The Blindboy Podcast - Climate action for Spring with Collie Ennis

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

I chat with Trinity College biodiversity officer Collie Ennis about rewilding, building ponds and biodiversity  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tickle of Vincent, you jaundiced morris. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If you're a first-time listener, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. I've been getting acquainted with a weighted blanket this week. It's like a blanket that's made out a chain mail.

It's covered in a soft fabric, but it's exceptionally, heavy, it's 10 kilograms, it's a 10 kilogram blanket that I wrap around my body. It had been recommended to me as an intervention, or no, I suppose, an accommodation, because I'm autistic. For ages I thought, that's a lot of bullshit. How could a, how could a heavy blanket help me in any way? That sounds like nonsense. But I have to report. It's fucking magnificent. I don't know what it's doing and I don't know what it's helping. All I can say is that it definitely fucking works. Whatever that is, I can't put words to what that is.

When I wear the weighted blanket if I'm just sitting on the couch, after about 10 minutes, I don't know, I get the feeling of the feeling you get when you've just had a really, really good stretch. I get that feeling. So I have difficulty switching off. My mind is consistently active. My body is consistently active. The example I always use is

I work in an office building and in my office building there's loads of other offices on my corridor and to save money the building doesn't allow light switches in individual offices so instead the lights turn on if you move. and on my corridor there's

there's some people who sit down at their desks and they remain so still that the lights just turn off and they sit in their offices not in darkness just with daylight coming in but they're so still that their lights don't turn on

in their fucking office and I marvel at the impossibility of that like do I have one of those lights in my office do I fuck I had to have a manual light switch installed in my office because I can't stay still and consistently stimming moving my fingers, moving my legs,

getting up walking around non-stop movement which meant that my light was on all day long because I kept waking it up and I had to get a manual light switch installed and then a soft light in my office so that the bright lights wouldn't over-stimulate me and it wasn't easy getting that light either when I went to the company that owned the building

and I'm like, I'm autistic, I need to have a fucking light switch. They were like, fuck off. So then I had to threaten them with the Employment Equality Act of 1998, which is what you can do. If you're diagnosed autistic or nora divergent and something in your workplace is overstimulating you and fucking with your capacity to do work, your employer is, they're obligated to do a,

called a reasonable accommodation and that's under the Employment Equality Act. But I'm consistently moving, consistently flicking my fingers, stimming, a way to, that's how I relax, that's how I feel normal. Some neurotypical people obviously they just don't need that, as I can observe in my office. They can just sit still for hours at their computer so still that they don't turn on a sensory light, but for me I've got to move all the time, which means rest can be difficult. Just like having a nap sitting down, that can be difficult unless I induce full-on meditation. But when I wear that weighted blanket, it's whatever about the pressure, the pressure of it

all over my body, whatever the fuck it does, it takes about 10 minutes to kick in. it appears to soothe the part of my brain that wants to move it appears to soothe that and I'm able to sit comfortably with stillness with not moving with not needing to move with just being fucking still and then I begin

I experience the feeling of rest see I don't get rest I get sleep but like rest I'm going to lie down in the middle of the day I'm going to sit down in the middle of the day and recharge and do nothing I don't get that I don't have that

due to being noradivurgent the weighted blanket allowed me to have that so the thing is there's no science behind it there's no evidence behind weighted blankets it's all anecdotal it's autistic people noradivirgent people saying this thing here really helps me and my sleep then

as well. I've been putting it on when I've been sleeping and I've got a sleep tracking device which is I don't know how helpful it is because when I wake up in the morning I get a report on how I slept and it's always like well done you just had a shit sleep so I wake up with a feeling of failure before I've even had my breakfast so I'm not sure how I feel about sleep trackers but I use them but since I started wearing the fucking weighted blanket I'm getting the same amount of hours of sleep as I would have gotten last week, but the quality of sleep and I can see it is way better. So I'm not sponsored by weighted blankets, I'm not selling weighted blankets.

I haven't been compromised by big weighted blanket. I'm just saying if you're noradivirgent, or if you just have trouble switching off, maybe consider getting your hands on a weighted blanket, they're not very expensive. I'm really shocked with how fucking good it is. So anyway, I have a wonderful guest for this week's podcast, which that's like a little week off for me when I get to have a guest on. Although I'm being a bit harsh on myself, because for other podcasters, that's the job. Most podcasters just have a guest on every single week. But when I have a guest on, it means I'm not doing like three or four days of research and writing to write a monologue podcast.

so it's a bit of a break when I get a guest on and have two gigs this week so it's the end of my Irish tour so I'm very grateful to have a guest I was in Vickers Street last night lovely intimate quiet Monday night gig you could have heard a pin drop

lovely audience and because of the time of year it's it's mid to late April which is a really really important time of year for biodiversity for the ecosystem. Now is the time for individual action to create meaningful change through individual action.

We're at the beginning of spring. The soil temperature is rising. There's increasing daylight. Animals are coming out of hibernation. Flowers are coming up. Those flowers need insects to pollinate them. Our food crops which are under stress because, as I mentioned two podcasts ago,

the price of fertiliser went up. So right now is the time to build a tiny little pond, to plant some real native wildflower, to not mow your lawn, to place bits of wood out for insects to live in that wood, to put cardboard over some grass

so that insects can live underneath that. Now is the time if you want, to plant a little bit of your own food and you don't even have to have a garden. It can be as simple as instead of throwing the top of that carrot in a bin, you grow it in a flower pot or a potato. You could look at how you can impact your own city, find the vacant lots and put some native wildflower there. Build a little illegal pond. Now I understand that there might sound a bit dangerous because that could be a drowning hazard for tiny little children. But as the guest whom I'm about to bring on explains, a pond doesn't have

to be something that's even, a pond can be a bucket of water that's left alone. So I had the most wonderful chat last night with Collie Ennis. Collie's been on this podcast a few times. He's one of my earliest guests back in 2018 and I've had him on a few times since. Me and Collie just click. He's another guest. I've said it before. There's been multiple guests on this podcast over the years. And when I've really, really clicked with these people and they've become friends, about 80% of them, it turns out,

they find out that they're autistic or neurodivergent. And Collie is one of those people. I was just like, this fella, when we chat, we fucking click. No issues whatsoever with small talk. We just go straight into it. And it's that example of what's, what's called double empathy. And double empathy is a beautiful theory

because it... It posits that it's not the neurodivergent people that are defective or wrong when it comes to social rules and understanding and communication. It's not autistic people struggle with small talk. Autistic people struggle with eye contact.

Autistic people struggle with this and that and all this social communication. Instead, it's... No, it's a miscommunication because a lot of neurodivergent people don't report these issues when they're speaking to another neurodivergent person. And that is 100% my experience. A lot of guests on this podcast who've been recurring. There's a couple of others who I won't mention because I don't know if they're public about it yet. But people who I've clicked with and then they mail me and go, turns out I'm autistic.

Not just this podcast, in my fucking life. Quite a lot of the people who I'd end up, I'm out in a pub, I'm overstimulated, I fucking hate it. And then there's one person and I can chat to them for hours and it's grand and I feel okay. Those people, they end up getting diagnosed as noradivargent in some way. And that illustrates double empathy for me. So neurotypical people can communicate brilliantly with other neurotypical people, but whatever set of rules, that is. ever set of rules that is, and then the noradivirgent have a different way. So it's the communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic, it arises from

a mismatch rather than the deficits solely being located with the autistic people. It just so happens that there's way more norotypical people and it's a norotypical society. And I just like that reading of it and like the weighted blankets. It's all anecdotal. It's just a theory. There's no evidence behind it. But it's something that aligns up my experience. But anyway, look, I had an unreal chat with Collie last night.

Collie is the chief biodiversity officer in Trinity College. But he's big into science communication and citizen science. Collie goes out into communities and teaches people about biodiversity and how to build ponds and the importance of insects and frogs and he's so passionate about it and so deeply interested in it and his passion is completely infectious and Collie's the person who got me into biodiversity. He's the person who really got me thinking about it and caring about it and understanding it you know. So have a listen to this and hopefully you'll come away from it wanting to build a pond or

plant some wildflower or ring your local council and get them to stop mum. lawns or destroying habitats. I don't know what to start with this, Colley. I suppose the first thing I want to ask you is the first time you came on this podcast was about 2018. And you were in Trinity College but working as a security guard and you were there as like a very, very passionate man about biodiversity. Now you're the biodiversity officer. You've a completely different fucking job. How are you finding this? the mess? Yeah, it's weird.

I mean, like, for me, walking full-time in a regular job and then doing the conservation walk on the outside research associate and zoology and then working with the herpetological society, building ponds and doing all that, was fantastic. But I could always step away from it.

