The Blindboy Podcast - Dr. Billy Mag Fhloinn

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

An chat with Dr. Billy Mag Fhloinn who is an expert in Irish folklore,Ritualistic animal sacrifice, and pre christian Irish practices. It's good craic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to podcast number 91. Episode 91 of the Blind Boy podcast. This week's podcast is pre-recorded because right now I am in Canada, probably with severe jet lag, because I'm flying to Vancouver to do a Rubber Bandits gig and a live podcast, and then I'm straight over to Toronto for the exact same, so this is a pre-recorded podcast in order to not have too much on my plate but next week's podcast um will most likely all going to plan next week week's podcast will most likely be a podcast from like a travel podcast that i record on the side of the street probably in toronto or in vancouver we'll see what the crack is, so I'm looking forward to doing that, just finding a nice little quietish spot, a cafe or whatever, and just to speak, so very much looking forward to that, but this week, pre-recorded podcast, last week's podcast, I went listening

to it, I tell you why, last week's podcast was strange, because after it I tell you I tell you why last week's podcast was strange because after it went out I had a number of like just concerned messages from listeners

I had a lot of DMs on Instagram and Twitter of just people asking me blind boy are you ok you seem pretty stressed in last week's podcast you seemed um a bit anxious and i listened back to it it's like fuck i was so last week's podcast was about

new rules that they're bringing in in the u.s regarding social media if you go into the u.s especially on a work visa which is the visa that I would be getting if I'm going over doing podcasts or anything I have to enter the US on like a temporary work visa if you do this from now on in the US they are entitled to all your social media stuff you have to provide your social media history and most likely because of my profile I am subjected to what's known as secondary screening which means I'm brought into a room and they look through my phone most likely but anyway yeah last week's podcast was when I listened back to it was quite catastrophic and was quite anxious um so apologies to anyone who comes to this podcast for a kind of a relaxing vibe and had

to listen to me last week basically run through in detail the worst possible things that could happen to me if i was in secondary screening of us security um the reason it was like that i suppose is i don't know i'm just i'm very overworked at the moment and the thing is with with mental health when it comes to your own mental health stress and work if you're overworked or overstressed your mental health can go off the rails a little bit so last week's podcast I think listening back it caused me to really check in with myself like put it this way when I recorded that podcast last week I'd spent the entire day meeting with my book editor had a chance to do a bit of eating then after I'd eaten I had to go and do emails and all that shit preparation so

I didn't record last week's podcast until about 12am. And by the time I had the podcast uploaded and finished, it was half four in the morning. And I had to be up the next day at like nine to start writing. So I'm actually not sleeping at all really recently. I'm getting maybe four hours of sleep a night because that's just how it has to be that's the nature of my job if if you're an entertainer or whatever a writer musician and you're essentially 100 self-implied you can't really can't really turn down work so sometimes it all happens at once so you just have to be someone who's willing to work

14 hours a day and get minimal amount of sleep which is what i've been doing for quite some time but it's gnawing at my mental health we'll say it's it the stress creeps in by essentially triggering parts of myself which are conducive with me having poor mental health and for me that would be anxiety so last week's podcast was quite a catastrophizing podcast but i think it was good that i did it because when i listened back to it i went holy fuck calm down lad will you chill out for fuck's sake so i did i reflected on it and said there is no reason in the world for me to engage in that level of catastrophizing about something that has not or may not have happened yet that's a waste of my time when i should be resting

but anyway look i'm gonna go to canada try and have as much crack as I can within the time allotted and even when I am working I'm going to try and enjoy that as well but this week I tell you what I have for you I have got a live podcast which I've been waiting a long time to show you it's i interviewed a chap called dr billy mcflynn and he is an expert specifically in irish folklore but he's also someone who makes his own instruments he you know has a background in archaeology he's a humanist celebrant and one of the most interesting people that i know so you're in for a real fucking treat this week um incredibly interesting person speaking about speaking about the type it's speaking at a level of expertise on irish folklore and mythology at a level that is hard to just come by from the internet or books so it's

going to be a real pleasure to show you this and also this week i won't be doing an ocarina pause and i'll tell you why because in this live podcast billy brings along an instrument that he made himself and he plays it so we'll have that as the ocarina pause. Okay. So that's what we're going to do this week. Before I get into the interview. Usual shit. You know the crack. Look.

This podcast is supported by you the listener. Via the Patreon page. If you're enjoying the podcast. If you're liking what I'm doing. If you're taking something from it each week. Please consider becoming a patron of the podcast. By going to patreon.com forward slash theblindboypodcast. Like, it makes a massive difference to my life.

It's so important to me that I have this Patreon thing. It's just fucking life-changing. So if you're someone who listens to it a lot and you can afford to give me the price of a cup of coffee or a pint once a month, please consider doing that doing that if you can't just continue listening for free that's no hassle all right um you can also subscribe to the podcast on fucking spotify on the podcast app on your phone on a cast and one thing as well that's hugely important especially if you're not from ireland just tell a friend about the podcast get get a friend listening to it post about it on your

social media you know and that's how you can help this podcast and have a valuable impact on my life um okay without further ado here is the interview that I conducted with Dr. here is the interview that I conducted with Dr. Billy McFlynn and I was listening back to this while I was cutting it together and I'm really happy with this one it's really fucking interesting and I hope you enjoy it too I think you will God bless I'll see you next week he's a folklorist a trad musician and an all-around interesting gas cunt. It is Dr. Billy McFlynn. I pronounced your second name in Irish wrong. McFlynn.

Is that what it is in Irish as well? Yeah, it's pretty easy. Okay. Right, first of all, tell us what it is you do and what does a doctor of folklore do? Part of the work that I do is I lecture. I teach in third level.

I teach courses in folklore, sometimes in archaeology and Irish studies in general. So when I'll be teaching in folklore, I cover a range of different topics. But folklore is a very wide subject. People think of folklore... Yeah, what is it? The people who don't know, like there's yanks listening who have no folklore. They do. Everyone has folklore. no folklore how they do everyone has folklore that's the thing everyone has folklore but um we have the stereotypical idea of what folklore is that it's old stories so the first thing that runs into people's heads is fionn macul and cuchulain and that kind of thing or a shanach sitting by a fire which of course it is that's part of folklore

but it's much bigger than that and it encompasses when you study it academically it encompasses an awful lot of things so it's more like ethnology or ethnography so you can include things like folk religion medicine vernacular architecture touching styles you know how to weave a basket all of that kind of thing so all of the festival days of the year, that kind of thing. So everything between life and death, in terms of unofficial culture, can be encompassed within folklore. So it's a very, very broad topic in a way, and you can specialise then in any kind of area. So anybody with any kind of interest in human life, you can find something in folklore. And what's a shanakí? A shanakí, it's a word that we use in Irish for a traditional storyteller. And I suppose that is the stereotypical idea of folklore,

is that it's an old person sitting by a fire telling old stories, or shanachas, which is old lore and old tradition. And Ireland was, and to a certain extent remains, a very, sort of a hots spot for that kind of thing in terms of you're studying old stories old traditions we have probably one of the best folklore collections in the world the national folklore collection and part of the reason for that is because storytelling was a very vibrant tradition in Ireland and it still is to an extent particularly in the Irish language, there are still very excellent storytellers.

So there's kind of a good reason why the stereotype is there, you know. And can you tell me, was pre-Christian Ireland, right, was that an oral culture? Or like, what's the... Yeah. Like, why does Ireland have these,

the stories that the Shanachese were telling? Why do we have such a good record of them? I think part of the reason why we have a very vital oral tradition historically is because when you look at other cultures, other folk cultures even of Europe, you see very often they can be quite visual. They will have folk costume, which is very colourful, and even folk art expressions of it,

and they're quite colourful and they're quite visual. Traditional Irish culture is not that visual. So we sort of compensated for that, I think, by telling stories and painting pictures with words. But a part of that as well is traditional Irish culture had very high esteem for poets and poetry. Poetry in ancient Ireland was a sacred practice, and poetry was conceived of as having its origins in the world beyond this world, and poets were almost like conduits bringing that

sacred poetry into the world. And this esteem that poets enjoyed lasted in an official sense, I suppose, up till the 16th century. So poets, they had to compose poetry, but also stories. The chief poet, the olive, the word we use now for professor um the chief poet in a kingdom had to know upwards of 300 stories as well as being versed in all the different types of poetry and the esteem that they enjoyed was that contained in his head yeah he couldn't write them down yeah now they did write them down as well and we have written examples of irish poetry from the 6th or 7th century onwards um But it was an oral culture very much as well. And that survived in an official way,

like as a sort of a high classical culture. It survived until the end of the 16th century when the flight of the earls and Ireland lost its aristocracy who were patronising the poets. So an interesting thing happened then where these professional class of poets who had been composing poetry in this very highbrow way for a thousand years or more

lost their patronage. So they became part of... Were poets wealthy? Would they have been wealthy? Yeah, I mean, in early Ireland, if you look at the Brehon laws, they talk about for a kingdom to be valid, it needed a king, it needed a bishop, and it needed a chief poet.

