The Blindboy Podcast - How Ireland invented spaces between words

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

The contribution that Irish monks made to the mechanics of writing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pummel the bun dungeon you custardy gubnets. Welcome to the Blind Byte Podcast. I hope you're all getting conkers deep in the bam of summer. I'm vandalizing myself with summer. I'm going for runs in the early dawn. Cornflower blue sunlight. Mist curling up off the water like the river has a hairstyle. Barge charpin' with enthusiasm, an air that

you can drink. And then I'm going for walks in the evening. Slanty sun that's so orange it's almost brown. Dragonflies voluntarily placing my head into a swarm of midges just to feel the itch. Experiencing the full vitality of being alive and reflecting on how lucky I am, how lucky and fortunate I am to be able to enjoy something like a summer's day. Ireland in the summer months is beautiful, absolutely stunning. The combination of rain and sunshine just means that everything explodes with life and it's a pleasure. Even the weeds that bloom from tarmac have a charm to them.

The blackcurrant foxpissed tang that you get from a bushel of nettles. You could stare at a nettle and watch it grow in real time right now. They're growing about two inches a day. In Ireland, in Ireland we call this leaving cert weather. The leaving cert is the state exam that you sit when you leave secondary school and the leaving cert starts today. Up and down the country 17 and 18 year olds, they're going to school now to sit their state exams and they'll be locked into exam halls for the next two fucking weeks, riddled with anxiety. Irish weather for 80% of the year. It's wet, cold, windy and grey. We can rely upon it being cold,

windy and grey. When the weather is sunny in Ireland, we don't fully trust it. We can rely upon it being called windy and grey. When the weather is sunny in Ireland we don't fully trust it. We feel like someone's playing a trick on us. So that's why we call this leaving sort weather. When the kids are sitting there leaving sort at the start of June, it tends to be absolutely stunning outside. We anthropomorphise the weather. We turn the sun into a type of trickster god who only comes out when our young people are forced inside to conduct these terrifying exams that they're told will define the rest of their lives. And the rest of us, we kind of jokingly thanked the leaving search students during the

first two weeks of June. Like the ultimate dad joke in Ireland at this time of year is for an older man to roll down the window of his car. Nine in the morning, the sun is blazing, he sees a group of young lads in their school uniforms on the way to their Leaving Cert and he shouts at them, thanks for the weather lads. And the students look down at the ground and they don't laugh because they're too worried about Matt's paper one. As if they are performing some type of penance like they're hermits or ascetics, monks, locking themselves away in their scriptorium

under artificial light, punishing themselves, doing penance so that the rest of us can have this beautiful weather. It's a real tongue in cheek, little culture that we have, that I adore because it's so... It's that early Irish blend of Christianity and paganism. The saints and scholars, our scholars are locked away in their Catholic schools like monks in the scriptorium punishing themselves to appease the pagan sun god. That's what Levensart weather means. It's early Irish Christian paganism through a modern lens. So thank you. Thank you to all the teenagers off sitting there Levensart this week.

Thank you for fueling teenagers off sitting their leave insert this week. Thank you for fuelling the sun with your pain. The rest of us, we're going to be using any available free time to enjoy the splendour of early June. This Friday, there's local elections all over Ireland. Very, very boring. We have the visual pollution of loads of local election candidates hanging their posters up on lamp posts and it feels

out of sync. It feels out of sync. It reminds us of having to sit the leave insert. Local elections are boring. They don't feel important, they take place in schools. You have to go to a fucking school and queue to vote in the local election. The last thing you want to do on Friday when the weather is lovely and you've time off is to go to your old fucking school and queue up and vote in the local elections. It feels really wrong and out of sync. And I'm saying that because that's what I've been feeling. I've been going for my gorgeous morning walks and my evening walks enjoying the weather. And my walks are being

marred by election posters. Election posters, poorly designed, boring looking pricks, looking for my vote. It's triggering, it's triggering very childish feelings in me. It's triggering these oppositional feelings. All those politicians are becoming my school principal, our teachers. This very immature, defiant emotion is bubbling up in me. And when I see election posters this week, I'm like, fuck you, I don't have to go to school. I'm an adult now, my leaving search is done, I can do what I want. And I took ownership of that feeling this week.

