The Blindboy Podcast - In memory of Manchán Magan

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Manchán Magan was an author and thinker, who was a friend and frequent guest on this podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On October 17th I'm an angel. See them wings? Don't miss the new comedy Good Fortune starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, and Keanu Reeves,

critics rave, needs haven't sent. Don't you have a budget guardian angel? Kind of. You were very unhelpful. Good fortune, directed by Aziz Ansari.

Dance abreast the heron's chest, you temporary emits. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. It's difficult to record a podcast this week. because of the sad news that Mancon Magin has died. Mancon was a friend of mine. He's been a guest on this podcast more than anyone else.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Mancon was very sick, very ill, but I didn't expect him to die as soon as he did. He died five days ago on the 2nd of October. Mancombe was a writer, broadcaster, documentary maker, environmentalist. He was all of those things, but most importantly, he's completely and utterly irreplaceable. And I don't say that lightly. The work that Mancom was doing around the Irish language, how that then relates to our mythology, are stories and then connecting that

with the environment, biodiversity in the context of the climate collapse. We've lost an incredibly unique brain, a really, really unique brain. He could listen to a fucking tree and he'd heard the story that the tree was telling him. As mad as that sounds, that's what Mankan could do. It was a beautiful, wonderful lunatic

and we're in bad need of lunatics. compassionate, thoughtful, eccentric people who don't even think outside the box. People who live in a spectrum of reality where boxes don't exist. There's not even any thinking outside the box, boxes don't exist. Mancom was one of these people, incredibly unique. And now he's gone and I'm very shocked by it because I didn't know it was going to be that quick. When I spoke to him last year, When he first told me he had cancer, he said, they're saying maybe four or five years.

Then I heard from him maybe around August, a couple of months back. And he was speaking in a much more positive way, almost as if the cancer had retreated. And then the last time I chatted to him was maybe about two weeks ago, a week ago. And that's when he told me that the doctor said he did. didn't have much long left. No, I did not know it meant days. I didn't know it meant fucking days. But he said,

yet the doctor said it don't have much long left. And that was the last chat I had with Mancon and I'm kicking myself. I'm regretting it because I didn't have an authentic chat with him. I got frightened. I got frightened. I got frightened. by the fact that he told me that he was dying and then didn't know what to say. And then I retreated into a humorless, solemn politeness.

And I regret that because that's not authentic. Me and Mancon would have fucking crack. What I regret is the reason Mancon was contacting me is the actor Gabriel Barn was trying to get in contact with me through Mancon. And then I went, oh, fuck, because I've written Gabriel Barn into my fictional fucking universe over the course of nearly 20 years like ridiculous shit

like I had an idea where Gabriel Barn was trying to shrink himself down to a subatomic level so that he can be intravenously injected into Daniel DeLewis and then there was a music video with a two-foot Gabriel Barn puppet and then I wrote a piece of short fiction in fucking 2019 called the skin method where Gabriel Byrne can visit earlier versions of himself by snorting bags of his own skin. And I've done all that really fucking publicly and now he wants to contact me and I'm like, oh shit.

A about what? And B, is he finally going to, is he finally going to tell me what the fuck are you doing? Why are you writing all this mad shit about me? I wanted to say that to Mancon. Because he'd have laughed his arse off at the utterly ridiculous situation. I found myself in, but I didn't. I didn't say that to him at all. Instead, I just gave some type of stock polite response of, oh, please send him on my details.

And I wasn't authentic with my friend. I gave him this facade of politeness instead because I was scared and frightened about what he just told me. And I also didn't use the opportunity to tell Mancom what he fucking meant to me. two weeks ago on the podcast when I said that Mankan was was seriously ill then I said on this podcast I spoke then about how important Mankan was

and how much I respected him and what he meant to me but I was kind of half doing that in the hopes that he was listening instead of saying it to him directly and then there's that thing of not knowing oh that was the last time I ever spoke to my friend That was the last time I ever, ever spoke to him. That was it. And I wasn't my authentic self in that moment.

