It’s rare to encounter a podcast that’s been on the go for as long as the Irish History Podcast. Its earlier episodes – the big platforms host episodes from 2013 onwards, though the project dates from 2010 – may even qualify as historical themselves at this stage. Even before everyone everywhere had a podcast (I see you, 2020), Waterford-based historian Fin Dwyer was telling the story of Ireland, one half-hour episode at a time.
In doing so, he has established himself as a kind of digital bard relating the story of this country over the past 2000 years or so, and it’s a rip-roaring ride. From the time of the Barbarians – when Ireland was covered by “vast expanses of dense deciduous natural forests that ran for mile after mile over the landscape” – all the way up to stories of the Irish who joined the French Resistance during the second World War, to the legalisation of contraception in Ireland, Dwyer pulls threads from moments over the millenniums to weave tales of battles and murders and romance and struggle and defiance.
Often Dwyer’s is the only voice we hear. That might seem like a hard lift for both podcaster and listener, but Dwyer is a rich storyteller, adept at the kind of sensory details that – sorry, but cliches exist for a reason, right? – bring history to life. This isn’t a one-man show, though: he also interviews other historians and writers, and brings in other narrators to give voice to some of history’s protagonists.
At times he’s sweeping across decades – The Vikings Arrive – in broad and vivid brushstrokes, at others telescopically focused on one wild tale illustrative of so much more about its time and place. Turns out Ireland was a violent and nefarious place populated by misfits and miscreants. Such as Ellen Kennedy, who shared one bed with her husband and her lover before one member of this particular triangle was murdered with a hatchet, one sentenced to death, and one deported to Australia for their involvement. Or the priest who followed his lover Molly Gilmartin across the Atlantic to shoot her on a Cincinnati street, and subsequently tried to poison himself, before being declared insane and dispatched to an asylum, from which he escaped, whereabouts thereafter unknown.
Occasionally, Dwyer records episodes in situ, from a ruined castle or an ancient hilltop, and somehow his mild huffing lends an immediacy to the investigation of his vanished subjects. And though male voices, largely his own, dominate this podcast, he is clearly invested in amplifying the stories of women long overlooked in the annals, those living in fear of abduction, those abused by priests, those banished to other countries, those joining the French Resistance, those writing lengthy memoirs of their life on the Blaskets for the delectation/mild torture of secondary school students everywhere.
Dwyer has accomplished with the Irish History Podcast something impressive in its depth and historical scope: he has created an audio archive deserving of its definitive title. What began as a one-man exploration of medieval Ireland has become, hundreds of episodes later, a wide-ranging and colourful cataloguing of our complicated past.
