The Blindboy Podcast - A cultural history of Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman Jokes

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

A deep dive hot take into anti irish jokes, kerryman jokes and Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman Jokes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Extend yourself towards the bendy hen, you heaven-sent brendons. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If this is your first ever episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. As you can hear, I'm recording this during a fucking biblical deluge. of rain.

The type of rain that you only see once a year, once every two years. All of the rain that we were supposed to get in July, it feels as if it's all coming down now. I am a huge fan

of the rain. I adore walking around in the rain while dressed appropriately. Umbrella, Gartex jacket, Gartex pants, waterproof boats, that type of garmentary prophylaxis is useless in this weather.

The rain hits with such violence that the droplets will jump up and find their way into your boats. I often dress up as a condom and penetrate the ether of Limerick City so that it doesn't get me pregnant. That's not how it works. That's not how that works at all.

I was trying to be poetic there and I forgot. I was trying to be poetic. And in doing so, I forgot about the basic mechanics of sexual reproduction there. And that's actually a poor metaphor. That's a very poor metaphor. Me dressing appropriately for the rain is not, it's nothing like a condom.

Unless there's like just one lunatic and the reason they wear a condom is exclusively to keep their penis dry and that's the only reason they do it which I haven't heard that since primary school since I was nine well there was a joke in school there was a joke a schoolyard joke

which was did you hear about the carry man who had sex no I didn't he put the condom on backwards and he went and I spent a good two years pretend that I understood what that joke meant

In the days before internet memes, WhatsApp messages, before the internet, when oral culture was still a huge part of the fabric of society, people told each other jokes, people memorized jokes and told them to each other. A joke like that, someone heard their da saying it in a pub and then just repeated it because their dad's friends laughed and brought it to the school yard. and we kept repeating it, even though we didn't really know what that meant. We received our sex education from priests, so they didn't tell us about condoms. When I was nine, like that the last of the magnanim laundries still existed. Condoms could only be purchased in chemists. They weren't spoken about. They were probably the dirtiest word that you could say around an adult would be condom.

It would bring about huge shame. and embarrassment. Speaking about condoms made the adults angry. Condoms were things that you found underneath electrical pylons. On the ground, used. Children would gather around a used condom and stare at it for days and touch it with a stick or try and make a dog eat it. Because when I was nine, touching condoms was how you got AIDS. I saw my first used condom. When I was about six, I found it on the ground and I called my mum. and showed her. And she went very silent and told me not to touch it because it was a dead ghost. And I believed her and asked her for a ghost soul ghost when it dies twice and she told

me to shut up. But I remembered the carryman putting the condom on backwards joke in my school leading to debates about putting condoms on backwards. And one fella saying, I think what the joke means is if you put a condom on backwards, the sperm has nowhere to go, so it travels back down your willy, and then your testicles explode. It happened to my dad's friend. His balls disappeared, and now he just has this hole. He showed it to everybody at the pub, and now he has to wear a nappy all the time, because all the piss just falls out around his legs. And we all knew that that was utterly ridiculous, but there wasn't really anything you could do about it. Because the young lad who's claiming that this has happened is no taking this personally.

My dad told me, of course it's true. You call him my father a liar. His very sense of identity became entrenched in defending this piece of information. I found him on Facebook a few years back around the pandemic and he joined a Facebook group that claimed that the coronavirus was caused by 5G signals. I was overwhelmed with a sense of comfort. He was still doing the same shit as a middle-aged man. structuring his sense of worth and self and identity around disinformation.

It had nothing to do with 5G or exploding testicles. It was about the shame of being publicly wrong and I wondered if his die used to wind him up for crack and make fun of him and that's where this sensitivity came from. But that joke, did you hear about the Kerryman who put the condom on backwards? You can't say to a teacher. You can't say it to your parents. Will my balls explode if I put a condom on backwards? There's nothing you can do.

No one has smartphones. You just had to sit with the anxiety of that piece of misinformation. Until you say it around the wrong person, an older lad, and they laugh into your face. And that culture, like if you look at the earliest episodes of South Park, South Park came out in 1997. The premise of a lot of early South Park episodes is a group of nine-year-olds being exposed to some usually sexually explicit adult information that they don't understand and then navigating that in the best way that nine-year-olds can. And that was the mechanics of a lot of early South Park humour.

And it was relatable because that's how it was. That's how it fucking was on the school yard before the internet. And I still think that's healthier and safer than if that happened now. And the nine-year-olds just type the question into Google and now they're looking at videos of adults having sex. At the very least, there was boundaries of safety and propriety in place for children. But also now, I reckon a group of nine-year-olds could safely go to their teacher. with that question and the teacher is trained in giving an age appropriate response which is based around their safety we did not have that we had a priest

the teachers left the room and a priest came in and told us that if you have a wet dream it means that you slept with the devil but the original joke there the carryman that's what's called a carryman joke which never sat very comfortably with me because there's a type of post-colonial internalised hatred that comes with the Kerryman joke. Kerry's an absolutely beautiful place in the south of Ireland in Munster. It's a county. The Kerry accent is incredibly lyrical.

A bit like certain Welsh accents or the Birmingham accent. It's an accent that's inherently comical. So Ireland, the people of Ireland like to view the people of Kerry as being silly and stupid and backwards. I'll play you an example of a Kerry accent because I don't think a description can do it justice. I personally find this accent incredibly beautiful. It's bird-like, it's jazz music and a wonderful use of Iberno English. You're not going to understand any of this, but this man is speaking English and he's...

