Podcast Corner: Two new shows delve into Irish history
The area near the Cenotaph at Enniskillen following the bombing in 1987.
“It’s been so long, surely some of those who know what happened that day will be ready to talk,” says Mario Ledwith, a news reporter at the Times and host of this six-part podcast series - the final episode is due this week. He’s talking about the Enniskillen bombing in Fermanagh in 1987. Eleven people were killed attending a Remembrance Sunday commemoration in the town, while a 12th victim dies years later while in coma. Nobody has ever been charged.
The bombing took place two days before Ledwith was born in the town. He explains his motivations behind the investigation at the start of episode two: “I left Northern Ireland in 2006 to live across the water in England, eventually moving to London. And in my new home something that always struck me, even annoyed me, was a lack of knowledge of the trauma my homeland had just been through.”
He says when he told a friend he was considering investigating the Enniskillen bombing, he was told, “Isn’t that a bit close to home?”
The third episode finds Ledwith driving around ‘the borderlands’, asking why the IRA targeted Enniskillen, what police may have known about suspected IRA figures seen nearby, on the night before the killing happened, and goes in search of the man accused of being the ‘mastermind’ behind the bomb. As he discovers, though, almost 40 years on, perhaps it’s still too close to home for many to talk.
Ahead of an event at Dublin Book Festival on Saturday (Imma, 11.45am), where author and academic Phil Mullen will be in conversation with author Afua Hirsch, comes this three-part series. Skein Podcasts, an offshoot of Skein Press publishing, presents live and recorded conversations amplifying voices that have been silenced in Irish cultural life. It says it gives space to artists, writers, and thinkers who offer radical new perspectives on existing narratives.
Mullen says: “We’re talking about something that is rarely discussed - what it was like to grow up black and mixed race in Ireland in the 20th century. For some of us that meant growing up in foster families or being adopted, while for many others they were incarcerated in mother and baby homes and industrial schools. My guests and I were born into a country that, for most of that time, refused to acknowledge us. Our voices and our stories have largely been absent from these conversations.”
