Deirdre Kinahan

speaker

239 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 24 May

Deirdre Kinahan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Brendan O'Connor · Playwright Deirdre Kinahan - “Living to retire is such a cod. None of us knows what’s coming next” · 24 May 2026 podcast

So basically what happened was at the time there had been a hundred years war in that part of Europe.

There'd been famine.

There had been, you know, great poverty and really, really harsh winter.

And Queen Anne of England at the time was trying to populate her colonies.

So this kind of great little golden book went running around all the German palatinate villages promising a great new life in the new world.

empty landscapes where you would get houses, you would get homes, you would get set up.

So Palatines literally set off in rafts down the Rhine, crossed Europe in little kind of trailers and arrived in London.

Absolutely not.

You know, they were seeking refuge.

A lot of them got sent to the West Indies.

A lot of them got sent to America.

But a handful of them were brought over by Irish planters and brought to estates in Wexford and in Kerry and in Limerick.

And they were given tools.

They were given land.

They were given housing.

But they didn't realise that they were being plucked out of one war and basically planted into another.

So I found that, you know, a really, really interesting conceit.

And I thought, right, I have to get into this story, find out who these people were, what they were fleeing, what their life was like in Germany and in Ireland.

And then I wanted to marry it with a contemporary story of emigration, because obviously, as we spoke of earlier, it really is the theme of our time.

And how did you do that?

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