But now I'm kind of full-time in it. It's a very different energy. It's deadly, but it is a heavy industry to be involved in. And you're constantly having to kind of communicate this message that nature is wonderful and nature's brilliant but also things aren't great and we need to do something about it so that kind of it being full time now it's taking a

little bit of getting used if that makes sense because what i wanted to something i've noticed in the eight years i've been doing my podcast race there's certain guests that i have on a lot because when I speak to these guests, I just click with them. We have Crank. You're one of them. Thank you. Every single one of these guests has also found out that they're artistic. Including you. I found out a long time ago. I was in tech as an electrician and I couldn't get colours right. I couldn't do any mats. I couldn't do anything. I was just all over the shop. but I could tell you who beat Batman

up in issue 27 of DC comics from 1974 do you know I mean? So I had a very weird kind of a mind and I could tell you like the you know how to breed giant African horn frogs at you know a certain time of year or whatever all these weird

stuff that I was mad into so one of the lectures actually in Kevin Street was really sound and he gave me a test read this look at this how many cows here what's all that kind of stuff, you know. And he came back to me a couple of weeks later and he said, you've got ADHD with autism mixed in and dyslexia. And the only thing I remember about it was dyslexia because I was thinking, well, that explains when I'm shy at maths.

So that was it. And I never really thought about the other thing because it didn't mean that to me. Nobody talked about it. Like it was only me early 20s at the time. So it was the dyslexia was the big thing. But it was only years later that I was reminded. by my wife that I had the autism and ADHD. What has me thinking about it is when you were working as a security guard, right? And then the biodiversity was a passion. Security guard is a great job for autistic people

because there's so much fucking time by yourself. Yeah. But now you're going out into schools every single day. You're speaking to people all the time. You're having to perform being a human, being like that's my job and I go mental after a while you know what I mean yeah what I're doing that how's that on your nervous system and it's like I said it's been a mad year and like there's a lot of downtime that I would have had in the

old job where I could read or listen to you know people talking about big foot or whatever just something that I'd be absolutely nothing to do with the heaviness the conservation work or just communicating with people all the time so like I'm lacking that so I have to literally deliberately go out my way to pick up the fishing rod and go down the river and get lost I go up to the woods

and look at tadpoles and all the stuff that gives me a bit of peace and so I'm really having to change that a battery does that return absolutely yeah it's like spinach to pop-boy it's fucking brilliant you know it's like as soon as I get it into me being alone with tadpoles

it gives me a great energy and a great set of sense of peace it's just a lovely little thing it takes me back to being a kid especially like when you had no worries it's just it's one of those things that really settles me nerves

when you were a small child like when did you start to become obsessive about frogs or insects and how much of that obsessiveness made you like weird to your friends I always got on with people I was good with people I never had that

that problem but they always thought it was a weirdo like in a nice way okay yeah yeah he was mad in us but yeah since I was about seven or eight I would have been mad into like

my dad built a pond in the back garden and crumlin and back then like you know there wasn't pond liners around around at the time well not not where I lived, but he made it out of bin liner. He just got a load of layers of bin liner and took a hole and put it in and then put the water in. And then he got...

But he's not doing that just because he went to the pond? Yeah, I think you saw on, like, the staple Sunday Night View would have been Gardner's World and the Antiques Roadshow in my house. So, yeah, and I still watch Gardner's World. I love it. And, yeah, I think he saw on that and he was like, that'd be deadly. Because I was already reading books and obsessed with Attenborough and... On the subject of pans, right?

I said to you recently, I sent you a video of a fellow who was, he had a panned out his back garden and it was self-contained. So there was no pump, there was nothing. And it was aquaculture. Yeah. So what I liked was you can just have a pot.

There's fish inside there, there's plants, and it filters itself, and you leave it the fuck alone, and there you have it. And you said to me, that's a great idea, but can you do it without the fish?

Yeah. And I was like, why? Why are fish a bad idea? Because there's plenty of space for fish everywhere in Ireland. They have the canals, the rivers, the lakes. There's loads of homes for fish. People want to keep fish in an ornamental hunt. That's brilliant and fair-plaiting.

But it's not a wildlife bond. Because anything that lands in there tries to eat, the fish are going to make a meal of. So most of the aquatic insects that we're trying to give a home to, they won't be able to survive. So when you take the fish away, what you're doing is recruit. creating these old areas that used to exist in Ireland for them to live.

For example, you know, you drive around the countryside if you're sitting in a train in particular and you look at the window, have a look out the window as you're passing along. And you'll see lots of troughs, metal troughs for cows and sheep and animals, horses to drink out. Before them, they had farm ponds. We had farm ponds all over the country, little wet patches on the grass. and they were all filled in on the instruction of better farming practices

by the government. Would they dangerous the kids? Well, I mean, it was more to give more land for grazing. But these were pans, didn't have fish in them, but these alone were sustaining flies.

Absolutely. Dragonflies, amphibians, which is my obsession, diving beetles, all the kind of the small aquatic midges that come up that feed bats. I mean, these pond ecosystems are so rare nowadays that there's no fresh water, small fresh water bodies without fishing them. The numbers just absolutely crashed. And what we need to do is kind of rethink what you'd like to have in an attractive pond in your backyard. And everybody should try to have one and it doesn't have to be a massive thing.

It can be exactly what your may have done. The thing is there, right, is... So first off, I just... When you told me that, I found it fascinating. I found, like, the introduction of troughs and farms, how that could, like, eliminate so much biodiversity. But the big thing is, you're speaking about water beetles,

you're speaking about mosquitoes, things like that. Why should we give a fuck about them? That's... Most people got... Who is the fuck? I don't give a fuck about water beetles, collie. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?

I do. I know now. Like, you're the person who got me to care about water. beetles. I didn't. I was just like, why would anyone care about insects? And then you were like, wait, no, hold on a second. This is about, this, this is about food systems. Yeah. This is, so what's the importance of the type of biodiversity that you would see on an Irish pan that doesn't exist anymore? What's the benefit of them? Well, you see, everything is connected in this food web. And the likes of, especially water beetles and the cryot beetles are quite chunky and large. So they're

feeding the bigger bats and the bigger boards. They're feeding on the wing. Because the water beetles, even though they're called water beetles, actually can fly like all beetles. They can flip, come up to the side of the pond, flip open their outer cases of their back. And then these origami wings come out and off they go. And some of them are like little helicopters and they'll take off.

And the gas thing is, so your auntie gets her lovely class table from Woody's. And she's sitting now having this cider of an even, this has happened loads of times I've gotten contact over. and people think, next minute they hear, a helicopter and a big beetle crashes off the table. Now, why is that happening? The beetle thinks the reflection on that table is pond war. And it happens all the time.

I think it's hilarious because people are like, there cockroaches attack me outside the canal. But it's actually just beetles coming out of the canal, looking for a new place to breed, new places to kind of set up new colonies. But if you get rid of them and all their numbers go down, because they're struggling can ask, for example. And that's the only thing. And their numbers go down.

Then you're taking away from Swift's diets. They need these bigger, bigger, chunkier insects. The larger bats that we have would need these chunkier insects. So it's not like, you know, everybody's played kerplunk. Yeah? And you know when you're playing kerplunk and you pull out the straws and you're thinking, I'm getting away with mortar here. And you can just pull one straw.

It doesn't have to be any particular one, anything looking special about it or anything. You just pull it and everything goes. And that's what happens with food webs. You know, they can just disappear overnight. If just a particular species and you might know which one it is. So everything has this value for the food web. Also, from a kind of a moral point of view,

fields have every right to be here. They've been here for 300 million years. Let them get on with it. And it costs us nothing to give them. home. And from a selfish point of view, it's really cool to observe their life cycles. Their young, their lava are called water tigers and they look like something out of aliens. They're the ones the big fangs. And they sit there in the water like with their ass is what they breathe through, which is hilarious. Like your man in the shower. But they have this tube where they

sit up in the water and they have this really ominous position where they're just kind of half the jaws clamped open. So you can imagine these big huge curved jaws. Now these things are the length of my finger and he's sitting there in the water and Mr. Tadpole or Mr. Stickleback comes along, having a lovely day out. Butchum.

Like, just like a bear trap. Have you witnessed this? I watch it every night. It's like Battledong out my back garden. It's like crazy. And that beetle then is keeping an eye on the tadpole numbers. Yeah. Yeah. And then like, so that all keeps

he's keeping them in check and then it was gas my daughter screaming one day because she didn't know what this thing was running across the driveway and it was the beetle larva coming out of the water

to form a cocoon to tour it to a beetle but as he was running do you remember Star Trek the racket? Yeah yeah do you remember the thing that came out of his ear

horrific it looked exactly like that it looked like so that's the transitionary period they wrapped himself in a cocoon and then they turn into

this beetle called the Great dive and beetle and they're huge absolutely huge. They're one of our biggest beels. Are they very vulnerable in that exact moment? Very. That's why they're panicking. That's a tiny moment where they're going from larvae

and it's somebody's job to eat them at that moment. Oh yeah, big time. So they're completely exposed but then once they get into a bit of mud they can cocoon themselves up and then just begin this transformation. And look, they're not as pretty as a peacock butterfly. A merrimo. But they are as fascinating and very important and fascinating to watch.

So there's a couple of reasons. I hope I convince you why you should keep these beetles around and give them a little bit of space, which they'll make use of. If you give some space for, I was really proud today at Trinity College because I was walking along with a delegation of people from American colleges and we were bringing them through our welfare meadows and we started a thing called Logs for Life. I came up with the name.

it's a bit of an affordsant name when you think about it, but because the students made front of it, but what we're doing instead of getting rid of the trees to fall on campus and giving it to people to carve up, we're leaving them for nature, as nature intended. And you're...

