Podcast reviews: With big elections looming, the generational divide is tackled across three fascinating series

Actor and playwright Mark O'Halloran, 2023. Photo: Gerry Mooney

Lucy White

As general election fever ­accelerates for both our ­nearest neighbours, culture wars have never been more polarised than ­pitching young v old, with ­economic status almost taking a back seat.

These three series cast off binary debates to explore ­nuances among the generations.

​RadioMoLI, the podcast of ­Dublin’s Museum of Literature Ireland is always worth a listen and its seven-part series Ireland’s Generation X? (Acast, Apple, Spotify; moli.ie) from ­September 2021 remains evergreen, as ­authors Belinda McKeon, Nick Laird, Caitriona Lally, Claire ­Kilroy, a pre-Bee Sting Paul Murray, actor and scriptwriter Mark O’Halloran and Lankum’s Ian Lynch reflect on their respective upbringings, as shaped by the Troubles, EU membership, the Peace Process, and the Celtic Tiger.

They’re each in conversation with ­Barry McCrea, with O’Halloran ­talking about growing up gay in Ennis and finding magic and ­camaraderie in the local theatre scene; Longford-born McKeon weighs up the rural/urban divide in the 1990s; while Kilroy has ­little good to say about the 1980s (“lots of dog poo”) comparing her schooling with that of her son’s. Unsurprisingly, Catholicism looms large across the series.

​A recent Sunday Times UK ­feature ran the headline ­“Generation X: The middle-aged voters politics forgot,” arguing political parties should neglect this pivotal demographic at their peril. But it’s Gen Z who are interrogated by The Guardian’s Who Screwed Millennials? (Apple, Spotify) Miles Herbert, himself a millennial. He ­investigates the origins of a generation ­infantilised by having to live with parents into their 30s and being berated for coffee consumption by OAPs from their own mortgage-free ivory towers.

Herbert lives in New South Wales but his findings are universal across “first-world” countries. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis offered him the advice: “There are two kinds of young people. There are the ­sensible ones who try to adapt themselves to the world around them, and then there are the mad ones who try to adapt the world to their own ideas of how it should be. Be mad.”

​And what of the post-War ­generation which doesn’t even have its own snappy tagline name? Chloe Fox interviews “extraordinary octogenarians” in Late Fragments (Apple, Spotify), by which she means famous (British) ones. Non-famous ­interviewees would’ve still been good but there’s no denying the fascinating contributions of explorer John Blashford-Snell, war correspondent Martin Bell and the infamously candid Miriam Margolyes.