I let fear and nervousness get the better of me. And the other thing that bothers me about doing that is, I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of that. And it feels very lonely and isolating. If you've ever, if you've ever had someone, lost someone close to you, or if it's been tragic. Like, for me, I lost my dad when I was quite young, fairly suddenly, got a sudden illness.

And everybody, everybody know this, and everyone felt very sorry for me. And when I'd be meeting my friends, people that I know, they're either avoiding me, are really scared and nervous when they chat to me, because from their point of view, they don't want to make me any more upset. Uh-oh.

his dad's going to die soon better not bring it up but instead what you get then is a nervous politeness a sorry for your troubles type of strange politeness and people are only doing their best when they do that but it does feel

very alienating and lonely incredibly lonely and I have to assume that being seriously ill or terminally ill is the same it inspires the same fear in other people where all you want is

authentic friendship and contact from the people that you know this is what you're looking for but you can't get it because what you're going through is too scary for those people so they retreat into politeness and that's what I did the last time I spoke to Mancon two weeks ago

I gave him a veneer of solemn politeness and not authenticity and crack and I really regret that and what I'm going to take from the situation is mindfulness around that that life is suffering

death and tragedy are unavoidable and I know that a person close to me is going to find themselves in an incredibly difficult situation and I have to accept responsibility for my feelings of fear and make sure that I'm authentic with that person, that I don't deploy veneer of politeness, and that I make real authentic human connection with the full spectrum of human emotions, tears and laughter included.

So I'm navigating grief this week and confronting that I took for granted the last words that I had with a friend. And it's frustrating too to see Jesus that the whole

country's and mourning over Mancon the outpouring of love and respect and admiration from all

corners of Irish society this is huge fucking news and it's frustrating because it's like it would have

been nice to have a bit of that when he was alive. Mancon had respect people loved Mancon but nothing on the scale

of what we've seen since he died and I would have loved for him to have seen that for him to know fuck me you're a legend and now we all have the I think it's because he was so accessible he was prolific Mancon was always working

he always either had a book out or he was making a documentary and because of that because he was so accessible I think we all took for granted a bit and now that he's gone it's that cliche of you don't know what you got till it's gone now Mancon is gone and everyone is like

oh my god you can't replace him who the fuck is going to step into those shoes there's no one doing anything like Mancon was doing but I know by Mancom was like a honey bee he was a pollinator he had an infectious enthusiasm if you spoke to mancon about mythology about the meaning of Irish words

if he spoke to him about a tree a field you would leave the conversation vibrating with enthusiasm and curiosity he didn't know the meaning of the word gig keeping he had such wide range of knowledge and he was generous with all of it. Incredibly generous and full of empathy when Mancom was chatting to you. It was never about how much he knew. It was about how he could communicate the thing that he was passionate about

in a way that the other person could grasp and understand so that he could share his love of storytelling or mythology with somebody else. pure and utter generosity and that's why I think he's, that's why I'm using the honeybee analogy. When it comes to grief, you see

when someone's gone they're gone but they can still ripple on through meaning we still have Mancon's words and his ideas and when someone dies especially when it's as like Mancon was young

he was in his 50s that's young to be dying you know I mean, Jesus, Mancombe was a, he was a great old man in the making. That's the thing, he had all the makings of a wonderful old man. We all thought he was going to be a queer, strange old man, telling stories, a proper Shanakie, you know. But that didn't happen, he just got incredibly unlucky, very, very unlucky. But I hope people out there have been fertilised by his ideas and his way of looking at the Irish language and looking at mythology and looking at the language.