So the three most important people in society was the political leader, the religious leader, and the poet. So that'll show you the esteem that these guys enjoyed. And then after the 16th century, their highbrow poetry mixed and melded with popular culture, because that was the only place they had left to go with it so um you see this combination of classical culture mixing with folk culture from the 16th century onwards and that sort of informed 20th and 21st century um oral tradition in Ireland as well and the one thing I'd wonder too is how much autonomy did the the poet have right? So like, were they obligated to say class things

about their patron? Yeah, they were, they really were. Is it similar to like, do you know like the Mexican mafia have the narco-corridas? Yeah, I mean, a big part of it in early Ireland, when you look at the Brehan laws, they talk about this thing called the loach-nenoch, the loach-nenoch, it literally means your face value

and your esteem in society. Everybody had a value based on your rank and your esteem. Like in China, with the... Yeah, this notion where the government rewards you with sort of points for being a good citizen. So was that present in...

Kind of. Well, like the poets, part of the job of the poet was to big up the lord or the king and to sort of increase the lord's esteem in society. And the way they did that was by composing poetry. But the opposite to that as well is poets held tremendous power in that if a king was abusing his position and if a king broke the rules of society, it was the job of the poet to put him in his place.

So the poet would first compose a praise poem, which was all, you're great, you're great, except when you do this kind of thing, you're still great. So they put in the little swipe and if the king kept going and misbehaving, essentially, it was said that poets, metaphorically, they had a tongue,

in their tongue they had two compartments, one full of honey and one full of poison. And their job was to use the poison to compose invectives about a king. And their job was to use the poison to compose invectives about a king. And if the king kept misbehaving, they would compose full-on satire. They had to get permission of all the other poets in the kingdom. And they would stand together on a hill at dawn. And they would compose a satire at the king, which was like a magic spell almost that they would hit him with. And the king would lose his political power and one one

version of the story said the ground would open up and swallow the king as well so and so do you know that story about um is it king swivna is it is it the one with the the ears the donkey's ears oh no um that's laurie lynchick yeah can you tell us that please very quickly i'll give you the the back of the postcard version the king, King Lowry Lynchick had horse's ears and he used to keep his, he was born with them he didn't get surgery or anything but he used to keep his hair

long so nobody could see that he had horse's ears but his hair would get too long so he would get a barber in to cut his hair but the barber was the only one who knew that the king had horse's ears. So if the king, if Larry Lynchik was worried that the barber would squeal, he basically, he'd kill him, he'd dispatch him. But one of the barbers found out that the king had horse's ears and he

was, you know, he thought he might be in trouble. So he had to tell this story to somebody. It was kind of chewing him up that he knew the secret. So he went out to the forest and he found a tree that had a kind of a hole in it. And he told the story into the tree, the king's got horse's ears. And then it was out of his system. So he was all right. But a while later, somebody was looking for some wood to make a harp. And they cut down the tree and they made a harp out of it and when they played the story or played the song, the harp started singing

and it squealed and it said the king's got horse's ears so the story was out and he was alright from then on that's it do we know who composed that, was that an example of of like was this Lowry what's his face was he a real dude probably not probably not so what type of story was that was that an

entertaining it's an entertainment story yeah yeah and a vast amount of stories are entertainment stories can you think of any off the top of your head that were the satirical poem that was used to take down power? Well, there was one... There's a satirical poem which talks about... It's called The Voyage of Meldun, and it's about... It's sort of slagging off of a literary trope at the time. So they took this idea of a voyage, a sacred voyage across the sea,

but he was slagging churchmen at the time, the author of this, and he was talking about the king or sorry it was a bishop I think it was who had a demon of gluttony so he was slagging him and he said instead of going on a voyage like Saint Brendan across the ocean he went on a voyage through a sea of milk and custard and all this kind of stuff

it's not exactly cutting edge by 21st century standards but it was really vicious at the time. But it was satirising the imaginary truth. Imagine that now, fucking Donald Trump man. You see him, he gets onto a boat and a load of custard. What a prick. Yeah, it's how you tell him as well, you know, so.

So, when I suggested to you, let's do a live podcast, you got very excited about the fact that it was St. Bridget's Day. Yeah. Why is that? Might as well do it on a good day. One of the things that I study is the ritual year.

Yeah. Looking at old festivals and, you know, things that have a deep tradition in Ireland that go back very, very far. And they're part of sort of the natural cycle, the agricultural cycle, the agricultural cycle, the cycle of nature. And they find their expression in these feast days. There's four of old feast days, which probably stretch back to the pre-Christian period. There's Samhain, which is Halloween now, and we're all pretty familiar with that. There's the first of May, which is known as Bealtaine. There's the first of August, or thereabouts, which is Lunace, which

has all but disappeared in most parts, but it's still celebrated in Mayo in a Christian way where they go to the top of Croke Patrick. And then there is St. Bridget's Day, which is very popular in primary schools. Kids make the crosses. So you've probably seen some of them today, kids coming home with these little crosses made of rushes. So I just find this way in which we celebrate these things and the fact that they persist in the 21st century, in certain respects, means they still have some kind of relevance for people. And now I think with the decline of orthodox religion for some people, they're looking to these things perhaps in a romantic way, looking into the past and sort of getting inspiration. And I think

environmentalism probably has something to do with people's interest in this thing as well, because we have this romanticised idea of the pre-Christian religion, that it was very in touch with nature, which it probably was in certain respects, but they weren't, I doubt they'd recycled very much or anything like that. Yeah. You know, But yeah, there's different ways of looking at it. You can look at it in a dry academic sense

and try and make sense of it there or you can take a more romantic notion of it as well and just draw inspiration in that way. And you're also interested in ritualistic sacrifice of animals. Yeah. I am, yeah. I wrote my...

I seen a man. He was outside. I had to call him in. he was kidding a jackdaw with a hammer. But that's something to clarify actually, because when I said it on Twitter, that you're interested in the ritualistic sacrifice of animals, there was a couple of people horrified as if, this isn't something you do. No, I don't skin horses to get into gigs with Rory Gallagher. No, I don't skin horses to get into gigs. Rory Gallagher and stuff like that.

No, I studied this particular feast day in Ireland, which was the Feast of St. Martin, which is the 11th of November. There's one or two people maybe in the audience who might have heard of it. It used to be very, very popular in loads of places in Ireland. And the way in which it was observed was by essentially ritual animal sacrifice. People would stand at the doorstep of their house when the sun was going down

on the eve of the feast day of St. Martin and they would draw the blood of an animal, they would shed its blood and then they would spread the blood on the doorstep of the house and sometimes they would put it on the four corners of the house as well and this was to protect the house and the people inside from evil and from death and from destruction. And in some places, they would anoint people

on the head with the blood. And in Galway, for some reason, they took a really weird turn on it and they would cut the head off chickens and throw them over the roof of the house for protection. So, but, you know, this... Would they eat the chicken?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and you would... They would... Would they eat the chicken? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and you would... They would. Probably not the head, because it was in your back garden now, but they would. They would eat the flesh as usual,

but, you know, sometimes they would kill pigs or sheep or goats, and you would always eat the blood of pigs and things like that on a normal day, but on St. Martin's Day, when you killed on St. Martin's Day, you would never eat the blood because it was a sacred substance.

You would use it in a sort of a defensive way against evil, against death and destruction. And it was a sacred substance that was not to be eaten. And, you know, this sounds, it sounds like voodoo.

It sounds like sub-Saharan African traditional rituals and things like that. Or even, you know, you see it, I think in Islam, they have Eid where they shed the blood of animals and things like that. But was something that continued in ireland into the 21st century i spoke to a woman from county clare who was still doing it in 2003 so it's not yeah it's not that

long gone it sounds like something from the ancient past which it is but it also persisted until very recently and i've spoken to dozens of people who've done it. Was she doing it, though, as a conscious nod to tradition, or had someone just not told her about the internet and EastEnders and stuff? Like, why was she doing it? Well, she did it to... She was devout, and she did it to honour St Martin. How did the Catholic...

Like, here's the thing, like... How did the Catholic Church like, here's the thing, like, how did the Catholic Church feel about essentially these pagan practices that had found their way into, like, if you went to the Pope now and said, how are you getting on? I'm going to fuck a dead chicken over the house. How does that fit in with what you're doing in the Vatican in 2019? Yeah, it's a good question. Do you know, how did the church feel about it? There's always been a kind of an ambiguity and a tension, and sometimes a creative tension, between what official religion is supposed to be and how it manifests amongst the people.

So you see certain practices that are disapproved of, but they still continue on, and other things that the church made a very continuous, or I'm sorry, a very conscientious effort to stamp out but the thing about it is priests come from the kinds of cultures and the kinds of societies that have these folk cultures to them

as well and it's kind of important to remember as well not to make a sort of a draw a line between things that are pagan and things that are Christian because the people doing this were some of the most devout Catholics What does pagan mean? What does pagan mean? It's a term that, I suppose, if you look at J.R.R.