Mushrooms are you getting class mushrooms? Mushrooms. We're getting all sorts of beetles coming in to feed it in the centre of the city. And today, while the delegation was there, I saw a very rare minor wasp. It's a single, they do solitary nesting. And it was great to see it in the middle of the city

with all these people there and I was telling them about it. And it's just, again, we left a bit of space for nature. We managed to habitat with nature and mind. And it's really woken. And how often, because most of your waking life is looking for insects in a way that I can't even imagine, you know what I mean?

And if you're saying you saw this particular wasp and it got you excited. But it's stuff that you'd see maybe in the hills or around Wicklow or down in the burn. But when you start to see it in the city centre, that's what really excites me. We're seeing frogs back in Trinity hopping around the front square. We've got nukes. We've got dragonflies that are freaking students out flying around the path in the summer. That's fantastic.

Like compared to like 20 years ago. So what I love about that in particular, and you were the person who got me into plenty of, in wildflowers. And I had a, it's, see, it's, it's not just about seeing cool things, right? It's, when I first planted native indigenous wildflower, which is fucking hard to get, unfortunately, there's one website and it's very difficult to order that seat. It's quite difficult. He wants you to write a check and send it in the post. But like, it's the real deal, when you go to B&Q and look for wildflower seed, it's not like native wildflower seed. It's not like native wildfire seed, it's from Poland or some of it's from America.

And what I learned with that is when you plant it, you do get wildflowers, but they might die that season and not regenerate. But if it's literal indigenous wildflower seed, you can personally help an ecosystem. But I had wildflowers out my back garden, only about six foot. And a year later, I started to see insects that I had never seen in my fucking life, that it didn't even know existed in Limerick. And there they were in this tiny small. Brilliant.

And it was, the fact that they showed up gave me hope. That's what was important. When I felt doing something about the climate is pointless, when you see nature appear spontaneously, it's phenomenal. Like one of the most beautiful facts you ever told me, and I want you to tell the audience, you were saying that if I had a panned out my back garden, eventually a fish might show up in it.

And I was like, go and fuck off. How the fuck in Limerick City is a fish getting into my fucking pond when I didn't put them there? How did the fish get in? Yeah, so a starling or a similar board will go down to an area where fish have spawned. When fish spawned, they spawn on mass. Or like sticklebacks, for example, they make little nests, which is really cool to watch as well. What's a sticker bag? Stickleback is a small, they used to call them pinkines back in the day.

They're small little native fish that used to be super common and the males have the red kind of underbelly and they've spikes on their back. The dog pond in the Phoenix Park still has a great population of them. But say Mr. Starling is down at the dog pond and it's a hot day and he goes for a wash in the spring and it washes his feathers and washes his legs. Some stickleback eggs can stick to the legs

and he'll fly off and maybe get touristy again later on the day. Land into your little book. pond and then one day you were there going how the hell did the stickle back get into my pond or how the hell did the roach get from here to here and it's just purely down to this evolutionary you trick that the fish came up with to help them disperse naturally it's really cool and lots of stuff like that daphnea which is a type of waterfully blows on the wind so you can just put a bucket there in your back garden and then wait and if you're anywhere within a pond miles of the pond, eventually you can look

into the water and you'll see these little creatures darting around under Daphnea, which are like the real, the kind of plankton of fresh water and they start off on the wind as eggs blown out. And what did they do? Like did they go to the surface of the water and reveal themselves and then get

taken away? No, no, so say if they were in a bucket or a pond or a puddle and it dries out and that their eggs are in the dust, yeah, it's mad or the edge of a pond. As a reservoir goes down and there's dirt there, the eggs could be in that,

and as it dries up and get dusty, they're off it goes. And as soon as they get wet again, I think everybody would have had, what's already called sea monkeys when they were younger? Do you know that they were made by a Nazi and were used to fund the Ku Klux Klan? I did not, but there you go.

No, seriously, look into sea monkeys. You remember sea monkeys, don't you? You buy them in the pet shop. The fella, they're brine shrimp. Yeah. But the fella who figured out, oh, I can make this into a kid's tie. He did.

But he used those millions to fund the KKK. There's a fact. Well, we'll stick with the Daphne then. Yeah. What would we fun with them? Let's have a small little ocarina pause now before we go back to the chat with Collie, because I loved even listening back to that there now.

I'm going to play the ocarina and you'll hear an advert for her. bullshit, all right? I'll try and play it gently so that I don't. You know, some people like to go to sleep to this podcast and I don't want to wake them up with an aggressive ocarina and the purpose of the ocarina is to warn you that you're going to hear an advert and it might be someone with a loud Dublin four accent. So we play the ocarina to warn you. I'll play gently. Bit high-pitched. Way too high-pitched. What can I do? That was the Ocarina boss.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. If you like listening to this podcast, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, mirth, merriment, education, whatever the fuck has you listen to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page because this is my full-time job. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay all my bills, it's how I purchase all my equipment.

It's how I have the time to deliver a podcast each week, to write it, to go on the road to do gigs. This is all possible because of direct listener funding. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee. Once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Just listen for free. Listen for free. Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free.

So everybody gets the exact same. podcast, I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. So that's Patreon.com forward slash the blind by a podcast and also keeps us fucking independent. Advertisers come here as guests on my terms. That's very rare. Usually advertisers come in and they're like, well we're advertising on your podcast so therefore you need to get more listens. Here's some ideas about how to get more listeners. And if you don't, if you don't do what we ask,

then we're not going to advertise on your podcast. Have you tried being more controversial? Have you tried speaking about things that you don't give a fuck about just because these things are popular? And I've worked in television. I still work in television. That, that infrastructure,

that model, that way of creating right there, that what fucking destroyed television. destroyed it. Ideas, creativity, originality, risk-taking, passion all out the fucking window. Let's aim for consistent mediocrity just to keep the advertisers happy. We don't have to fucking deal with that. This is listener-funded. No advertiser has any say whatsoever on the content of this podcast. I show up each week and I speak about what I'm legitimately passionate about. That's what I've done every week for eight years and that's what I love.

I love doing. That's what gives me a sense of purpose and meaning and it's what has me consistent in my output. So just a couple of gigs now. I'm really happy to be at the end of my Irish tour. I loved doing the gigs and getting to be in a room with people who are listening to this podcast and have the crack. That bit is fantastic. But getting home at 4 in the morning once or twice a week, that bit is not fantastic. So I'm really looking forward to a couple of months of quiet. But this Saturday, I mean Galway, I mean Galway at Leisureland, that's that gig that was rescheduled because I got the chicken pox.

Come along to that if you want. There's very, very few tickets left. That'll be good crack if you're on Galway. Then, on the 5th of, 9th of May, daytime gig, right, 1.30 in the day, up in Maynooth, at Maynoot University as part of the Arts and Mines Festival. I've got a cracker of a guest for that. That'll be really interesting. So if you're doing fuck all at 1.30 on a Saturday, come along to that one. Then on the same day, at around 5 o'clock, I'm at Wellfest, which is at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. A lovely fucking venue. Wonderful venue.

Wellfest is at that, and I'm going to do a live podcast. Even though I'm aware that I just spoke about needing to take a fucking rest from gigging. And now I just told you I'm doing two gigs in the same day. But that's the last of it. That's the final ejaculation, if you will. Then I'm chilling the fuck out. And my next gig is until the middle of June. Where I'm in Berlin for two nights?

Uh, where is that in Berlin? The Babylon Theatre on the 19th and the 20th, I believe. 19th is sold out and a small amount of tickets left for the 20th. Looking forward to Berlin. Apologies last week for calling the Czech Republic, Czech is LeVos. A few of my listeners from the Czech Republic mailed me to correct me and I apologize for that because that's... It's like someone calling Ireland, Britain. Alright, so sorry about that.

I know what the Czech Republic is. It's just I'm old enough to remember when a country called Czechoslovakia existed and it's just stuck in my head. Sheffield in July at the Crossed Wires Festival on the 5th of July. Then October, big tour of England, Scotland and Wales. So we're talking Brighton, Cardiff, Warwick. No, sorry, Coventry, the Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry. Bristol, Beacon Hall, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. And I know those gigs are a long time away, but a lot of them, London and Glasgow,

I think, I haven't gotten official confirmation, but there was people saying they can't get tickets anymore for those. So if you are coming, don't wait because those tickets will be gone even though it's months away. So that's that tour. Now back to the chat with Collianis. I don't want to say you've moved away from dangerous insects, but you've

become much more like about biodiversity, but how I first came across you is you were the fella who had, I had to ask him to stop eventually. You came to a gig in Korkman with the most poisonous spider in the fucking world. Inside in a Chinese

takeaway container. And you said that three or four times, I'm like, it's a lockbox. It had specific locks on it. It wasn't just it. But it wasn't. It looked like a Chinese takeaway container. But I would not bring the most dangerous spider in Ireland to your gig in a Chinese takeaway box. Okay. That might be my anxiety.

I don't blame you. My anxiety, but it was the six-eyed sand spider. Yes. Yes. And look, come here. the claim is that their venom is so strong because they're desert creatures and desert creatures tend to have this really funky venom because if you live in the desert everyone wants to eat you

and anything that passes by you that might be a meal you have to be able to kill it quickly hence the massive amounts of or their poisons or venoms that they carry in their body and you also introduce me to two wonderful lads in Galway who work in what's called the Venom Lad. Yeah.

