Kieran Tansey works in financial services, but for the past 15 years much of his time outside work has been devoted to getting practical help to people who need it. He is a founder, board member and financial director of Irish charity Project ESPWA. Listen to the radio show here (September 21) The charity’s original name was Haiti Orphanage Project Espwa, with the initials spelling HOPE. Espoir is the French word for hope, while ESPWA is the Haitian Creole spelling. As the organisation expanded beyond Haiti, it shortened its name to Project ESPWA. The charity began with a trip to Haiti in April 2010, three months after the devastating earthquake that killed an estimated 200,000 people and displaced around 1.5 million. Tansey was among approximately 300 volunteers who travelled with the Haven Partnership to a remote area in the northwest of the country. Over the course of a week, they built around 80 houses, a community centre and a playground. Although his professional background was in finance, Tansey was no stranger to manual work, having worked on building sites during his later years at secondary school. Nor did the volunteers need to arrive with particular construction skills. “In fairness, you didn’t have to be […]

Lorraine O’Dwyer was once told she was no good for anything but gallivanting. As it turns out, they were right. “I am very good at it,” she says. Listen to the radio show here (Sept 7) Today, gallivanting is not simply something O’Dwyer does; it is the name of her business and, in many ways, her vocation. She takes people into the woods, forages, tells stories, explores Ireland’s ancient mythology and introduces visitors to plants and traditions that would have been immediately familiar to our ancestors. She is also a bean feasa, an Irish term she translates as “wise woman”, and describes herself as the eighth generation of wise women in her family. Once, those women made medicines from the plants around them. O’Dwyer brings people into the woods to show them what they used and, just as importantly, to tell the stories of the women who carried that knowledge. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate occupation for the girl who couldn’t sit still in school. O’Dwyer was eventually expelled, something she discusses with characteristic good humour. She says she has ADHD, at a time when girls were far less likely to be diagnosed, and the conventional classroom […]

Creating an entirely new world is no small undertaking, but for Dublin author Conor Rennick, imagination is only the beginning. His debut novel, Electric Blue, Plague Green, the first in the Arbiter series, introduces readers to an urban fantasy where folklore, mythology, conspiracy theories and modern beliefs all coexist beneath the surface of everyday Dublin. The second novel is already well underway, with an expansive mythology and carefully constructed lore continuing to evolve. Listen to the radio show here (August 24) Rennick describes his work as urban fantasy with science fiction elements, but the premise is unlike anything readers might expect. His starting point is deceptively simple: what if everything humanity has ever believed in gained power through belief itself? “It’s our Earth,” he explains, “but taking our folklore and our myths and treating them as real.” That single idea opens the door to an extraordinary cast of characters. Ancient Irish fairies exist alongside UFOs, alien abductors, reptilian conspiracies and creatures drawn from Indian mythology. As modern societies become increasingly multicultural, Rennick believes their myths naturally become part of the same shared landscape. “I realised that if belief creates reality, then you can cast a much wider net than traditional […]

Some people inherit a family business. Carla Benedetti inherited an eye. Long before she became one of Ireland’s most thoughtful interior designers, before beautifully curated homes and the launch of The Quiet Edit, she was a little girl in Roscommon watching her father quietly create beauty. A first-“We were immersed in it,” Carla recalls. “He was a quiet man and he worked hard. I was always surrounded by design and wanting to draw and do stuff to show Dad.” Listen to the radio show on (August 17th) Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that design would become her life’s work. Yet the route she followed wasn’t quite the obvious one. After school she studied Visual Communications at DIT (now TU Dublin), specialising in typography before completing a Master’s that explored the legibility of typefaces for people living with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative visual condition. It sounds highly specialised, but for Carla it reflected something that still shapes everything she does today: design isn’t simply about appearance. It is about how people experience the world, and that sensitivity reveals itself in unexpected ways. “I look at shop signs,” she laughs. “I think, ‘Oh my God, I wish the sign didn’t look […]

There was a time when astrology sat at the very heart of human civilisation. Kings consulted astrologers before making decisions of state. Universities required students to study it. Physicians believed timing was as important as treatment. Today, however, astrology is more often associated with newspaper horoscopes and social media snippets than with scholarship or strategy. Karina Abramova is quietly challenging those assumptions. Listen to the radio show here (10 August) An author, transformational advisor and astrologer, Abramova works with entrepreneurs, business leaders and individuals standing at important crossroads in their lives. Her clients are not looking for someone to predict the future. They are looking for clarity, direction and, perhaps most importantly, timing. “I help men and women on the edge of reinvention and on the crossroads of transformation to decide when to act, what to begin or end, and where their greatest potential and evolution lies,” she says. “In other words, I am a strategic astrologer.” It is a description that immediately prompts curiosity. Astrology is often dismissed without much thought, yet Abramova’s explanation reveals something far more complex than weekly horoscopes. According to Abramova, astrology began around 5,000 years ago in ancient Babylon, modern day Iraq. Priests carefully […]