I noticed, I was like, what's this feeling in me that's coming up when I see these election posters? Why am I irritated by them? Ah, something about this. Authority, boring-looking politicians, the nice weather. Ah, this is bringing up some challenging memories and feelings of the very difficult time I had in school. And that's why I feel defiant and angry in a situation which doesn't call for those responses at all. Responses that worked for me when I was 16 but not now as an adult. And I said

fuck it, I better vote on Friday. As a responsible adult who cares about his community, I'm gonna have to inconvenience myself on Friday. I'm gonna have to take some time out and do my duty and use my vote and go and vote in the local elections. Why? To keep out the fascists. All up and down Ireland this year, there's fascists who are looking for your vote in the local elections and to become MEPs, European elections. This is quite new in Ireland. We don't really have hard right fascist politicians in Ireland.

We don't have a hard right fascist party with any representation. But now it's starting to emerge. It's starting to emerge and we've got fascists looking for your vote. What's a fascist? A bully. A big aggressive bully who are blaming refugees and immigrants for the fact that there's a shortage of housing and that rents are very, very high in Ireland. Fascists who openly lie online, who spread disinformation.

People who behave incredibly aggressively under the guise of caring about homeless people, women and children. When really, they just hate, they hate immigrants, they hate black people, they hate Muslim people, and they respond to their own feelings of pain by wanting to hurt other people. Particularly wanting to hurt people who are weaker or more vulnerable than them. If you point any of this out, they'll turn around and say, I'm a concerned citizen.

Disagree with them, they'll call you a traitor, they'll call you a paedophile. It's all out of a playbook. When you see videos of them online, intimidating library workers, intimidating construction workers, it brings up this queasy feeling. And it's the feeling of being back in school and seeing bullies, watching a bully being a bully. It's this type of nervous cowardice that masks into this unsure aggression

as soon as the bully has identified a victim who has less power. We all saw that in the classroom or in the schoolyard. It's not an adult way to behave, but you see it again when you watch a fascist in action. So this type of fascism is increasing in Ireland the past year, the past two years. It's a relatively small group, but they're very organized and they travel all over Ireland doing what's known as astroturfing. You've heard of the phrase grassroots campaigning in politics. Grassroots is when a politician will go to a small community and then genuinely listen

to the grievances of that community and try and address it. That politician then achieves grassroot support. Astro-turfing is when a politician or actors infiltrate a community and rile that community up with disinformation or fear or paranoia. So they're astro-turfing. Instead of it's not grass roots, it's creating fake grass in a community. And groups of fascists have been doing that in villages, villages in rural communities in Ireland. There might be a group of Ukrainian refugees, or refugees from the Congo. And then the government are trying to accommodate these refugees in hotels or campsites. Effectively direct provision, even though they're not calling it direct provision anymore.

And then fascists go into the villages with these printed signs and they start a protest and they rile up the locals and they say, the refugees are undocumented males, the refugees are all pedophiles, the refugees are gonna commit sex crimes, the refugees are violent. They're out of control Muslims.

They're gonna stab everybody. And they drum up fear. And then some of the locals are like, I never thought about it that way. Fuck it, hell, you might have a pint. And then they agitate the protest. We shake it up, make it aggressive, to deliberately provoke a reaction from the guards.

And then the guards get heavy. And now it's us and them, us and them, us and them. Astro-turfing, there's been arson attacks, huge big riots up in Dublin, misinformation being spread online, all based around fear, hatred, racism, xenophobia, and framing the housing crisis homelessness, framing all that as this is happening because of the foreigners.

And the suspicion is as well, is that there's quite a bit of outside influence. So Ireland itself is being astroturfed. And it's hard to know who by, but you just gotta look at who's cheering. So when the Dublin riots happened, the people who were cheering were the English far right, people like Tommy Robinson, the EDL, white nationalists, Nazis in America, and hard right American Christians. Over in England it appears to be Brexit parties. The same people who wanted Brexit over in the UK, now want Ireland to leave the EU. And they're drumming up the same anti-immigration, it's the immigrants' fault, it's the EU's fault for making you take immigrants.

The same narrative is being peddled here, apparently supported by the English fascists with the end goal of Ireland leaving the EU and then we fall back under the British fear of influence. If Ireland was to leave the EU then we would grow closer with our nearest neighbor, fucking the Brits. But that's never worked out for us. That hasn't worked out for us before. Also, they want to prevent, they want to prevent a united Ireland through democratic means, which is one of the provisions in the Good Friday Agreement, that Ireland at some point can vote on whether we want a united Ireland. That means Britain out of the north. Britain obviously doesn't want that, because that

