Scéaleenies
Scéaleenies, noun, plural. A weekly podcast of Irish short stories. Intimate, slightly off-beat. A patent-pending blend of Irish inflection, wit and observation focused on the moment, voices and strangeness of life. Currently in between seasons - expect season 2 later in 2026 Contact: scealeenies@gmail.com
Episodes
On Midsummer’s Eve, traffic begins to slow on a motorway in the west of Ireland.
Hares run alongside the cars. Birds gather overhead. Music drifts across the road. Then figures appear in the fields, riders, antlers, banners, shadows, moving according to laws older than the motorway itself.
No one agrees on what they saw.
No crash occurs.
The official explanation calls it “an unauthorised eque...
A strange arcade cabinet appeared in a seaside amusement hall in the 90s.
Nobody saw it arrive.
John Joe Malarkey wakes up in Dublin to a leaking ceiling, broken appliances, dead buses, failed Luas machines, impossible clocks, and the growing suspicion that the city itself has turned against him.
Everyone keeps saying the same thing.
Things will be grand.
They will not.
The benches came first.
Then the town began moving between them in groups of four. Not officially. Not intentionally. Just… naturally.
Soon nobody could remember when benchcrawling had started, only that you were noticed if you stopped.
After losing his long-held job at a rural supermarket, a middle-aged man drifts into isolation, resentment, and emotional paralysis. Convinced his wife is having an affair and unable to imagine a future for himself, he sets out one night intending not to return.
What follows is not redemption in the sentimental sense, but something quieter and more recognisable: the gradual rediscovery of motion, habit, and endurance through run...
Two urban explorers descend beneath one of Dublin’s most familiar buildings and find something far older than the city above it.
In a hidden chamber, figures gather around a black pool, speaking not in chants, but in the calm, measured language of decisions and public life.
What they witness is not a secret, exactly.
It’s a system.
They weren’t exploring Dublin.
Dublin was letting them i...
Pride before the fall is what we are told.
What happens when local pride meets
ancient tradition and modern norms are abandoned
in the search for a temporary glory.
They didn’t just train harder.
They fed something.
And it worked.
There was a boy who would “go away.”
Just for a few seconds.
Everyone knew the rule:
Don’t touch him.
Count to ten.
He’ll be back.
Until one day… he wasn’t.
A disused church on the edge of an Irish estuary is reopened as a music venue. The sessions are lively, the crowd is warm, and the tradition feels alive again.
But something beneath the ground is stirring.
And the musicians have learned that the music isn’t just for enjoyment, it’s keeping something vast, old, and awake from rising too close to the surface.
There’s a hall in every town that used to be full of music.
Ours is called The Paradise.
Now it’s empty. Locked. Forgotten.
But some nights, you can hear a band playing inside.
Old songs. Perfectly played.
And when someone dies in the town…
the music draws a crowd you can’t see.
If you pass by, don’t stop.
Don’t look in.
It’s not for you.
There’s an island on estuary that used to be inhabited.
Not many families. Just enough.
They guided ships through the channel. They survived hardship. They never left.
People said it was skill.
Older people said it was a bargain.
Now the island is empty.
The last man from that line still works the river.
And on certain nights, when the weather turns and no pilot boats go out, ships are tol...
There are seven curses of Quilty.
No one agrees on the order.
The first is peace.
What begins as healing, neighbour speaking to neighbour again, land settling, old grievances loosening, slowly becomes something else. Attention sharpens. Lines harden. Memory returns at the wrong moment. And beneath it all, something older waits.
Not anger. Not mercy.
An arrangement.
🎧 A story about community, control, and what grows quietly whe...
A scholar of Irish manuscripts begins to notice a pattern.
Not in the text. In the margins.
Across centuries, in ink, print, dreams, and now machines, something has been repeating itself. Not a story, but a structure. Not a creature, but a recurrence.
It does not need to be written.
Only noticed.
This episode of Scéaleenies explores An Athfhillteach, that which returns by repeating.
🎧 Listen if yo...
A tired Dublin father goes out on Christmas Eve to find the one gift his son asked Santa for, a rocking horse he can't afford.
After every shop fails him, a strange figure by the canal offers him a beautifully carved hobby horse for free, in exchange for a small and very unclear bargain.
The gift works. His son loves it.
But over the following weeks the boy grows stronger, stranger, and more alive, while his parents begins to feel...
A man buys a cottage with “great potential,” which is auctioneer language for no heating and mice.
What begins as romantic renovation quickly becomes a quiet war. Humane traps become snap traps. Flour becomes surveillance. The walls begin to speak in scratching sounds and small movements in the night.
A story about property, vermin, and the strange rituals people invent to convince themselves they’re still in contro...
At his first international conference, funded to the exact punt and sworn not to disgrace the nation, a young Irish scholar begins exchanging chess moves with a mysterious counterpart. The ritual continues for decades across symposia, Festschrifts, and semiotic congresses, until intelligence services intervene and a foreign power claims the moves concealed a transformative technology.
“We decided, together, not to see.”
On a remote Irish peninsula, the priest was the centre of everything.
He visited homes at night. Boys came home pale. Once, during a storm, a child saw him in the graveyard, listening.
No one ever proved anything.
But the parish decided, together, not to see.
New original Irish folk horror audio story now available.
Airports - The pinnacle of modernity. Long-haul flights, high technology and ever shorter attention spans.
Dolmens - The ancient stone-age sentinels surrounded by folklore and memories older than nations and cultures.
This is a tale of what happens when the two shall meet. When modern mundanity observes ancient exceptionalism and the curious get a glimpse into the place where the veil is thinnest.
A tale about an underground practice, where participants secretly inspect strangers’ homes, document every detail, and leave no trace. As the practice spreads, the boundaries between observer and observed begin to collapse.
Best experienced in one uninterrupted listen, after sweeping your house for listening devices.
Short audio fiction
A stormy night folk tale about music, migration, and the pull west.
This episode presents a spoken reading of The Emigrant Song, a literary folk-horror story set in Dublin on a stormy night near the equinox.
As a tune rises in a city pub, people begin to leave, calmly and irresistibly, drawn westward out of the capital and toward the Atlantic. The story unfolds as a meditation on Irish emigration, collective memory, and t...
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