landscape and that people out there will carry it on, carry it on in an ecosystem, especially if you can speak the Irish language. Like that's the thing, I was shit at school, so I don't have much fucking Irish language. But if you properly understand the Irish language, if you're fluent, and you can use that then to find the true meaning of places, laws, the land, how it relates to biodiversity, if you're fluent, and you can use that then to find the true meaning of places, places, laws, laws, the land, how it relates to biodiversity, if you You can do that, continue on Mancon's work, let it ripple and pollinate and fertilise. Because it's not about old mythology, it's not just about old stories. If you keep the stories alive, then you keep respect for the environmental life and we need that to survive as a species. And what Mancon showed me, he showed me that there's every fucking tree and lake and well and mountain and valleys. has a name and it has a story and this story tells us how we as human beings must live sustainably

with the ecosystem and this isn't just an Irish thing this is in indigenous cultures all around the world and Mancom was great for that like his thing was Ireland but he used to fuck off to indigenous tribes in Canada, New Zealand, in Australia, in America. I mean, the work that he used to do in trying to trace the Irish language thousands and thousands of years to fucking India. And the great thing about Mancomas is madness. He wasn't an academic. And I'm not shitting on academics.

Academics are essential. Like, I wouldn't be able to read old mythology if it wasn't for the academics that are translating it. But because Mankan wasn't an academic, he wasn't tethered by anything. So his imagination around the Irish language or the roots of it or stories from mythology, his imagination could run fucking wild. And I know that used to piss off some academics because sometimes maybe Mankan's wildness wasn't very accurate.

But his wildness and eccentricity, that's the honeybee. That's the excited honeybee. That's what inspired people and fertilized people with ideas. So look for this week's podcast, I couldn't do a podcast this week. I know whatever podcast I'd do this week, it had to be about Mankan. But I certainly couldn't go off doing any hot takes or anything like that. So what I'd like to do in memory of Mankan this week is, I want to play the first ever interview I did with Mankon.

I've had Mancon on loads like six times. Like when I thought Mancon had maybe a year left, what I wanted to do was to sit down with him, a microphone on a camera for like five hours and just me and him chat and record everything, everything about his life, his viewpoints, to have this record. We didn't get to do it.

But the first ever chat that I had with him, which was six years ago, that's the thing, it was six years ago. It's the closest that I've come to that because he speaks about his life. I didn't. I knew who Mancon was before my first chat with him. But this chat, this was the one where we became fucking friends. This was the one where, like I'm fucking autistic. so I don't click with a lot of people. I can count on one hand

the people who I can truly like I could speak to this person for hours. Exact same frequency. Adore speaking to him. That's a very small amount of people that I can do that with because I'm autistic. Mancon was one of those people. In his

the past year or so he started referring to himself as Noro Spicy. So I don't think Mancon was diagnosed with nora divergence, but he's norah spicy as he referred to himself and he was a loner, deeply passionate about ideas. I'd imagine Mancon was nora divergent in some way. And often I find and other nora divergent people will find this, when I click with a person, when, when I can chat with a person and there's no fucking small talk and all we're doing is speaking about it. days and we're on the same frequency. Often I find out later that that person is actually noradivergent. That's called

double empathy. It's a theory that autistic and neurodivergent people, autistic people mainly don't necessarily have a deficit in empathy or social understanding or communication. But it's more of a reciprocal thing that when autistic people

and non-autistic people that communication can be difficult but when autistic or noradivergent people speak to other autistic or noradivergent people conversation moves quite smoothly and that's a theory called double empathy and it's a view of neurodivergence and that's my lived experience

communicating with strangers for me is quite a lot of effort and it's tough going it's difficult very nervous when I'm doing it But sometimes I'll meet a person and that doesn't exist where on the same frequency we can chat for hours. It's amazing. It's just exchange of ideas

non-stop back and forth like a game of tennis. Most of the people and like I said I can count that on maybe two hands. Most of those people who have had those conversations with have turned out to be nora-divergent. They've found out same as me they got diagnosed as adults.

