Irish Stew Podcast: Irish filmmaker Ruán Magan

Award-winning director, producer, and writer Ruán Magan joins Irish Stew for a timely conversation ahead of his double appearance last weekend at the Solas Nua Capital Irish Film Festival, where he presented two very different visions of Ireland on screen.

Ruán reflects on a creative life that has taken him from early collaborations with his brother, writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan, through decades of boundary-pushing work that has reached audiences around the world.

He talks about growing up in a family steeped in story, language, and history, and how that background propels him toward projects that dig beneath the surface of Ireland’s past and present.

One of his festival offerings is the new documentary "Daniel O’Connell – The Emancipator," which marks the 250th anniversary of O’Connell’s birth and revisits the life, legacy, and global impact of “The Liberator."

Ruán describes the film as “a chance to step back from today’s noise and remember how one determined Irish lawyer changed the democratic DNA of the modern world,” connecting O’Connell’s campaigns for Catholic Emancipation to later movements led by figures like Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

He then turns to his Irish-language drama "Báite," a feature that takes his fascination with Irish history and identity into more intimate, psychological territory.

Ruán calls it “a story where the past seeps up through the floorboards of ordinary lives,” using the rhythms of the Irish language and the coastal landscape to explore guilt, memory, and the pull of old ghosts.

Throughout the episode, Ruán shares his approach to filmmaking as “trying to make the invisible visible—whether that’s buried history, an overlooked revolutionary, or the quiet truths people carry inside them.” He talks about balancing scholarship and emotion, why collaboration matters, and what keeps drawing him back to Irish subjects for a global audience.

As the Capital Irish Film Festival Podcast in Residence, Irish Stew took to the stage Friday evening to discuss Northern Irish film with Colin McIvor, the director of Belfast-centric "No Ordinary Heist," and Ruth Carter, one of the film’s producers, in a conversation that will be released as a future episode of Irish Stew.