It's from Instagram. It's a video of a man in his car speaking about his dog Tommy. Here we are the season on the roadside by Barlaco Beach, myself and Tommy in what is a misty, dump type of an evening. We're after a walk there. I know earlier, this is the second walk today, luckily. We got to walk in before the rain to 19 degrees. Thank everyone for that concerned about Tommy and the chicken bones. And, you know, I have my mind made up there now that I won't give him no more chicken. Raw chicken, like, some say, like, raw chicken is fine for him, but, You know, I want to read now the comments there.

You know, the bones could still, like, even that they wouldn't be cooked or think, that they could still be bad for him, that I'll, um, sometime now I'm going to ask you later or something. That's a Kerry man by the name of Liam Wilcox, who he just records videos of himself in his car with his little Jack Russell Tommy over his shoulders. And he's talking there about, you know, thanking everybody on Instagram for being concerned about Tommy because Tommy's having difficulty eating chicken bones, whether it's raw chicken or cooked chicken. That to me, that's jazz music.

That is Ireland's jazz music. That's the prose of Irish literature. And that's a pure, rural, carry accent. With all due respect, it's also fucking hilarious. Okay? It's a very, very funny accent. So we have the Kerryman joke. How do you make a carryman laugh on a Monday?

Tell him a joke. on a Friday. How do you confuse the Kerryman? Put two shovels against a wall and tell him to take his pick. Did you hear about the Kerryman who tried to blow up a bus? He burnt his lips on the exhaust. They're all really funny one-liners and they're pretty harmless. But my issue with them is a lot of them started off as anti-Irish jokes. It's a huge thing in England during the 1970s. When Irish people in England or Scotland or Wales were emigrate emigrating there

legitimately marginalised and facing institutional discrimination anti-irish jokes didn't help any of that it was completely normal to call Irish people thick as fuck big thick fucking patties backwards muck savages I actually resent that last one

because it comes from the joke that you hear about the Irish man who tried to blow up a bus he burnt his lips on the exhaust Who the fuck are ye to tell us we can't blow up buses We're fucking brilliant at blowing up buses We invented how to blow up buses You English cunts

I'm only joking I'm only joking But seriously like That one does offend me a little bit Not as an Irish person But as a writer The shovel one for fuck sake Irish people built England

Irish people were working on the construction sites Why the fuck would they not know what a pick is? What do you call an Irishman under a wheelbarrow? A mechanic. Fair enough, now now you're making sense. If we're in Sheffield or Coventry in the 1950s, big industrial wealthy cities and you're trying to make fun of an Irish immigrant

who comes from a very poor rural background where they may not have seen a car. Now that joke works. Now we're making sense with your racism. Paddy has never seen a car. He thinks a wheelbarrow is a car. Fair enough, you have me there. But don't like...

Did you hear about the Irishman who blew up a bus? Yeah, I did. It devastated the financial centre of London and now Margaret Thatcher wants to negotiate. But anti-Irish, racist anti-Irish jokes were completely normalized. You had comedians, 1970s English comedians like Frank Carson, Jim Davidson,

fucking Mike Reed, who used to be EastEnders, Bernard Manning, would have a comedy routine based around one-liners, and a huge part of that comedy routine was anti-Irish jokes, and then anti-Pakistani jokes, anti-West Indian jokes, and then you'd have the famous comedians, and then you had thousands of copycat comedians, with this one-liner racist humour. And the stinger is that a lot of this humour would take place

in what was called Working Men's Clubs in England. Working men's clubs were very important. So they weren't just like pubs. Working men's clubs started to pop up. Mid to late Industrial Revolution, 1860s onwards. Now when I said they weren't pubs, they emerged as a response to pubs. So you have this large industrial working class.

England, Scotland and Wales. North of Ireland too. I'd be surprised if there wasn't one or two in maybe Limerick or Dublin. But I'm going to stick with England. So with the industrial evolution you've got, steelworkers, miners, all of these separate industries emerging. And a new industrial working class, urban industrial working class,

whose grandparents might have been peasants in a field. And when the men were finished working in the steel mill or working in the coal mine, they'd all just, they'd go to the pub because they'd have money in their pockets, and they'd go to the pub and get shit-faced and spend all their money in the pub to a private pub landlord. You've got to realise that the Industrial Revolution and the modern industrial city, I'm talking 1750s onwards, introduced things like widespread alcoholism, the widespread trauma of addiction that comes with

industrially produced gin look up the paintings and drawings of William Hogarth from the 1700s a drawing of his like gin lane used to draw I suppose you'd call him satirical cartoons maybe but it was more of a like a social

realism and he would portray working class people living in industrial slums suffering from the poverty of gin addiction. So the temperance movement started to emerge during the Victorian era to move the urban industrial working classes away from destructive alcohol consumption. So from that comes the working men's clubs on the 1850s. Where can all the miners and their families gather to let off steam after work in a space which isn't exclusively focused on getting a shit-faced?

