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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The name Peelers and Sheep comes from an incident in the 1919 Meath and Kildare farm labour strike. It took eleven policemen, nicknamed peelers, led by a sergeant and a head constable, with fixed bayonets, just to deliver thirteen sheep to Drumree railway station. In the end, as you’ll discover when listening to our first episode,…