Which it's an amazing thing. Like, sounds like a dodgy nightclub. It does. It sounds like a dodgy nightclub, but Jesus, they open my eyes up to how important venom is to medicine. Like even,

like the most revolutionary drug of the past three or four years is Ozympic. Like we all know Ozempic and GLP drugs. That comes from the bite of, is it, Egilip? monster? Yeah, it's based on their their venom. And venom has so many uses in general. I mean, everything from

breast cancer to strokes to erectile dysfunction, all sorts of shit that venom can sort out. And these animals again, it's kind of like we're kind of putting a human dimension

onto what they're worth. Yeah. But they're just living their lives. They're just trying to get by and survive. like they have for millions of years. But again, if you're going to quantify it and look at it in a human-centric way, if we get rid of them,

if we lose rainforests, if we wreck deserts, if we kind of lose all these important habitats where these creatures have been home for millions of years before we were around doing what we do. We're selling ourselves short with these potential cures for all sorts of stuff.

But it's, I guess I had on this stage, the last gig I did here had Professor Jane Stout who you work with and what I boss what I was chatting to Jane about was how in your field

in order to get people to give a shit about this stuff you have to make the argument for capitalism so when we're speaking about you know venom it's like well well they're not just insects

they can cure diseases and the other thing we were speaking about was it was the UN's was it the biodiversity report that the UN did. The UN did this huge report where they had to use the language of

finance. No, it was water. The UN said the world is approaching water bankruptcy. That because of how we're exploiting the ecosystem, that fresh water is disappearing. But all the language that they

used was they had to go, this is like having a bank account. And you think the money is there, but it's going disappear. And they had to do this because they need politicians and people in finance to care about this stuff because these are the people with the necessary power to try and stop it. Yeah. Which is bleak. It is bleak and when you're kind of trying to do science communication and I'm talking about the importance of dragonflies, it's hard to get across as somebody who'd be very financially minded. That would be their foremost thoughts about what's it worth. But

you try and get the message across as best you can. Now, I find the best way I reach out to people, and I'm doing a lot of work with the Trinity Access Program at the moment, which is a great program where Trinity goes out to less fortunate areas and tells people, look, anybody can go to Trinity and make it go. If you're interested in stuff, and when I go out to these communities, I bring a jar of padpoles.

and I'll sit down with the kids and talk and the parents will come in there go, I haven't seen tadpoles in 20 years and I go and I remember there used to be a little pond in the park over there and there was loads of tadpoles and we catch them and we watch them and turn into frogs

and you can see that child like wonder coming back into them in adults. In adults and then when you reach the adults because the kids are brilliant there's a couple of things about kids

like I mean kids are naturally curious all them and they're naturally into nature they are they all there some of them are naturally afraid of it but into it at the same time but we were digging a pond for the Trindy Access program I went to school

in Drimna and we were digging a pond and these were 50 year kids and as we were digging in I was getting them excited about we're going to put the tadpoles in we're going to put in native plants and explain all to them and next minute they all jumped back and said what the fuck is that

and it was an earth one And I said, it's a worm. And I went, it's not real. And I'm like, yeah, it's an earthworm. Have you never tried to pick it up? So the pond was dug and it was gorgeous and all that. But there's more photographs of the kids holding an earthworm. Because, and I actually was talking to a teacher afterwards that she was saying.

I said, I thought you were taking the Mickey out of me, you know what I mean? But what it is is, when they go home from school, most of our gardens are plastic. grass are paved over. Most of the parks around are mown within an inch of their life, or they're just blank greens. And when they're even playing with their mates, they're online on headphones.

So they've no access to nature. They've no connection. And that air one set them off on this whole thing. Now I'm going to go back to school, hopefully, very soon and help them with a bit of gardening, a bit of just getting a bit of dork

under the fingernails of the kids. to your kids. But when I was a kid, there was no fucking internet. So what we did is we hung around on an old building site. There was a building site and there was a dump. And beside the dump, there was a pond.

Like, I've kids now and I keep saying, I can't believe it. Like, I did something today that you'd fucking hate. My two little kids were in the garden and there's a bit of long grass and I didn't want them there barefoot and I said to him,

stay out of there, there's spiders they'll bite you. Oh, for God's sake. And I fucking... But I had to! I had to! Because they're too small. I had to. And then I thought,

Collie, I'm doing that thing. They're so young and I told them be afraid of spiders rather than be curious because it was so inconvenient for me. Yeah. And now they stay out of the tall grass.

Yeah. You know? But when I was a kid, we just played with noots and frogs. Yep. We went to the building site, went to the pond, and we were all playing with frogs and nudes

because there was nothing else. Yeah. Now I know that the kids who were my age then, they're not doing that now. Yeah, and there's that, it's like, it's a digital disconnect

is a really way good way of looking at it. And, you know, the concept of getting out and finding things, like, it's kind of a running joke with me and some of my friends.

Is that real? Like, and that's literally what they say when you showed them a caterpillar, a frog. Do you know, They're thinking that reality is a YouTube video. Yeah.

Yeah. So if they saw that Earthworm on a YouTube video, they're going, is that real? Yeah. And it's, you know, to try and get them more involved in it and using digital media, there's wonderful stuff out there. And I recommend Olli is to get into this as well. And I'm sure when we were going down the lockdown route, everybody got into walking and then got into looking at nature. But a lot of people got into Pokemon Go.

we would have we would have out during the Pokemon Go so there's a real life Pokemon Go called I Naturalist and it's a free app you can get and not only are you out there looking at you'll get your head in some nettles and your ass will be up in the air and people think you're a weirdo but stick your head in some nettles this year because there's all sorts of creatures in there

you're walking past them on your rocks you're walking the dog you're looking after the kids stop have a look in the nettles nettles are brilliant, really, really good. Why? Loads of species depend on them, especially our butterflies and caterpillars, depend on them to finish off their life cycle,

but also there's all little predators in there from crab spiders to harvestmen. They're all in there hiding away. If you have this little app called I Naturalist, which is free, you can take a photograph, it will educate, you will kind of give you a couple of ideas of what it is. Some scientists will identify it for you.

Oh, go away. And the data from that goes into a big, huge, massive data system. So if you were doing research, like if I'm researching a certain species, I can look at the maps, the date, the timeline, they're doing well. They seem to be dropping off. The more people who are adding data to it, the more information we have about animals that, to be honest, which are pretty hard to study. So it's citizen science.

Citizen science, man. And it's fun. And it's ethical, too, because... You know what Pokemon Go was far, don't you? I don't have used to if you crooks can again, was it? It's not far off it, man. Now, I was on this. If you're, if you've been listening to the podcast since 2018,

I did the Pokemon Go episode in 2018. I went deep at the time and I looked at who was funding Pokemon Go. There's a company by the name of Incutel. Now, Incutel are an American venture capital company that get billions because they are the venture capital. the wing of the CIA, like fact. They funded Pokemon Go. Do you know what Pokemon Go ended up being used for?

So have you seen, we don't have them in Ireland yet, but in America, do you know the, you can order food now and it's not a human that arise at the robot. Yeah. All the data of Pokemon Go, it was a way to train those. No way. So it went into training. You'd send people out into the streets and you effectively become a data harvester, a map for the streets.

All that data was then fed back into these robots and that's how they can walk around. So with this, it's not that. If you're harvesting... All the robots are we're just going into the nettles. That's it. That's it. There you go, yeah. Or into ponds.

Speaking about invasive species, so... These fucking... There's worms from New Zealand that I don't like the sound of it all. And they're very recent. They're from garden centres. The New Zealand flatworm, apparently they're quite disturbing. when you see them in real life as well. They look like a living board shit.

What? Are you coming across a lot of them? I absolutely. Every time I see it and I nuke them from space. They are everywhere. The land of gentry actually kind of brought them in. Oh, so they're not as recent as at all? No, they probably were here for a long time before they started to really reproduce.

So, ferns would have been brought over from New Zealand to Ireland and to the UK, to big centres. And then then, of course, the more exotic plants and stuff you had in your house, the richer you wear. So people would get in these huge tree ferns and all these kind of posh exotic plants from all over the world. And New Zealand's climate is quite similar to Ireland.

Have you been there? Not yet. There's parts of New Zealand where you're walking around. You think you're in fucking Dublin or think you're in Limerick, even the walls. Yeah. That's what the Brits wanted to do was turning into a New England. I hate having a lash at the Brits every single time, but... Oh, Jesus, they did some fucking terrible things to eat.

Do you know what the Brits did? No, but seriously, like this is... This will show the arrogance of it, right? When they colonized Australia, they literally looked around and said, this is a bit like Africa, this is. Let's get some African animals and put them here for the laugh. And now you've got wild, rabid flocks of camels

in the middle of Australia that were just put there because some man called Sir Chomsley Wamsley decided to be a good idea. Did you ever hear about the story about the dung beetles in Australia? No, go on.

So there was a point in Australian history where humans came over with all their cattle and the camels and the exotic animals. But there was no bovine naturally in Australia ever. There was only marsupials. And marsupial shit is very dry and crumbly.

