Podcast Corner: Three Irish shows to check out this week
Ruth Negga narrates the latest RTÉ podcast, First Conviction. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
The latest series from the RTÉ Documentary on One Team, following and earlier in 2025, is a six-part series that will wrap next week (November 5) and be followed a week later by a TV documentary. Alongside the RTÉ Documentary on One team, RTÉ Investigates has worked on this story for the past 12 months.
It begins in 2016, when a father brings his daughter to a hospital emergency department after she suffered an injury to her genital area. Hospital staff deem that it appears to be consistent with female genital mutilation.
Things escalate quickly over the course of the first episode and the couple, originally from two countries in east Africa, are eventually found guilty in 2019 in the first trial of its kind in Ireland and sentenced to jail. No one seems to believe the parents’ explanation that the girl had suffered the injury after falling on a toy.
The series is narrated by renowned actress Ruth Negga with the various family members also voiced by actors to protect their identity.
Only available on YouTube, a disclaimer at the outset of the first of eight episodes says this is not an investigation into the 1985 killing of Fr Niall Molloy at a “lavish wedding party” in Co Offaly but rather a “comprehensive presentation of all the available facts surrounding the tragic case”.
The series is written, produced, and edited by Liv Kirwan, who gives a detailed chronological account of events, piecing together the evidence, alleged inconsistencies, and the long shadow cast by the case. It’s narrated by her husband Marcus Kirwan.
After an initial eight-episode run through its first series earlier this year, touching on subjects as various as philosophy, skorts, and the traditional Irish ballad Eolan Ryng returns with a new season of
Focusing on how ice cream is linked to the Irish presidential election cycle and ‘How A GAA Crest leads us to the Battle of Fontenoy’, Ryng explains: “in the time off and in the preparation for season one, I thought long and hard about what I wanted to achieve and what I wanted to create with this particular podcast and to be entirely honest, I don’t have exactly a full answer - and maybe that is the answer itself: It’s simply a journey through history, through language, through culture, mainly around Irish and Irishness, sometimes national and sometimes international, sometimes stories, sometimes ballads - a little bit of everything.”
We always say it can take a new podcast a few episodes to find its voice, but so far, Undercover Irish is a fine addition to the burgeoning genre of Irish history podcasts.