So the working men's club, it was a cooperative. They were cooperatives. So they weren't necessarily run for profit. Not like the pub landlord who's extracting everyone's wages for drink. The working men's club, a co-op, not run for profit. Member owned, self-governing, a social institution with cheap pints, cheap pints, because it's not being run for profit, and all the profits go back into the club

but also a space for the families of we say the miners or the steelworkers mutual aid healthcare education political association like

a working men's club in like Coventry let's just say 1870 so bicycles bicycles were a huge industry in Coventry during the Industrial Revolution

so you'd have your bicycle makers Working Men's Club So now all the workers who make bicycles They're going to the Working Men's Club They're buying pints

cheap Money from the pints Going back into the club Club is reinvesting it Now they're building Snooker tables Now there's a stage for entertainment There's a piano

There's all this money coming in from pints But it's not going into anyone's pocket There's no landlord here So now we have all this surplus money What do the workers need. Well, a lot of them live in slums and they don't have proper toilets, showering facilities, neither that they're families. Brilliant, okay, let's build a bunch of fucking showers, decent bathrooms that are plumbed. Now the workers have access to showers and cleanliness

and so that they're kids and their wives. Ah, fuck, this lad, this lad's after breaking his hand while he was making a bicycle and now he can't work. Okay, let's use all this money to have mutual aid funds and sickness funds. Let's have, let's organise seaside trips for the children of the workers here. Fuck it. Shouldn't the bicycle making company that we all work for, shouldn't they be providing some of this shit? Well let's form a union. Let's organise a union here in this working men's club and have a bit of solidarity. Let's build a boardroom. Let's have a committee. Let's train working class men into how to chair meetings and keep accounts and debate, collective administration

organization this sounds amazing how is this all possible because no one's siphoning off the profits this is a cooperative no one the workers own this the money that the bicycle makers are

earning is going back into their own bicycle working men's club for the good of all the workers and their families and what you start to see emerge is a healthy community joy and meaning that isn't centered exclusively around

just the men getting shit-faced and pissing their wages away to a pub landlord. It also creates the type of space and the type of community where yeah there's pints being drank and you're going to have your alcoholics of course. But it's not a gin shop, it's not a crack den. There's community, snooker, education, entertainment, fucking meetings, mutual aid, collective governance. The unit of alcohol, it's embedded in social participation rather than alcohol being the sole purpose of the institution. That environment is it's healthier because there's a lot of meaning present.

But crowshly, like the English working men's club becomes the foundations of the welfare state. Things like free healthcare, free housing, free education, what you'd call the social net. You can trace the roots of that to these working men's clubs. In England, by the 50s, 60s, 70s, these working men's clubs became sites of entertainment. There was a stage and the money existed to hire entertainers, singers, comedians, bands. But what does this have to do with anti-Irish jokes or the Kerryman joke? The comedians I mentioned, your Mike reads, your Bernard Mannings, whose entire set was

based around these anti-Irish or anti-Pakistani or anti-black jokes. They were on the working men's circuit and all their copycats. were on the working men's circuit. The reason it's a stinger, as I said, is all those jokes served to do was to create racial division amongst the group of people who actually had a folklore in common.

You're all working in the same mine, in the same steel mill, the same factory. I would argue possibly 40% or to 50% of the workforce are Irish immigrants. You've the wind rush generation, over from the Caribbean so you've got people from Barbados, Jamaica

working in the fucking factories. Your fellow workers are from Pakistan. So you have this beautiful space cooperatively owned by the workers. A site of union organization, solidarity, collective bargaining against the fucking factory owners. And now Paddy doesn't feel safe showing up

because he's going to get called the Paddy and the entertainer on stage. All he's doing is telling jokes about how Patty is thick. And earlier on in the day, yourself and Paddy were working together equal in the fucking mines. In some clubs, Irish people just weren't allowed in. Black people definitely weren't allowed in because there was a working men's club in Doncaster in 1968. And there was a Jamaican, a miner by the name of Ivor Brown, who was explicitly barred from his working men's club because they didn't allow black people in.

So where'd you go if you're not allowed in? So if you're listening to this from England and your grandparents are, from Jamaica or Barbados, Trinidad, Mancaret or South Africa, then you'll know the word Shibbean. If you're listening to this and your people were Irish, you'll know the word Shabin too. Shabin is an Irish word. It's from about the 1700s. In Ireland it used to mean a little illegal hut where you could purchase and drink Puccine. Puccine being our or moonshine. So the Irish and Jamaicans in London, Birmingham, Sheffield, wherever the fuck, we had our Shibines.

Or the Irish worker in the steel mill and the Jamaican worker in the steel mill go to a little a makeshift pub where they'd drink Guinness. Because Guinness is a big thing in Jamaica too and you probably had a lot of Kerrymen and a lot of Jamaican fellas going, why do our accents sound the same? Now I'm talking 1940s and 50s for that, but not just Shibbeans. Irish pubs, if you've ever wondered, why the fuck are there so many Irish pubs in England, what's that about? Why didn't she integrate? You're all working in the coal mine. You're all working in the steel mill or making tools in Birmingham. Why aren't you going to the

working men's club with all the lads that you work with? Because Bernard Manning's up on stage calling me a thick cunt. So Irish pubs come from that and Irish centres. Like my first ever live podcast that I did in England would have been London 2018. In the London Irish Centre, very strange gig. I learned a few things about doing live podcasts from that gig. In Camden, I think it is. And that was set up in 1955. As a social institution for Irish immigrants,

it was doing the job that the working men's clubs were doing for white English working class people, but this was for Irish people, new immigrants. So these alternative spaces emerge. amongst workers because of because of racism that's present in the working men's clubs where are the working men's clubs now

but 70% of them have disappeared because Margaret Thatcher brought in neoliberalism in the 80s and shut down national industries shut down the coal mines, shut down the factories give the workers who own their council houses the right to buy those houses now entered the private market but new council houses weren't billed

working class communities become eviscerated they lose their community centres, they lose their working men's clubs and now these areas are incredibly poor. You see things like men's sheds emerging in that space. You see Nigel Farage and the Reform

