When a jury found in Gerry Adams’s favour in his case against the BBC, executives from the British Broadcasting Corporation sounded like they had won.

On Free State today, Joe and Dion disagree about the importance of the verdict in the libel trial. Joe explains why the jury reached that verdict and why the BBC’s evidence was flawed.

They look at how the BBC was a propaganda tool in the north for too long and why this verdict might be a long awaited turning point.

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“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” Bobby Sands famously said. But what happens in a land where children are being killed in their thousands?

On Free State today, trauma surgeon Morgan McMonagle provides a harrowing insight into his time working in the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

Morgan went to Gaza for the first time in 2024 and returned in 2025. He talks about how Israel’s onslaught over the past 20 months has destroyed a land and a people.

He talks about the playgrounds that are no longer playgrounds but graveyards for the children who used to play there. They have no other use in a land where genocide is taking place and more than 50,000 children have been killed by the IDF.

Morgan speaks about the four pillars of humanitarian work and why he has been compelled to speak out since he returned. It is not about taking sides, he says, it is about advocating for the truth.

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How do we make sense of a world when it no longer contains the people we love?

How do we make peace with the past when it’s still a mystery?

On Free State today, writer Oona Frawley talked about her new memoir This Interim Time. A book about the loss of her parents and the gratitude that comes from her children.She talks about her own father’s struggle with alcoholism and Dion reflects on how drink and its consequences can be handed down through generations.

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