Tolkien, he took the word Celtic, and he said, Celtic is like a magic bag into which you can put anything, in which you can pull anything out. And I think pagan is kind of like that as well, because it means different things to different people. If you want to look at it in that sense, you could say that it relates to the pre-christian religion or the sort of the non-christian religious practices that you find in ireland but you know just because the pagans did something and it continued on it at christian period doesn't mean that it's you know a pagan an island of paganism in a sea of christianity or anything

like that like practices continue in a culture because they're relevant to them. And if you look at Rome, before Rome was the center of Christianity, you know, they were going to basilicas, and the pontiff was the head of the church, and they had altars, and they had prayers, and they had holy water, and they had incense. Wow. Yeah, that's all pagan.

So a lot of our modern Christianity comes from pagan Roman practices, or pagan practices in Italy. It does. But, you know, like prayer is a pagan thing. Altars are a pagan thing. It doesn't mean that they're essentially, what they are is their religion. And religion manifests in all kinds kind of different ways is it's people trying to make sense of the world and to search for meaning and to search for whatever the numinous nature of this thing that they're

trying to chase after is and drawing clear lines between one religion and another it's probably and and you know in the past stuff that happened in the past and continues into the present it's probably foolish to say this is one thing and this is another, because things have always existed on this continuum, and their meaning changes. And if this practice of slaughtering animals in this ritualistic way was something that was originally associated with Samhain, which I think it is, and probably dedicated to pre-Christian gods, it doesn't mean that the people who are doing it in Clare in the 21st century have anything to do with that. They're just doing a practice that is a religious practice, and it is meaningful for them, but they still have the same concerns. They're afraid of death, they're afraid of disease, and they're taking control. They're

standing on the doorstep, which is the sort of threshold space in the house, and they're looking at the sun going down. They're standing on the brink of winter, and they're facing it down, and they're drawing this sacred substance, this this blood they're taking the life of one thing to protect the lives of the rest of the things so in a way like we can look at it as being superstitious and silly and they're afraid of death what this is it this is an active this is an act of defiance against their fears and this is overcoming their fears so those kind of things are not you know as folklorists we tend to not use the word superstition, we just use folk belief, because superstition has a kind of a value judgment,

saying you're kind of silly to believe in things that are superstitious, but they're just beliefs, they're folk beliefs, and they manifest in all kinds of different ways, and all kinds of different religions, and along a continuum, because it's the human brain trying to make sense of the world, and trying to take control, and trying to assert yourself in the world. And that manifests in so many different ways. And that's kind of why I study it. I'm just trying to make sense of what religion is. And I find it really, really interesting.

And would you call yourself atheistic? Are you an atheist? Yeah, I would be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't preach it or anything like that. Yeah, that's the problem. When you say you're an atheist nowadays, you kind of have to apologise it because so many atheists are pricks. Yeah.

It's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to argue on the internet now. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm a humanist. That's the way I look at it. And I suppose my perspective is, as a non-believer, I believe in the importance of celebrating human life and human existence and marking the important points in human life and celebrating them in this way.

And I look at religious activity and look at religious belief and I take great inspiration in the best parts of it. And I find it really interesting and really worthy of study. And the bits that I don't like or the bits that I don't believe, they don't apply to me. So that's fine, you know. And some people take great solace in them

and some people, they're very important to them. And that's cool, you know. Everybody needs to chill out and just let each other be who they are, you know. That's kind of my attitude towards it. And for those who aren't religious, I try to cater to them in a way, you know?

Yeah. I mean, my thing with that as well is that, like, I don't like when someone's religious in a way that they're trying to control someone else's behaviour, you know, to restrict their freedom. But at the same time, I view religious people as that's their way of, that's their way of sorting their mental health.

That's their way of finding personal meaning so they can get on with their lives and achieve happiness and contentment you know, so I'm grand with that even if it means, you know, killing chickens or eating haunted bread but you know

we are looking at the chicken over the roof scenario going crazy Claire people you know we at seven years of age I have to invent sins and tell them to a man in an upright coffin you know and then drink blood drink symbolic blood and before we have we we're going to have a little interval where you can all have a gentle pint and a small wee. And you can turn off your phones for the few people who have buzzing phones.

Do all three at the same time. Have a pint of piss and a turning off of the phone. Like, you do loads of shit. One of the things you do is instrument making. Yeah. And this thing here, this isn't just there by accident, lads. It's not a bit of scaffolding. Yeah, this is part of the show.

This was planned. Can you tell us, before the interval, what are we looking at? And can you make some noise out of it? Okay, I can I suppose part of the inspiration that I get from studying history and archaeology and folklore and religion and all of that

is I've created this art project it's kind of an ongoing performance project which I call Pagan Rave kind of tongue in cheek I'm using that very wide meaning of the term pagan. And it is class. I've been to a couple of them.

It's down in Dingle, and it is insane. Yeah. Giant flaming wicker men, everyone dressed up with skulls on their heads, and I can't even describe it. Yeah. Because I was on acid. I wasn't.

You'd think you were if you were at it, all right, I suppose. You don't need any drugs. Yeah. If you're interested in that project, you can look,

I have a bit on my website which is tradition.ie and if you look that there, you can see some images. Fair play on getting that URL. Yeah. Yeah, it was good.

You've had that a few years, I'd say, have you? Yeah, yeah. Fucking hell. But part of the project, like, it's ongoing, and we use costume. Some of them are based on traditional stuff, and some of them we make them up. But I've made a lot of costumes,

and we make instruments as well. I've made replicas of of old instruments and i've sort of invented other instruments as well but the most recent one that i made is this um it's called a yebaher okay yeah no it's uh i saw a guy is anyone seeing it as slightly sexualized i like girls with large feet yeah I'll never look at it the same again now but tell us about it Billy what is it where does it come from it's it's there's a guy he's from Turkey he's called a Gorkim Shem and he invented it a couple of years ago I saw him playing it on YouTube and the minute I heard it I just said I want one so I wrote to him and I asked him his permission do you mind if

I make my own one and so he said yeah work away he did a master's in music technology and at the end of it he said I want to make electronic music acoustically which is a bit of a contradiction in terms. But it's a fully acoustic instrument. No one believes me until you hear it, until you see me playing it, but it's completely acoustic. There's no reverb or anything like that. The reverb and the whole sound comes from these big, two-metre-long springs that are sticking out of it. And is that a pair of bow-rons at the end?

Yeah, it's basically you play it like a cello, and the vibration from the strings runs down these big metal springs, and then the bow-rons at the end act like amplifiers. So it's got this huge, expansive kind of sound. It sounds a bit like an 80s synthesizer essentially. Give us a crack of the whip!

Alright, okay. Thank you. mental health to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th

when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. I don't know if it's in tune, but we'll try. Hello? Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooioooooioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioioio I got asked this question by a Sinn Féin counsellor. What are the origins of Néa of Breed as a pagan goddess?

I'd love to hear all about her. Yeah, it's a good day to ask the question, I suppose. Gerry Adams asked that. We can be pretty sure there was a goddess in Ireland and in Britain that went by the name of Brigid, or the earlier version of the name Brigid, which is Brigantia, which means the exalted one.

There are a couple of mentions of her. One most famous mention of her is from a 10th century text by Bishop Cormac O'Cullinan, and he put together a list of terms and ideas and things that were passing out of knowledge at that time, so he was kind of gathering old lore and old tradition. And he talked about Brigid being a goddess that was worshipped by the Irish, by the pagan Irish, and that she was the patron of poets, blacksmiths, and healers. Now, if we can take that account at face value, which is like nearly 500 years after conversion, then maybe it is, maybe that's exactly what Brigid represented. But we can't be sure, like it was a good few hundred years after paganism was no longer being practiced. But we can be confident there. It was a good few hundred years after paganism was no longer being practiced. But we can be confident there was a goddess called Brigantia because we find inscriptions to her and a couple of statues in Britain

from the Roman conquest period. So there definitely was a pre-Christian goddess called Brigid or some version of that name. But Gwen, when you try and look at then like folk traditions and St. Brigid's Day practices and try and separate out the pagan from the Christian, like we've no way of identifying what aspects of St. Brigid's Day customs pre-existed. We know there was a festival before it was called St. Brigid's Day, it was called Imboloc and that name Imboloc, there was a festival before it was called St. Bridget's Day. It was called Imboloc.

And that name, Imboloc, which was around the 1st of February, it means possibly something like purification, or it might be to do with birth and animals, sheep giving birth to lambs, things like that. But those themes, again, like this trying to separate out pagan from Christian is probably pointless because the themes that were relevant to the pre-Christian people continue to be relevant to Christian people. So themes, ideas, imagery, stories to do with the goddess probably persisted and became thoroughly Christianized.

But when you look at the customs of St. Bridget's Day, there's this overwhelming concern with birth and passing from the womb, from being unborn into the world of being born. I heard a scholar from UCC, Shane Lehan is his name, he's a very good folklore scholar, and he was talking about the imagery to do with birth

at St. Bridget's Day. So the weaving of the crosses, he saw a symbol at the centre of the cross, the diamond shape, and he drew a parallel of that with essentially the birth canal and that that is a symbol of, you know, a female symbol.