Party and Brexit voters emerging from that space. All those jokes did is they divided a community that should have been together as one. They all have one thing in common. Whether you're Caribbean, Irish or white working class,

You're all working class. You're all working in the same factory. You all need solidarity for collective bargaining to keep the unions strong. How did those jokes benefit in the end? The capitalist class, the billionaires, the private interests enabled by Thatcher that dismantled and took over British industry. The racism fractured potential working class solidarity by encouraging the workers to identify against the Irish black immigrant workers who shared the same material interests it made unified resistance

a lot more difficult and when neoliberalism tore apart the fucking unions dismantled the communities the police on horseback cracking the skulls of striking minors covered head to toe in sut those police didn't give a fuck who you are

whether you're Irish or English or Caribbean you're just peasants standing in the way of the class solidarity, the ultra wealthy. But those jokes, I learned that they were called chicken in a basket humor. In the comedy industry, about 15 years ago,

when I was a professional comedian 15 years ago, I used to do Edinburgh Festival and all that shit. And I'd speak to older English comedians and they'd use the term, oh, that joke was a bit chicken in a basket. And I'd ask them, what the fuck does that mean? Who was it? Alexei Sale,

absolutely lovely fella an English comedian actually he probably wouldn't even be like being called English he'd identify more as Liverpool a lot of Liverpool people who see themselves as completely separate they're just Liverpool he's an old school communist and he would have been quite

literally in the 1980s part of like a younger wave of comedian who created a new type of stand-up comedy that was opposed to the working men's club one-liner tradition I'd pints with him a couple of times

when I was in London or in Edinburgh Very kind to me when I was in my 20s and figuring out the entertainment industry and he was the one who told me about this chicken in a basket humour that all the working men's clubs they used to have these comedian circuits and those shitty one-liners

were called chicken in a basket humour because chicken and chips in a basket was the food that was being served in the 70s at these working men's clubs and I'd never heard I'd never actually heard anti-irish jokes until I went to

London in the early 2010s and I'd be going to different comedy clubs and every so often a shitty comedian would get up and make a couple of tongue-in-cheek anti-Irish jokes and I was

shocked by it and I think I told Alexei Sale about it afterwards and he went oh that's chicken in a basket that's what that is and explained what that meant But I knew those jokes. Not as anti-Irish jokes, I knew them as Kerryman jokes.

So I knew the same jokes and had heard them in the school yard, but they were about Kerrymen back home in Ireland. So we'd taken those same jokes against us and then applied them to people from Kerry. I found a brilliant academic folklore article. I was trying to get to the roots of the Kerryman joke, this article written by Leah Lothorpe. She did

deep research and found that the Kerryman jokes they didn't exist before 1973. The jokes emerged the Kerryman jokes emerged in the London Irish community in 1973.

Now the correlation that I see that wasn't made in this paper is and it has to be connected. 1973 is also the same year that the provisional IRA began their mainland campaign in England. So you now go from Paddy being a thick fuck, to Paddy being a legitimately dangerous fuck. The IRA never ever targeted a working men's club. But if you're in Birmingham or Sheffield, 1972, 73, you're a steel worker working in a mine

and one of your sons is a squaddy. I can see why these people would be afraid that their club might become a target. the Irish racism would have exploded around 1972 when that IRA campaign began. And you got to remember, you're dealing with a couple of hundred thousand Irish people, 99.9% in no way affiliated with the provisional IRA, not carrying out attacks, not even being in support of the attacks, just trying to exist as Irish people in England. And I just find it so interesting that the Kerryman joke emerges in that,

year and that the vast majority of the Kerryman jokes that I've heard, they're just anti-Irish jokes, but it's a Kerryman instead of an Irish man. And at the core of the Kerryman joke, it's an urban Irish thing, it's an anti-culture thing. I think it was a way for the Irish immigrant to try and let their English neighbour know that they're quote-unquote civilised. We're not the thick ones. That's the Kerry people. They're the rural ones. They're the mock savages. They're the ones you're talking about, the people from Kerry. Not us. And by 1976 there was a book released in Ireland, which is apparently the best-selling paperback

book in Ireland of all time, which is the book of Kerryman Jokes, released in 1976. Most of the jokes in that book, it's English chicken in a basket anti-Irish jokes, except now it's about Kerry people. Now in the London Irish context, I can see why a frightened, ashamed and embarrassed community tried to distance themselves from Irish stereotypes by picking the scapegoat of the carry person. But why did it then take off so massively in Ireland?

In the mid-1970s. Because 1973 was the year that we joined the EEC, the European Economic Community, which became the EU. Both of my parents were born into what would be considered a third world country, very rural, very poor. My dad was born in rural, West Cork. He wouldn't have had electricity when he was a child. His toilet was bushes, bringing pigs into the house in winter for warmth. Because we were colonised for so long,

Ireland was a country of extraction. The north of Ireland, Belfast, which the Brits held to the six counties, that was your industry. There's your Harland and Wolfe, your shipbuilding. But outside of Dublin, maybe Limerick, Cork City, Rural Ireland was colonised by England and was not designed for the Irish people. It was about agricultural extraction. The forests cleared and just swathes of fucking pasture land that the English used for dairy, meat, butter to be exported to their slave colonies in the Caribbean. So when the south of Ireland, the 26 counties of Ireland,

achieved independence from Britain and we were no longer part of the fucking empire, we had nothing. We'd lost half our population during the famine. So after independence, we just take back this a country shaped by fucking colonialism that's just geared towards extraction. No industrial base. No skilled working class.

