CountryWide

Countrywide Full Episode 13/09/2025. (For copyright reasons the full musical tracks are not available in the podcast)

Music Network has been bringing live music performances to venues in towns and villages across the country for decades, fostering interesting collaborations. Such as this collaboration between traditional pianist Ryan Molloy and sean nos singers Séamus & Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta. (For copyright reasons full musical tracks are not available here)

For the first time in the 26 year history of the Macra Na Feirme Young Farmer of the Year competition, the overall winner is a woman, Aileen Sheehan.

Maura, from Co Derry, married a farmer from Leinster and now lives on the farm in Kildare. This morning she tells us about the changing seasons of her life as her eldest child begins school.

Back in the 90s, the introduction of Special Areas of Conservation created mistrust among some farmers, and now there is fear that history is about to repeat itself with the Nature Restoration Law. We take a closer look at those concerns with Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin, chair of the independent advisory committee on the Nature Restoration Plan.

Countrywide Full Episode 06/09/2025.

The temperatures of waters off the west coast of Ireland have been heating up, resulting in a lot of changes to marine life. Six months ago, we heard from ten year-old Jonathan Padden from North Mayo, who found a tiny loggerhead turtle on An Fál Mór beach in Blacksod Bay.

ACORNS (Accelerating the Creation Of Rural Nascent Start-ups) is a free initiative for early-stage female entrepreneurs based in rural Ireland. Central to its popularity is the idea that early-stage entrepreneurs learn best from their peers.

Fin Walsh is a dairy farmer from Patrickswell, Co Limerick who has amassed over 150,000 TikTok followers, with posts about daily life on the farm.

Dr Dara Stanley, Associate Professor in Applied Entomology in the School of Agriculture and Food Science, and Earth Institute, at UCD.

Uisce Éireann is running a pilot project to reduce the amount of pesticides going in to lakes and rivers. They think it will be easier in the long run for them to stop pesticides getting in to our drinking water than it is for them to have to take them out.

Countrywide Full Episode 30/08/2025

The fungus that causes Ash trees to die arrived here in 2012, with devastating consequences for 90% of the population. But now scientists have been investigating what was going on with the 10% of trees that will remain healthy, and they think that might hold the answer to how to restore the Ash in Ireland.

Countrywide speaks to Michael Healy-Rae, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine with special responsibility for Forestry, Farm Safety and Horticulture.

In 1988 the Guild of Agricultural Journalists put together a time capsule in a milk churn. Inside, they placed articles of the day from the main Irish newspapers and the farming press, plus brochures for machinery, and that piece of radio archive. This week the padlocked churn was opened in the RDS at a gathering of agricultural journalists.

If you go down to the woods today, particularly the woodland created by John Normanly in County Sligo, you are sure to see all manner of wild life. Together with his wife Maria, John has worked for more than twenty years to transform his fourteen hectare farm into a mixed forest with mostly oak trees, some larch and spruce and some beech trees.

The people at Farming For Nature have asked 21 of their farming ambassadors all around the country to open the gates to the public tomorrow for guided farm walks. Countrywide did just that during the week, and visited a farm outside Maynooth in Co Kildare.

Countrywide Full Episode 23/08/2025.

If you’re a child in rural Ireland, will it ever be an option for you to cycle safely to school? The Rural Cycling Collective, which is part of the Irish Cycling Campaign, want rural roads to become safe again for cyclists. More on cyclist.ie

Countrywide decided to hop on board a traditional barge which travels along the Grand Canal from Sallins in Kildare, joining other passengers to explore the nature in and along the waterway and guided by Chris McKenna. For more, go to bargetrip.ie