I assume Blowback has been recommended on here somewhere. Delves into well known American geo political interventions. Three seasons so far, one on Iraq II, Cuba and Korea
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Real dictators is class. The narrator, McGann has a great voice.
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Epiosde 189: Why did secretive Garda unit destroy data relating to the tracking of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch?. Episode: Epiosde 189: Why did secretive Garda unit destroy data relating to the tracking of Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch? Podcast Republic . Media: https://traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/fdd7ab40-270d-4a1e-a257-acd200da1324/c5ee97f4-742a-4abc-b951-ae720077c257/96b64668-bd58-4bce-b850-af4f014e0219/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=6b0e56ae-81e9-402b-bac1-ae720077c273 . – Sent from Podcast Republic.
This is intriguing!
I probably should have said invasions! It’s not in any way pro American in fairness
It’s excellent,Dan Snow’s History Hit is very good also.
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In our time is another great history podcast. Running about 20 years now
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Podcasts
Lads still stuck in a 2020 mindset.
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Choosing not to live life, I don’t get it.
Make history.
Thanks boy - read about that chap previously
Actually an ex marine based in Ballyshannon - good republican in the past
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‘‘Twas a good listen. Smart bloke. I saw someone commenting to get more loyalist ex prisoners on. Wonder if they could hold a conversation even !
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Some can
I’ve a mate ex UDA in Derry
( used work in orphanages etc in Romania 
for years)
Was a firebrand anti rc etc
We sang ours they sang theirs in Romania
Amongst our charity at the time we’re provos- ex ones aswell
RIRA members
Ex UVF UDA members
Christians
Conservative RCs etc
You can imagine the craic after 6/7 pints
But no antagonism
Jaffa’s in our group could certainly talk
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I remember you writing about these guys before on a thread here
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Ones still bitter- close relatives killed
Other married a Romanian RC so he’s obviously no religious problem anymore
All products of their environment
Glen Miller the bitter one is a nice guy but family history made him what he is
I was the exact same being anti Protestant/ English etc for years
Now one of my closest friends fiend here is C of I
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Yer man the yank made some good points in the vid on Protestant Irish v “planters”…
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Six days into January 2014, also known as Little Christmas, Mark Mehigan first began talking about Susie. The subject of his first viral video (which, at time of writing, has 14,000 likes and 2,100 comments), Susie was Mehigan’s fictional girlfriend, forever just out of shot, who had been escorted to St Vincent’s Hospital because she was “literally dying”.
“The doctor needed to inject her with something called … a Domino’s Meal Deal,” he says, shaky of breath, in the now eight-year-old piece. “They tried to make her feel better by … showing her pictures of sloths online,” he says, his sympathetic to-camera gaze shifting ever-so-slightly wider. “I remember putting up that video because I had just seen so many girls over Christmas say they were dead and dying due to drinking too much, and I was like — we’re not just gonna let that one slide, are we?”
Mehigan, then 23, had been living in Los Angeles for a year, working with the former Westlife star Mark Feehily on music, his first love. “We met backstage at Oxegen when I was …” he laughs, his head lowering, “doing a drunken rendition of a song I’d written on guitar.” Feehily had been working on a solo record and flew Mehigan out to his hotel room on Sunset Boulevard to write, while his counterparts did their J1s three beaches south. “Here I was, sharing songwriting credits with Joni Mitchell [they are both credited on the same album], having parties in my room with the bit of money I had, still trying to kiss the girl I fancied in Irish college,” he says. “Such was my insatiable appetite to be validated.”
He then moved to London, which was to be his home over the next decade, to live with “a couple of lads from Leeds” in a houseshare in Clapton. “It was the first time I felt I’d been surrounded by like-minded people,” he says.
“I was actually asked to release an EP with a Scottish label called Numbers. I thought this was it for me, but six months went by and nothing happened. I was devastated, so disconnected and despondent that I just said, f*** this, I have to do comedy. But I also had to pay the bills, so I picked up where my videos left off and got a job selling robot costumes out in Bradford. It was miserable,” he says with a laugh. “It was around then I flew back to Dublin and a friend, who noticed how gutted I was after we met, ordered me a podcast microphone and kit from Amazon with a text saying ‘press record’. That friend is now my manager.”
