Takashi Miyazaki moved to Ireland in 2008. In 2015, he opened Cork’s first Japanese takeaway - Miyazaki, and he followed that up in early 2018 with the first Japanese fine dining restaurant in Cork, Ichigo Ichie. His flagship bricks and mortar restaurant on Evergreen street has remained a constant go-to for people looking for a little bit more from a takeaway and his second restaurant on Sheares Street earned him a Michelin star. We talk about his time in Hiroshima, getting to Ireland and settling in Cork and much more. I hope you enjoy :-)

Padraig Rice is the Social Democrats Councillor for Cork City South Central. He lives in Ballyphehane and he has been a community organiser and human rights campaigner for the last 15 years. He currently works as the Policy and Research Manager with LGBT Ireland. He previously worked as a Parliamentary Assistant in the Dáil and Seanad, as a Community Worker with the Cork Gay Project, as the Welfare Officer of UCC Students’ Union and as a Research Intern with Trócaire in Uganda. He has a Law degree and a BSc from UCC, and a Masters degree in Public Policy from the University of Oxford. His vision is for a City of Equals where everyone has access to decent housing, timely healthcare and a clean environment. I hope you enjoy

Ciara Ruth represents the Cork city branch of the Community Action Tenants Union. C.A.T.U is owned by its members who fight alongside each other to win changes in our everyday lives around tenants' rights. We speak about the work C.A.T.U does, illegal evictions, direct provision evictions, the Council Executive, C.A.T.U's community campaigns and much more. Ciara also plays some really great music that accompanies the themes in our chat. I hope you enjoy!

Mick O'Shea is the director of the Cork Artists Collective and The Guesthouse and he has been instrumental in establishing a vibrant and growing sound art scene in Cork City. He studied instrument physics in C.I.T. and worked as an instrument technician in UCC. All of his works spring from his essential experience in drawing. His medium includes sculpture, drawing, sound and cooking. In 2003 he set up the collaborative practice with fellow artists Stephen Brandes and Irene Murphy, called The Domestic Godless which, through performative cooking events, explores culinary activity as art practice and tests assumptions about the cultural traditions of food in challenging and often irreverent and absurdist ways. He also works with various sound artists and composers both national and international. In 2006 he formed The Quiet Club with sound artist Danny McCarthy to promote and showcase improvised music and soundworks. This was a joyous chat, I hope you enjoy!

Conal Creedon grew up on Devonshire Street in Cork city where generations of his family traded for over 100 years and where he himself ran a launderette for 12 years during the dark days of the 80s recession. He still lives on Devonshire street and in the passing 30 years or so he has gone on to be an award winning novelist, playwright and documentary filmmaker. He has written 8 novels including Pancho and Lefty Ride Again, Passion Play and Begotten Not Made, he has written 5 plays including The Trial Of Jesus, and his Second City Trilogy - After Luke, When I Was God, and The Cure. He created 8 film documentaries including The Burning of Cork, and he has penned over 60 hours of original fiction, short stories and plays for radio.

Maureen Mclaughlin Is a Canadian woman who has been residing in Cork for the past 10 years. She is the proprietor of a small neighbourhood pub on the corner of Dominick and John Redmond street at the edge of Shandon. Her pub offers a cosy, welcoming, and safe space for conversation, and it is also an intimate venue for music and spoken word events.

Mike McGrath Bryan is currently a features journalist for The Irish Examiner and a music scribe for The Echo, both Cork City newspapers. He has been very prolific in the field of freelance journalism over the past 15 years, earning bylines in Nialler9, The Irish Post, Hot Press, Alternative Ulster Magazine; The Thin Air, Irish Metal Archive and Drop-d.ie to name a small few and he has most recently become a contributor to Bandcamp Daily. In 2021, at the age of 33, he was diagnosed as autistic and in 2022 he was diagnosed with ADHD and has since gone on to give speeches on behalf of ADHD Ireland. We discuss all this and so much more and Mike chose a great exclusively Irish playlist to accompany our chat. I hope you enjoy and thanks for supporting local radio ❤️ ✌

Albert Twomey has done immense work for the independent music scenes in Limerick and in Cork. Cutting his teeth in Limerick as a promoter he started out with the non-profit Aspersion Music Collective and by the mid-2000s, AMC were bringing bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Fugazi to Limerick. In 2003 he co-founded ‘Out On A Limb Records’ which is one of the longest running independent labels in Ireland. In 2007, he moved to Cork and began a long stint as a purveyor of all things underground with Plugd Records, he ran the hugely popular alternative club night ‘Ping Pong’, he started another independent record label called Penske Recordings, he still puts on gigs as a promoter under various monikers from time to time and he has most recently become a library assistant in the Cork City Libraries. We talk about all this and much more and Albert chose a great playlist to accompany our chat. I hope you enjoy and thanks for supporting local radio :)

Amanda Feery is a composer working with acoustic, electronic, and improvised music. She has written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, installation, and multimedia. She was the Mark Nelson Fellow in Music at Princeton University, completing her PhD in Music Composition in 2019. She has formed multiple collaborative relationships with many ensembles and musicians including Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Mise-en, Bearthoven, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Crash Ensemble, ConTempo Quartet, the National Symphony Orchestra, This is How We Fly, Chamber Choir Ireland, Dublin Guitar Quartet, Paul Roe, Michelle O’Rourke, and Lina Andonovska plus many more. Her work has been featured at New Music Dublin, First Fortnight Festival, and Dublin Fringe Festival, among others, and she has been composer-in-residence at Bang on a Can Summer Festival, SOUNDscape, and Greywood Arts. Her 2019 residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais focused on recording piano improvisations on public pianos in Paris. Her recent projects include: A Thing I Cannot Name, a 20-minute opera film commissioned by the Irish National Opera; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra; and we could be diving for pearls, commissioned by Gleo Festival. She was a 2023 recipient of the Markievicz Award, which is funding the composition of an hour-long radio work, in response to Eamon de Valera’s 1943 radio address, ‘On Language and the Irish Nation’ and she is currently a Lecturer in Composition at the University of Galway. I hope you enjoy!

Advert for my live show on Friday from 10 to 11 on UCC98.3FM.