would weaken Britain and it would, it causes them to lose face. Also the Brits want us to become more partitionist if if there's sufficient anti-immigrant sentiment in the 26 counties of Ireland you have this fear that refugees are being turned away from England or Scotland or whatever and then using the north of Ireland, which is occupied by Britain, to enter the 26 counties, the Republic of Ireland, which is in the EU. The fear of that scenario pushes the 26 counties towards enforcing its own border with the north of Ireland, which is something the Brits can't do because of the Good Friday Agreement. They'd love a hard border but they can't because of the Good Friday Agreement. But you've got British fascists who fucking

hate Irish people who would call us a paddy and a heartbeats who are openly aligned with loyalists up north. You now have these people clapping along and supporting Irish fascists and saying the Irish are fighting back. The Irish are finally fighting back against the colonizing immigrants. The new plantation they're calling it. And then you've got American fascists clapping along too. Because in America, white Christian nationalists and hard-right American Catholics, they see Ireland as this fantasy land. They view Ireland as the last bastion of white-skinned Christian people who have yet to be tarnished by multiculturalism. We saw this during the repeal referendum,

where American Christian Catholic money started flooding into the country to stop Ireland legalizing abortion. Because the Christians in America, they needed to have Ireland as this untarnished place. This place that still has lots of white skin and lots of people who believe in Jesus. So Ireland is experiencing a rise in fascism, a normalization of racism, a rise in racist

violence, a rise in disinformation, and very clear, obvious outside interference from pro-Brexit Brits, white nationalist American Christians, and probably a bit of Russia in there for the crack, just to fuck things up. Now we have fascists looking for your vote, and they're gonna get elected. They will get elected because people like me will go, the weather's too nice, I'm not gonna vote on Friday. That's how these people would get elected. And these people are bullies. They're bullies who consistently try to push boundaries,

trying to see what they can get away with. They experience a lot of internal pain, a lot of fear. This then informs them to behave with anger and hatred, and they experience a feeling of safety and power when they can hurt someone who's more vulnerable than they are, who's weaker. And they internally rationalize this by thinking that they're protecting women and children. And then the established parties, the established politicians that have been in power in Ireland for ages. The centrists will say, they fucking love this. The establishment political parties fucking love it

because the fascists and their message serves as a really brilliant distraction. There's a massive housing crisis in Ireland. There has been for some time. Rents are incredibly high. Houses are very expensive. Not a lot of people can get mortgages. There aren't a lot of houses available. People with jobs in their 30s are living at home with their parents. People are emigrating, not because they can't find work,

but because they can't find anywhere to live. And the reason this is happening is because of government policy. Government policy that's been going on for fucking years. Housing is left exclusively up to the speculative forces of the market. Housing isn't about giving people homes, it's about profit, it's about earning money. So because of that, housing is scarce. The way you drive up the value of something is you keep it really, really scarce. And now you add to that investment funds, gigantic piles of faceless international cash

run as corporations, buying up loads of property and then renting that property out. 100% for profit. Our government have been fully infiltrated by the interests of these giant faceless piles of cash. So these investment funds and vulture funds and cuckoo funds, whatever the fuck you want to call them, they get tax breaks in Ireland. Then the government, instead of building houses

through local councils, they're pushing it all onto the private market. So the people who are lucky enough to access affordable housing in Ireland, the government pays rent at market value to a private landlord or private investment fund, so the whole system is stitched up for profit. The government aren't building new houses. When developers build new houses, investment funds are just buying up entire estates before people who are lucky enough to get mortgages can even get near these houses. It's gotten so bad that, like, Ryanair bought a fucking housing estate to house its workers

because its workers couldn't find housing. So we're seeing the return of company towns, like fucking Victorian times. So there's a housing crisis in Ireland because government policy has been to push everything towards the speculative forces of the market. Everything is for profit, so scarcity makes more money. That's why there's a housing crisis, and it doesn't have to be that way at all. The government could build more houses, they have the money, and giant investment funds and corporate landlords could be illegal.

Like, that's wrong. This is housing. That's fucking wrong. Berlin has tried to make these investment funds illegal. So there you go. There's your foreigner to be pissed off with. Big giant foreign investment funds that are buying up all the housing stock. That's who you get pissed off with. But when you have a bunch of fascists and instead they're blaming refugees and immigrants, and saying it's those people, those brown people over there, they're the reason you can't afford your rent, they're the reason you're living with your parents, they're

the reason you're emigrating, they're the reason houses aren't being built. Now all conversation shifts towards that. It shifts all the way over towards that. And the actual problem, which is government policy, that's not being looked at at all, because it's all the way over towards that. And the actual problem, which is government policy, that's not being looked at at all, because it's too complex. It's very difficult to project anger on a giant faceless investment fund,

but it's very easy to get angry with someone from Yemen who just got a free tent from the Irish government and now they're living on the Grand Canal. So get out and vote on the elections this fucking Friday, even if the weather is nice, and do it to keep out the bullies. People who are going up and down the country, behaving aggressively, spouting hate, lying, they want to be legitimised.

