Honouring Manchán Magan: How Old Stories Guide Us Through An Uncertain Future

Welcome to the 10th year of the podcast! And thank you. As an entirely listener supported show, it only happens thanks to listeners like you. 

To start off the year, another form of thanks, and tribute, to a guest from 2023 who was so wonderful, as much for his brilliance as his grace. I’m talking of the late Manchán Magan, acclaimed Irish travel writer, documentary maker, radio producer, theatre performer, builder of the first straw-bale house in Ireland, regenerator of the 10 acre block it stands on, and best-selling author. Manchán died in October last year at an age not too senior to mine, just a couple of months after a diagnosis of prostate cancer. 

Beautifully, I’ve learned he and long-term partner Aisling married a few weeks before he died. Aisling described how they fell in love too, as she later posthumously accepted the Best Irish-Published Book of the Year award for Manchán's latest work ‘Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun)’. You can find that story here. 

Manchán and I signed off our podcast chat looking forward to meeting, given the various threads emerging at the time, including tracing more of my roots back to Ireland, and the connections between those roots and Aboriginal cultures and Country here - so a little slice of me cut away with the news too. But what a blessing to have had that yarn. Thanks Manchán for your fleeting but unforgettable presence in my life. And of course, for being so much more for so many more people all over the place. That, no doubt, will continue on. Right now, in fact. 

For here are the last 25 minutes or so of my conversation with Manchán from a couple of years ago. So much to love in just this small window.

To listen to the full episode with Manchán, and find further links, head to episode 173. Recorded with thanks to the Derby Aboriginal Media Corporation, at 6DBY deadly Derby radio in the West Kimberley, on the heels of the Aboriginal Irish festival in Fremantle WA.

Title image source.

Chapters and transcripts.

Music: The Blackbird (Irish Song Dance), by Ennis, Morrison and Muller (from Artlist).

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