So every dung beetle And dung beetles are hugely Important species They take shit and bury it And recycle it into the soil They give the nutrients Yes For they're young

So their life cycle Depends on the poo ball And their baby Eating it and then coming out as an adult So anyway The Australian dung beetles are Smelling all this cow shit And they're landing

And they're drowning Because it's not It's not the marsupial dry shit. So what happened then was there was nothing around to bury the cow pads. And there was Australians

who couldn't go out to have a beer outside because there were so many flies. The flies just multiplied and it was a massive problem. So I think he was a Hungarian scientist. He came up with the idea of, right, we're going to have to sort something out in Australia. So he went

to Africa. and he picked out every kind of dung beetle you could imagine from over there and he systematically tested with very scientific methodology not like the cane toad he didn't just book them out there he really he really tested his theory and tried out different species

and eventually he found a few species that he could let go they started going around burying all the couch and the beetles saved the population of Australia from disease from all sorts of horrendous conditions of flies just taken over the country. That's fucking so. So for a while, cow ship became like plastic. It couldn't

be decollied. Get rid of it. That is amazing. So the beetles came in and rescued her thanks to a crazy Hungarian I think he was Hungarian, but anyway scientists over there. And it goes to show, like if you're careful about putting invasive species, not invasive, potentially invasive species into an area

to solve a problem. Nowadays we call it nature-based solution. So say for a species of plant like rodendrum or for Japanese not weed which people have big problems with. Now in their local areas

they're controlled by species that are in there but the problem is you could release the species into Ireland and go it's going to take over it's going to take care of the Japanese not weed but it won't it might kill everything else. Do something very different yeah so you have to really really look at it carefully

I know in the UK they're doing a lot work with spurt and fungal diseases that will affect certain plants. But, you know, these invasive species, they're no joke. I mean, we have the alpine newts in Ireland. I don't know about these, Chris. Ah. One of my brilliant students, Aynia, back in the day, he was working for, doing survey work

in the Midlands, and he took a photograph of a newt, and he goes, I think this is a bit of an odd-looking newt. And it was an alpine newt in this middle of a bog, in the middle of nowhere, in the Midlands. And I'm like, what the hell is that down there? That's not good news. So anyway, we went down in the Frog Mobile to investigate and we discovered that the population of alpine newts were so dense in some areas. So say if you had a puddle this size, the size of this table, right? Just you know the way there's ponds like that in bogs that have been walked on and you dip your net in and you couldn't lift the net. And I don't. And I don't. And I don't.

I'm quite strong. But you couldn't lift the net for the weight of them. Like, they were absolutely packed in. And that's it. Way too many. Not only that. We didn't find any dragonflies.

We didn't find a single frog. We didn't, like, on a bog, that's insane. When you're on a bog, you should be walking and just frogs are going everywhere. So we didn't find any of them. So what was happening? And then we discovered, like, in certain areas, the alpine nudes, because we'd check out their stomachs

to see what they were eating. they were they were turning into like a commodo dragon type setup and you know that unnatural they were getting larger than this no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no sorry they're not going to turn into giant up newts yeah but like um um um comodo dragons before people brought uh uh you know domesticated animals onto the o the roost they ruled the roost and they'd eat their own young to grow big oh my god so a commodo dragon in a state where there's no buffalo or goats around. How they get massive is by eating juveniles and they gang up on them and they kill them. But they'll lay so many eggs that all the juveniles

go up into the trees and they'll feed off bugs, stuff that wouldn't satiate an adult, but will feed and make a young one grow and then it comes down and then they predate on that and the biggest and toughest survive. Not mad. Now that's that kind of same. It's unnatural.

that is an unnatural system. That's a natural system for Komodo dragons but what was happening with the alpine newts in these ponds where they'd eaten everything. They were eating their own young, eating their own eggs and they were just turned into these massive amounts of them. It's crazy.

So now we're in this kind of position where we really have to get them under control because... But how do you do that? New Zealand eradicated them using traps with pheromones in it.

So we'll have to look into something like that. That's better than bringing in a wasp. Exactly. Now, the gas thing about the alpine newts is, and another one is the white two shrew, which is in the country, and it's bullying our pygmy shrew out of the country. But the gas thing is,

those two species live with the same species in Europe, and they get on fine. So you think to yourself, well, if we release, in theory, we release them out here, there'd be no problems. But on Europe, you have also, lots of other creatures in the food web.

You've grass snakes, you've others, you've other big newts like the great crested newts. So it's a completely different system. So Ireland is a really odd little place in Europe when it comes to biodiversity because a lot of the animals here are what we would call quite naive, as in they wouldn't have experienced heavy competition from their European cousins ever before.

So that's the risk you take when you're, you know. So they just, they freak out and get, I've never had to learn how to fight. Yeah, never had to compete

for food or space and what's going on. Who is this fella? Do you know what I mean? And is that an island thing? It's very much an island thing. Because I'm thinking of the fucking the dodo

of Mauritius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rats, anything like that onto the island. Stoats. Stoats being released

down to New Zealand by, you know, chumny-womily. But I heard, Two, who's the, mink aren't great in Ireland. They're terrible, but that was a disaster done by so-called environmentalists.

So, like, we've a mink problem in Ireland, right? But what I heard was there were environmentalists in the 70s who cared about the earth, who thought they were doing a good thing. Mink was being farmed in Ireland and they were like, well, this is particularly cruel. You have an industry where you're killing this little animal for its far. So in the 70s, environmentalists said, well, free the fuck. fucking mink and they did and now we're fucked. Yeah.

People have gone into restaurants and taken out lobsters. Ran outside and I'm freeing the lobster and let it go. And it's completely different species to the native lobsters. And it breeds and it kills everything off. So you know, Ireland? No, it's happened worldwide. You can't just take an animal even though it might be horrible and cruel and I couldn't agree more that mink farming shouldn't have been happening.

the way it was. It's a horrible system, especially for, you know, mammals are active and smart creatures, but you just can't let things out and just hope for the best. I mean, the massive problem we have in this country, like, and it's not just mammals, I mean, the main

one, anybody will tell you who's trying to do something good for biodiversity is like, and there's a lot of talk of rewiling and that's a really noble pursuit. And it's hugely important, but it's rewiling but you

actually still have to manage the land for nature you have to pull up the invasive plants because no matter what you do you keep the deer out but the plants will come in you'll have to look at make sure that you do something to keep them out because if you just left it as is to just

rewiled you would get cherry laurel in growing and then that will smother out all the the other plants and that's a that's a nightmare plan to get rid of. So just, so I made you about this a couple of weeks ago.

So there's an area in Nimerick that I know near a river. And they're trying to build houses there, but they can't because it's a fucking floodplain. So what they did recently is a lot of bulldozers came into this wasteland and they laid it bare. It's just soil. And then they found out we can't build here. Great news, but now it's just soiled.

But I'm going, fuck yes. So I'm going, going down there with proper indigenous wildflower because they just till the land for me and I'm going to I'm going to change the ecosystem. I'm going to rewild it with native Irish wildflower and I think

that's a, is that a good idea or I doing it? If you were to leave that as is and hopefully it will be left and not built on because there's a massive problem in this country with because we are desperate for houses.

and I want people to be able to be homeed and all that, but you can't be building on floodplains. It's fucking ridiculous. And you see people with their hearts broken because they're in a gaff and they have their little kids there and they're like, we've been in this house for 10 years. But you go through the historical records and it's like it floods every 20 years.

It's a floodplain. Why did you just get permission to build a gaff here? Well, I got the brown envelope, you know? And I'm seeing it before. Like, it's like we know it's a floodplain, but they're there every year trying each year they want the result to be different. Absolutely.

You know, and it takes people to complain and ring the council and go they're trying to build on a floodplain. Keep the pressure on it. If anyone is trying to do that in your area and you know it's ridiculous and make it kick up some noise about it

and talk to media but say, look, this place floods all the time. Why are they looking to build houses on it? It's crazy. But to get back to you, carapult and wildflowers in there, and the best thing to do for nature is to let it rest.

seed itself if you can. But will that not just get, like I know there's Japanese, not weed there. If that's left as it is, yes, in a couple of months' time it will regrow. But is that growth not going to be a lot of bullshit or is it

better for me to go in with those difficult seeds that I had to get off the old man and the interests? Well, first of all, floodplains are quite rich in all the water that don't there. Very a lot of sea. Exactly.

Exactly. So there'd be a different type of soil than you'd need for wildflowers. They'd like kind of poor soil. So they might need... If you and me, would you be like, just fuck off. Just leave it alone. Let nature take its course. If there's Japanese knotweed down there, somebody asked earlier on, I believe,

about tackling Japanese not weed, call someone in for that because the danger is in trying to be a good person and trying to do it yourself, a tiny little piece of that gets moved somewhere else and it takes over you know,

maybe an important wilderness site or something but call it in make sure you call it in because councils are paranoid about that they want to make sure that it's under control

but you know the best thing we can do for nature sometimes is leave it be with a little bit of hard management when it comes to invasives.

Does that make sense? It does. So you let nature do her thing let the native plants and the thing about the native plants and you're right it's hard to get the seeds

but sometimes if you just leave Illinois, they'll show up. I mean, the great success story we had was the rare orchards coming up on the front square of Trinity College. Oh, tell us about that. Yeah, so we stopped cutting the lawn in the inside gate. So the outside

gate of Trinity College, we stopped cutting the lawn a good few years ago. We went to a vote in the college. We asked the college community, would you be interested in doing something visual for nature to say, look, we're in a biodiversity crisis and we're going to try and make a difference. And 90% people said, yes.

which was very shocking to me. I was delighted. So we planted it out. It's not all native, but it's very welfare-friendly, and it served the purpose of making a statement at the time. And we're learning as we go.

