The Field Day Podcast is going on a hiatus from November 2020. It takes quite a bit of time and energy to produce the kind of content we want to share, and time and energy are in short supply these days, in the face of other commitments. Additionally, as the podcast approaches its 3rd anniversary, and as Field Day closes its 40th year of existence,…

The political doesn’t always correspond in Ireland to the culinary. Dorothy Cashman reads the long-forgotten recipe books of Irish country houses, and inserts them into the history of the country and the world. In her analysis of one recipe book from Kilkenny, she gives us a fascinating portrait of a network of women and food culture, just as Irela…

2020 marks the 40th anniversary of the technical standard for the compact disc. Eamonn Bell explains how this format is an important hinge in the establishment of digital music for the general consumer. As a portable medium, it belongs to the era of vinyl and magnetic tape, yet as the first widespread digital music format, its arrival marks the beg…

Polly Platt is not a household name, and that is the problem we tackle in this episode. Photo by © Steve Banks / mptvimages.com She was a lynchpin in the making of an astonishing list of some of the best American films for more than two decades. So how come so few people know about her? When her name is remembered, it is as a production designer. B…

Crowds create atmospheres. Police try to control those atmospheres. From the interaction between them, says Illan Rua Wall, emerges power. And that power can take the form of political upheaval and unrest, or the consolidation of pre-existing sovereignty. A lecturer in law at the University of Warwick, Illan Rua Wall pursues questions of police and…

When it comes to work, the coronavirus has changed everything, and changed nothing. We are more idle, and we are busier than ever. Petting alpacas can be good for your mind and body. Photo: Tambako the Jaguar (Flickr) Some employers bring therapets (therapeutic pets), such as alpacas, into the office. It helps people get out of their heads, as Step…

The history of rural life is a history of technology. In this interview, we explore the machinery, systems of distribution and technological innovations that transformed many Irish rural communities when they adopted the cooperative model in the late 19th century. Historian Patrick Doyle of the University of Manchester opens his account of the Iris…

I don’t trust newspapers. Half the time they lie. – Alex Jones, Infowars In this conversation, we talk about trust, truth and trolls. Are conspiracy theories a new phenomenon? Do we believe authorities less than we used to? What is a Russian troll farm? Eileen Culloty is an expert in conspiracy theories, and she has written recently about the half-…

Does a city have a sound? It’s the question that set writer Karl Whitney on a unique musical pilgrimage around the cities of Britain. The result is his book, just out: Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop. When Karl was back in his native Dublin recently, we talked about the book, the journey he took, and the experi…

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the right to have rights’ in her 1958 book The Human Condition. In this lecture, literary critic Seamus Deane links Arendt’s phrase with the Irish immigration system, in particular the ‘Direct Provision’ centres. Since the first half of the the twentieth century, the condition of being stateless, of being a displace…

How has the Irish Sea become the most polluted sea in the world? Sellafield is on the English coast, to the east of the Isle of Man. The answer lies in the north west of England, where the Sellafield site has poured millions of tonnes of nuclear waste into the sea since the 1950s. Like the history of nuclear power plants around the world, its histo…

We are seeing Ireland north and south being sold to corporate powers Bernadette Devlin McAliskey is Ireland’s finest political orator, and a key figure in recent political history. In this lecture she takes as her theme a line from playwright Sean O’Casey, ‘A Terrible State o’ Chassis’, where chassis means ‘crisis’. Bernadette Devlin (later Devlin …

One of many prophets who forecast the disasters of modernism, but one of the few who did it from the left. Georg Lukács was one of the leading European literary critics of the 20th century. His life story was entangled with the political storms that swept across his native Hungary – communist revolution, reaction, fascism, global war and Stalinism.…

From the 1910s to the 1950s, newsreels were the only source of non-fictional moving images available to the public. Many samples of this forgotten genre survive. Now researchers are uncovering a whole new set of archival sources that nuance and illustrate the history of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century. Dublin 1916. A screenshot from ‘…

In 2013, Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy had a bright idea. Why not make a statistical analysis of Irish film? This conversation explores the surprising things they found out. Tony Tracy (left) and Roddy Flynn Flynn and Tracy’s data-driven approach focuses particularly on the Irish Film Board and the projects it has supported. In this insightful and ent…

This is a threshold moment, Johnny. Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth instalment in the Mad Max franchise The Mad Max world teeters on the edge of reason and on the edge of existence. It is difficult to think of a more highly-charged and high-octane film franchise that has reached a mass global audience. The four iconic films are among the most recogn…