And so my lived experience there is that this double empathy thing is real. I had that with Mankan. We could just fucking chat for hours. So I want to play the first chat that me and Mankan had for this week's episode. I've improved the audio on it. And look, I've got nearly,

I've got almost 500 podcasts over the course of eight years. I don't like replaying old content, but in this situation I'm making an exception because I want this episode to be about Mankon and Mankon's memory. Before we do that, I'm going to have an ocarina pause because I don't want to interrupt the chat

and also I'm contractually obligated to promote gigs. Every podcast, it's unavoidable. I don't have an ocarina. What I do have is the lid of a yogurt here. Lovely tin lid of a yogurt. I learned something this week. I was in my office

eating this yogurt the other day and I was like starving and didn't have a fucking spoon. So I'm like, how am I going to eat this yogurt? without a spoon. Can't use your fingers with yogurt. It's not happening. So the only implement I had to eat this yogurt was a hammer. I had a claw hammer. I said fuck it. Let's try it. A hammer is metal like a spoon. So I put the hammer into the yogurt. Try and suck the yogurt off the end of the hammer. Never again. Awful. Awful. Very unpleasant and depressing.

out actually you can you can shape the lid of the yogurt so that it becomes a bit of a spoon that's what I'll be doing from now on but here's the yogurt lid pause you're gonna hear some fucking adverts for some shit all right crinkly beautifully crinkly on October 17 I'm an angel see the wings don't miss the new comedy good Good Fortune, starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, and Kiana Reeves, critics rave, eats haven't sent. Don't you have a budget, guardian angel? Kind of.

You were very unhelpful. Good fortune, directed by Aziz Ansari. Calgary, also known as the Blue Sky City. We get more sunny days than anywhere in the country, but more importantly, we're the Canadian capital of Blue Sky Thinking. This is where bold ideas meet big opportunity, where dreams become reality. Whether you're building your career or scaling your business, Calgary is where what if turns into what's next. It's possible here in Calgary, the blue sky city. Learn more at

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my gigs. Last gig of 2025. This month, Halloween night, 31st of October, the Poka Festival in Mead. Some Halloween fun. Come along to that. Then, 2026. The 23rd of January, I'm in Waterford in the Theatre Royal. On the 4th of February, I'm back in Vicker Street, up in Dublin for a lovely Wednesday night gig there. On the 12th of January, I'm in Wiccar Street, up in Dublin. On the 12th of On the 12th of February, I'm up in Belfast in the Waterfront Theatre. On the 15th of February, Galway, beautiful Galway, there in Leisureland. And then, fucking 28th of February, Killarney, let's do a bit of the eye neck. I'm currently trying to sort out my websites that it has all the dates of my gigs on it.

I've been trying to build a fucking website for it. I'd say nearly 25 years. I've never had a successful website, ever. something has always gone wrong. I'm almost there now after 25 fucking years. Any more gigs? Loads, but I can't be arsed. That's enough.

There's a tour of England, Scotland and Wales there. In October 26, ages away. Fane.com. UK, forward slash, the blind by podcast. All right. Now, I want to get into this chat. with the very recently departed, Mankan, Megan. This conversation is from 2020.

It's the first time I spoke to Mankan. The reason I've chosen this particular conversation is it's biographical. All the other chats I had with Mankan, they're about ideas, they're about his work. This one is about his life. one thing I want to point out this chat is from 2020

before I found out that I was autistic and I'm a little bit interrupty autistic people struggle with interrupting other people I struggle with interrupting other people but since I learned that I am autistic

I'm a lot more mindful in conversations to not interrupt the other person before I receiving a diagnosis this wasn't hugely in my awareness. So if you listen to this and you find yourself getting a bit pissed off with me interrupting,

please don't mail me on Instagram about it. This is a conversation from 36 years ago and I'm working on the interrupting thing. I'm aware of it and I try my best not to. I'm better now than I was then. But anyway, this chat, not only is it two people becoming friends, it's a chat about Mankan's life.

