate were shipped to penal colonies on the far side of the globe to serve out their sentences. It has become synonymous with injustice during the famine when man...

Dublin is often forgotten in the story of the Great Famine. While death rates in the capital were not as severe as the west of Ireland, the city suffered nevertheless. The show follows the story of the Mulherins, a family who fled famine in their home ...

From January 1847 Irish people desperately trying to flee the famine began to leave the island in huge numbers. 220,000 left in that year alone and by 1853 more than one in six people who had lived in Ireland in 1845 had emigrated. While we k...

This series continues the story of the Great Famine into the notorious year of Black '47 by returning to the town of Skibbereen. Looking at how life in the town changed it details the horrifying lives many had to endure. However starvation was not...

As the situation deteriorated in Ireland in late 1846, the two Cork towns of Youghal and Skibbereen experienced the unfolding horrors in very different ways. The people of Youghal, due to local dynamics, were in a position to rise up against some of th...

Many travellers who visited the west of Ireland in the 19th century considered it as a frontier of sorts. They were more often than not deeply racist, yet we still rely heavily on their accounts to reconstruct a picture of life at the time. In this sho...