Episode 15: Frank Berry

Helen Shaw’s guest in this episode of The Family of Things is film-maker Frank Berry whose work tells stories of social realism in often tough suburbs from the documentary film ‘Ballymun Lullaby’ at the time of the tearing down of the Ballymun Towers to dramas like ‘I Used to Live Here’, touching on youth mental health and suicide.

More recently released was his acclaimed ‘Michael Inside’ about a teenage boy caught up in the quicksand of the Irish prison system. Frank loves working with young people and his twin passions are teaching and film-making, looking for the moments when he can turn a switch on in someone’s mind.

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Episode 14: Tony Bates

In this episode of The Family of Things Helen Shaw’s guest is the psychologist and author Dr Tony Bates. Tony founded Headstrong, (now Jigsaw),  the National Agency for Youth Mental Health, after a long career in clinical psychology.

In this episode of The Family of Things Helen Shaw’s guest is the psychologist and author Dr Tony Bates. Tony founded Headstrong, (now Jigsaw),  the National Agency for Youth Mental Health, after a long career in clinical psychology.

He was the co-editor of Vision for Change, the mental health strategic review in 2006 and that work motivated him to create an NGO with a mission to provide mental health resources for young people. Jigsaw now has 13 centres across Ireland and has become a critical part of support services for young people in Ireland.

Tony is also credited as one of the people who brought the practice of mindfulness to Ireland following his own experience at the buddhist retreat centre in Plum Village, France with the spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh. He is the author of Coming Through Depression, a Mindful Approach to Recovery’

Episode 13: Peter Gallagher

Helen Shaw’s guest in this edition of the The Family of Things podcast is Irish scientist and astro physicist Professor Peter Gallagher.

 
 

 

Peter Gallagher leads solar physics and space weather research at Trinity College Dublin. Gallagher researches the Sun, in particular solar storms and their impact on Earth. He is Director of the Rosse Solar Terrestrial Observatory at Birr Castle and leads the Irish LOFAR radio telescope project. Gallagher says he was always fascinated by how things work when he was a small boy, even taking the television apart to see what made it work but was a lack lustre student at school.

He took physics and mathematics at UCD before his PhD in solar physics at Queen’s University Belfast. At UCD he met and married fellow scientist Emma Teeling who now heads the bat lab at UCD and is an internationally acclaimed geneticist. Gallagher spent six years in the US including working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

His cutting edge work at Birr Castle connects Ireland’s space research history with its future since the 3rd Earl of Rosse in 1845 constructed the biggest telescope in the world – Leviathan – and identified the whirl pool galaxy.

 

www.tcd.ie/Physics/people/Peter.Gallagher

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Episode 12: Vivienne DeCourcy

Vivienne DeCourcy, the writer and director of the new feature film ‘Dare to be Wild’ is Helen Shaw’s guest in episode 12 of The Family of Things.

Vivienne DeCourcy

‘Dare to be Wild’, is based on the true story of Irish wild garden designer Mary Reynolds who won the Chelsea Garden Show in 2002. The film is Vivienne’s directorial debut and in this podcast Vivienne talks about her connection to the film’s message, the importance of the environment, nature conservation on our planet and the connection between man and the environment. Vivienne, a former lawyer, began writing scripts after surviving cancer and she talks about her instinctive relationship with the outdoors and nature from her childhood.

Her parents, her father was in the Irish Army, and her mother was an English teacher, encouraged her to become a doctor or a lawyer, but as a lover of art and history, she feels she was given a special gift – to take inspirational and enlightening stories and share them with an audience. Stories, she says, that may “positively impact the way we live on planet earth

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Episode 11: Rory O’Neill

Helen Shaw’s guest is performer and accidental activist Rory O’Neill AKA the Queen of Ireland Panti Bliss.</p style>

Rory talks about his memoir ‘Woman in the Making’ (Hachette 2014) and his personal journey from growing up in rural Ireland to become a ‘national treasure’ as the drag queen Panti Bliss who he says has become a sort of ‘avatar for change’. Rory shares the highs heels and lows of the last few years since his landmark speech on the stage of the Abbey Theatre which mobilised support for the Marriage Equality Referendum that was later passed by the Irish public in May 2015.