Born in Cabinteely, and later moving to Foxrock, Mehigan had an interest in music from day one. He’s the youngest of four and the posters in his room varied from Eminem (he tried to take Marshall as his confirmation name) to the Spice Girls to Korn (he was permitted the name Jonathan — Jonathan Davis is the lead singer). Now 31, he is finally comfortable in his own skin. We meet in the foyer of the Royal Marine Hotel, a Dún Laoghaire landmark (previous guests include Laurel and Hardy, Michael Collins and Queen Victoria) just moments from Mehigan’s newly purchased home. He’s dressed entirely in black — a round-neck Awake NY pullover and Levi 501s — and his gold chain necklace and thick onyx ring glint against the mid-morning sun.
Mehigan speaks with authenticity yet at an amped-up pace; rarely finishing one sentence before launching into another. He hangs his coat on the back of his seat, orders a sparkling water and a black coffee, and begins to laugh about how sensitive he was as a child. “I’m still extremely sensitive. I think many comedians are. Certainly many alcoholics are,” he says with a grin.
“I was an attention seeker. But I also didn’t like lots of people. It’s very clichéd to say this, but I always felt like I was on the outside; but perhaps that’s my mind tricking me into thinking that.”
His comedy is almost entirely observation-based, a natural fit for a soul permanently on the fringes. He made it through a year of college, a songwriting course at BIMM in Brighton (“My parents didn’t allow me to book a one-way ticket to LA with my confirmation money, but we settled on the UK”), before dropping out and starting up an internet channel, Balcony TV.
His podcast, Mark Mehigan’s Sunday Roast, which has had 701,675 downloads since its inception, covers subjects such as Tight People Are the Worst, Gym + Coffee Couples and Influencers Doing Charity Work. A three-year stint working in social media for BBC Comedy showed what life could be, as he curated projects for UK programmes such as Gavin and Stacey and I’m Alan Partridge, but he wasn’t developing his own talent. On the outside, however, things looked rosy. “I thought it was going to be a real foot-in-the-door experience,” he says. “Everybody said to me, ‘Oh, you’re in the right place.’ Only when I was in there did I realise that’s not how the BBC works.”
He doesn’t take his comedy seriously, far from it. “There is nothing worse than a comedian who starts getting intellectual about comedy, it’s just so indulgent,” he says while shaking his head. “The only reason you’re here is because people are laughing. That could stop at any minute.” It isn’t stopping for Mehigan, whose recent shows haven’t held on to their tickets for long.
Mehigan has experienced lofty peaks and deep troughs. He recently celebrated a year of sobriety, after several years of battle and denial about his addiction. He also recently passed his driver theory test, and this morning he has been on a date, a walk at 8am. He describes his comedy as cynical, sarcastic, acerbic — but also “none of the above”.
“I got asked to go on a reality TV show last year,” he tells me. “The producer got on to me and was like, ‘We want you on because you’re always so outraged by everything.’ I’m like, ‘Do you honestly think I’m that annoyed all the time?’ I guess it’s just different to what Irish comedy might be used to, jokes about mammies and immersions and whatever, which are just shit.”
Mehigan’s hard-shelled vulnerability is obvious. “It’s why everything I do is so controlled by fear,” he says with a laugh. “Every time there’s this amazing peak, a trough is waiting for me around the corner.” His face tenses when speaking about his personal life, the girls he never kissed. Finances are only spoken about in comedic terms. “I’d be getting paid by the BBC, which was grand money, not great, but I was always broke. As soon as I got my first pay cheque, I paid an annual membership to Soho House, and thought I’d made it because I saw Lily James.”
A sense of wasted potential has haunted him, from school reports to weekends lost to afterparties in hotel rooms. “I have always had the capacity to be a self-saboteur,” he says, his eyes staring deep into mine. But for all Mehigan’s surface bravado, here lies his one-two comedic punch; he’s just putting one foot in front of the other, and is as clueless as the rest of us.
“Fortunately I’ve met some of the most incredible people over the past 12 months,” he says, as sunbeams light his face. “It’s just added a different dimension to my life. The only way I can describe it is like discovering a new colour. There was something in my life that has just opened up more and wasn’t there before. There’s still an undercurrent of darkness within me that I have to deal with every day, but for the first time in my entire life I’m optimistic about the future.” He pauses. “That seems so f***ing bleak, but I’m just really happy not to be near robot costumes any more.”
Mehigan will play Vicar Street, Dublin, next year. More information on dates and tickets can be found via his Instagram: @mehiganmark
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