They want to be legitimised by getting elected. Bullies get drunk on power. They're driven by a toxic fear and an anger. They distort reality through the lens of those emotions and use it to justify any behaviour so long as they're allowed. And if you don't know who to vote for, just fucking vote left. Vote left, transfer left. Who's talking about housing?

Who's talking about workers' rights? Who's talking about unions? Who's talking about the climate? Who's talking about protecting renters? Who's talking about protecting people from eviction, who appears to be driven by genuine compassion for their community. Vote for that person, keep a fascist out. Because the misinformation that appeals to people's emotions like fear and anger, that's what's winning. Okay let's have a little Ocarina pause because I've got a large hot take and I want it to be undisturbed.

I don't want to disturb the hot take that I'm gonna give you after the ocarina pause. What have I got here? I'm in my office, I don't have an ocarina. I've got a shit lighter. I've got a shit lighter. I'm gonna flick this lighter and you'll hear an advert for something, all right? From fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions. At Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities. Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure

it's on the road to success. Enterprise Mobility. Moving you moves the world. I don't want to burn the top of my mic. Alright, that was the light, or pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. This podcast is how I earn a living. It's my full-time job. It's how I rent out this office. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I... The patrons of this podcast are how I have the time and space to deliver the podcast that I need to deliver each week.

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But if you would like to directly fund this podcast, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast please though upcoming gigs live podcasts not many because I'm taking a rest for the summer I Need a fucking rest because I've been going Since November since I released my book I've been going non-stop. So 18th of June Vicar Street up in Dublin. Very nearly sold out. I've released a couple of extra tickets that I was holding back for the guest list. Vicar Street on the 18th of June. It's the only gig of mine this summer that you'll be able to come to, so

come along to that please, it's gonna be great craic. And then what have I got? Kilkenny in July, that's sold out. And then Cork. Cork at the Cork Podcast Festival on the 15th of September. So come along to those gigs. Also follow me on Instagram, Blind by Ball Club. Because I got shadow banned on Instagram. Because last week's podcast was about the genocide in Gaza. And because I was posting about it on Instagram, and resharing,

I got fucking penalized on Instagram. This is what they're doing. People who speak up about fucking Palestine, if you have a large following on Instagram, they shadowban you. So even though I've got like, a hundred and whatever thousand followers, only like, one percent of my followers were seeing my posts because I'd been penalized for speaking about genocide in Gaza. So please give me a follow on Instagram and like my posts and shit. That's the only way I can get myself back into the algorithm unfortunately.

Where I've got a steaming hot take ready for you right now. At the beginning of the podcast there, when I was speaking about leaving Sartre weather, I said I admired the early Irish Christian paganism, which implies that our our scholars have to sacrifice themselves to the sun so that the community can bask in its rays. I want to speak about that in this week's podcast. I want to speak about early Christian Ireland, which is the period from about the 5th century

AD when St. Patrick arrived. Up to the 12th century when we were colonized by the Normans, by the British. Ireland for like 500 years, fifth century onwards, was called the land of saints and scholars. We had a golden age of learning and technological development. We played a crucial role in the history of Europe and the preservation of knowledge because Christianity gave us Latin script, it gave us books. We became a Christian center of learning while Europe was collapsing, with the exception of Islamic Spain.

And the thing is with that period of history, it can be difficult to feel proud of that as an Irish person because of the legacy of the Catholic Church in 20th century Ireland. On the subject of fascism, the Catholic Church in Ireland and the power that it had operated as a type of fascism. The Catholic Church in Ireland prayed upon the most vulnerable people in society, the people that it said it was protecting, women, children and poor people. Up until 1996, we had the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.

