How To Listen To The First Episode of This Year’s Series of Second Captains Saturday, With Senator George Mitchell

Second Captains Saturday is back on RTÉ Radio One every Saturday at 10am throughout the summer. We’ve kicked off this year’s series with former US Senate Majority leader and the broker of the Good Friday Agreement, Senator George Mitchell.

The son of a working class Lebanese immigrant mother and Irish-American father, Senator Mitchell tells us how very little he knew about the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland or indeed his own Irish heritage before being appointed US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland and chairing the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, and we ask whether his rise to prominence, encapsulating the ideals of the American Dream, could ever happen today.

Having led a major investigation into doping in Major League Baseball, met his wife at the US Open and been a member of the board at the Boston Red Sox, sport has played a major role in Mitchell’s life and career. However, having grown up as the inferior athlete in a household known for basketball and baseball players, he describes how his relationship with sport hasn’t always been a bed of roses.

And Senator Mitchell feels the heat as Murph assigns him a score in this year’s race for the title of Ireland’s Greatest Non-Sportsperson Sportsperson.

If you want to listen back to our chat with Senator Mitchell, you can download the show as a podcast from iTunes or your preferred podcast app by searching for ‘Second Captains Saturday’. Alternatively, stream or download the episode from the RTÉ Player here.