Archives: Episode

Red Flag in Kilmallock

In this episode after Truce & Treaty Irish separatists have assumed control over much of the country and we go to Ireland’s dairying heartland and to the winter farm strikes of the winter of 1921-’22. Very different conditions to the harvest farm strike we looked at in episode one of season one, not only seasonality…

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Season Two Trailer: The Summer of 22

A taster of what is coming in future episodes on popular struggles as the British state slowly withdraws from much of Ireland and a new Irish Free State is established, a wave of workplace occupations and land conflicts resume in late spring & early summer 1922. This was the Third Revolution – pushing back against…

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Ep 8: The Factory Farm and the Forest Frontier

All about habitat destruction, simplified eco-systems, declining bio-diversity and how this ties in the spread of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, Avian Flu & Swine Flu. Looking not just at human impact on nature but at particularly capitalist forms of agriculture & resource extraction and how that form of society determines environmental crises.

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Ep 7: Landscape of Lyme

All about landscape as a historic creation – how what we often think of as ‘nature’ has been shaped by generations of human activity – especially farming. Changing land uses impact on eco-systems and helps spread zoonotic diseases – that’s diseases that come to us from animals – like Covid, AIDS, Ebola, Avian Flu. This…

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Ep 6: In Dublin County In 1913

Starting in the summer just before the famous Lock-Out of 1913 was a movement of farm workers in the rural parts of Dublin – back then the countryside went in as far as Crumlin. So this is Dublin in 1913, but not the Dublin of trams and tenements— this is the Dublin of bullocks and…

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Ep 5: Notes on the Defence of Irish Country Houses.

The name comes from a draft document composed in 1914 by Colonel George O’Callaghan-Westropp, self-styled as The O’Callaghan, a county Clare landlord. O’Callaghan-Westropp was an activist in the British conservative-nationalist mobilisation against Home Rule and lost out through agrarian agitation and government intervention in the years running up to 1914 (that is the years of…

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Ep 4: Dubs, Dirty Shirts and World Revolution

Where were the Irish regiments of the British Army in 1919‒21? This episode goes from Cairo and Constantinople to Iraq and India and puts the Irish revolution into its global context through some of the scribblings of Sir Henry Wilson – the Longford man who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff – the highest…

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Ep 3: The Last Campaign Of The Leinsters

In the Autumn of 1921 men of the 1st Battalion Leinster Regiment were in action against a rebellion in Malabar, in the south-west of what was then British India. This was the last combat of any of the southern Irish regiments which were disbanded in 1922.  In this podcast there is some of the history…

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Ep 2: Prairie Fire

This episode looks at the West of Ireland agrarian movement of the spring and early summer of 1920. That year saw a widespread popular mobilisation known as the cattle drives – crowds assembling to drive cattle and sheep off disputed land. This movement was a major factor underpinning the land reform policies of the new…

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Ep: 1 The Forgotten

This episode is about the farm labour strike in Meath and Kildare in July and August 1919. Farm workers were by far the largest single group in the Transport Union during the revolutionary years. The episode will look at the forming of small local unions in 1917 and 1918 as well as the epic clash…

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