How has the Irish Sea become the most polluted sea in the world? The answer lies in the north west of England, where the Sellafield site has poured millions of tonnes of nuclear waste into the sea since the 1950s.

We are seeing Ireland north and south being sold to corporate powers Bernadette Devlin McAliskey is Ireland’s finest political orator, and a key figure in recent political history. In this lecture she takes as her theme a line from playwright Sean O’Ca...

One of many prophets who forecast the disasters of modernism, but one of the few who did it from the left. Georg Lukács was one of the leading European literary critics of the 20th century. His life story was entangled with the political storms that sw...

From the 1910s to the 1950s, newsreels were the only source of non-fictional moving images available to the public. Many samples of this forgotten genre survive. Now researchers are uncovering a whole new set of archival sources that nuance and illustr...

In 2013, Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy had a bright idea. Why not make a statistical analysis of Irish film? This conversation explores the surprising things they found out. Flynn and Tracy’s data-driven approach focuses particularly on the Irish Film Boa...

This is a threshold moment, Johnny. The Mad Max world teeters on the edge of reason and on the edge of existence. It is difficult to think of a more highly-charged and high-octane film franchise that has reached a mass global audience.

What is society going to look like if you have a certain number of people living forever? Mark O’Connell is best known for his bestselling, prizewinnng To Be A Machine. In that book, he describes various fringe projects around the world dedicated to ex...

“The language we speak is always borrowed. We don’t invent it ourselves.  It comes from somebody else.” Some modernist writers in search of a way out of their alienation found that leaving their own native languages offered a new freedom.

Steve Coleman is an American anthropologist at Maynooth University who  studies the Irish language and the Gaeltacht way of life. As part of that project, in the 1970s he got to know the legendary sean-nós singer Joe Heaney,

The first million-seller in the global music industry was the sheet music of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. Using this as his starting point, music historian and industry insider Michael Mary Murphy shows that there are long chains of cause and effect ...