Niamh Browne (she/her) URANIA How to make a podcast with your friend and not murder each other in the process Alana Daly Mulligan (she/they)
All-round riotous duo Niamh Browne (she/her) and Alana Daly Mulligan (she/they) give insight into creating their new podcast URANIA - IRELAND’S SECRET SAPPHIC SALON in partnership with Hot Press Magazine. Alana: I was painting Niamh’s bedroom wall in August 2023 when she came to me with the idea for the podcast. I was painting her wall because she was absolutely shite at it and I can be talked into just about anything, from painting a wall to a queer podcast. You see, Niamh and myself, we’re exceptional talkers. For as long as we’ve known each other, I can’t really remember a time when we sat still or silent together, there’s just this current of creative energy that we both really buzz off. Anyways, onto my third cup of tea and halfway through painting the back wall to its original soap-scum white that Niamh had creatively painted blue, we hit an idea – a gay Irish podcast idea. We laughed at the instinct that we thought we would be pretty funny, not mind mildly interesting – how cis-het-white- toxic-man of us! Niamh: For me, the process was a bit longer, and involved far less home decorating. I had come across Kathleen Lynn when I was about seventeen or so, and vaguely knew she was an important woman at the foundation of the Irish State. This was at the peak of the 1916 centenary celebrations frenzy, so I was regularly being drilled in school on the importance of Connolly, Pearse and the boys in the band. But I had never heard much said about the women in question, bar Countess Markievicz, but Dr. Kathleen Lynn was a new name that popped up in a history class one day, and what’s more, the teacher said she was gay.
While I had of course known gay people and gay marriage was just voted in by a landslide two years earlier, I quite simply, and perhaps densely just thought it was a newfangled 21st-century sexuality, one that Tumblr invented. I was constantly hearing hushed tones of “the world’s gone mad”, or “In my day…” and I had kind of absorbed that mindset by osmosis. The fact that there were people who not only lived their lives as queer individuals 100 years ago, and not in some kind of hushed exile but active members contributing to society- was nothing short of a revelation. I sat on this for a few years, always knowing that Dr. Lynn was brave and fierce and fought for the rights of many generations of people who in turn didn’t acknowledge hers. It’s when Alana is painting the walls of my dingy houseshare to get it back to landlord-white many years later, that I mention, “D’you know I’ve a podcast idea that I have been sitting on?”. Alana: About a month later, Niamh came to me with her very on-brand determination to make a podcast about queer Irish women. As talkers who enjoy balanced conversation, we also like to listen…a lot, and we are both huge consumers of podcasts. But, we had limited experience making them, and personally, the idea of editing audio files does not give me the flutters. But, we thought to start researching, scoured libraries and archives for materials about the existence of queer women in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century – queer of course being anachronistic – women who found companionship with other women shall we say. Niamh: As we digged, I figured we would find a handful of queer women for our study. To my astonishment, we put together a list of twelve queer women involved in 1916, enough to serve a jury. I couldn’t believe it, that there was a circle of women living in Dublin one hundred years previous, who like my group of friends were interested in politics and activism. Their hangouts involved discussions of home rule, language revival and workers’ rights. Mine were populated by like-minded young women who spoke of Marriage Equality, repealing the
8th Amendment and indeed, language revival. I felt these historical figures to be real, tangible people with hopes and dreams and desires to love and be loved. I knew that there was a story to be told and that myself and Alana could do it in a way others couldn’t. Alana: I got the train up to Dublin on a Thursday evening to get two days of recording in, we’d laugh at the research we found, go for dinner, have a few civilised drinks (and some not-so- civilised drinks). One night, we took the train back to Donabate after a long evening of recording, lay in the sand and watched the lights of Dublin dance across the water. It was a moment of clarity. We were looking at a city that was built on the pioneering work of women, no less, women who were devoted to social justice, and to their long-term female partners. There’s been a lot of laughing, the occasional tears, stressed emails, video calls, phone calls, work lunches, pints. We were
lucky to have the support of Hot Press who saw the value in the work we were doing. Niamh: I knew however, that when it came to talking about historical badasses, I needed a fellow kindred spirit, someone who also had the same zany creative sensibility, who was resilient, and who cared about these women. In Alana, I found the perfect co-host. There are many to thank, Hot Press, Alana, Flo Laurent our SOUND GUY, the exceptional Dr Mary McCauliffe, the team at Glasnevin Cemetary who kindly let us record live ambiences in the space, but most importantly are the women at the heart of Urania, who broke the mould, and in doing so, not only gave us a story to tell, but fought for an Ireland where we could tell it. You can listen to Urania: Ireland’s Secret Sapphic Salon anywhere you get your podcasts.
You’re telling me that there was a known gay woman involved in the shaping of the Irish State? And that it’s just a fact, an accepted piece of information and no one has gone mad over it?
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