Now, the next phase of that, we said we're not putting in anything non-native. We're going to let native plants see themselves naturally. With a little help from a wonderful plant called Yellow Rattle, and Yellow Rattle is a parasitic flower

that eats other root systems around it to help with nutrients and they call it the meadow maker so we threw a bit of that in let the let the grass grow what is that doing is it is it taken care of like it's taking the grass away mainly and that allows it's patches for the dandelion seed for the comfrey for tree foil for all these little plants need plants to get in and get a bit of light on and start grown and but when we did this what jenny you had jenny on the in the podcast who was a brilliant from Trinity. She was passing by and just her I just went, oh my God, that's an orchid. What's it doing here in Trinity? And just because we provided a habitat again, it gave it the space to grow up.

Do you know where that seed came from? We have no idea. Do you think it could have been dormant for years? It would be dormant for ages. It's the same with the, you know, when we were talking about the ponds earlier on and, you know, I was saying you're going past areas on the train and you'll see all the troughs there but also when you're going past areas and fields on the train if you see massive do you ever see the massive amounts of reeds

they're like the short green reeds but they're real tick and they're like in fields it just fall on and they're going your eye yeah exactly yeah they're spiking but they are usually an indication that there used to be a water body there

go ahead it's a wet patch in the ground and so it's a really good way of kind of notice this was once a pan and now it's not a panning more or maybe not. Then you go to the OPPW maps or the old maps.

So there's a great project in the UK done by some of my college called the Ghost Pond Project. And I like this. Yeah, and it's not a hot that news coming out in the middle of night going,

ooh, but what they did was they went around the Ponds area. They really trialed it out in Norfolk. And Norfolk would historically had a lot

of these kind of farm-yard ponds. And what they did was then, looked at patches, looked at the kind of the wet loving plants like reeds, said, okay, and they marked them all out. They went back to the old OPW maps and the old maps going back generated there, and they'd find a pond. Then they'd get permission from the landowner with grants from the government, which is important because they are giving up a patch of their land. And what they did was they got in with a digger and very carefully went down to the original mud line of the pond, which was, still be there. Does that make sense to you so far? Yeah. Now, when they're digging out the ponds,

what happens is the water level finds itself naturally. Fuck! Yeah. So it reforms, but not only that, the best thing about it is, they were finding some seeds in there. Oh my gosh. That has been extinct locally for generations. But the seeds were kept there waiting for hundreds and hundreds of years for somebody to come along and give them a bit of sunlight and somewhere and the whole ecosystems came back to life.

Is mycarcia in the soil part of that too? All the stuff, everything, all the different bacteria, all the, all the, you know, the fungal elements, everything would have come back because it was all sitting there dormant waiting for a chance to grow again. These are natural ponds that are old, are they man-made ponds that are old? There were natural ponds that were old,

probably used for, again, for water and cattle, water and sheep. And did they have, is this, what do you call them, fens? Is it groundwater coming up? Some of them, some of them would be fenced, some of them would just be a wet patch in the field. Like, you'd often hear, you know,

do you remember the fast show, Ted? I'm going to drain the wet patch in the field. Yeah, but that was always a thing. Drainning. Yeah. People draining it for tillage to put the cows on it. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Wow.

So these, these ponds are in Ireland as well. So there's an opportunity there to kind of, do work like that. I know there's a few places around that are doing really good work like Harris Corner is a good little society in Ireland but like to incentivise people to say look it's great for biodiversity

it's great for to bring back potential species that might be extinct. You can, the beauty of that right is you can tie folklore and stories into all of that because it's the you can find old stories that would have mentioned

the body of water that doesn't exist there anymore. you were going to talk about folk plots. It's true. Absolutely. But the names of Mayo, Mayo up in, in, there and the top left. Like, it means playing of U-trees, but the U-Trees are gone, you know, so we have this here and. But it's one of the most annoying things when I drive around estates in Dublin. I know, but the fake names, you cunts. Oh my God. Oak View. And where are the fucking Oaks, you pricks? Who come up with this, some property developer? Badgers ball bag. Where? What's what's going on? glad in Limerick there's a place they built a new estate in Limerick and fair play to them they

called the Towlerton and if you go back into the language Towellerton means like a burial place you know so at the very least they built the new hospital there they built everything but you can at least see the name is there and I know what this once was yeah even though they destroyed a river scary going to a hospital named after the dead place yeah they didn't yeah actually that's true What I'm adoring about the pond information you just gave me is how similar it is to... So, Mankan, when he was alive, God rest. He was a great guy. A fucking magnificent person.

For Mankan, he used to work with a home tree. And Mankan was all about rewilding forests. But what he said to me was, you can't just get an oak and planted in the ground. He had to try and go and find ancient forests. because what he was after were the microbes in the soil and the fungi. And where he used to find the best forest was hedgerows. Yep.

It's between land where no one has, like, a foot long. No one's fucked with this for thousands of years. And if you go into this hedgerow and dig, and if you find a tree, you get that fucking soil and that's the start of your forest. It has all the microorganisms and all that will help out. Because hedgerows are essentially the remnants of our old forests. that's what they are. No one is bothered with.

No one's bothered with them because they've been serving a function. Another way to look out for old forests is you see do you ever see the lords and ladies the plant that comes up? It's like a

it looks like berries on a kind of a stick. Dogs Mickey I think is the Irish name verse. I'll get that but you know if you've spot all these things and again it's the importance

we're losing our hedgerows they're so massively important. Now another great study we're doing hopefully this year is a study on the traditional dry walls of Ireland the stone walls. Nobody looks at them

and they've turned into ecosystems their extensions of the bourne. Do you ever think of that? No. So all the plants that live in the burund are kind of stuck down there can move along these dry walls all over the country and get blown on the wind because they're damp, they're stony.

You have all kind of lichens growing them. know personally that our native lizard absolutely loves them. Frogs use them in the winter to hide down and so do newts. So I get massive migrations to my ponds from the dry stone walls. But like hedge rows... When you say dry

stone what you mean like the old walls? The people that were built by hand. The thing of them too. And they're coming back as well from a folklore point of view. Well you've got fucking David Kjohn down in Waterford the living in the big stones and the thing is too with a lot of old stone walls that could have been a castle a thousand years ago

and they would have gotten or a mound or something and they took that and then made the wall out of it so you're talking about real ancient stones here yeah and again important habitat I mean lichens and mosses are something that people don't look at but they're incredibly important I really started getting involved in snails recently right but I tell you I tell you like

well there was first so when I was a child right I was friends with these yanks. About six or seven years of age and my neighbours were from New York. They'd come over and visit their grannies. And they had teenage mutant ninja turtles

a year before we did. So they would come to me and they'd have their toys of Donatello on this and like, look at these. I'm like, this is fucking amazing. I've never seen the cartoon. This is yank shit. This is astounding.

And then they'd leave in the summertime and I'd have nothing but the memories of the teenage mutant ninja turtles. Okay. so I'd just get snails and then paint the bandanas on the snails and give them Donatello Raphael that's what I used to do

but that was the last time I seriously engaged with snails and then recently what made me fucking love snails was the reason they're on walls and on stones is those snails suck minerals out of stones but then they put like calcium

in their shells But then the birds eat the shells and that's what goes into eggs. So if we lost snails, birds wouldn't be able to lay eggs. Yeah, it's... But like, come on, like, is that not astounding? You know what I mean? But the snails are the ones... Because birds' eggs are calcium and they're getting that out of the ground.

And the other thing I found out about snails too is... Because they are looking for the limestone in the soil, you can use snails almost like litmus paper. You know if there's plenty of snails there, that means that that soil isn't acidic. Am I talking to my ears? No, no, no, no. I am a bit.

A little bit, but go on. Correct me. Correct me. No, no, no. Look, it just goes to show that everything is important in the food web we were talking about earlier on. And snails are great indicators of a head thing. Is the egg thing?

Am I going a bit far with the egg thing? Maybe a little bit far, but like they do provide great nutrients and like a great lesson with eggs with boards was the DDT. The DDT. I mean, I said that to me kid once and he thought it was a rap band from the 80s. The DDT was a general poison that was used to nuke everything. Plants, bugs, mosquitoes. Forties and 50s, and 50s.

And it was a wonder spray. But what they were doing was when they were spraying it then, it was getting into snails, beetens, bugs, all sorts of creatures. and it went up to food chain to birds. And then what was happening was because it was so toxic and it would affect their ability to produce calcium, when the birds were sitting on their eggs, they'd crush them. And it was particularly birds of prey, wasn't it?

It was a prey because they were at the top of the food chain. Any pollutants will always end up in higher levels in animals that live longer, but particularly predators. So all of your tuna in the sea, for example, tuna, the big sharks and all those big predators are very heavily loaded with the heavy manned

tuna a couple of times a week because of the mercury and the half of the food chain. Whales are the same when they test whales when they're washed up, they have massive levels of these things. But like, you know to round off that point I mean it's great that we're kind of cupping on to the fact that these

chemicals that are so freely available and shouldn't be used and roundup should be used and roundup should be gone off the face of the earth. That's the one that may be responsible for the bee collapse, isn't it? Yeah, well, that's death by a thousand cuts, but it's definitely not good. And it's like, it's not good for them. If animals are dying around you, you should be worried about the chemicals they're using on the animals.