Institutions, prisons, where women were sent to, sometimes for their entire lives, because they got pregnant before marriage, they had sex before marriage, because they might have been victims of rape, because a male redative sent them to the Magdalen Laundry. It's argued that at one point Ireland had the highest prison population in the world if you were to define Magdalen Laundries as prisons. But they operated as prisons and forced labour camps. The women couldn't leave, but they were there under the Good Shepherd,

the Good Shepherd nuns, to atone for their sins, to atone for their souls. It wasn't called punishment. It wasn't called crime. It was called sin and atonement. And the women were beaten and abused by the Catholic Church and so were their children. And their children were sold to America for profit, trafficked. And there was mother and baby homes for unmarried mothers and their new born babies before the babies were taken away. And unmarked graves have been found with skeletons of hundreds of little children buried in septic tanks. Buies were sent to industrial schools, especially if they were from poor families. They were sent to industrial schools to atone for their sins,

to be given guidance by Christian brothers. But the Christian brothers sexually abused a lot of those boys, prayed upon them because they were vulnerable and had nobody to stand up for them. Those are just a few examples, but that's the legacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland, a legacy of very cruel and evil authoritarianism under the guise of

helping women and children and poor people. And that legacy, it kind of puts a stain, it puts a stain over that period in Irish history from the year 500 up until the 1200s, that huge, huge chunk of our history where we were the land of saints and scholars, early Christian Ireland, early Irish Christianity. And I want to be passionate about that period. I want to be proud of that period where we were a European center of learning and writing and technology and advancement and intellect and pride before we were colonised. That period which is inextricably linked with Christianity and the Irish Christian Church. I want to marvel and admire and be curious about the monasteries and the monks and the Irish saints and I want to do this as an artist, as a writer. I don't want

to just be proud of our oral tradition, our pre-Christian mythological tradition. I want to be proud of the Christian tradition too. And not because of religion or spirituality or anything like that, because it's an incredibly important piece of Irish art. And it's part of the lineage of not just Irish writing, but all writing, all writing that exists today. And I don't want to feel queasy about early Irish Christianity or about Irish saints or the early Irish Church. I don't want to feel queasy about any of that because of the actions of the Catholic Church in the 20th century. So I'll try and offer some brief historical context.

We're talking about the year 500. That's 500 years after the birth of Christ, right? So that's 1500 years ago. It's a long time ago. Ireland was a pagan society. When I say pagan, Christianity wasn't there. So Ireland had its own religion and beliefs. Ireland, you have to remember, was an Atlantic rainforest.

Ireland was a rainforest covered from top to bottom in thick forest. A lot of forest had to be cleared for people to live and for cattle in particular. But because Ireland was covered in such dense forest, there were just lots and lots of petty kingdoms. Tiny kingdoms and clans and families, no centralized role, no fucking towns, just little kingdoms bordered by thick impenetrable forest and a pastoral lifestyle that revolved around cattle. Cows were real important. Ireland before 500 was an

oral culture. Writing didn't exist. Well it did. There was Owam writing, which was an indigenous Irish alphabet that was mostly carved on stones. But we didn't have books, we didn't have widespread use of writing to preserve memory, to preserve stories. Instead we had oral culture. Recollections of our laws at the time suggest that poets, or phila, or druids if you want to call them that, were hugely important to Irish society. Poets had ways to collect all of our stories and our mythology and our laws. They had to hold knowledge in their heads to be passed on orally because writing didn't exist.

But yet we had a massive mythology. We had loads of stories. We had epic stories. So how do you preserve stories when you don't have books? The best way to take a guess is to look at cultures today that still use an oral tradition. Indigenous Australian people for example, and the practice of song lines. Indigenous Australian people have a way of walking their landscape in combination with songs and stories, whereby the songs and stories hold important information about the landscape, such as what plants are beneficial, where there's watering holes, directions, but then the landscape itself, the journey, has monuments and points that then inform the song and the

story so that you remember it. This is almost impossible for us to comprehend because you see, we have writing. If you want a fucking story now, even if the story is thousands and thousands and thousands of words long, we can write it down and read it, or we can record it and listen to it. But in the absence of these technologies you have to make the landscape your novel. One of the most beautiful examples of this was there was a marine geologist in Australia called Mick O'Leary and Mick O'Leary was using digital scanners to model the bottom of the ocean

just off the coast of Western Australia. So like a laser scanner, right? That he could shine at the ocean and then it would give him on the computer a picture of what that ocean floor was like. So you have a geologist using modern science to try and figure out what was underneath this ocean?

Back when it was land Before the Ice Age what was underneath this ocean and the 3d model showed watering holes It showed that this was once desert and there was watering holes there and the geologist estimated Maybe eight or nine thousand years ago these watering holes were covered with ocean the sea level rose because of the ice age and these watering holes got covered with water and then he showed this 3d model to some aboriginal people and they knew about the watering holes these

aboriginal people who weren't geologists knew about 7 watering holes. These Aboriginal people, who weren't geologists, knew about 7,000 year old watering holes underneath the ocean. And the reason was because they had a story in their mythology called the Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters story is, it's a mythological saga about a shape-shifting villain who chases seven sisters that represent star systems in the night sky and the song it's a story and a song in one.

