Jan Carson

speaker

829 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 14 May

Jan Carson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Last Word with Matt Cooper · Jan Carson Reimagines A Plan To Drain Lough Neagh In Latest Novel · 21 Apr 2026 podcast

And so I heard this story and I thought, gosh, that's really interesting.

I know.

But I mean, if you think about it, we're talking about just after things like FDR's New Deal, where he was, you know, in the States flooding whole valleys and waterways.

blocking rivers and building dams.

And it's not completely unbelievable.

Other geographical projects on that scale have been done elsewhere.

Like a lot of O'Neill's schemes, I often say I read his autobiography to prepare for this book.

And it's the best example of an unreliable narrator that I've ever come across.

In what way?

You know, I think he believed his own hype quite a lot.

So O'Neill's ideas were often brilliant in his own head, but no one else went for them in the end.

And this was a key example of this.

But I began to investigate what would happen if you did drain Loch Nye, discovered the Victorian schemes and then came across a fantastic map which showed a group of kind of elevated bits of land in the middle of the loch.

that are just below the waterline.

And I thought, you know, if you could drain the loch a bit, those would emerge and they'd form a kind of archipelago.

And then I started to wonder, well, who would live in that archipelago?

And we're just before the Troubles at this point.

And I thought, what if a group of people sought sanctuary out there?

And I'll tell you what, Matt, the lovely thing about it was once I had my idea, I started to chat to folks around the loch.

I travelled around the loch doing some research and I met a woman in Oxford Island whose grandfather was old enough to have remembered the Victorian drainage schemes and he had told her about seeing these pieces of land actually emerge.

Showing 401–420 of 829 · page 21 of 42