There's this tradition as well. I'm trying to be polite about it. It's my podcast, man. It's grand. Yeah. They're grand. But there was this custom as well where they would make the crisp reed,

St. Bridget's belt, and people would step through St. Bridget's belt. And belts in Irish tradition and medieval tradition are associated with birth as well. Women, when they were giving birth, when they were in labour, they would wear belts on their bump, essentially, and and at a certain point they would open the belt and the thinking was that by letting that release that it would release and let the child be born so these belts

were tied up with the image image and the the association with birth and therefore this moving through a belt which people do they step through these big woven belts made out of straw or made out of rushes. And that's sort of like moving. So like there's essentially, is it, it's a birth thing. It's not a sexual thing. It's a birth thing. No. Yeah. That, that, that, that is, is essentially what it is. And St. Bridget's cloak, we've very often heard the story of St. Bridget's cloak as well. Kildare people will be very familiar with that. People would leave a piece of cloth outside their door and it was said that Bridget would come around

to every house and she would touch the cloth and then that cloth would be used. People could use it as a sacred relic kind of thing and it would protect sailors against drowning. It could protect the house against burning. But women, women in particular, would collect these cloths.

And there's stories of these women who would go around on St. Bridges Day with the cloth. And if people were having trouble with fertility, either animals or humans, they would place the cloth on women who were infertile. And then they could conceive, or cattle that were having difficult births, she would place the cloth on the animal animal and then it would give birth easily. So there's this overwhelming imagery to do with that, to do with new life. And of course, that time of the year as well, you're coming out of winter, you're turning into spring, buds are coming in the trees, the greenery is starting to grow.

So this is the start. The sheep are giving birth to lambs at this time. Was there a correlation between, we'll say, human sexual activity and the seasons in the way that animals would, like you're describing?

Would people have done more riding on St. Bridget's Day? Short answer is, I think so, yeah. Like, St. Bridget's crosses were sometimes put under the beds of couples that couldn't conceive. And in Duntree League, which is the only passage tomb in County Limerick, as far as I know,

in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal, there was a scholar who went up there, and he found a half-burnt St. Bridget's cross inside the passage tomb. And his thinking was that in the 20th century, couples were going there and lying on the stones of the tomb and doing some kind of ritual because lying on... Yeah. Anyway. Not anyway. Yeah, it was good. It was, you know, that's what you do. But they were, these passage tombs are sometimes, or wedge tombs are sometimes referred to as Dermot and Gráinne's bed, named after the sometimes referred to as Dermot and Gráinne's bed named after the mythological

figure of Dermot and Gráinne and Dermot would abstain from enjoining with Gráinne for quite a while but he eventually gave up she was washing herself in the river and the water started splashing up her leg and she started slagging him saying look the water is more adventurous than you are

so he did. So these tombs, these ancient tombs were associated with fertility. And couples who had difficulty conceiving used to lie on them. And they were connecting this to St. Bridget's crosses, which were put under beds of couples who were having difficulty conceiving. And also there's a series of symbolic actions that happen on St. Bridget's Day as well, which again, Shane Lehan put me onto this. They would make mashed potatoes, and that was the meal that you would eat. But the way they would make mashed potatoes, they'd make them using a beetle. They would have these big pots, and then they would use this big long shaft.

A phallic. A phallic masher, basically. And this would go into the pot like this. So you have this thing ramming into the pot. The other thing as well would be a dash churn. A dash churn is a type of churn which has a long stick and it has kind of an X at the end.

And it goes into a long, narrow vessel. And again, the way you do it is you ram it in and out. And they would use... And they were conscious of this. Totally, of course they were. And of course, you say this to an audience in 2019, and we all giggle because it makes us awkward

talking about sexuality like that. But I'm guessing for them, they might have had... What was their attitude towards sexuality? If you're fucking Daz coming into the room and going, hey, look at this with the spuds, lads, it's dick yeah chances are like everyone's like okay grand well that's that's actually here's the other thing as well and i always think it is privacy is a very recent concept yeah people were fucking each other in front of their children yeah in one bedroom houses i suppose yeah and then a pig in the corner yeah to keep to keep warm. To keep it warm, yeah.

So the modern notion of, the modern association of Catholicism with prudism is a very recent thing. And if you look at pre-famine Ireland, people were living together and having kids without being married, and there was no stigma attached to any of that. There was no concept of illegitimate children or anything like that and in fact like you look at some of the

reports and some of the writings by the english at the time and they were saying essentially that the irish have brought this upon themselves with their wanton ways yeah and like it's true and they kind of blame the irish around the famine is the same time that the first Magdalene laundry started to be developed, the Magdalene order. Well, like post-famine Ireland was a highly traumatised people, and this narrative was kind of spun by a couple of different authorities that the Irish had brought this upon themselves with their ways. And you see in the second half of the 19th century, we kind of looked towards Victorian mores

and Victorian social attitudes to sort of guide our behaviour and before that things were a lot more earthy I think is the way to say it and like if you go to Gaeltacht areas as well where they never, even still when they never conceptually moved into the Anglosphere and they're still thinking and speaking in the Irish language, things are a lot

freer sometimes there. Traditionally, you'd be surprised at some of the lyrics of some of the old songs and things like that and the attitudes of people, they're not sometimes as reserved as you see in the English-speaking parts of Ireland. A big part of that, I think, is this

Victorian post-famine self-consciousness and association of sexuality with sinfulness and shame which is probably

a Protestant thing they were big into that and the fucking Victorians man every ailment they have they tried to cure it with a mercury enema

yeah I don't know if we can blame Protestants as such you know Catholics were pretty good at spinning that yarn but it was definitely yeah leave the prods alone but uh the post-famine authorities be they english irish catholic or protestant they gotta dig into the irish people sometimes and a big part of it was saying what happened to you as a people like sodom and gamara

yeah you deserved it i mean and it was easy it's easy to say that to a traumatized people. Like what Jordan Peterson would be saying if he was around in the 1840s. Yeah, his laissez-faire model of economics, I suppose, would definitely lead to the famine as it happened. Can you tell me about Sheet and the Gigs and describe what a Sheet and the Gig is to the Americans? Here we go.

I'd prefer for the Americans to just Google sheet in a gig. Leave me alone. But it's... You all know what a sheet in a gig is, yeah? Yeah. So it's a woman. It's a small little figurine, and it's a woman opening her cloaca.

That's what fish have. Cloacas are, yeah, fish and monotremes and things, yeah. So don't ask me for sex education. Humans have different parts, yeah. It's an exhibitionist figure is what they call it. She's exposing herself in a very obvious way. But she and the gigs were found in churches. Yeah, I think they began life as carvings and sculptures

as a warning against lust. But I think the Irish kind of took the image of the shield in the gig and instead of being a warning against lust they developed them into something different and I think they became a symbol of protection and luck and again you see them over doorways sometimes they're moved from their original position in the church to being over the doorway very few sheila's are not a good few sheilas are not in their original position. Yeah. So I think far from being a sort of a negative thing that you should warn against,

I think this sense of, I don't know, I could be wrong, but I think there's something to do with female agency and tying sexuality and power into that. And that kind of developed. There is this sense that you get in Irish folklore sometimes as well

of female agency, which sometimes can arise from old lore and tradition to do with the goddess. The Cailach is a figure that you find in Irish lore, and she is a divine woman. She's very often an old woman.

Her age is depicted as being... She lives on sort of tectonic or geological time. She remembers when the oceans were forests and when the mountains were flat. So she's so old that she is the mother of all the tribes and races and groups of Ireland. She's depicted as that. Is she one of the two

I heard they're then in? She's kind of outside of them actually. It's unusual. She's not depicted as one of them. She's older than them in a way. And what you see is tectonic forces, the moving of mountains, the digging out. The creation of mountains are said to be her actions in the landscape.

She will be walking around with rocks in her apron and they'll fall out and they'll form mountains. So she is... And the stories of her are this kind of thing that you get in traditional Irish culture of female agency and female power. And she is, like, her age and the fact that she is depicted as the mother of all people is sort of an

idealised version of what that is of motherhood and female power sort of conceptualised in this abstract way as a kind of a goddess figure essentially so and perhaps stories like that fed into or gave power to what the Sheila

ended up representing in the medieval period. You know, it's not that she was a pagan symbol or anything, but just that notion persisted and persists now even still in stories. There's still stories told of the Kalloch. I heard an interesting reading of what the Sheila in the gig was, right? And it wasn't...

Some people look at it as a fertility thing. And I heard that that was like the male gaze that the male looked at the sheet in the gig with her legs open and said all right that's a woman who wants sex but there's another reading of it that's the woman with her legs open was a protection against the huge amount of child mortality that was happening that it was wishing upon the woman that she had this gigantic fanny that would basically very easily allow the child out because so many women

were just dying from having kids and that's the other reading of it. And that we've sexualised it. There is a sexual element to it in as much as sex, reproduction and birth are obviously, they're all linked. Fuck off. Turns out.