And when I listened to it during the week, it made me realise what we've lost, the person that we've lost, the wonderful person that's gone. And yes, we should feel sad, but I want this to inspire you, to be palaneted by the honeybee. And continue on Mancon's ideas and work for biodiversity and meadows and caves and mountains and trees and rivers. Because one thing I'm sure of, that's what he would have wanted. I want to kind of start on an autobiographical level, right?

Yeah, but you know, you just said that, you know the way you said I want to kind of start with? But the way you said it made it sound exactly like a Wanachorn, which is the evocative of my name, which was beautiful. It was like you delved into the most beautiful art. So you know the way there's a, you know, when you're calling someone's name, there's like a Hamas or Afodric. but Man Khan is my name

or a Monachon but then in up in Dunnigal it becomes a Wanachain or a Wanking which is you didn't quite go that far but it was a lovely a lovely

accidental Irish beginning to it um one of your first one of your first books right were you the travel books I want to speak about your travel books first right

like what's the journey what do you hope do you say to yourself right I'm fucking off to America for six months and I'm just going to write about what I see. Do you have, like, what are you looking for there? Do you fear that you'll come away with nothing?

No, so what happened was, like, I was one of these kids who would have, like, heard voices in my head when I was young. Like, I was this idyllic. What, literally, like, as in mental illness? No, not a mental illness, but nice voices. I mean, you know, someone could have called it a mental illness, but it was never, I mean, I did go to a psychiatrist,

but I think that was because I was just saying anxious. No, I was, like, I had this herb garden, so I didn't really fit in in the real world. But I just had these gorgeous, like, you know, reassuring voices and words and dreams that I could escape into. And that works out really well, basically like one of those spiritual kids. And that works really well until you become about 18 or 19. And then, you know, suddenly the school tells you, you're doing your leaving search and you're going to have to, you know, get a job. And you're going to have to get a mortgage and do that.

And I realized that I couldn't do that. There was no way in my life that I could, you know, knuckle down like that. So it was either these voices, giving that freedom that I had, or otherwise it was depression. And so at the age of about 17 or 80... Would you, do the voices mean, is that like a calling? You felt the sense of a calling? No, no, it didn't. It was just, I was really happy.

I was deliriously happy and felt absolutely free. Yeah? I just felt there was no stopping me. I was like almost angelic you know and then this is and you can believe

like that and you're in school you can get away with it I didn't get bullied I was just ignored but then when you when they tell you

have to go into the real world and you know do all these things I thought I couldn't do that and then depression comes and you get that with a lot of these sort of

you know dream minded kids so so the constrictions of society basically did not work with your personality and the constrictions of society

would bring on a sadness I didn't fit in exactly. And so I fled. I knew that I'd end up in St. Pat's if I stayed in Dublin. And that would have been fine had I done that. But I realized that there was another way. And so I was

because my family were Republican revolutionaries back long ago, we used to learn they... Yeah, you've got a fucking serious lineage, man. Your your grand uncle is the O'Reilly. My great... Yeah, that was my great...

Grand uncle is the O'Reilly. And then Sheila Humphreys is your grandmother. So, and then my grandfather was director of arms Dono Dono Dono for the IRA. Wow. So there was a rule in the house

which you always learned French and German just so did you could import guns if you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been doing that since about 1890s. So luckily I was brought up in the,

I mean, I left school in the 80s was a recession but because I had German and French I was able to just go off to Germany and work in a hypermarket. So I had money, at money at the age of 18 or 19 and I just went off

and then I could see with this money that there was trucks leaving, crossing Africa, going across Africa overland, and it was going to cost three grand, no, 1,000 euros, £1,000 for the year, for six, sorry, for seven months. And I thought, this is it, I will finally be free. I'm going to understand that the bigger world is out there. I'll escape the claustrophobia and the confines of this suburban Dublin world. So I, um, so that was the big idea.