We're the only species that I know of that spray is poison on their food to keep other things from eating it. And then eats the food. Like, it's madness to think. And I understand, like, you have to, we really need to think about, like, rejigging our food systems over here as well, because we become so reliant on bringing food in from abroad that waiting you see in the next couple of weeks, things are going to get pricier because of the orange dope, you know? And just as an aside there, because I went researching into the DDT, you know that one of the solutions to the DDT was a man had to train a falcon to have sex with his head. See then that he agreed with that. Yes. Yeah.

So that the, the falcon population was crashed. Like almost to the point of extinction because their eggs were falling apart. And then they had to invent a falcon sex hat. You can buy them online. They're 60 euros. It's a fucking hat where they had to, a falcon has sex with your hat. And then it has loads of these little holes in it. And that's where you collect falcon cum.

But that's intervention allowed them to bring the falcon back. That was a very strange and ingenious man to do that. I mean, fair fucking play. Yeah? And now they want the top predators, natural predators for rodents in New York, for example, are the Perigrant Falcons. They're bringing them back for that or they? Massive population. It's the biggest urban population in the world. There's so many of them now that, like, they're just everywhere.

and they're doing really well because the ETT isn't in the system anymore. Now the other things we need to kind of reconsider our rodenticide, there's a lot of stuff we need to work on still. I'd love to chat to you about fertilizers because

so I did the podcast last week about the fuel protests, right? Now I was supporting the protesters because I just fucking support protests. I was making the point that some people were like that's not how you protest. If you want to protest,

just go out onto the street and march. There's no reason to be stopping the traffic. The point that I was making was the social contract has eroded. So back in the days, those farmers would have had a really, really strong fucking union. So they could have protested politely, and then the union would have spoken with the government

and conversation would have happened. But because all that has been dismantled, now you end up with protest that has to be really, really disruptive. And that's because unions have disappeared, you know? Tootless crocodiles. That's it. So the other thing too is,

so I think it was the UN, did a report and they reckon that 40 million people are now at risk of famine and poverty because of the past month. Because most of the, 20% of the world's nitrogen needs to come out, is being made in the Middle East

and it needs to escape the straight of hormones. So that's 20% of the world's nitrogen. So that's fertiliser. 20% of that did not leave. The growing season was missed and now as a result, a load of food was not grown and prices, we're going to experience it as higher prices come September,

but people in the Global South would experience it as famine and death. And that's what the UN had to say a couple of weeks ago. And I got really pissed off and I said to myself, what the fuck is going on? Why is all that farclers are being made there? And the reason is unfettered capitalism.

Ireland used to have like a national fertiliser company. We used to make our own fertiliser and it was run by the government like electricity, like trains, to avoid this specifically. It's like fertiliser is so important

we need to make it in Ireland so that this doesn't happen. And then once the Berlin Wall collapsed, you had unfettered neoliberalism, the Gulf countries, because to make nitrogen, you need to have,

natural gas. So it all became there, but it's like, we can make it really cheap there. However, there's this thing called the Strait of Hermanns and Israel and Iran might have a scrap at any point and all of it has to come out of there. They put profits before the needs of people.

They put profits before food security and now this is where we are. But at the same time, fertiliser is shit because fartleaser has created huge problems. Is there a way for Ireland to grow

enough food that we need without relying upon fertiliser that destroys the environment? Not my field of expertise. I know, like I'm sure you've thought about it. Well, I do think about all the time. I'm an avid gardener. I always haven't been. I've always had an allotment or somewhere

where I can grow my own veg. Try to do it all the time. Try and get enough, especially during the summer months, get me spuds up and a few other bits of pieces. Like practical stuff that's easy to grow, they grow. And I'm trying to teach me kids about that too. I think it's a skill set that has been lost

in so many people. To be able to grow your own food is massively important because you don't know. Are you doing your own fartiser? You're mulching and composting. Okay. Yeah. Not creating it myself, but the chickens are. So yeah, so all the scrap goes into the chickens.

I use the cockroach poo. Oh shit, you've got those brilliant Japanese cockroaches, haven't she? Madagascans and hissing cockroaches. And I have them in big drums. So all the kitchen waste goes into them and then to fill it up and make it into guano and then that goes on

the plants as well so they do hiss when you open you do they do and people look at you strange when they go this tomato is delicious and you say yeah fed on cockroach and how are those would you recommend I get some of them well it depends and but that's the

thing like if I want to start composting if I want to fuck a lot of cockroaches into it am I going to destroy limerick? But you know what I mean? Like, they're from Madagascar. They're not potentially invasive because they need a very heated area. They can't survive. Okay.

The practical thing to do is do a warmery. It's really nice to do. And that's what our earthworms. Airwarms, yes. And that's a fantastic way of doing it. If you can't keep a couple of boards or something like that, I think keeping chickens is a great thing to do. Lots of battery hands need rescuing. It's a great way of getting a bit of knowledge up.

If you live in a very small back garden, like I did for 60 years. You're doing it in the city and tell her where you were growing chickens? I couldn't grow chickens because you just could. Both of us are up to think growing chickens there now. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I couldn't keep them, but I kept quail. So you can keep quail who would give you eggs. And I was under 77A eating quail eggs going into work at a morning,

thinking I was getting notions. But you could keep them, you can keep them in a, like, a guinea pig container and you can they're essentially the same as chickens but a lot smaller and using their poo

use their poo then for fertiliser my big thing as well as biodiversity and nature and getting involved and getting out there and doing the

real life Pokemon if you can try and get into a bit of growing your own stuff and push for community gardens push for community gardens in your own name they've taken

all that space that was once open to people to have like market gardens that's all gone you know and if you're a suspicious type you'd be thinking

why is that you know the ability to be able to grow your own food even to like sustain you for a little while was a market garden a market you go to and the food is grown by your neighbours

yeah wow yeah and like it you know places that in times of wo like the English did a great job victory gardens yeah

victory. In Cuba, when they went through hard times with blockades, they turned every Castro got them to grow on every shelf, every roof. They'd have gardens growing stuff. So it's really doable and achievable. And I think again, as well as everything else, you're getting connection with the soil. You're getting out in nature. It's great for your head. It's great for the head. And again, it's like even something simple I find with spring onions. We all use spring onions. No one wants that bit at the end with the haircut. You can just get that and put it into a pot and it grows into a new spring onion or another one, and I found this out yesterday, do you know the way you buy the basil in Duns or Aldi? And you buy that fucking basil plant

and you go, excellent, basil forever. And then it dies after a week. And you're like, what's going? Like, I knew it was planned. I knew it was deliberate. But I found out the reason the basil plants die is it's not a basil plant. It's like 20 basil plants in one pot and they just kill each other over competition. So what you can do is get your Aldi basil plant,

take them all out and then put them into little pots and then you have forever basil. Yeah. Split them all over. You just tweez them all out and put them in a row and then just repot them all. Keep them on a windowsill. Fantastic. I mean that stuff is great.

I'm doing the I'm growing spuds for the crack. I'm doing whatever I can. Yeah. You know? I got blight this week. Go away. Did you fair fucking play to you?

The earliest I ever got it. And I came into the house and I was like, there's blight under the potatoes. And my son is like, you're so old. And I was really disgusted because I was like, what the fact do you do? Like later in the season, you can still get to mew. But like, this is mad early to be getting polite.

So I'm just like, I bit this heart. But I have Jerusalem artichokes. So they'll get me true if I'm stuck. I heard a good solution. for blight in Ireland would be not to spray it but to go to Peru bring a fuckload of

because they have loads of potato varieties where it's indigenous even the ones that we can't eat because there's potatoes we can't eat and if you grow loads and loads of those that can protect against blight. Now I know you're bringing loads of non-indigenous

and also the whole fly into Peru thing is a bit difficult part. There's that but you know I always say it to people too the famine is the original climate collapse, we brought in an invasive species. An invasive species. But the other thing too is,

it was a monoculture. And when you were speaking earlier about the noots and the noots are doing so well, that's actually what happened to Irish people when the potato came in. Because when the Brits like, so post Cramwell,

they're really like serious about the colonisation. And they kicked the Irish after the line and said, fuck off over there to Conard. right? The farmers that were brought from England this is actually interesting because this you can explain why

there's orange marches because of the type of crops that were grown. So the colonization of the south was mostly English farmers like from England. They were growing wheat. The wheat wasn't doing very well here. So those farmers that were catanizing

were like fuck this, this isn't working. So in the south they said I'm going to sell out and I'm going to go back home to England, and they sold their land to giant farmers. So that's how you ended up with the massive landlords down south, is the wheat wasn't growing effectively. But up north, they were Scottish Protestants, and they grew oats, and the oats grew brilliantly up north. So you ended up with a community of people there who were able to remain solid. So that's one of the reasons why the colonisation was so effective up north was because oats grew better, and the English

ones couldn't grow the wheat. But at the same time, the Irish are over in Connacht and they're growing this new thing, the potato. And the plan was, I think it had something to do with the fucking penal laws. In order to effectively stop the

Catholics, if you had land, you couldn't give all of that land to one son. You had to divide your land equally to all of your kids. Smaller and smaller and smaller. Smaller and smaller. So, Catholics couldn't have power, but the fucking potato stepped in.

