CountryWide

Six of the country's biggest retailers - Aldi, Dunnes, Lidl, Marks and Spencer, SuperValu and Centra, and Tesco - have signed up to the principles of a new Horticulture Grower-Retail Charter. It arrives at a hard moment. Irish horticulture was worth €652 million at the farm gate last year. But the growers are disappearing. So how is the charter landing with the people who actually grow the food? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Grangecon is in the west of Wicklow, under the hills. Hannah Page Fox lives on a sheep and Christmas tree farm in Grangecon. A year ago, with nothing much to warn her, Hannah was told she had lobular breast cancer, and that it had already spread. The year since for Hannah has been medical. Ella met with Hannah during the week to hear how the farm has helped her get through. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On 26th of July, 75 years of waiting ended in Croke Park, and Sam Maguire is in Mayo at last. Stephen Coen has been chasing that day since he was seventeen, but he was named to start last month's final, and before throw-in, injury took him out of the squad on the day, but no one was more central to Mayo’s successful run than Coen. When he's not playing, Stephen farms cattle and sheep with his father Liam and his brother David outside the village of Hollymount. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kate O'Sullivan is the new owner of café Pónaire in Newport, County Tipperary - a café at the front, and behind it a roastery that roasts every bean the business sells. Prices in Brazil for beans peaked early last year at nearly four and a half dollars a pound. It's eased since. But the warehouses are emptier than they've been in years, nobody in the trade will tell you where it goes next, and the cup you buy on the way to work has not got any cheaper. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr Mary Burke, geographer at Trinity College Dublin talked about her research SloWaters project that encourages farmers to slow the flow of water off their lands during heavy rains to reduce the risk of flooding downstream. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Journalist Hannah Quinn Mulligan met with potato farmer Donald Tracy in Kildare whose harvest has been reduced to half due to the hot and dry weather this year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Under the EU Nature restoration plan, Ireland must draw up an inventory of artificial barriers on its rivers and decide which of them will come out to restore at least 25,000 kilometers of free flowing rivers by 2030. One of these barriers is Annacotty weir in Limerick on the river Mulkear. Head of Inland Fisheries Ireland Hazel King joined us to tell us more. And some locals told Ella McSweeney their concerns. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Black water valley has a new resident, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Ella McSweeney spoke with a cheesemaker who lives a stone's throw away from his new residence. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The city's food festival, Cork on a Fork, has two more days to run. Some of the best of it isn't happening in restaurants at all. Up on the northside, in Knocknaheeny and Hollyhill, there's a community garden that neighbours have built between them, run by the NICHE Community Health Project. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s unfortunately become part of the summer in Ireland - reports of algal blooms on our lakes, some toxic, with county councils across the country warning us to not bathe in the water and keep dogs away. Frances Lucy is a freshwater scientist at ATU who’s spent her career studying Irish freshwater. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every rural parish had homes where the latch was never down. They were called rambling houses, and they were a deeply held tradition in rural Ireland, helping bond communities. It’s a tradition that’s being celebrated by Birr Men Together working with artist Hazel Greene to collect the stories and songs that made those nights what they were. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ll begin on the hills and it’s about commonage - land own between farmers. Roughly 400,000 hectares of farmland is held under commonage, and it can become some of the richest habitat in the country. Managing it well means getting all the shareholders to agree, which can be easier said than done. So what’s the future for our uplands? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Countrywide Full Episode 08/08/26 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2018, a summer drought hit Ireland hard, and farmers were counting the cost of it for months afterwards. This year, it's happening all over again. July was the driest on record, so what does this mean for dairy farmers? Ella visits Malcolm Kidd, a young dairy farmer outside Bagenalstown to see how he's dealing with the drought. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The season is nearly at an end for Ireland's smallest and rarest seabirds, Little Terns, and they'll soon be off on their journey south back to Africa. As they nest on the ground, they're extremely vulnerable to disturbance from all of us. Della Kilroy went to Kilcoole to meet the conservationists working to protect the seabird species. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's not only Malcolm's farm affected, it's playing out on other farms, mainly in the south and southeast. So what does this actually mean for farmers, and how do you make a farm more resilient to to extremes - droughts in summers, and deluges of rain in winter? Cathal Somers from Teagasc, and Conor Murphy of NUI Maynooth discuss further. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Five new wind farms are waiting on planning approval in the Irish Sea and it appears that the sites line up with some of the best fishing grounds on the east coast. So it's no great surprise that fishermen are worried, both about losing space to work, and about what all those structures under the water might do to the marine environment they depend on. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's been one hundred years since Irish Army officers first jumped for their country, and now we are looking at how they’re marking the centenary at this week's Dublin Horse Show in the RDS. Suzanne Campbell reports. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's programme is a River Shannon special as we hear about the life along the river. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We continue our River Shannon special, and Regan Hutchins also chats to Donal Boland about life living on the Shannon, on a boat in Co Offaly. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.