We had a peasant class. None of the infrastructure for an economically independent 20th century country. And then you have Dublin. Still in absolute shit compared to an equivalent city of its size over in England and Scotland. So in 1973, when we joined

the European Economic Community, you have countries like France or Britain or West Germany going, fuck! Ireland is in shit. We're just after letting them join the EU effectively and Ireland is in a state of poverty. So the EEC had to throw billions at us for rapid modernisation.

So we had roads built telephones, rural electrification, water and storage, all of the infrastructure that we didn't have, European money paid for that. But also, because of colonisation, because of 800 years of colonisation, we'd miss the Industrial Revolution. So the infrastructure was being paid for it to attract foreign investment. That's how we end up in the situation where we are now,

where we have fucking no autonomy. And we're a country where the biggest corporations in the world just launder their money in Ireland and don't pay tax. I'm blaming the Brits on that one. That's a big reason for why so much of our economy is just going to join corporations and saying, here, come here, you won't have to pay tax. Just come here, invest a little bit. All of that modernisation, all of that investment all over the news made us feel collectively

very insecure about being a modern country. We were ashamed. We had huge shame about being Irish. shame about being rural, poor, backwards. We were ashamed about all of the things we were being accused of in those anti-Irish working men's club jokes. So then we took those same fucking jokes and used the carryman as a scapegoat.

Why did the carryman put a ladder in the pub? Because the drinks were on the house. Why did the carryman put his radio in the fridge? He wanted cool music. Why did the carryman? man stare at the orange juice. Because it said concentrate. Why did the carryman take his car door

to the desert? So he could roll the window down when it was hot. Did you hear about the carryman who had sex? He put the condom on backwards and he went. They became popular in the 1970s. We didn't have any immigrants to take the piss out of so we picked the carry people. Why Kerry?

Their accents are funny. So like Barmingham are like Wales it's just an inherently funny accent. Same thing in Spain. In Spain they take the piss out of people from Andalusia because apparently those southern Spanish people have got a ridiculous accent. But also in 1975 when it came to this EEC funding, Kerry was identified as a less favoured area, an area that needed more investment than anywhere else. Because only a hundred years previously, it had been destroyed by the famine. It lost thousands of people.

The European investment made us hyper aware that we as a nation were seen as rural, backwards and poor by the rest of Europe, that we required massive charity. So the distance ourselves from that shame, we picked the carry people down at the bottom and said, no, not us, it's them. They're the ones you're thinking of. They're the backwards rural ones. Not us up here in Dublin. It comes down to class and money. If you think of those white English working class people in the, the working men's clubs making the anti-Irish jokes. It's not just to shit on the Irish, it's to try and gain acceptance from the middle classes and the upper classes. Because if they laugh at those jokes, then it must mean that the English working class are going to be accepted. In the same way that when the dark poor Irish immigrants went to New York in the

1840s and were seen as the absolute bottom of society, it was the The Irish people that were the first black and white minstrel performers, the Irish lived in the same New York slums as previously enslaved African Americans. The Irish learned how to speak like their African American neighbors, how to dance like them, how to sing like them, through a shared economic position. And then the Irish go up on stage in blackface as minstrels and start taking the piss out of African American people to a white middle, class American audience in the hopes that ye might accept us because we're different from them.

We're not like them. We're more like ye. Now a huge difference there is I don't think any carry people were marginalized. Also, if you told it, if I went and told a carryman joke to a carry person, they're not going to be deeply offended and it won't exacerbate any pre-existing structural oppression that they experience, which they don't. But minstrel shows in America and anti-Irish jokes in the 1970s in London. Different story. I think it's time now for an ocarina pause. That rain is still thundering outside.

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Upcoming gigs. I believe I'm in Sligo. Oh wait, no. I'm in England, Scotland and Wales first. October, right? My largest ever England, Scotland and Wales tour is this October, beginning on the 8th, and Brighton at the Brighton Dome. Then over to Wales, Cardiff.

Then I'm in Coventry on the 21st of October. Bristol at Beacon Hall on the 22nd of October. Guilford there on the 24th. London is sold out, Glasgow is sold out. Then onto Gateshead on the 29th, Nottingham then on the first of November. Please come along to those gigs and recommend some interesting local guests for me. Just give me a DM on Instagram at Blind by Boat Club. Back in Ireland then for November. Gig up in Sligo on the 19th. I'd say that's nearly sold out. But you could give it a go anyway. Someone told me it was sold out during the week that they couldn't get tickets, but give it a crack.

I'm going to take December off. I want to have December off and I won't be gigging in Ireland again until March 27th. I'll do an old Vicar Street. I don't know if that's available yet. Not sure. My next Dublin Vickers Street gig is going to be the 24th of March 27. And then on to New Zealand and Australia, Parth and Brisbane are sold out. Sydney Opera House is ready to go.

that leaves Melbourne. Melbourne's nearly ready to go as well. And then Auckland in New Zealand. I hope I didn't forget one there. You'll find all tickets at the blindby podcast.e. And the English tickets are feign.co. UK forward slash blindby. Now we'll do the ocarina pause.

We'll have a little break and you will hear some adverts and then I'll be back after the adverts with some further hot takes. Ocarina in the rain. Shit, Okarina. Another joke format that I'd like to interrogate is the Englishman Scotsman and Irishman joke. And I want to point out too, what I'm speaking about this shit, I'm not being a buzzkill.

