John Dillon, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin, is an Irish classicist and philosopher considered a world authority in ancient philosophy and Platonism. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1939, he returned to Ireland as a child and studied Classics at Oxford before earning a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley from 1969 until his appointment at Trinity in 1980, where he remained until his retirement in 2006. Dillon is founder and Director Emeritus of the Dublin Plato Centre and a member of several prestigious academies, including the Royal Irish Academy and the Academy of Athens. A professor Emeritus of the British Academy. He has published over thirty books and numerous articles, focusing on the transmission of Platonic philosophy.

Episode Credits:

Host: Luke Sheehan

Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com

Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin's North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe's largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture.

He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore and information about this lost world, as well as a collector of histories of it.

In the 1970s, Fagan began his historical work by recording oral histories from local residents, many of whom remembered formative events such as the 1913 Lock-Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, and the War of Independence and Civil War. These interviews also documented memories relating to life in Dublin's tenements, experiences in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries, dock work, women's roles, deaths of children, money lenders, orphanage life, and more, covering both the public and intensely personal history of inner-city Dublin.

Fagan's work extends far beyond oral interviews. He is the longtime director of the North Inner City Folklore Project, an initiative that began as a jobs program and allowed him to preserve and publish stories from his community. Over decades, he has amassed a vast collection of tenement artefacts: photographs, books, letters, coins, dockers' buttons, children's toys. His vision has always been to open a dedicated museum so this vital social history is preserved within, and for, the local community rather than being housed elsewhere.

This museum has been a reality in the past and Terry's current passion is to reestablish it.

Terry has published works such as "Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle" and "Dublin Tenements: Memories of Life in Dublin's Notorious Tenements," both drawn from his extensive oral history collections. He is also a popular walking tour guide, interweaving tales from his own life as well as audio samples from the collections he oversaw. The Monto tour includes tales about brothel madams, dockers, and a "hidden Dublin" many would prefer to leave interred in the past.

Host: Luke Sheehan

Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com

"The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened"

It has been one year since Cassandra Voices forayed into podcasting. The guest for our podcast's first-ever episode — the extraordinary journalist Patrick Cockburn — returns to talk with Luke Sheehan through Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, and his recent writings on these wars.

Host: Luke Sheehan

Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com