And I just went off to Africa, you know, I was so desperate. this are... What was your first trip like decent trip like you went to Germany but what was your first decent trip abroad where it's an artistic experience as such? You're going to not only travel but experience and also journal your what's

happening. Yeah so I was 19 years of age it was about two months after the German trip and I get on this truck this ex this ex army overland truck that's leaving London and driving the whole way to Kenya. So it's going to go through France France and Spain it's going to go down through Morocco, through

Algeria, through the center of the Sahara Desert. How do you even find that? How do you even find that, Mancon? Yeah, there were these little ads at the back of the British newspapers, of the Guardian or the Observer. And they said, like, three grand for seven months. But I found a dirt cheap company that was doing it for one grand for the seven months.

And they just put 12 tents on board. They put 20 people. They just bought the truck from the British Army for about seven grand, put I think four-wheel drive tires on. to put sand mats and just sent it off across Africa. And who else was on this with you? Who are the type of people that want to do that?

That's a great question. They were not who I thought, who I thought would be honest, would be other free-thinking, open-minded people who wanted to explore the world, other people who were as dreamy and idealistic and ridiculous as me. But it turned out,

and they probably were on the trip that cost three grand. But because I was on this one-grand trip, it wasn't them. It was basically the drop. out, the dregs, all of us were just people who didn't function in society and people who wanted to escape. So there was one bloke he had been in the British

army three times in Northern Ireland and there was a rule that if you ever went back the fourth time, you know, you'd be, you'd die. There was just superstition. And he had done things like in the first few days he'd be boasting to me. Yeah, you know, we used to do this thing. He had a great idea. When Bobby Sands was in Hungerstrike, he would

drive his, he'd get a, he'd hire a chipper van and drive it up to the ventilation shaft in Bobby Sanz's cell so that Bobby will be here would be smelling like fresh fish and chips. Oh my God. How did that feel to you, man? Like your grandmother went on hunger strike.

Exactly. And I spent the 1980s helping my granny, she was still in contact with H Block and May's prisoners during the 80s. So, you know, the comms, these Rizla papers that were sent in and out of, when her eyesight got, you know, bad. Oh, they used to write tiny little notes

on Rizzle papers and, like, hide them under fingers. nails or wherever you could hit them basically. Exactly. Exactly. Swallow them or whatever, yeah. But my granny would get these letters from the prisoners and then she'd have to write back. But her eyesight wasn't so great anymore. So she'd

like dictate the little letter to me and I would then write it in minuscule handwriting on the on the RISLA paper. One question there, Manconi. So if your granny is like, so she's actively involved communicating with the provisional IRA and provisional IRA prisoners,

did that mean that you being watched or for you to like go to London and fuck off to Africa like surely MI5 would be keeping an eye on you. I mean I was so innocent and young in 19. So my granny was living with us in the in the granny flat of our house in Dublin 4. She's being watched surely. He's been watched. Yeah, that house was being watched and like not only watched but I remember during the last the great maze escape, you know, the special branch came to her door because she'd had in the past she'd had prisoners that were on the run, H-block prisoners that were on the run, staying in the house.

And it was sad, like, my dad was this Fienegale, quiet Fienegale farmer from the, well, you know, he was a doctor, but from a farming background from Longford, absolutely Redmondite, a committed pacifist. But, of course, he marries into this Republican family and this lovely house that he's bought, you know, in Dublin, and he pays for the granny flat.

And now my granny has these, you know, these prisoners hiding out in it. And at one time, my dad was incredibly, peaceful and, you know, just a quiet... Did your dad know that these men were prisoners? Yeah, oh yeah, the only time I heard my dad roar was he went downstairs to check on my

granny once, he'd say the rosary with her every evening in Irish. He even learned Irish just, you know, because the Irish was so important to the family. And he goes down and he recognises who's hiding out near Colehole and he just screams, you know, not in my house, he says.