But sheilas are not young women. They're inevitably depicted as old women. They're generally naked. A couple of sheilas have belts and that is probably back to that belt image as well. But they're deliberately old you can see their ribs so they're they're old women so whatever they're depicting it's not come get it

lads kind of thing it's something very different um and i think it is a statement in some way or at least the irish interpreted and diverted it into meaning something else not that sort of the male gaze type of look. It's something very, very different and I think it's an assertion of power and protection in a different context. Can you tell me,

it's something you said to me fucking years ago. I think it was a chariot driver and he had a hole in his chariot. Oh God, yeah. It's just, I don't know why you're picking this out. Because I remember it, man.

Yeah, it's from the Tarnbork Koolinge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley. And it's basically just a body image of a lad who's so old that his bag is hanging down past his legs and through a hole in the floor of his chariot sticking out.

That's all it is. Would that have been written as comedy at the time? Would that have been... Yeah, I mean, there's this stereotype of older lads... The descendant testicle of age. Dropping, dropping.

So they were emphasising the age of this bike. If you're finding your first grey pube, that's what comes next. Yeah. Yeah. Testicles that wad up

off your knees. Yeah, but I mean, there's loads of body images, sometimes for comic effect, I think, like that one, in the town and in lots of the old stories as well, you know?

One thing I never think of when I think of Irish kind of folklore or tradition, you don't see a lot of sculptures, do you? No, there's not a lot of them. Like, this goes back, I think, to that idea

that we are not as visual a culture as other other um european cultures why why is that like why are we not it's hard to say i mean if you go back to like let's say the the iron age and the roman period the romans were mad for making sculptures but like even though there was connection to roman culture here on the east coast and we see bits and pieces of roman culture and the odd statue from that period, there's very little of it because they didn't formally conquer Ireland in any way. So there was no ancient statues going on at that time. But I'm not sure.

I think the primacy of the word over the image is possibly, I'm just guessing, but I think because of the importance of poets was that why we became an oral culture much more than a visual culture and back then again to the poets right we were speaking earlier that the poet was so important in society and how this poet spoke about the the leader because it did what happened if like a king was like that poet's talking shit about me i'm'm going to kill him. Were they protected by divinity? It would have been a bad thing to go around killing poets. Yeah, you couldn't kill a poet without good reason, essentially. And the poets were kind of the ones who dictated the reasons.

And the poets essentially were journalists. It's like having a society that really... Yeah, but I think they're more like propagandists because, remember, it was the king who was paying the poets. so a smart poet isn't going to talk too much shit about his king no he's really not but the other thing as well is if the king is way out of line it's the poet's job to put him back in line or to get rid of him so would you have had one poet belonging to one king talking shit about another thing king that his king is warring with? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think so. That makes sense, like.

That's like, but like, would you see, now I'm taking this into hot take territory that you are not allowed to talk about in your academic circles. No. But I'm drawing correlations with gangster rap. I'm drawing correlations with the Mexican mafia and the narco-corridas.

Let's go there, Billy. There was... Well, you are right. I'll give you this, right? There was satirists, and satirists were... They were kind of not regarded as being very honourable people. Yeah. But they definitely had a role in society. So they were the ones throwing shade, definitely.

And... So were the satirists like indie musicians who were like fuck this i can't get a decent label so i'm gonna do some punk yeah i think so i think the role of the satirist was like to just to remind everybody and by slagging essentially they were full-time piss takers and they weren't uh as anointed as the poets they weren't esteemed but they were kind of led away with it, you know? And how would they go about their Saturday? Would they be doing it in the back on the sleigh?

I don't know. I'd say they were just going around it at festival days and things and when people would get together in assemblies that they were good at slagging, you know?

And a good slag can be really funny if it's done right, as you know. So, yeah. So I think that was probably why they were tolerated and why they were led yeah so i think that was probably how they were why they were tolerated and why they were led away with it it's probably because they were good at it i don't know i'm guessing i'm guessing you'd have to ask fergus kelly he knows a lot more about

this kind of thing um one other you you have a roaring hot take about the uh stones of new grange and the art that's on new grange it's not not my hot take, and it's not that hot. It's been on the go since the 90s. All right. Yeah. It's one interpretation of it, and a lot of scholars have no time for it. But I know you'd like it, because it's kind of... It's bold, man.

It's bold, yeah. Lewis Williams, Jeremy Dronfield, there's a couple of scholars in England, and their idea is that the imagery from megalithic art, that it's what's called entoptic art, and that it was generated in the brain. So we're talking like the Newgrange stone, the spirals and the chevrons

that we all did in Leaving Sardar. Yeah, and it's generated in the human nervous system. Now, there's a couple of different ways and it's generated in the human nervous system. Now, there's a couple of different ways of generating these images in the human nervous system. You can sit in the dark and chant and not eat and drink and that kind of stuff, or you can dance yourself into a frenzy. Or the one that you seem to like

is that you can eat mushrooms, and that will induce these images. So these boys put forward this idea by going into the lab and giving people mushrooms and making them draw the images that they saw. And they saw that they had similarities to these images that they found on megalithic art.

Like I said, it's not widely subscribed to, but it's an intriguing idea and bowel fellas like you seem to like it. And so do the bowel chattery boys at the back. They're just coming up on the mushrooms. Because my old art teacher,

and I believe he used to teach you art as well. He did. Beaker. Yeah. We had a teacher called Beaker. Mr. McGrath. Mr. McGrath. Yeah.

I would call him that. You would call him Beaker. But Beaker. But Beaker, he used to get very passionate about he used to get very passionate about the art on Newgrange and he would get angry

if people suggested that the Irish were not visually artistic and he would say look at those spirals and those chevrons we were the originators of abstract art. Well it's right. I mean, the Boyne Valley accounts for a huge proportion of all of the megalithic art from passage tombs in all of Europe. And in fact, North has half of all of the passage tomb art

in maybe in Ireland. It's got like around 400 decorated stones in one tomb. So it's a huge hotspot for this really developed abstract and I think it's really beautiful. That's what fascinates me is why were they not doing representational art? Like are there images in Ireland of I'm going to have a crack at a horse, I'm going to have a crack at a dog? You get it here and there in prehistory. I mean there's a pot that has a pair of ears and a nose and eyes. And you can read into some of the abstract art that it might be faces,

but that might be pareidolia, so we see faces in everything. Yeah. You drop coins on the ground and you'll see a face. Yeah. Oh, it happened last week, man. Yeah. But, no, they were into abstract art and they were into design in a big way. You don't get depictive art until the medieval period,

and that's kind of standard in the medieval period, then, that illustration style. So, I don't know why they loved abstract much more than representative, but they did. What about when people say that the Irish were Celts? How accurate is that? We'd need a whole other podcast just to talk about the word Celts. Let's do, as you said, the postcard

version. Oh God, I don't think there is a postcard version of it. I taught a course in UL and it was a three month long course on what the word Celts mean and are they Irish Celtic? And at the end of the 12 weeks of teaching and lecturing, the answer was we don't know.

The answer is it depends what you mean by Celtic, because there's different scholars use the term. So linguists talk about the Celtic languages, and that's the label that they have given to this set of related languages. But when did the languages get here? Was it in the Iron Age? Was it in the Bronze Age? Where did they come from?

There's a serious train of thought that says the Celtic language is developed in the West and spread into Central Europe. Is it like saying classical music and not differentiating fucking Baroque? It's much more than that, I suppose, because you have an art style which is defined as Celtic, which seems to have arisen around Central Europe,

you know, Switzerland and Austria and places like that. Is that La Tienne? Yeah, La Tienne and Holstadt style of art. Then you have things like archaeologists talk about Celtic culture. You have places where they speak a Celtic language, but they're not using a Celtic art. Or you have very clear evidence of people migrating from one Celtic area to another and bringing their culture with them.

And then you have places like in Ireland, where we have a language which we call Celtic. We have an art style which we call Celtic, one Celtic area to another, bringing their culture with them. And then you have places in Ireland where we have a language which we call Celtic, we have an art style which we call Celtic, we have a religion which is related to the religion in other Celtic speaking areas, but there's no definite evidence for a big movement of people from the Celtic homeland as such. So geneticists, archaeologists, classicists, old Irish scholars, linguists, all have a different working definition of what Celtic is. So to say, is Ireland Celtic, it depends on who you're asking

and it depends what you're asking about. I would say it's becoming a less and less useful label all the time because the parameters of it are constantly shifting. So I would say Gaelic, just use the term Gaelic to refer to the culture in ireland that emerged but does that also refer to scotland wales as well scotland and the isle of man were both

gaelic speaking places and what was the crack with the welsh the welsh the cornish um and the bretons were speaking uh brithonic which is a different type of language but even in the languages like you have celtic languages languages which are related to Irish some quite closely some very distantly been spoken in Spain been spoken in France possibly Western Germany Switzerland Austria all the way over to Turkey there's people who speak a language Galatian in you know Galatasaray the football team that the Gal bit of their name is related to like the Gauls of France. And that's in Turkey. Yeah. And like St. Paul, I think, wrote a letter

to the Galatians in the New Testament, like they're Celtic speaking people living in Turkey. So to think that there was a common culture from Turkey all the way to Ireland and that this is, you can label it Celtic, you know, it's far too difficult to say Celtic means any one thing. So we're probably, and the other thing about it as well is when you look at, if you say Celtic refers to the Iron Age, this period from, let's say, 600 BC to 400 AD,

that's a very small window even in prehistory. Like we have evidence of people going back to the Mesolithic and even suggestive evidence of the Paleolithic. So 10,000 years or more in Ireland. And the so-called Celtic period, the quintessentially Celtic period, is the tail end of that. So there's all this cultural development going on in Ireland

for most of prehistory. And then to think that we are Celts because the period at the very tail end of that people have labelled Celtic's it's it's much more complicated and much more interesting than that the best thing to do is instead of just saying we're Celts and leave it at that dive into prehistory learn about it find out about our language about our art about our culture and just sort of you'll see as the picture gets bigger and more complicated it just gets more fascinating and I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying it and probably never come to a definitive answer,

but it's fantastic to just keep digging. One thing there that stuck out... APPLAUSE One thing that I haven't actually mentioned tonight, because you mentioned Carnish, which is now essentially a dead language. Yeah, they've revived it. And of course, the first thing they did when they revived it was have a split.