So what was designed to try and starve the Catholics? Because if you have fuck all end and you have to grow grain, you're fucked. But now the potato is there. So unintentionally, the Catholic population exploded. So that's how we went from, I think it was about 3 million at the end of the 1600s to nearly 8 million by 1840. It's the amount of calories that the potato could give to people. It's a super clue.

Yeah. But then, of course, it's all one type of potato. It's all, they're all related. And then the blight comes over from on bird shit. Guano. Came over on Guammer from Panama and from Peru. And that's how the blight got to Ireland. But then everything's gone at once.

Yep. You know, so that is a story of climate collapse. And it's there in our fucking history. Yeah. You know? But I'd love to, before I take questions from the audience, why I brought you out is we're in the middle of April. This is the fucking time of year for action,

for everyone here to do one small little thing. What would you like to leave people with? What piece of advice? Just to give people a little bit of hope, for starters, because there can be a lot of grim stories about nature and climate and everything. But there's a lot you can do. There's a lot of practical actions you can take no matter where you live. If you're fortunate enough to have a bit of a garden,

please, please consider putting a shoe box size bit of standing water with some native plants in it, a couple of stones. That's not even digging the ground. You don't even have to dig the ground. You can build it up around if you want and try it out. The great thing about ponds are, and I've been pushing ponds for 20 years on people,

they're very addictive. When you see how effective and quickly you can bring some life into your garden, and how fascinating is you'll want to step it up a little bit. Here's a tiny question, Holly. So I have like pots of water at the back, right?

I haven't fucking gone near him. It's just rain, right? At what point does that stop being a bucket full of rain and when does it become a pond? But you know what I mean? Yeah, 100%. So there's a lot of different types of pot and the classic

description of a pond there's something that sunlight can get from the top to the bottom. So it could be the size of this this whole vicarry. But if it's shallow enough,

you'd call it a pond as opposed to a lake. But there's also ephemeral ponds which could be the size of this table or like I said a shoe box that tend to dry out during the summer.

They're really important habitats. Then there's other ponds that are just covered in leaves and they're swampy and they're stinky but they're brilliant for dragon flower for hoverfly lava called rat-tail maggots

who breed through their earth and they're fantastic little bugs so all these different things to to answer your question does all sorts of different ponds so that book is that sitting there

and if it's holding water and it has some algae growing in it and has some daphne in there is essentially a pond is that a pan mower as soon as it's a big small little pond wow so we had a great movement we were doing for a while

we were called the micropon and we're taking, when the flowers come out into your flourish shop, they come in these black, you've seen the black plastic tubs. All them get thrown out. They're not recycled or anything. They're just thrown out after the flowers were out. So we were taking them and doing pond building courses. So people could dig a hole in the ground, stick it in,

put a bit of substrate on the bottom of the pond, put a stick in it, put some, we'd give them some hornswort, native plant, throw it in. And everybody was buzzing off it. And then, of course, they'll put another one in and another, or they'll just enjoy what they're out to doing. The point of it is you can fit it to your budget. You don't have to make it massive. You can do it.

If you have young children, you can cover it with galvanized steel mesh if you want to do, or just do one that shallow, you know? They're very easy to do. They're incredibly good for our nature. on top of that anywhere in your garden you can't leave a bit of a mess leave some rotten wood leave some piles of leaves leave some stones

when you just go out to move the wheelie bins to put it out for the lads to take away I guarantee if you look down you'll find wood life slugs at worm something looking for a home so leave a permanent spot for them because they'll find that spot but you're also naturally feeding

the blackboards especially at this time of year the blue tits and all that they're looking for bugs in those places so it's really easy to do if you can't do it if you haven't got the opportunity

to do it in your own garden encourage somebody who has a garden to do it or go to your community space and see if they'll let you do it one we said the last time is if you're working for a giant company

one of the multinationals right they're always trying to do some type of woke HR shit they are go to them and instead of them taking your white water rafting, you go, what about we all have a biodiversity garden?

What about we all have a punch? The cunts aren't paying taxes, you know what I mean? And they'll do it. You know, HR people are sound. They replaced unions. And there's plenty of people out there who are really good at teaching these kind of skill sets, Wild Acres down in Wicklow's a great place as well.

There's lots of places you can go on Google Online, nature courses and stuff like that. Leave a mess for nature, leave some piles of stones, get interested, get invested, see what's there. Just try and give it a bit of breeding space and I guarantee it it would be great for your head,

it's good for your soul, and over the years we've been talking about this for a long time and I get messages from people all the time about they've done this and how much joy it's brought to their life and thank you very much. And it really is,

because it is a hard gig sometimes talk about this all the time, but that is just, it brings me a lot of joy as well to see people getting a kick out of it and giving a home to some creatures that we need in the world. And the subject of good news, right?

One of the first things you walk my mind to, and I'd never thought about it, as you said to me, back in 2018, do you remember when you were a kid and you'd drive out the country and the windshield would be foot of it, insects. And at that moment, I said, oh yeah, fuck, remember that. And that was really sad, because

I'm like, I do remember that. I thought it had something to do with the cars we had back then. Oh, shit, the insects may not be around anymore. But when we drove up to Dublin today, I saw a bunch of insects on the windsealed. Like, I was speaking to Jane Stout, and she is responsible for the oil, Ireland pollinator plants. And so this is why, if you go around the country, country, your roundabout is messy and not being mowed. Now, I was asking her. I'm like, look, come on, is it working? Is it working? But she's a scientist. She's like, I can't tell you that's why. Jane's a lot more cagey than me and rightly so. But you, you said something last year where you said, I've seen more pollinators in the first month of this summer than I saw

all last summer. Yeah, it was a bumper year for them. And that's anecdotally. It's my own experience. but I've been looking at this stuff for years and I think I have my eye in and I do kind of take notes of what's around and it was a bumper year it was a really good year just like this year for tadpoles has been incredible

incredible like ponside I've been monitoring and they're just full of life and that's the way nature goes and you do get ups and downs and that's what Jane was talking about you have to be careful you have to be careful

barking yeah but it's the first time in 10 years I've seen splats on cars like insect splats on cars loads of them and I've noticed on me on care and it's great to see it's a bit like maybe it's just a blip maybe it's it's not but but at the same time good to think that we're going and the same horses are doing this all-earlene pollinator thing and

people are listening and we're seeing wildflowers there and this is what it's supposed to do yep and like it it makes sense to me that if all this habitat has been created for them and they get a good year with some good weather then they have somewhere to go as opposed to if it wasn't there and Jane doesn't take enough credit for what she's doing with this.

It's a really, really unique way of promoting. And of course pollinators were used as the kind of the mascot for her. But Jane's the scientist

she wanted to get every insect in there. But when you're trying to appeal to the masses, you've got to go with bees. You can't go someone breeding

out of their arse. You can't go or the fucking thing crawling along. Exactly. Yeah. Even though I need to see one of them.

I'll show you. I'll show you a video. I'll send it to you later. But yeah, so we went with the pollinaires, but it's to bring everything, carpenters, beetles, dung beetles, everything along because all that habitat...

Spiders, you don't want to talk about the spiders. I love spiders. I know you love them, but a lot of people. Like I just did, like I said, I did it this morning, I said to my kids, spiders, stay the fuck out of the long grass. Imagine the All-Ireland spider plan. That wouldn't get very far with the Kings. It's quarter to 11 and you have buses and homes to

right? So I'm going to say good night to everybody. Callie, thank you so much. Callie Ennis. That was a beautiful chat. I knew it was going to be gorgeous. Thank you to all of you for coming along. What a great night. Go in peace. Dog bless.

There you have it. That was a great night. That was my last Vickr Street of this year. I'm not going to do another Vicar Street now until 2027, assuming I haven't been assassinated by Limerick City Council by then. The Starlings will be returning to the Bardshed District, let's say maybe three weeks, three or four weeks.

That's going to be a big event for this podcast. I'm going to make sure I record it. More than that, I'm after getting a special type of microphone called a contact microphone, and it doesn't record sounds in the air. It records the vibration of surfaces. and what I want to do is when the starlings return to the Bardshut district and they congregate in the trees,

I want to record their song as it vibrates through the wood and then use that signal to control an analog synthesizer. And I'd be very... I've tried it already with Terry Wogan's head. There's a statue of Terry Wogan, a bronze statue at the end of the Bard Schitt District. and I was putting the contact microphone on his head and hitting it with a pencil and then I was able to use that to control an analogue synthesizer but with the birds

I just there's going to be hundreds of them in the tree and I just want to see is a hundred is hundreds of little birds chipping is that enough to vibrate the wood so that I can pick it up on a contact microphone

I don't know and I really want to find out And if I can get a signal, I can then input that into an analogue synthesizer and make some weird shit for fun. Because I know there's going to be more bird shit tourism too. It's going to be very serious bird shit tourism happening in Limerick City this summer. All right, wink at a cat, dig a little pond, plant a bit of wildfire, genuflect to a nettle. I'll catch you next week with a hot take.

Dog bless. Thank you.