In The News

Michael, the biopic tracking the early years of Michael Jackson, opened to dire reviews and criticism over its silence on the child sex abuse allegations levelled at the music superstar.

The fans, though, don’t care; they made Michael a box office smash. Its first weekend broke records, with the film scoring the biggest opening of all time for any musical biopic.

It stars Jaafar Jackson, who does a good job channelling his late uncle Michael, and the music is wall-to-wall with brief detours into some aspects of Jackson’s odd life, including his obsession with Peter Pan, his first nose job and his acquisition of Bubbles the chimpanzee. Originally the script included the case of one of the boys who alleged sex abuse, but that was cut.

So without the truth of Jackson’s life, what is the point of this biopic? And why is Hollywood so fixated on musical biopics?

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by John Casey.
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Last Saturday evening, a food delivery driver was hijacked in Co Antrim, a bomb was placed in his car and he was ordered to drive to Dunmurry police station. When he got there he ran in to raise the alarm. Minutes later, a police officer’s bodycam recorded the car exploding as nearby houses were being evacuated, with two babies among those who were being brought to safety at the time.

The attack is being treated by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) as attempted murder and comes just weeks after an attempted car bomb attack on Lurgan police station in Co Armagh. The New IRA has claimed responsibility for both attacks but who is this dissident republican group?

The car bombs were crude but according to Irish Times Northern correspondent Freya McClements, what counts in these attacks is the attention they receive for the organisation and the fear they instil in local communities and members of the PSNI.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For a man who has been targeted by assassins, Gerry Hutch is surprisingly easy to track down in the village in Lanzarote where he has lived for more than 10 years.
He hikes in the morning, frequents the island’s many Irish bars – Paddy’s Point is a favourite – and is happy to stop for selfies with the Irish holidaymakers attracted by the island’s winter sun.

Irish Times investigative reporter Conor Gallagher travelled to the Spanish island last week to interview the veteran criminal as part of a wider investigation into the Dubliner’s property holdings.

Hutch has long maintained that his lifestyle is funded by savvy property investments although in a wide-ranging interview he tells Gallagher they have been “exaggerated”.

From his sunny base he talks of his political ambitions for the May 22nd Dublin Central byelection, his reaction to his son’s recent arrest in Lanzarote and the ongoing criminal investigation by the Spanish authorities into his own activities.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Ellen Coyne heard her phone buzz in bed on a dark October night in 2022, she couldn’t have known that answering it would lead to the “biggest thing to happen to Irish dancing since Riverdance.”

A dossier of messages and WhatsApp screen grabs claimed to uncover what had long been suspected about the sport and art-form; that competition-fixing between teachers and adjudicators was widespread, and that the practise hadn’t just been a problem in recent years but rather stretched back over decades.

The feis-fixing scandal as it came to be known revealed a global culture of lobbying judges to promote or demote a given dancer with the implicit understanding the favour would be returned.

“If a judge had marked up your students, let’s say a major competition six months previously, [and] it’s your turn to judge when it comes to the Al-Irelands, there’s an expectation that you have a debt that needs to be repaid.”

Despite the spotlight suddenly being shone on the alleged practise, Coyne came up against a wall of silence.

“A lot of people kept drawing parallels with the mafia, which I initially thought was a little bit over the top.”

But the longer she spent researching the claims the more she realised that those who put their heads above the parapet felt genuine fear of retribution.

“There was always this theory that dancers would get bombed, basically, where one judge would mark them down so significantly that it would obliterate their chances of competing.”

Coyne paints a picture of a world that has lost itself to toxic competitiveness. Rather than being a joyful expression of Irish culture the sport has simply become about winning, at the expense of the youngsters taking part.

“Children were put in the position of looking at the medals and trophies on their bedroom wall and starting to question what is probably the single most important trusting relationship they have with an adult outside of the ones that they’re directly related to.”

The governing body abandoned disciplinary hearings in 2024 but has the cheating scandal changed the culture for good?

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Presented by Aideen Finnegan. Produced by Andrew McNair.
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Notorious Dublin criminal Robbie Lawlor was shot dead in Belfast in 2020, when he arrived at a house in the Ardoyne area of the city, to collect a drug debt.

Lawlor was a 36-year-old father originally from Coolock, Dublin, though he had relocated to Laytown, Co Meath, for the final years of his life. He was the chief suspect in a number of gangland attacks, including five murders over a 15-year period to 2020.

Now new details have emerged, which outline the alleged planning of the killing, and the economics that underpinned it. They are contained within a legal document, seen by Irish Times crime and security editor Conor Lally. It alleges a three-way coalition acted together to murder Lawlor and how the main players in this plan stood to gain financially because debts they owed would die with Lawlor, or would be cancelled as a reward for his murder.

In this episode, Lally explains how the murder took place and the impact it had on the gangland scene.
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