Send us Fan Mail

Ep 94---

Andrea Cosgrave set up a travel page to document a family trip to Iceland. The trip never happened. It was the Saint Patrick's weekend that the country shut down, and she was left with an empty account and a folder of older photographs.

She started posting them anyway. Six years and somewhere past twenty countries later, she talks to Florence about spreadsheets, Thailand, a passport that expired at the check in desk, and why she would rather it was hard in the sunshine.

Check out the full blog post for this episode -
https://www.voicesofboyle.com/andrea-cosgrave/

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 93---

Historian and author Paul Connolly joins Carlo for what turned into a proper local history lesson.

It starts with a ruin across the road from his national school in Mount Talbot, and a teacher named Sonny Cronin who had his pupils naming spring flowers in Latin and Irish decades before anyone used the word biodiversity. It goes on through sixteen years of senior hurling, and the void that opens when the matches stop.

Then there is the day that changed everything. Paul took a day off work, drove to Boyle, walked into King House and introduced himself to Tommy Egan. Three or four hours later he drove back to Galway with a whole book formed in his head.

In this conversation: the night Rockingham burned in 1957 and the local people who saved what furniture they could. Why King House is standing today and Moat Park is not. The Quakers of Frybrook who fed the starving from their own kitchen. Castle Island, the McDermotts, and the castle Yeats never built. Why the gate lodges survived when the mansions did not.

And a question worth sitting with. We are the most photographed generation who ever lived, and we may be the one that leaves the least behind.

Check out the full blog post for this episode - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/paulconnolly

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 92---

This week, Carlo chats with Nicola Wynne, who grew up on the Carrick Road and went on to live a life you would struggle to believe.

She spent five and a half years with the United Nations in former Yugoslavia during the war. She was also based in New York on September 11th 2001. She built a 20-year career in real estate in New Jersey. And when she lost her father and her American visa in the same year, she came home to Boyle for three years during COVID that she still calls some of the happiest and most healing of her life.

Nicola lives in Mallorca now, but this conversation is a love letter to Boyle and to what home really means.

Have a listen, and share it on to someone who would appreciate it.

Check out the full length blog post that goes along with this episode over on https://www.voicesofboyle.com/nicolawynne/

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 91---

Carlo and Florence sit down with Vincent Beirne, originally from Plunkett Avenue in Boyle, now living in the west of Ireland, for a wide-ranging conversation about life, loss, healing and the path he has taken since losing his father.

Vincent talks about growing up in Boyle, his father's profound influence on his life, losing a property at 21 through adverse possession, the shamanic practice he trained in and now works with, his understanding of soul loss, the man he helped over a 22-year alcohol relapse, the election he stood in as an independent, and his vision for bringing a rambling house back to Boyle.

He also talks about the fire, the importance of looking within, and what he would put on a billboard in the town.

Check out for full blog post to go with this episode - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/vincentbeirne/

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 90---

Carlo and Florence sit down with Dolores Sheerin, a Termon woman with a life full of stories.

From working as a telephonist in Galway in the late 1970s, where she answered a bomb threat during the Troubles and climbed onto the roof of the telephone exchange to watch Pope John Paul II bless them from his helicopter, to raising three sons in Boyle, joining the Moylurg Writers Group and discovering she could write, and travelling to Bosnia in 1994 with 26 suitcases of aid during the war.

Dolores also shares memories of characters and corners of Boyle that have largely disappeared, her deep faith, and the poem she wrote for the Moylurg writers simply called Boyle. A warm, funny, moving and genuinely memorable conversation.

Check out for full blog post to accompany this episode here - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/doloressheerin

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 89---

Carlo sits down with David McGee, a young man from Boyle who has quietly built one of the most niche and impressive YouTube channels in Ireland.

Blue Star Line, his channel dedicated to historically accurate 3D ship animations, has over 127,000 subscribers and a single video with close to 7 million views.

David talks about growing up beside the boys school in Boyle, his grandfather Dick McGee's influence on his love of photography and storytelling, making short films on a Nintendo 3DS, his obsession with the Titanic since the age of four or five, and how a school musical called All Shook Up set him on the path to technical production.

He also covers commissions from Italian documentary companies, drone footage of the hot air balloons at Lough Key that went viral, working on the film "Ann" in Boyle, and what it takes to render a 20-minute animation that can take a month to produce.

A genuinely fascinating conversation about creativity, craft and a passion pursued quietly but brilliantly.

Check out the full blog post on this episode - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/davidmcgee

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 88---

Carlo sits down with Mairead Cogan, the youngest of six children raised on a farm in the Curlew Mountains, who went on to play GAA, break her leg and ankle in 2019, discover a passion for coaching, and found her own fitness business, Supple Fitness.

But this episode is about more than fitness. Mairead also talks about two volunteer trips to Africa with Plant the Planet Games in partnership with Self Help Africa and Warriors for Humanity. A warm, honest and genuinely moving conversation about hard work, community, perspective, and what really matters in life.

Check out the full blog post - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/maireadcogan

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 87---

In towns like Boyle, a post office was never just a place to buy stamps or send parcels. It was where news arrived before phones ever rang, where pensions were collected with a handshake and a chat, and where generations crossed the same threshold week after week. The red brick building on Shop Street stood quietly at the centre of it all, watching the town change while somehow staying the same.

For decades, people stepped inside carrying letters, savings books, worries, and good news. Behind the counter for the past few decades stood a familiar face who saw Boyle through its busiest days and its quietest moments, through the shift from handwritten envelopes to digital screens, from queues at the counter to a changing world outside the door.

Today both Florence and I are sitting down with the last postmaster of the old Post Office, Paul Forde. This is a conversation about community, memory, and a place that meant far more than its walls ever suggested. Because when a post office leaves a building like that, it’s not just a relocation. It marks the end of an era in the life of the town.

You’re very welcome to the Voices of Boyle. This is episode 87 with Paul Forde.

If you'd like to see some photos of the final day of business with Paul and customers, then please click here

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.