EP4. Lockdowns: "Thinking in One Dimension," with guest Professor Sunetra Gupta.
Release Date: 03/10/2024
EP 21 The Great Famine in Ireland with Padraic X. Scanlon
Cassandra Voices Podcast
adraic X. Scanlan joins Frank Armstrong to discuss his book Rot: A History of the Irish Famine, which explores the modernity of Ireland’s experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans in 1845. He reveals how Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Thus, the staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were...
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EP 20 Murder Most Foul: Amanda Knox on the Lucy Letby Case
Cassandra Voices Podcast
American journalist Amanda Knox joins Frank Armstrong to discuss the case of English nurse Lucy Letby. Knox was herself falsely charged with murdering her roommate Meredith Kerchner in Italy in 2007 and spent four years in prison. Lucy Letby was a nurse working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester hospital. She was found guilty of murdering seven babies in her care in 2023, based primarily on statistical evidence and statements she made apparently implicating her. Amanda has found parallels with her treatment by the British media, and points to major flaws in the prosecution...
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EP19 Ward Bosses and Alligator Bishops: Irish Americans and Tammany Hall with Terry Golway
Cassandra Voices Podcast
For this Saint Patrick’s Day episode, Luke Sheehan asked Irish-American historian and New York history expert Terry Golway to help create an overview of the Irish American experience, with a focus on post-famine migration and the infamous Tammany Hall. Episode Credits: Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - Produced by Massimiliano Galli -
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EP 18 Podcast: Why I joined the revolution in Rojava
Cassandra Voices Podcast
For this episode we have asked our friend and contributor, Greek journalist and filmmaker, Alexis Daloumis, to sit in for an interview with Luke Sheehan about his newly released Documentary Belki Sibe. Back in 2015 Alexis travelled in northern Syria to Rojava, to join the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and soon was deployed on the frontlines as a member of the International Freedom battalion. His documentary depicts with unprecedented candour and rawness his eighteen-month journey through war and revolution, during the advances and victory against Isis, the liberation of Raqqa in 2017, until...
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EP17 Fatma Akman Lehmann - Turkey's Phrase of the Year: Gözaltina aliniyorum
Cassandra Voices Podcast
Fatma Akman Lehmann was born and raised in Ankara. From a young age, she was drawn to writing—a passion that later shaped her path toward journalism, politics, and civic activism. Now resident in Germany, she is the author of the Turkey: Lost in Translation Substack. Intended to cover politics and culture in a general way, the arrest of Istanbul Mayor and Presidential contender flung her into a far deeper engagement with events in her home country. As of the end of 2025, has been served an indictment with a stupefying range of charges, including espionage and terrorism, and was...
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EP 16 “He Bought Plato” a conversation with John Dillon
Cassandra Voices Podcast
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...
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EP 15 The Ghosts of Monto: Terry Fagan on 1950s Dublin
Cassandra Voices Podcast
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...
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EP 14 Patrick Cockburn: on Syria and Ukraine
Cassandra Voices Podcast
“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 - Produced by Massimiliano Galli -
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EP 13 Philip McDonagh: 'We Urgently Need a Global Vision'
Cassandra Voices Podcast
In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish ambassador to Russia, Philip McDonagh, who also worked for a long period on the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. He explores the possibilities for a lasting, inclusive peace between Russia and Ukraine. He also laments the expansion of military investment in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, calling for a new global vision to contend with the troubles of our time. Host: Frank Armstrong Music: Loafing Heroes - Produced by Massimiliano...
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EP 12 My Mother (at the Time)
Cassandra Voices Podcast
‘My Mother (at the Time)’ is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, fitting for an installment that marks the one year point since its inception. For this episode, host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy. A brilliant scholar, Healy was born to an unmarried mother and raised in fosterage with multiple families. He impressed his peers at college in 80s Dublin but soon felt alienated enough to start a life of intermittent exile, wandering Europe, mastering German and Dutch, evolving into a scholar of art...
info_outlineIn early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected.
This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, whose modelling assumed COVID-19 had just arrived in the West and that we had no cross-immunity from other coronaviruses against it, meaning it would kill almost one in a hundred of those who contracted it. For reasons still inadequately explored, the U.K., Irish and most Western governments – along with many in the Global South – followed Ferguson's (and others’) doomsday prediction and chose untested lockdowns in anticipation of a vaccine – a containment strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, as opposed to a (Chinese-style) elimination strategy.
Sunetra Gupta has been vindicated in her assessment that COVID-19 had been circulating far longer than initially understood, and also that it had a much lower fatality rate than Ferguson and others assumed from limited data. Moreover, it was obvious that this social experiment would cause serious harms, while the capacity of the strategy to contain the virus was unknown.
Sunetra Gupta did not take lockdown lying down. She and a number of academic colleagues authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, advocating for an end to lockdowns, and promoting the targeted protection of the elderly – who were by far the most susceptible to death from the virus.
What followed was not, as she hoped, a civilised discussion weighing the costs and benefits of each strategy, but abuse and even an attempt to have her silenced.
Host: Frank Armstrong
Music:
Loafing Heroes - https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com
PostPrimitive - https://postprimitive.bandcamp.com/album/limits
Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com