They were fighting about what version of Cornish they were going to revive. So, like everything, you know, the Judean People's Front versus the People's Front of Judea. You know, first on the agenda, let's split the house. So, yeah, it's an interesting thing that the Cornish,

like Cornish was a language which is not related to English at all, and they were speaking it up until the 18th century, I think, and then it died out as a spoken language, and they're reviving it. There was a small pocket of it in parts of America where they went after to the mines, and then it disappeared. Yeah, was that... I know the one... What state is that again?

Montana, I believe. And there was a lot of Irish there too, wasn't there? Yeah, to the point that... Have you all seen Deadwood? So Deadwood is... Look at it, it's fairly class. It was a HBO thing about cowboys in 2008. And there's a

scene in it in Montana where they're dealing with Cornish miners and this is like 1910 and when you see the Cornish miners that are in it they had to find people that were Irish speakers because they couldn't so if you watch it as an Irish person and see the Cornish miners and they'd would they're speaking Irish they're Irish people they couldn't find any Cornish speakers. Yeah, there's very few. I think they only number in the hundreds. I could be wrong, so if there's any Cornish speakers listening to your podcast,

they should let themselves be known, but I think there's only a couple of hundred Cornish speakers and I'm not sure if there are any native or first language Cornish speakers. There might be some kids who are being raised in Cornish now, but it's not an unbroken tradition. One thing I never mentioned, Billy, in his day-to-day life, doesn't even speak English.

Well, it depends on where I am. But you live in the Gaeltacht, and you speak Irish as your everyday language. Yeah. And your daughters speak Irish as a first language. Yeah, they're both native Irish speakers. Their mom is from the Gaeltacht, from Duncain. So my wife is Morin the Cowleaf. She's a Shanno singer and a musician.

And we made the decision, when we live in the Gaeltacht, we're going to raise our kids in Irish. And I'm from Limerick, but I learned it. Because if you marry someone from Spain and you live in Spain you learn Spanish yeah so I married a goth woman

I moved to the goth so I learned Irish and now we're raising our children in Irish so yeah yeah we're delighted you know

the the rubber bandit songs the Irish version of I Wanna Fight Your Father and Sonny it was Billy and his wife did the music and Sonny

in particular was a lot of fun because what I did was I found a type of music from Mississippi from the 1860s called Fife and Drum Music which was, I'm going to do a podcast on it but it was a type of music that was a mixture of kind of traditional Irish

from Irish people that had gone to Mississippi and African folk, and it's a precursor to blues and jazz. And I found recordings of this and sent it to Ewan Wirren to try and do this with bower on and flute. And whistle, yeah, she played it on an E-flat. And whistle, yeah.

And that's what Sonny is. That's the music in Sonny. It's two proper Irish trad musicians playing a version of 1860s Mississippi, Irish and African music. And it was tough going for you, wasn't it? Because the time signature was nuts. Yeah, to replicate it exactly,

like the lads were using these really interesting... They were African rhythms. Syncopations, yeah. So just to get that bang on, I kept slipping into Irish style of doing it, and I had to try and be a bit groovier when the lads were doing it. Tell us about...

Because you're like multi-instrumentalist, you make your own fucking instruments. Yeah. Tell us about some of that crack. Well, like... And tell us about the pig in Rave, man. We want to hear about the fucking... Yeah.

Mr. I-don't-want-to-talk-about-mushrooms-and-sex. What happens at pagan rave stays at pagan rave. Yeah, it's... I was talking about it earlier, I suppose. It's an ongoing project. It's an exploration of the notion of ritual and using the traditional celebrations of Ireland you know things like um the lighting of bonfires of Halloween of dressing

up um traditional costumes from all around Europe and um we get together and we do these events I don't know what you call them. Ceremonies, rituals, events, shows, something like that, where we'll wear these costumes, we'll perform music. That's what the instruments I build are for. And I have a team of amazing musicians, traditional musicians and contemporary hip-hop and metalers and rappers and all kinds of stuff.

And we mix this music together with, you you know performance and dance and moving in these interesting ways i'm trying to create a sense of um when we do these ceremonies or celebrations it's like trying to create a timeless space a space out of normal space and a time out of time because what the sense i get as well is that what i admire about it is you take inspiration from tradition but you bring a lot of your own creativity to it like when you've made someone like the costumes are mad like fucking a deer skull and loads of fur and you make them on yourself and you you find dead animals i believe isn't it yeah and what's happened now is like the word is out and people bring me bits of dead animals all the time. So roadkill and bones and all kinds of mad stuff.

So yeah, I make costumes. I try to use... For me, the material is the most important thing with the costume because what we're doing is not an authentic expression of any particular culture, but it feels like it because we put an awful lot of work... When I'm making the costumes, I put a lot of work into making them out of material that seems authentic so it's leather it's bone it's stone um it's uh wood and plant-based stuff so you know this is a costume that's a couple of years old but

it looks like something that maybe the lads who built new grange could have been wearing even if they weren't and it's to give that sense of timelessness as well. But we're mixing up all kinds of different things as well, because we have electronic music. Banging fucking techno as well, yeah. Banging techno and lasers and fire and smoke and all of that kind of stuff. And like a replica of a trumpet that they were playing in the temple at Awan Macha in the

first century BC, alongside drum and bass track or something like that. What I love is it's like, it's a lot of Irish people expressing creatively our Irish culture and it doesn't have

to be a cover version of something 2,000 years ago. No, it's not. It could be in your mind. It's a work of imagination and we all and hopefully the people who come surrender themselves to the moment and you just sort of embrace what's happening now as being you know it's like a ceremony or ritual I don't I put a lot of personal meaning into it but it's not meant to mean anything in particular but when you

come you hopefully you will invest your sense of meaning into it and you will see it as being whatever it is is, is something really significant. And it's a lot of fun to do. So, you know, people get different things out of it. And I feel like, like I mentioned earlier, I'm not especially religious myself. I don't profess to be religious, but I think ceremony is a really

important thing and ritual and marking the seasons and marking the time and coming together as a community and that's something that religion does really well and for people who aren't religious or for people who want to experience something else as well as their religious ceremonies these things that we do are a great way of people coming together and i draw on tradition i draw on culture i draw on archaeology folklore history um folk art all of that kind of stuff for these images to give a sort of a primal sense of this is something of us and it's something of now but it's very much informed by the past and it's something of the future as well we We're bringing things that are, you know,

looking into the future about it. Yeah, just like, I've been to one of the pagan raves and it gave me a feeling that I don't have any other context for the feeling. I was trying, like, it was very emotional. I felt, I felt like you were decolonizing. Do you know? And now I'm blaming the Brits again.

But it felt like a very emotional washing of, this is mine. This is really and truly mine. I don't know what it is. There's a giant load of hay on fire. There's banging techno. But this strange, queer thing that everyone is doing yeah it's not frightening and strange to me it's mine yeah and i don't have a context or an

emotion for anything else no i'm not you know i was talking to dan murphy about it afterwards and i started off hand said he said i don't know what this feeling is it's mad and I said it's waking up your genetic memory you know yes and it's not but that's what it feels like it feels like something old is stirring in you and I'm deliberately trying to get at that sense of didn't this is telling me that you had be you actually that yeah was Dan Dan's in a band called hermitage green and he told me that you played some instrument and he felt some intense emotion that he didn't have words for and that was the genetic memory. What was

the instrument? You don't remember, do you? I can't remember. It might have been this thing. This has a weird effect on people, myself included. But I have a lot of different instruments, you know. Some of them are tradition, some of them we've just made up and they're meant to be played like most of the instruments,

you pick them up and you can get something that sounds like music out of them pretty quick, so you can jam together pretty fast. Like you've been there when you've been playing them,

you've played a few of them. Yeah. All kinds of different stuff, lots of drones and melody instruments based on the natural harmonic scales. I was playing a radiator

at one point with a spoon, and I destroyed the radiator in the Airbnb And On that question actually someone asked can you talk about new Grange and similar sites and 4440 Hertz for 40 Hertz. Yeah, what the fuck is that? I don't know what that question means, but it sounds like it's relevant. 440 hertz is the modern convention. CDs are 440 hertz, aren't they?