I'm being curious. They're just jokes, it's not that deep. They are just jokes and you can laugh all you want. But it is that deep. They're hugely important pieces of folklore. And they survive. are shared and are popular because they reinforce underlying structures of power and hierarchies. The Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen joke, it's highly sneaky. It's a very, very sneaky

and manipulative apparatus which absorbs Scottish people into English colonisation. An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman are about to be sentenced to death. They're up against the wall and there's a line of guns pointed at them. Just before the triggers are pulled the Englishman shouts Earthquake!

Everybody panics and the Englishman runs away. The Scotsman sees this and the Scotsman goes, flood! Huge confusion, everyone thinks there's a flood happening and the Scotsman runs away. Now the Englishman and the Scotsman have escaped. They're not going to get executed.

but the Irishman is left He has a think I'm going to do the same thing So the Irish man shouts Fire! And the triggers are pulled and he's dead An Englishman A Scotsman and an Irish man

Find a magic slide And whatever you shout When you're sliding down this slide Is going to appear at the bottom So the English man gets up onto the slide And shouts Gold! Slides down the slide

and lands into a huge pit of gold coins and the Scotsman sees this. He slides down the slide and shouts, Silver! He slides off and lands into a huge pile of silver. Now it's the Irishman's turn. As he's about to slide down, he slips,

and then shouts, Ah shit! And lands into a gigantic pile of shit. So that format there is the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman joke. That was also a chicken in a basket joke. It was an oral culture joke But if you look at it, what is it doing? It's manipulating the Scottish person

The English person Is the smart one, the level-headed, clever one The leader, the James Bond The one who knows how to get out of these situations Who uses critical thinking and a cool head The Englishman always wins The Scotsman always wins too But not by using critical thinking

or leadership or autonomy or thinking for himself the Scotsman only wins when he obediently follows the Englishman. The Scotsman is being trained like an obedient dog but the Irishman always loses

but the Scotsman it's the English saying to the Scottish and you're almost one of us we're not sure about ye we don't know the story with ye Scots we think you're one of us you're definitely not you're not as bad as Patty

but you're kind of half-paddy though, aren't you? You're a bit half-paddy. No, we're not. We're British. I don't know about that. I mean, let's look at your history. I mean, we're Anglo-Saxon. We had Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.

I mean, what did you have up there in Scotland? You had the Picks? The fuck were they? Wild cunts? The Picts? A bit of Viking going on. A lot of Irish there, though, isn't there? No, there's not.

We're British. No, no. There was Dalerita there in the 9th century. century. Huge part of Scotland was actually an Irish kingdom. Why do you speak Gaelic up there? No, we don't. We tried to get rid. You do, yeah, you speak Gaelic. You speak

bog savage Irish gibberish there on the west coast. You've got it, you have a gale-tucked. In fact, there's Scottish people and you can speak to a mock savage Irish in your own fucking language, the same thing?

What are you exactly? Are you sure you're like us? you're British? Are you sure about that? Because we think you're fucking half-paddy. Prove it to us. Prove it to us. Prove it to us. Prove it to us that you're not fucking half-patti. How do we prove it to you? We want your approval. Just follow what we're doing.

You just follow what we're doing. Go along with the orders. And you're as good as English, all right? Okay, anything, but don't call us half-Irish, please. I can't remove that structure of power and that dynamic from the Ulster plantations. beginning in 1609 the English crown colonised the north of Ireland engaged in scorched earth

genocide and ethnic cleansing and replaced the Irish people with Scottish Scottish colonisers the orange men up there today in the north of Ireland the ones doing those 12th of July bonfires the loyalists who call themselves British who wave the British flags who were not seen as fucking British by anyone

in England at all, they're just seen as fucking paddies. Those people are descended from Scottish planters. The Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman joke is actually a highly manipulative form of control and colonisation, which plays upon a crisis of Scottish identity. Because Scotland was the Picts. Then you had huge amounts of Viking and Norwegian settlement.

You go up there around Arkney and the people of Arkney in Scotland. they kind of identify as Norwegian and then the west coast of Scotland for I think around 300 years was part of a Gaelic-speaking Irish kingdom the Anglo-Saxons never went up there

the Normans did that's where you get the Bruce families and the Stuart families but I actually really fucking hate that particular joke format because it's so sneaky it's really condescending it's a form of negging it's pain

the Scottish compliments that are actually backhanded insults. Just follow us. You're not smart enough to think for yourself to have leadership or autonomy or your own identity. You're not that smart, but you're smart enough to copy us the English. You're smart enough

when we go down the slide and we say gold, you're smart enough to look for silver. Now silver's not good enough, but you're fucking smart enough. Not like that thick cunt over there who goes into the shit. You're not like Demi, eh? and this the exact same divide and conquer dynamic the exact same one is happening right now in

Ireland with far right influence campaigns as is evidenced okay 77% of far right messaging on the Irish social media is coming from outside of Ireland some of them from America some of it from Russia loads of it from the UK there's an emerging trend in the Irish far right circles. Coming from the Tommy Robinson aligned side, whatever the fuck that is, that Tommy Robinson side, where the Southern Irish, far right, are marching with loyalists up in Belfast against Muslims.