This song describes planes, rock formations, creeks, all this stuff and this story it's not intended to be told sitting down. It's a story and a journey in one. So the story both directs the person on the journey and then elements of the physical journey inform the story so that the person remembers it. So the land becomes a novel in the absence of writing. And this aboriginal fella, Timmy Douglas was his name. He was only ever able to complete half of this Seven Sisters story. When he walked this song line, when he walked the walk, and sang the song and told the story, across thousands of kilometers,

halfway through the story, it stops exactly at the coast. And he can look up to the sky and he can see the stars and he knows this story continues beyond this beach and this story continues and tells me about watering holes that are a couple of miles ahead but I can't go a couple of miles ahead because the ocean is here now. So when he spoke to the geologist about this the geologist was able to know, fuck me, your story is 7,000 years old. Your people and your culture have used the land to remember this story and now you can tell me about watering holes under the ocean that I had to use laser

scanners to find out about. So that there is an example of how the landscape becomes a novel, becomes a repository of data and information in the absence of the written word. And in Ireland we probably used the landscape and songs and oral stories to remember epic myths when you couldn't write them down. And a good example of where this most likely took place is this big hill, man-made hill, a mound called Rathcroggan in County Roscommon in Ireland. I visited this hill and I don't view this as a hill anymore, I view this hill as a novel. So Rathcroggan, now again I'm talking the year 100, the year 200 before Christianity in Ireland, Rathcrogan was an important pagan gathering site in Ireland.

There'd have been a couple of festivals a year around Samhain, Halloween, Inbulk, Lunase. Massive festivals would have been held on this hill, Rathcroggan, and communities would have traveled from all around to come together on this hill at various pagan festivals. Now writing doesn't exist, but there was an epic, we have an epic Irish tale called The Tine Bo Cúilinne. And the story all starts on this Rathcroghan hill. Now it's a massive story. It's a fucking huge book, if you were to buy it now, The Tine.

It's about Queen Maeve. Queen Maeve who is, she's a queen but she's also a goddess of the land. And it's Queen Maeve in her royal bed with her husband Alil, who's the king, and they're in bed in Rackgrogan, and they're arguing about who owns the most cows. And then her husband Alil wins, because he has the same amount of cows, but he's got this white bull, this very special white bull. And then Maeve is pissed off, because she's like,

well that means my husband is more powerful now because he owns more cattle than me so she decides she wants the great brown bull of Cooley this mythical fucking bull she wants to get a loan of this bull to bring it into her herd so that she can be more powerful than her husband so long story short she decides she's gonna steal the bull there's gonna be a big she decides she's going to steal the bull. There's going to be a big cattle raid. She's going to send her soldiers up to Ulster, all the way to the top of Ireland, to steal this fucking brown bull. And then a big battle ensues and Cough Cullen is involved. This is huge. This is an epic tale with battlefields and characters and places all over Ireland.

But how does a story like that exist when you don't have books to write it down? How do you remember a story that's hundreds of thousands of words long with different characters and places? How do you do that when you don't have a book, when you don't have writing. Most likely, Rath Krogan, the hill itself, that was...it's not a hill, it's a fucking novel. At each festival, people would gather on the hill, and then the druids, or the poets, or whatever the fuck you want to call them, they would be able to tell the story of the time from this hill by pointing at that mountain over there, that tree there, that lake in the distance.

The songs and the landscape held the data of the story, so the landscape becomes the novel in the absence of writing, and this was rehearsed and passed down as oral culture. And the story would have contained very important information. It wasn't just an entertaining, brilliant story about Queen Maeve who wants a brown bull. It would have contained lineages, who owns that kingdom, whose great-great-great-great grandfather was over there. It would have contained relevant information about how to care for your cattle, what fish are in that lake, what medicinal plants are over there,

a way of using song, dance, poetry, story telling, landscape to preserve and hold on to the important data of your culture and survival, a way to hold collective memory in the landscape. This is fucking impossible for us to fathom. How the fuck do we fathom this in a world where we know what writing is, in a world where we've got hard drives, where we can record things?

How can we possibly imagine the landscape as a repository for cultural data? The closest thing we have is Aboriginal Australian song lines. But Rathcroghan, this hill in Roscommon, it's a novel. The hill is a novel. And if you stood at the right point and had the right songs and trained for it your whole life, if you stood on this fucking hill, you could tell the entire story of the time. And that's probably why

druids or poets or bards were so so important in ancient Irish culture. That's what these people were. The judges of society because they held the knowledge, they understood how to use the land to remember. And then the 5th century comes about. And long story short, St. Patrick arrives. I'm not going to get into Patrick, but he was a real person. We know this because he's really the only saint that left his own writing behind. He was a historical figure. Patrick came from around Wales.