No, it's the key of A, the tuning of A. A modern orchestra will often tune, they'll say 440 hertz is what A is. Because the labels we give to frequencies are arbitrary. A used to be 432, I think, and it's gradually come up over the centuries. So 440 hertz is the standard convention for the A, and we all tune to that.

There are notions, there are theories of that idea. Archaeoacoustics is the notion of acoustics and sound and the properties of sound in an archaeological context. And some people have done experiments with sound in the chambers of passage tombs and talking about they may have, part of the design might have been the way sound works in them. And they found that some of them are resonant or that you can hear, like certain frequencies will resonate quite well inside in the chambers. I haven't studied it well myself, so I'm in no position to answer the question properly.

All I know is I tune my instruments to 440. Do you have any, what was Newgrange used for? Because there's a lot of arguments about that. Well, I think... And did someone recently say that it's bullshit and they made it like 60 years ago? Well, like it was rebuilt and there is arguments as to how it was rebuilt which i'm not rehashing now but um if you if you knew if you came let's say there was a an earthquake tomorrow and all of western europe got swallowed up and buried under a load of ash in 10 000 years into future, an archaeologist dug up a big medieval cathedral. They knew nothing about what it was used for.

Let's say only the foundation of the cathedral stands and they don't know what this building was used for. Somewhere like Notre Dame or somewhere like the big cathedral in England, what's it called again? Canterbury? Is that it? St. Paul's Cathedral?

No, the one where they do the coronations. It's a bit vague. Westminster, right? Yeah, there was a vague question. If you dug up Westminster and you didn't know what it was... The big cathedral in England. Well, we got there. Okay.

Someone knew what I was talking about. Westminster, if you knew nothing about Westminster, you would say it was a tomb. Because when you dig up the floor, you're going to find skeletons there for 800 years. And of course, it is a tomb. It's a burial place. And it's a burial place for monarchs and bishops and the high and mighty of England for the last 800 or more years. I don't know how long it's there, but hundreds of years anyway. So you'd call it a tomb. But of course, we know that it was much

more than a tomb. It was a place for daily worship, for yearly worship. It was a place where the political leaders over the years went for coronations, for baptisms, for funerals, for all of the different life cycles. King William's corpse exploded in Westminster Cathedral and the poor robbed his rotting, bloated, exploded corpse. What did they do with it? They took his money. The first King William, your man, William the Conqueror, he, what happened to him?

He was, managed to get really overweight and he was only about 40 but that was considered old age at the time and he was riding on his horse and his belly was so big

that it hit his saddle. He got a rip in his belly. It went septic. He died. They put the body laying in state. They had no embalming techniques. He got so bloated and infected and he exploded in the tomb

and they heard it outside and the poor just came in and robbed all the jewels off his hands and that happened in Westminster Cathedral so in Newgrange they probably used these passage tombs in the same way they were receptacles for the dead are places where the dead were buried exploding or not um and you know using the bones of the ancestors in different ways like you might use them i don't know we can only speculate really but they might have performed certain ritual activities outside, inside. Of course, this idea of the sun coming into the passage of Newgrange, regardless of the reconstruction, the sun definitely did come in to the passage. Whether it came into the roof box or not, it definitely came into the passage.

So there is all of this imagery of death and life, you know, the sun rising on the end of the darkest night, you know, this is really powerful imagery. And surely people gathered together in big numbers. That thing didn't build itself. A lot of people came together to build that. So it was probably used for much more than just the deposition of the remains of the dead. And the quartz, the art, sunlight, all of these things would be extremely powerful images, and particularly in a religious context. Now, whether or not they were high on mushrooms, I don't know. But they certainly, it's very likely

that they came together to celebrate the high points of their life. And that's something that really interests me all the time, celebrating high points in your life, celebrating points in the calendar, in the seasons, and as a community coming together and doing that. It's why I got into doing humanist celebrants. That's what I want to talk about. You're a celebrant.

Yeah, I'm a humanist celebrant, so I do weddings. I also do baby naming ceremonies and funerals as well for people, non-religious ceremonies is what I do. So I find it really rewarding work. It's brilliant. And it's great. How long have you been doing that? Only about two years? Yeah, about a year and a half, I guess.

I do secular weddings for people, essentially. It's just a way of catering to people who don't want a religious wedding, but they still want to celebrate this very important part of their lives. Do you act flexibly within... Like, if someone said to you, he was mad into Slayer,

within your humanism, can you go, okay, I'm going to do a Slayer. Within your humanism, can you go, okay, I'm going to do a Slayer funeral? Like, personally, I wouldn't do anything that I thought

cheapened the dignity of the person. Okay. But, if they had written it before they died. If that music is important to people

and it's just as legitimate as any other kind of music, then if you do it in the proper way and you're respectful about it, then you shouldn't have those kinds of restrictions. Yeah. For a secular funeral

or for a secular wedding, let the religious make their own rules and that's really important to them and they clearly define what they think is acceptable and what isn't. And that's totally fine for somebody who is doing a secular wedding a secular funeral if there's a particular type of

music that you want like when i do a wedding it's almost always a legal ceremony so i'm okay i'm speaking on behalf of the state so i'm not doing foolish things but if people want to do but you have done a paganish wedding like the the very first wedding that I did, it wasn't pagan, but the very first wedding that I did, which was long before I was qualified, it was... I did it in Kennedy Castle. It was with a friend of mine who asked me to do it for him, and that's what got me into it.

It wasn't a pagan wedding as such, but he did say, would you look at all old Irish traditions and draw on those? So it was it was essentially a secular thing but we were drawing on old ceremonies old traditions that people used to do outside of Christianity and yeah Irishness yeah and there was like part of it was drawn from folklore part of it was drawn from old texts there was ritual actions in it which we I drew from inspired by old ideas specific examples you give us specific examples? One thing that was done in certain parts of Ireland

was people would pledge to be married by clasping their hands through a hole in a stone. And there's a couple of these marriage stones around the country. So what we did for this one was, I couldn't bring a two-metre-high standing stone into the room where we were. So I got a small stone, and I carved a hole in it, and we put that up on a pedestal, and they clasped hands, and they pledged to be married through the hole in the stone. So that was a nice thing inspired by Irish folkloric traditions. Isn't that fucking class? That is fucking class. That's fucking class.

That is fucking class. Is this type of thing, is there demand for it now? Is there more demand for it now? There's huge demand, yeah. Secular weddings and non-religious weddings and weddings outside of the Catholic Church are on the up and up all the time. And of course, they've gotten rid of that thing where your child has to be baptized to get into school. Yeah, yeah. The baptism barrier is gone, I think, in a lot of places.

Most people now are just like, what's the point? Let's have some crack. Well, I don't know. Like, Christians and Catholics who want to baptize their kids, that's very important to them, and it has to be respected. You know, that's great for the people who it's meaningful for. But the notion that people were going through the motions of baptizing their children

just to get them into a school, it's not fair on the people. Or to keep the grandparents happy. Well, it's not fair on the Christian churches as well for people going through the motions with them and not being honest, standing on altars and not being honest. That's disrespectful to that religion. So I'm really glad that the people who honestly want

to baptize their kids can do it, knowing that this is a sincere thing that's happening. And then the people who don't want to baptize their children don't have to, and they don't feel a pressure to do it. And it's great. Nobody should feel pressure to go into religious traditions and ceremonies if they don't want to. And likewise, religious traditions, it's worth respecting them for the people who they're important for. One thing as well,

didn't you officially leave the Catholic Church or try and officially get out of the church? Yeah, I tried. There was a space of people leaving. And it was not easy at all. Well, I don't think they accepted it in the end. Tell us about that process. Well, there was a space of people and it was not easy at all well they I don't think they accepted it in the end tell us about that process

well there was a lot of people doing it it was Count Me Out which was a campaign I just it wasn't for me I just decided

I don't really want to be part of the club anymore and I didn't want to make a big deal out of it but I wrote to the bishop

but I don't think Limerick had a bishop at that time so that was kind of the end of it it didn't really go anywhere but there was

a lot of people officially wanting to leave, just as a, I'm finished with this. How do you go about it? If you want to just like... I don't know if you can do it anymore, but there was a time where... So I'm Catholic forever.

There's nothing I can do about it. Well, what does that mean? And what does that mean to you? You know what I mean? If you are a member of the Catholic Church and you're honest about it, good for you. And if you're not, if somebody says you are, does that make you a Catholic? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't think it matters. If you're not, if you don't want to be part of the club, I don't think you have to be. Yeah. Yeah. My grandfather was officially excommunicated by the Bishop of Cork. He was. Every member of the IRA in Cork in the 1920s, the Bishop of Cork excommunicated him.

So I'm using that to say that any baptism I had was illegitimate. Are you also in the RA then? No. But I remember when he was on his deathbed he was paranoid about it and my dad had to get a priest that he knew to lie to him on his deathbed and say that he spoke to the bishop and the bishop said he was allowed back in

because he was like, it was a thing the church eventually I think they rolled back in it but the bishop of Cork did say that members of the ran, Cork you're not in the church, you're excommunicated. And my great-grandmother went apeshit, like, you know what I mean? But, yeah, my dad had to do that.

