Rebel Matters: Cork-made podcast covers all sorts of bases for Ainle Ó Cairealláin
Ainle Ó Cairealláin, host of the Rebel Matters podcast.
While podcasts suddenly seem to springing up from every corner, Ainle Ó Cairealláin can consider himself a veteran of the format. The Cork-based Belfast man has been hosting his Rebel Matters show since 2017, and is now up to his 88th episode.
The show offers an intimate glimpse at Ó Cairealláin’s own preoccupations: often with a focus on wellbeing and self-improvement, as well as various social causes, Rebel Matters episodes are rambling, informal conversations with musicians, activists, sportspeople and whoever else he's interested in.
“I just love sitting down talking to someone,” he says. “There are highly produced podcasts too, but I like Rebel Matters to feel like you’re just listening to a chat I’m having with someone that I’d have anyway.”
Before the upheaval of 2020, Rebel Matters was an irregular affair, fitted in whenever Ó Cairealláin could record them. But in 2020, the podcast became a more important feature of his own life, a way of reaching out, a “lovely social outlet”.
He started recording more regularly, and has now been joined by musician and artist Vicky Langan as his producer. Guests have include Ian Lynch of the band Lankum, and former IRA hunger striker Laurence McKeown.
While Ó Cairealláin developed his podcast in 2020, and faced many of the same lockdown issues as many other people, in September, the year took a catastrophic turn when he lost his mother to suicide.
Aoife ní Riain was an Irish language activist, librarian, musician and radio show host who moved from Dublin to West Belfast in the 1980s, embedding herself in the Gaeilgeoir community and raising three sons.
Ó Cairealláin says his world was turned upside-down, that her death was unexpected.
“In recent days, it seems like I’ve moved from asking why it happened and if there was something I could have done to stop it, to just really missing her and wishing I could pick up the phone and call her,” he says. “It’s been a really tough time.”
For Ó Cairealláin, a former hurler, a strength and conditioning coach and the founder of Aclaí gym in Cork city, physical and emotional wellbeing are intimately intertwined, but for now, even his physical training has a limited impact.
“I will usually do a bit of training to kind of shake myself out and reconnect with myself, but when something like this happens, it’s on an extreme level,” he says. “It puts everything into perspective: how you communicate with other people, the connection you have with yourself. I’m lucky to have my brothers.”
Ó Cairealláin is the eldest of three brothers, all with unique strings to their bow, all in some sense continuing the values of community and culture instilled in them during their upbringing in the Andersonstown area of West Belfast.
Middle brother Cairbre is strength and conditioning coach with the Tipperary senior hurling team, while youngest brother Naoise is one third of controversy-courting Gaeilgeoir hiphop act Kneecap.
Irish was their first language, Ó Cairealláin says. While Gaeilgeoirs down South can be an ideological enough bunch, in Belfast, the stakes were higher, the struggle for language parity more political, at times dangerous.
“Our secondary school, Coláiste Féirste, only started a few years before I went there, out of necessity, because there was no Irish language secondary school in Belfast,” Ó Cairealláin says. “That was the same with a lot of the other things in the community: the theatre, the newspaper, the GAA club.
“All that infrastructure that was set up in the 1980s and '90s, they’re things that wouldn’t have existed except people just took the initiative and did it because it was needed. So we grew up with this attitude: Ná habair é, déan é. Don’t talk about it, just do it.”
Ó Cairealláin moved south to study and play hurling, first moving to Limerick to study Sports Science in UL, and from there to Cork, to play for hurling team Na Piarsaigh alongside his brother Cairbre. He founded his gym, Aclaí, in 2013.
He’s not exactly your stereotypical fitness fanatic; Aclaí is a far cry from most gyms, more focused on the wellbeing of the individual than on image-obsessed iron pumping. Before the Covid lockdowns, the space was earning a reputation in the city as a place for gigs, talks, other community happenings.
“Yeah, some people think it’s really strange when I say I hate gyms,” he says with a rueful grin. “But I think most gyms are where creativity goes to die.
“The way we train in Aclaí is that you’re learning a type of movement that’s meaningful, and that you feel like you’re progressing with. For me, the important thing isn’t what form your physical activity is, whether you’re cycling, running or playing hurling. It’s more to do with remaining in communion with yourself, with what’s happening on the inside.”
In days that he’s all too aware are dark for so many, Ó Cairealláin sees creativity and connection as forces of salvation and sustenance.
“So many people have been in touch to say the podcast is a source of company to them,” he says. “And music is the same. I really don’t know how we’d be doing now if we hadn’t had music when our mum died. It was like a hug for a whole week of the funeral. There’s this power to art and music: we need to be protective of people’s creativity. Because when the shit hits the fan, that’s what you fall back on.”