He came from Rome and Britain. Rome was Christian. Rome had books, it had Latin script, but by the fifth century, Rome was collapsing. All around Europe, the Roman Empire was collapsing. And everywhere that Rome touched, Britain, fucking France, Gaul, it would have been called at the time,

Rome introduced literacy, Rome introduced books. When you have literacy, when you have the capacity to hold memory and historical records and data in fucking books, then it allows your civilization to advance beyond a certain point. Because you can just consult the books, you can trade, you can communicate with other people who understand what you're writing. Books were technology, but as Rome collapses, slowly collapses all around Europe, these cultures that have relied upon books had forgotten how to read,

they'd forgotten how to write. They were far too removed from their ancestors' oral culture to remember how to preserve data in the landscape. So Roman society just started crumbling and collapsing into complete darkness. And this is when Patrick arrived in Ireland as a slave. Patrick was, he was wealthy. His dad was a tax collector. Patrick could read, Patrick could write.

He was at the upper class of British Roman society as that society was crumbling and collapsing. So when he made it to Ireland, he spread the message of Christianity. He did it in a top-down way. He would go to petty kings first, convert them, and then the conversion would go top-down to the people. Patrick had books. Can you imagine what a book, a book full of writing, is like to someone from an oral culture who's never seen it. Can you imagine Patrick showing a book to an Irish petty king who only knew an oral culture?

It'd be like showing an iPhone to someone from the 1950s. This beautiful, strange little man-made object with intricate marks in a secret code that only certain people could decipher and it held stories and wisdom or records of property or kinships or who owned this land and who owned that land. A book was a piece of technology that allowed society to advance beyond a certain point to the next stage and Patrick's books were Gospels. This was Christianity. So soon monasteries started to pop up around Ireland. The abbots, the people around these monasteries, were usually posh Irish people. They were the sons of

kings. Monasteries became a very important political tool within the Irish petty kingdom system. Different families had control over different monasteries and monasteries went to war with each other. The founders of the monasteries became saints, but early Irish saints were more like superheroes. They were mythical figures that could tame animals and talk to animals. They were very pagan and Irish monasteries would compete with each other to have the best saints so that

they could have power. But the most important thing that Irish monasteries did is that while Europe is crumbling and collapsing, forgetting how to read, forgetting how to write, forgetting how to write, forgetting how to govern. Chaos. Ireland became a centre of literacy and learning through its monastic system. The Christian monks were scholars and they would travel to Europe and they would try and find as many old Roman books as possible, books that were written in Latin, that were written in Latin that were written in Greek but by about the year 500 Latin as a spoken language was disappearing in Rome in Italy people

weren't speaking Latin anymore they were speaking a slang which would have been the origins of what is now modern Italian but Latin was this language that existed only in writing but everyone in fucking Europe had forgotten how to read. We're at about the year 600 now, 700, and the Roman Empire started to collapse, maybe two, three hundred years previously. So Irish monks around that period, they started to produce incredibly detailed dictionaries and lexicons of translating Latin and translating Greek.

There's ancient Greek texts and ancient Roman texts that we're able to understand because in Ireland we preserved that language in our monastic system, but we did more than that. them, but we did more than that. Latin was written before Ireland's intervention. Latin was written in what's called Scriptio Continua, one continuous script. Latin writing didn't contain spaces between words. All writing was like a really long text from your math. Now imagine trying to read a story and there's no spaces between the words. Writing is an art form. Spaces are important. Punctuation is important. But guess what the fuck we invented? Spaces between words. We invented spaces between words. You see now, the written word on the page isn't just a repository to hold data. It's not just for remembering things now. Now you can start exploring writing and prose as an art form. When you start including spaces between words, what

have you done to your writing there? You've introduced music, you've introduced a beat, pauses. There's now a musicality, now we can speak about prose and it takes an oral and musical culture to do that. You see, we know about our Irish mythology now, a story like the Tine, a story like the Tine, which is, it's set in the first century, so you have to assume it's at 1900 years old. It's set in the first century,

and the Tine was told on the hill of Rathcroghan, and it was told with the the hill and the landscape is the novel that's how you hold the data and it was probably sung the tarn was probably sung as a piece of poetry with a melody that was easier to remember or maybe accompanied by instruments like the aboriginal song lines but how do we know about the tarn now how do we know about any Irish mythology how do we know about Fionn Macúil how do we know about the time now? How do we know about any Irish mythology? How do we know about Fionn Macúil? How do we know about the salmon of knowledge?

