In 2017, an ordinary afternoon in Dublin’s Santry turned into a waking nightmare when a teenager attempted to pull a toddler into the undergrowth. When police searched her Ballymun bedroom, they didn't just find a troubled adolescent—they uncovered a chillingly meticulous, step-by-step operational manual for murder. Host Tim Warburton details the case of Stephanie Smith, a highly intelligent chameleonic predator whose capacity for manipulation turned a multi-million euro high-security facility into a playground for further crime.

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When an armed raid at a Swords bookmakers ends in a terrifying high-speed hijacking, detectives are left with an underworld campaign of fear and zero cooperative witnesses. But a single instinctual glance at a security camera and a burner phone dropped in the pitch-black of a getaway car would trigger a fifteen-year legal war.

Walking down a street in Amsterdam in the winter of 2002, two American men smiled as a stranger brushed past them carrying a massive bouquet of roses. They genuinely believed it was a supernatural thank-you note from a woman they had left dead on a floor in Dublin just days before.

This is the story of Rosemary Toole Gilhooley, a deeply sensitive woman who lost her invisible battle with severe clinical depression, and George Exoo, the unvetted American operator who commodified her despair.

How does a Roman Catholic altar boy from working-class Dublin, trained to save lives as an intensive care nurse, become a suicide bomber for ISIS? In this episode, we trace the bizarre, dark, and highly public trajectory of Terence Kelly (aka "Taliban Terry"). From a Saudi bootlegging ring to a rural cottage in Longford, we explore the domestic isolation and digital radicalization that led a brilliant man to volunteer for the Islamic State’s formalized "martyrdom register"—and examine the military reality of his final moments in the apocalyptic Battle of Mosul.

For decades, Ireland told itself a comfortable lie: that neutrality was a shield, and the shadows of global espionage would simply pass the island by. But from the aisles of a suburban Dublin shopping center to the historic quadrangles of Trinity College, the Kremlin saw something else entirely—an open door. Tonight, we trace forty years of cold-war stings, deep-cover "Illegals," and the modern political warfare that shattered the illusion of Irish isolation.

In April 2017, armed Gardaí smashed through the door of a quiet safehouse in West Dublin. Sitting on a couch inside was an elderly, bearded man who looked like an eccentric geography teacher. In reality, he was Imre "The Butcher" Arakas—one of Europe’s most elusive and lethal contract killers, flown into Ireland by the Kinahan Cartel to execute a high-profile target with a single, silenced shot to the head.

In this episode, Tim Warburton traces the extraordinary, chilling forty-year journey of a man who began his life as an idealistic, anti-Soviet rebel leaping out of courthouse windows in 1970s Estonia, only to be corrupted by the brutality of the gulags and the chaos of the post-communist Baltic mafia wars. We lift the veil on the international machine behind Dublin’s gangland feud, exploring how a local Irish turf war became entangled with a global mercenary network, and how a joint intelligence operation finally brought down a ghost.

For generations, unwritten laws and "fair play" governed conflicts within the Irish Traveller community. But when an old-school family dispute collided with modern smartphone culture and digital algorithms, the rules evaporated. In this episode of Shadows of Èire, we dissect the terrifying escalation of the McGinley and Hannifin conflict—a multi-jurisdictional blood feud fought not just with blades, guns, and chemical weapons, but via viral "call-out" videos that pushed the state's justice system to its absolute limits.

December 2016: 62-year-old grandfather Noel "Duck Egg" Kirwan is assassinated in his Dublin driveway. His only crime? Attending the funeral of a childhood friend.

December 2017: His 24-year-old son, Kane McCormack, survives an assassination attempt and an intense underworld threat, only to be lured into a fatal trap by someone he trusted completely.

In this episode of Shadows of Èire, host Tim Warburton unpacks a devastating father-and-son tragedy born from Ireland's deadliest gangland war. We explore the cold-blooded psychological grooming used by cartel proxies, the chilling security measures taken in Irish courts, and the historic 2026 landmark reckoning that brought a senior Kinahan lieutenant to justice.