There's an organised campaign of far right messaging. The Southern Irish to identify a commonality with loyalists up north. people associated with the Shankill Butchers They were death squads Death squads English government colluded Death squads In the north of Ireland in the 70s

That killed random Catholic civilians Loyalists who burn effigies of Catholics Every 12th of July There's a very deliberate and obvious Far Right campaign Coming from Tommy Robinson Aligned that area That basically says

ye people are all the same the Muslims are the problem you're not like themy yeah and you know who's bringing all those Muslims in don't you Sinn Féin the Irish Republicans they're the ones that are bringing those Muslims in

so it turns that it identifies Muslims as the enemy and then turns a lot of people from the south of Ireland against Irish Republicans who want the unification of Ireland very effective and messy division tactics

And what's the ultimate goal of that? Like, why? It's a long ball astroturfing campaign. To create division in the event of a democratic reunification campaign. The Good Friday Agreement states that when the time is appropriate, when the time is agreed upon, the island of Ireland can vote democratically to leave Britain. if you can create a cultural seed where there's a lot of people who believe in far right messaging down south

if you can convince them that the loyalists up north are actually their kin because the real problem is the Muslims then that is exactly the type of disinformation campaign that would fuck up a unification referendum when it happens it also turns like I said a bunch of southerners against Irish Republicans and another part of the messaging is get Ireland out of the EU.

Now I said this a couple of weeks back but who wants Ireland out of the EU? Billionaires. Billionaires want Ireland out of the EU. The capitalist class. Why? Because the EU has got lots of regulations. Things like forcing Apple to only use USBC cables and all their iPhones. hugely expensive, tons and tons of regulations.

Ireland's presence makes it very difficult for... makes it very difficult for billionaires or corporations to lobby the EU when it comes to regulation because Ireland is unique because we have a thing called the Crotty Doctrine from 1987. It was a court ruling that said that some parts of the EU treaty go against the Irish constitution. So Ireland stands out as unique.

when the EU wants to change its constitution if the EU ever changes its constitution the other member states a government can sign off on that change Ireland has to have a referendum a public vote so for the billionaire class for corporations

Ireland is this tiny little island that's really inconvenient and has an inordinate amount of power because we have to have a fucking public referendum every time the EU wants to change its constitution So the easiest thing to do is get Ireland the fuck out of the EU. If you're wondering, why is 70% of far right messaging in Ireland happening from outside of Ireland?

Who's bothering their ars? Who's paying for that? That's really expensive. It's being paid for by whoever would benefit from us being the fuck out of the EU. And if you want to see that messaging play out in real time, you see it on podcasts. You'd have a podcast and they're interviewing an ex-loyalist paramilitary.

Someone who shot and murdered Catholic civilians. Now the vast majority of those loyalists, the ones that were active, were also absorbed into MI5. Collusion, the British government, the British state. But you'll see podcasts coming out now. And it's this loyalist who murdered a bunch of Catholics in the 70s and now they're doing a podcast and they're saying,

you know, I really respected the IRA. even though they were my enemies, I really, really respected them, how tough they were. Those hunger strikers, even though they were my deathly enemy, me and all the other loyalists in the H block. You know, we didn't want to admit it,

but we really respected how tough they were with that hunger strike. Did you fuck? Used to wave sandwiches out the windows or the prisons. I think now it's time to let bygones be bygones, and we need to look at the real problem now the real colonisation which is this invasion by foreigners

in particular Muslims I've seen two or three interviews exactly like that ex-parachute regiment ex-British soldiers who did tours of duty in the north of Ireland I've seen them on podcasts

and it's the same messaging you know I was in Belfast in 1976 and it was really tough and we were fighting the IRA but you know what? I really respected the IRA. Even though they were my enemy, I respected them because they were hard,

they were good fighters. And they were my enemy, but I respected them as soldiers. Not like these Muslims, not like these terrorists. I mean, the IRA, they used to phone ahead, they used to ring up before they did a bomb.

Not like these Muslims. Not like these suicide bombers. You know, I really respected the IRA. The mechanics of that, that's identical to Scotsmen, Englishmen, Irishman joke. Fucking identical. It's negging. It's the same mechanics. It's the ex-Lylus,

it's the ex-British soldier. Going, I was at war and at one point I considered you terrorists, I considered you scum. But you know what? You're all right, Paddy. You're all right, because you're not like them. You're not like those savages over there. Prove to me that you're not like them.

Do you want my approval? Yes, I do want your approval, Mr. Lylist. I'm going to go up to Belfast and wave an Irish flag beside your fucking Union Jack. this is what's happening. That is an influence campaign. That's propaganda. I can't point out exactly who's behind it.

But the same shit is happening in America, the exact same shit. Look at, there's loads of mafia podcasts now, right? So the mafia don't really exist anymore. Not like the used to. So you've got like literal, actual mafia, did 20 years in jail, murderers.

They're now out of jail. jail. They all have podcasts, every one of them. They're also all Trump supporters. And if you peel back the surface of those mafia podcasts, the messaging becomes, I was in the mafia. I shot people, I killed people. I was a criminal. But we had a code. I was an ordinary decent criminal. I was a soldier. This was much closer to the military. We only shot other made men. We did We didn't shoot women, we didn't shoot children. We had a code, we had a rule book. Not like these scumbags now.

Not like these crazy Islamic terrorists. Are these Mexicans, the Mexican mafia chopping people up? Or those crips in the bloods, fighting over colors? We had a code. We were ordinary, decent criminals, not the depravity and savagery that you see today. All of them have that exact same fucking messaging, and what it means is make America great again. Oh, wouldn't it be great if it was like good fellas or the Godfather? As if the mafia weren't absolute fucking scumbags.