Why do we have access to our stories that are thousands of years old? Why do we have that? Because that's what the Irish Christian monks were writing down in their books. In the 5th century, the 6th century, the 7th century onwards, that's what they were writing down. They were taking our pagan oral mythology, our stories, that were very important to these people and their culture, and they were writing them down in books. And sometimes they were changing the myths to include biblical references, so they weren't pagan. Or other times they'd just write the story down as they know it orally and Put a disclaimer underneath saying only pagans believe this stuff. This is a silly story

But we invented spaces between words and I reckon we invented spaces between words Because this Latin continual script wasn't working. It was the I think The Irish monks were trying to figure out. I know this story, I know the time in my head as something I've heard a druid sing and it has a beat and it has a melody. It could have been like rap music and they're figuring how do I write this down? How do I make the prose, the melody, the beat, the rhythm of these words, how do I write this down? How do I make the prose, the melody, the beat, the rhythm of these words, how do I make this work visually? Ah, spaces between words, punctuation too. And that's when writing moves from, like I said, a way to collect data, to actual art, to art. Because now you've got pauses and beats. It's fucking impossible to get

our heads around. It's so difficult to be able to look at just, even just to look at a book and say that this book that has writing is a piece of technology that will change the world. And it's even more bizarre to think of what writing would be like without spaces. We also preserved distillation. When those Irish monks were translating all the old Latin script and Greek books, everything they could get their hands on in Europe when Europe was forgetting and had forgotten how to write and read, Irish monks had found old Middle Eastern books. And in the Middle East, perfume was a big deal for thousands of years. And the Middle East had figured

out how to, had figured out distillation, the distillation process of how to get a bunch of flowers and distill those flowers using a coaling column and fire, chemistry basically. How to distill flowers down to their essential oils. What Irish monks read this and were like, I wonder if we could try doing this with beer. And then they invented whiskey. That's how the Irish invented whiskey. By having the ability and knowledge to translate old Middle Eastern manuals of distillation

to make perfume, and then just to do the Irish thing and say let's put beer in here instead of fucking flowers and see what happens, and you get whiskey. They called it ischabáthá, the water of life. And when the Irish monks would write about having hangovers or being drunk, they wouldn't write it in Latin. They wouldn't even write it in Irish. They'd write about being drunk in the margins of the manuscripts in Aom. They'd write it in real ancient Aom script for whatever reason. So that there, that's why I'm proud of that period of Irish history. You know, you're talking about 500 years there, the Irish monastic system.

And that's the roots of the Irish Church. They were Christian, they were deeply devoted, they were ascetics. But there's a direct connection there. Those monks, more than a thousand years ago, not only preserving and saving the technology of the written word, but adding the artistic innovation of spaces between words and certain punctuation, adding that musicality and rhythm to the written word. There's a direct lineage between that

and fucking James Joyce. You know, I was chatting to Don Donald Ryan about this a few podcasts back. And Donald Ryan, like I said, is an Irish writer. But before I brought Donald on, I made the point of saying, you know, Donald is just an Irish writer who lives in Limerick, same city as me, just happens to be here, and he's got two Booker nominations. That's absurd. We've halved the population of London as a country,

and throughout history, right up until now, we consistently churn out the best writers in the world. That's our thing. Writing is our jazz music, that's what the fuck we do. And you can't separate that from 500 years of deeply Christian monks inventing spaces between words to visually translate the musicality of our oral mythology onto paper.

And that's what has me proud. That's why I'm proud and curious and fascinated by early Irish Christianity. I'm proud of it as an Irish writer. I don't need any religion for that. I don't need God for that. I don't need the Catholic Church for that. Yes, they were saints. And yes, they were fucking monks. They were artists. They were writers. They were artists, they were writers, they were deeply curious people who had the time and space and means and safety to advance the technology of writing that the whole world benefits from today. And we taught the English how to write, the Northern English and the Scottish. The Pigs couldn't write, Anglo-Saxons couldn't write, Rome had collapsed.

It was Irish monks who travelled to places like Iona who introduced the written word and Latin script to Scotland for sure and reintroduced it to parts of the north of England. So that's all I've got time for this week. That was a strange podcast. Fascism and the history of writing. Dog bless. I'll catch you next week. Wink at a strange podcast. Fascism and the history of writing. God bless. I'll catch you next week. Wink at a dragonfly.

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