Podcast Corner: Shaktar's strange season, and a look at the Magdalenes
Shakhtar Donetsk fans hold up Ukraine flags and signs during a recent Champions League match at Celtic Park, Glasgow. Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA
Just in case you don't have enough football to feast on at the moment, Away From Home features Adam Crafton and Joey D'Urso of The Athletic following Shakhtar Donetsk on their Champions League adventures this season.
Such access to a high-level club would be interesting at the best of times but of course, it’s even more eye-opening considering Donetsk are playing their games while Russia’s invasion of their country is ongoing.
One curious titbit that Crafton explains on the first episode - after talking to a player whose father-in-law has died in the war - is that the team’s plane was out of the country when Russia invaded (“a stroke of good planning or good luck”).
We also hear how most of the journalists now covering the team are female, because the men are largely conscripted to fight in the war.
Shakhtar played their home Champions League group-stage matches in Poland.
The second episode begins with the club captain’s team talk, in the dressing room, before their game against Celtic; the third explains why the club is suing Fifa; and all the while Donetsk are defying the odds by putting up a fight to progress in the Champions League as missiles and the sound of war rages around them.
Away From Home doesn’t have the banter of other football podcasts - it’s much more important than that.
There are any number of moments that you’ll want to stop listening to Redacted Lives, the new six-part series from The Journal that seeks to tell the story of mother and baby homes in Ireland.
Talking to women who found themselves in the homes against their will, brought back from London by priests or cast off by their parents, presenter Órla Ryan has made a series that should leave the listener angry and ashamed - furious at how the religious-run Magdalene laundies were allowed operate for so long.
Ryan talks to Caelainn Hogan, author of Republic of Shame, for some context towards the end of the second episode.
She says: “This cycle of institutionalisation that affected families and generations in Ireland has had such a deep impact on people. It’s still having a deep impact today.”
That episode, titled ‘High Walls’, begins with audio testimony that one woman, Monica Walsh, gave to the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, whose subsequent report was decried as misrepresenting what was said.
Ryan says this is the first time the audio is being heard outside the commission and Walsh’s family.
“Survivors have been silenced throughout their lives, with external forces controlling the narratives of what they experienced. Many are only now telling their stories,” says Ryan.
Redacted Lives, which has four episodes to come, is playing an important role in that.