They weren't ordinary decent criminals. They were vicious psychopathic bullies in their own communities. Horrible people. Yes, they did kill innocent people. They were horrible psychopathic criminals. And their code was bullshit. It only suited them when they wanted it to. And all the mafia ever did was turn against their own working class communities.

They destroyed fucking unions. busted unions corrupted unions parasites to their own working neighbours on behalf of the capitalist class that's what the fuck the mafia were

and all of them who have podcasts it's maga maga Trump Trump I hate the Mexicans I hate the Muslims they weren't like us they didn't have a code make America great again

and I would wager that a huge amount of them are on either the CIA or the FBI payroll and it is deliberate influence campaign because they were all in the federal system they were all in fucking prison the mafia were in federal prison the FBI the CIA would have leaned

on him we'll reduce your sentence or we have five murders here that we know about and we won't convict you on them we'll make life easier for your family we will we will help you all you got to do is help us what are we got to do when you come out of prison you're going to have a podcast that's going to be your new job

you're going to be paid well just fucking make sure that your messaging is consistent me. Maga, maga. The problem is the Mexicans. The problem is the Muslims. The mafia were brilliant and make America great again. And then you've got your working class American boomers who remember when things were better. Things were better because there was unions and jobs that was torn apart by the fucking mafia. These people remember, things were better about 30 or 40 years ago. Houses weren't that expensive. A regular job meant that you could have a family. Trump and his cohorts. They need those

working class boomers to not realize that what was taken away was a social net. They don't want them to realize that. They want them to think, no, shit fell apart because of all the immigrants. Because of all the fucking immigrants.

You used to have stand-off guys like John Gotti ordinary decent criminals. Now look what you've got. Look at the depravity in your city streets. It's not because the social net was taken away or because everything was privatized. No, it's these immigrants. And those mafia podcaster, that's the shit that they go on with.

What does it do? It's propaganda that justifies the presence of ice. It justifies surveillance, palanteer. It justifies flock cameras. It stops people seeing their Mexican neighbor. A fucking van, an unmarked van putting up with masked men. Stuffing their neighbor into a van and they disappear to a private for-profit prison in El Salvador. It stops the average human being who has compassion.

and empathy from going, hey, that looks like a civil rights violation. Instead, they go, not one of those Ecuadorian criminals. That's supposed to happen. I heard it last week on a fucking, on a podcast from a fella who murdered 17 people in the 1980s. And I'd say it's the same with the, there's so many ex-loyalists in the north of Ireland, ex-paraminitaries, who are active now in far-right circles and are. active in agitation and coming down south to Dublin or to Limerick or Cork and being welcomed into these far right rallies, anti-immigration and anti-Ipass centre rallies, being welcomed into

these fucking communities. All of those loyalists were in prison. Collusion between MI5 and loyalists via Margaret Thatcher was rampant. Are you telling me a lot of those. those loyalists aren't protected, aren't still in connection with British intelligence, aren't being payrolled by someone for these organised campaigns. So that's Scotsman Englishmen and Irishmen jokes. It's that. It's that. It's a type of a negging.

It's a backhanded compliment and then identifying someone else who's an enemy. And you, I've more power than you. And you want to be like me and I need you to prove to me that you're not like that scum over there. And then those jokes, this is the bit I can't understand. So I knew all of those Scotsmen, Irishman, Englishmen jokes in school. But we changed them in Ireland to Paddy Irishman, Paddy Scotsman and Paddy Englishmen. I don't know why we did that. You see, the jokes were legitimately funny and some of them were clever and we loved telling them.

And maybe here in this country, if we just made all of them Paddies, whether it's Paddy Englishmen, Paddy Scotsman or Paddy Irishman, That's that little Hiberno English intervention That intervention of absurdity Where the joke can't be Anti-Irish If all three of them are Paddies That makes no sense

Paddy Englishmen, Paddy Scotsman and Paddy Irishmen But see now they're all Paddies So you don't know who's the thick one And that's what we had to do to tell those jokes And sometimes some of the Paddy Englishmen Paddy Scotsman and Paddy Irishmen Jokes that I'd hear We'd intervene with the farm

What I mean by that? That is. So Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman and Paddy Scotsman, they die and they go up to heaven and they find themselves at the gates before God. And God says to him, I'm going to give each of ye a wish before you get into heaven. And the wish has to be something that you can do for your country. So you go first, Paddy Scotsman.

What would you wish for? Patty Scotsman says, well, there's loads of fishermen in Scotland. So I'd like the rivers, lakes and oceans all around Scotland to be full of fish forever and no one would ever go hungry. So God says, there you go. I've given infinite fish to Scotland. Then God turns to Paddy Englishmen and says,

Paddy Englishmen, what would you do for England? Paddy Englishman says, I want to build a big huge high wall all around England to protect us so no one can attack us. Alright, Paddy Englishman says God. I'm going to build a giant wall all around England. Nothing's going to get in and nothing's going to get out. Then God turns to Paddy Irishman and says,

Patty Irishman, what would you like for Ireland? Patty Irishman says, well God, now that England has that giant wall, can you fill it full of water so we don't have to deal with the cunts? And that's one of our ones. That's one of our, that's vernacular. on the fucking school yard Paddy Irishman

Paddy Englishman Paddy Scotsman that was our intervention in that all I have time for this week in the meantime rub a dog genie fleck to a trout tickled the belly of a pine

Martin dog bless