He reads from his memoir and talks about the influences on his Panti persona including Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett with her frosted eyeshadow and blonde mane and his exotic Aunty Qy who visited from the US with gifts of ‘jumpers with hoods’ for him and his cousins. Highlights of this funny and insightful podcast include Rory’s description of sharing a stage with Bono in U2’s recent Dublin gig and the story behind the making of Conor Horgan’s documentary film ‘Queen of Ireland’ charting Rory’s involvement in the Marriage Referendum Yes campaign.

Episode 10 – Eleanor Fitzsimons

Author and researcher Eleanor Fitzsimons is our latest guest in The Family of Things.

Eleanor’s acclaimed biography of Oscar Wilde from the perspective of the women in his life ‘Wilde’s Women‘ opens new windows on both Wilde and his work.
 
Eleanor beautifully written and carefully researched study was published in Ireland in Autumn 2015 and is being released in the US this year. In this conversation with presenter Helen Shaw she introduces us to Wilde’s intriguing mother, Jane Wilde a celebrated writer in her own time, and his much suffering wife Constance LLoyd as well as the women writers who influenced and inspired Wilde.
 
Eleanor describes her work as ‘recovering’ lost stories of women in history and sees her journey as akin to excavating the past; bringing forth what has been forgotten or obscured.
Wilde’s Women is published by Duckworth Overlook and you can follow Eleanor’s work and story via twitter. A short sample of the full episode is available below:
 

 

Episode 9 – Nóirín Hegarty

Nóirín Hegarty found her calling as a news reporter but moved into news management at just 25 years of age.

She was editor of the national sunday newspaper The Sunday Tribune at a time when there were very few women editors in Ireland and lead that newspaper from 2005 until it closed in 2011. Since then she’s been at the heart of digital change in the print industry but says she’s finally found her dream job with iconic travel brand Lonely Planet. She moved family and home to London to take up an editorial post with Lonely Planet but she then had the chance to open a Lonely Planet office in Dublin – bringing it all back home again.
 
In this podcast interview for The Family of Things with Helen Shaw, Nóirín talks openly about how tough and macho the editorial newspaper world was and how being a mother of three and a national newspaper editor was a challenging balancing act.
 

David Gillick

In The FAMILY of THINGS, Helen Shaw’s guest is a man known for his winning speed – it’s champion sprinter and Olympian David Gillick.

David Gillick, is now retired from competitive running but held the Irish indoor and outdoor 400m records, won two Gold European medals  and was a world finalist during his track career. In this episode of The Family of Things David shares his life story, what motivates him and what he has learnt along the way. Today he is a corporate coach sharing his sporting strategies with business leaders and he is also mentoring school students in athletics as well as playing in his local GAA team.

David’s story of the boy from Ballinteer in Dublin who made it to the highest levels of sporting achievement is both personal and inspiring and he chats about how his love of cooking grew from his obsession with fitness and how his Granny, now in her 90s, has been an inspiration in life.

Linda Buckley

Helen Shaw’s guest is the composer Linda Buckley who writes contemporary music drawing inspiration from the world around her, from the soundscape of her childhood growing up on a diary farm overlooking the Old Head of Kinsale to places close to her heart like Iceland.

Buckley’s work has been performed by Crash Ensemble, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the University of York Javanese Gamelan to name a few, and its mix of vocal, acoustic and electronic sounds is often termed spacial music. Buckley draws references from medieval music and sees her works not just as compositions but as live engagements defined by space and audiences. The podcasts draws from Buckley’s work including Torann, Eriu, Chiyo, Telephones and Gongs, Revelavit, Numarimur, Do you remember the planets, Fall Approaches Jump and O Iochtar Mara, and you can find out more on her website www.lindabuckley.org.

Photo courtesy of Olesya Zdorovetska

Mark O’Halloran

Helen Shaw meets actor and writer Mark O’Halloran the creative force behind the darkly comic films Adam and Paul and Garage. Mark talks about growing up in a big family in Ennis, Co.Clare  and his journey to become an artist.

He describes how limiting Ireland was as a young gay man and how a year spent in Amsterdam liberated him. He found a creative soul-mate in director Lenny Abrahamson and the two made the acclaimed independent film Adam and Paul in 2004. Mark shares life, love and loss in an open and revealing conversation stretches from his recent time filming in Havana for his new film ‘Viva’ to his poignant experiences in Iran.