My granddad was about 80 when he died, and he had to bring a friend of his who was a priest and said, just please tell him that he's allowed back in, because he thinks he's going to go and meet Christ in a half an hour. And he did it for him, yeah. And so fair play to the priest. Do you know, that's proper priesting. I. So fair play to the priest. Do you know what? That's proper priesting. I'm going to lie to a dying man, you know. It's compassion.

We could all do it a little more compassion, I think. I'm going to pass the microphone around to the audience if you have any questions about things, okay? Is the microphone flying around? God bless you. This lady here with the black arm. There we go.

Hi. How are you? I'm Protestant. Yes. What are you protesting? What are you protesting? I told you to leave the prods alone.

I sort of feel that we never really... I went to Protestant primary school and secondary school and I didn't really have the whole traditional side of religion. Yeah. Like, St Brigid's Day today in block.

And I was wondering, like, how do you celebrate that, like, traditionally? Because, like, I was thinking about making it Bridget's Cross, but I really associated it with Catholicism, which I'm not really a fan of. And I wouldn't consider myself Protestant either, really. It's just I grew up in that. St. Bridget dates to before any talk of Protestantism or Catholicism, so she's part of the Christian tradition that Protestantism became

just as much as she's part of the Christian tradition that Roman Catholicism maintained. You'd see that in a lot of the older churches. They're named after native saints and they're Church of Ireland. And I think Church of Ireland people have just as much acclaim

over this tradition as anyone else. This is part of your history as much as it is anyone else's. I think my question sort of is, what is a tradition? Because I wasn't taught it. Like, how would you go back to the way it was?

All we were taught about was St. Bridget's crosses, and that was it. Well, it depends. No one told me about killing fucking chickens. That's St. Martin. All right, sorry. But actually, there was, in Gaelic Scotland,

there was this tradition where they would leave out, they would leave the door unlocked, hoping St. Bridget would come, and they would look in the morning to see if there was any marks in the ashes. And if there wasn't... And they'd leave whiskey out for her, and they'd leave Christmas cake out for her.

No, that's a different one again. But they thought if they felt St. Bridget hadn't come to visit them, they might have slighted her. So the way to remedy that was to go where three streams met and bury the cockerel alive. Bury a cockerel alive? And then she'd be happy.

Oh, my God. Yeah, there's one account of that in Gaelic Scotland. A live male chicken. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So try not to bury any cockerels. I don't think that's probably taking it too far. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's what you need to do.

Billy said it. You need to go where the three streams meet, and you need to bury a live cockerel, and that will solve whatever burns in your soul, all right? That's what you need to do. That take is too hot for me. But there's lots to do with St. Bridget's Day. There was, you know, making crosses is one of them,

but another thing was bitty boys, and you get them in Kerry as well. Bitty boys would dress up, and they still do. Is this like the Wren? It's like the Wren, yeah. They dress up, straw costumes, straw hats, would dress up, and they still do. Is this like the Wren? It's like the Wren, yeah, they dress up, straw costumes, straw hats, white clothes sometimes, and they go around house

to house with a doll, and the doll... A doll of Nicolas Cage. ...represents St. Bridget. But the doll would often be made out of the churn dash, which was that stick that I told you about earlier. But there's different things. I'll tell you afterwards, there's a great book, actually, if you want to learn about the festivals of Ireland, there's a fantastic book

called The Year in Ireland. And it was written by a wonderful folklore scholar called Kevin Danaher. And it's still widely available. So if you want to learn about St. Bridget's Day customs, that's a good place to start. There's another book by Sean O'Dinn on St. Bridget. And there's a book by Seamus O'Cohan on St. Bridget so that will be a good place to start but the year in Ireland is a great overview because it has all of the festivals from one end of the year to the other

Who had their hand up there? There we go. Just a question for Billy I wonder if you know anything about the cure as in rural Ireland a lot of people go and get the cure for many different ailments like a strain or whatever

I know I did I'm from Monaghan I went and got the cure for the sprain I got the sprain from my wrist sweet fuck all but

I was wondering do you know anything about the history of that I don't have the cure for Anton and what do you think of Robert Smith's songwriting

it's a part of traditional Irish folk medicine have the cure for Anton. And what do you think of Robert Smith's songwriting? It's a part of traditional Irish folk medicine. It was believed that certain families have what they called the cure. And the cure could be very specific. It could be for sprains, it could be for shingles, it could be for sore throats, those kind of things. There was different ways in which the cure, somebody could get the cure. It very often went from one generation to the next. Sometimes it crossed the gender. So a male family member would hand it on to a female and a female would hand it to a male down through the line. Different families were said to have cures. The blood of a cure is a good cure, I think, or a double Darcy was another one. The blood of a what?

A Kyo? A person called Kyo? Yeah. You rub a Kyo's blood onto shingles and that would cure it. Or a double Darcy was another one who was said to have the cure. That's somebody whose father's surname was Darcy and their mother's maiden name was Darcy as well. And what would you do with a double Darcy? A double Darcy would have a cure as well.

But that's like, remember the lad in Limerick? And we used to call him Vendlin because he shifted a girl and she claimed that her sore throat went when she shifted him. We called him Vendlin. That's a true story. There's a lad in Limerick called Vendlin because he shifted a girl and she said that her sore throat went away. Was he a cure?

I don't know. Some people swear by the cure. You seem to have some doubts over it. There's lots of traditions like that. There was bone setters. There was people who had recipes for potions and poultices and things like that. So folk medicine is a fascinating subject.

You sent me a text once of some mad fucking cures for like a sore tooth. What was it? There was one where you would pick up a skull from a crypt in a graveyard and you would pull out the tooth, your sore tooth. You pull a tooth out of the skull and that would cure your toothache. And there was another one. If you have a out the tooth, your sore tooth. You'd pull a tooth out of the skull, and that would cure your toothache.

And there was another one. If you have a very sore tooth, you run into a barn, run around in circles, and don't think of a fox. That was it. Yeah, that was it. Which, if you think of it, is brilliant. Like, if you've ever had an abscess,

and you've no access to fucking Panadol or something, running around in a circle and not thinking about a fox is enough to momentarily not experience the pain in your mouth. fucking panadol or something running around in a circle and think and not thinking about a fox is enough to momentarily not experience the pain in your mouth i got i got that one and you'll get more cures and saint british state customs and all of that kind of stuff online there's a skull one as well it's like if okay so if i have a sore tooth right yeah and it's wrecking my day yeah and i want to have a bigger problem in my life. I'm going to rob a grave. Because now the biggest problem in my day is that I've just robbed a grave

and not that I have a sore tooth. You can learn all about this stuff. There's a great website. It's duchas.ie. D-U-C-H-A-S dot I-E. Is there fadas in URLs? There is now, but you'll get there without this one.

D-U-C-H-A-S and that is the National Folklore Schools Collection which was it was folklore collected by primary school children isn't that

the Banshee and the Handball Alley isn't from that no? no that was Michael Fortune who's a brilliant folklore collector from Wexford

who filmed that in I think St. Monty's School in Limerick that's a great YouTube video as well the Banshee the Banshee lives in the Handball Alley and it's videos School in Limerick. Yeah. That's a great YouTube video as well. Yeah, the banshee lives in the handball alley

and it's videos of young Limerick kids talking about just folklore. Their granny saw the banshee and all of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the headless horseman of Limerick. If you want to dive into this stuff, go to duchas.ie and have a look around. It has, I think there's maybe three quarters

of a million pages of stuff there. Wow. And you can go by place, you can go by school, you can go by school, you can go by topic, you can browse by subject. Who funds that? Or is it a private thing? It's run by the government.

It's connected to loganim.ie, which is the place names, and anim.ie. There's a couple of them. They're all interlinked as well. So you can search by area, you can search by topic. Do you think the government are doing a good job at preserving this stuff or funding the preservation? Some departments are working well

and some agencies are working very well. And I think the digitisation of the National Folklore Collection, which is a project that's going on, is a really wonderful thing because the National Folklore Collection, it's probably one of the, if not the best, collections of folklore in the world. And that was donated by the people of Ireland to the folklore collectors with goodwill and with the intention that this information be shared, be studied, be appreciated.

And it is fantastic that we as a nation want to put that up online and make it available to everybody because it is from us and for us so it should be available to us yeah and to the whole world so it's there and i'd urge anybody who's even remotely interested in the topic to go and have a browse around you won't be disappointed all right york that was a bit of a long one no harm in that i do enjoy a long podcast every so often and you know you can listen to it in two parts. No one is forcing you. Alright so I'll catch you next week. I absolutely loved that.

I really enjoyed it. I loved just interviewing anyone. Who's incredibly passionate and knowledgeable. In their field. And Billy is certainly an example of that. So that was a real pleasure. I learned a lot. I hope you did too

and i hope for my non-irish listeners it wasn't exclusionary but fuck it look irish folklore mythology we've a very rich deep uh interest in history in this country we really really do and i love seeing how despite you know 800 years of its attempt of eradicating it, it still kind of lives through in certain ways. I do enjoy that. I'll talk to you next week. Thank you. Rock City, rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game,

and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.