So, yeah. He recognised the person from the news, Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't good. Holy fuck. Yeah, it's like, you know, when you have a mother-in-law, people say they have a problem with mother-in-law. Well, I mean, people have problems at mother-in-law, but if you're fucking, if you're,

Martin McGuinness or something in a call bunker, different story, man. Exactly. So bringing over the wrong cake. Yeah, so that, I mean, I'm getting distracted in one way, but that meant that my relationship with the Irish language was complicated, but I might go back to that in a second. But one reason that I, so I fled because I said,

I was this idealistic person I go off to Africa but there's a few reasons why I'm fleeing also because I realize this Irish language that I had been given by my granny

as this beautiful treasure and cultural sort of heirloom actually had an agenda you know that it was in some way a political

weapon of war so this would be why I would have I would have you know gone off travelling and I mean Africa

that Africa trip turned out terrible everyone like I mentioned the bloke who was the British Army but everyone was worse there were people who had been embezzling people else

who were running away from packs but there were just the drags and our first day on our first day in Africa we arrived in Morocco

in the little town of Chef Schwann having driven through France and Spain and some of the Bedouins come up to offer us we set up our tents

you know the little old triangular army tents set the light of fire were there any hash smugglers with you that sounds like

a hash smuggling type of thing there was no I was no I was the only one who got involved with grass smuggled

later but there weren't one no they were all better they were all fine in that terms but there was on the first day anyway this better one came up to me and he said it came up to us all and the offers us firewood

and the others are just super disgusted and suspicious and they just call him a they started calling a raghead and said get him away all he'll do is dirty he'll steal and I realized I was stuck on this truck

for seven months with these absolute racists who didn't know only had English and like 70% those countries were were French speaking countries. So it was a pretty, it was a pretty dark trip. It turned out to be the best thing for me in my life. I had this utterly life-changing experience when we got to Zaire, to the Congo. And anybody that,

you know, Zaire is the heart of darkness. It is where Conrad, where Kurtz got stuck. If you're ever going to have Roger Casement, mate. Exactly. Exactly. If you're ever going to have a life-changing experience, it'll be in the Congo. We arrived there. And we had this woman who was driving us, Belinda, an amazingly strong woman. I call her something else in the book. But she, all she wanted to do

was keep us alive. On every, she had done about 12 trips up into there, maybe or seven, between seven and 12 trips. Yeah, what's the danger like here,

Mancon? Like, what's the level of, going into the Congo on the back of a truck? To me, I'd be like, that sounds a bit scary,

man. So on all of her previous trips, someone had died. That's the level. What type of death? Like, I mean, through disease,

through being killed through being kidnapped? Mainly stupidity you know if the we are as I said the dregs of society we're not the ones

who know about Africa we're not the ones who've read who are careful we're just people who are totally uncommitted unkempt

so sometimes it was for the last one they were on an old man just got a harshtack in the middle of the Sahara

and they had to bury him there the time before that she had begged them not to go on not to take out the inner tubes

from the truck and start you know riding the rapids on a river and one person smashed. What type of request? Don't take the tubes off the truck and go onto the river. Yeah, yeah. But they, anyway, they did and they smash. He smashed his head open. He died. So, Jesus.

So, otherwise it was just malaria or Bill Hartsey or some disease. So the, did you get your, like, I'm trying to gauge like the level of innocence that you'd gone into this situation. I mean, did you get your injections? Uh, yes, I did, actually. I never had injections after that. I know that my other trips, but I did for that because I think they insisted on. And so when we arrive anyway in Zaire, in the Congo, she makes one, she has one other request for us that none of us will ever buy or take drugs. Because, you know, every single military dictatorship there, all they're trying to do is get their hands on white people

for some crime. And it's just so easy for them to find drugs on you. Why is that? What's the incentive for them to capture a white person with drugs? It's just, you know, they, they're, they, they, they have no money. They want to get money and the best way of getting bribes out of people is, you know, to get someone to crime and they actually have a crime and then have to pay big amount of bribes. So we have a 19 year old Irish lad here. We're going to sentence him to debt. And now all of a sudden the UN is involved or something. Exactly. Exactly. Wow. I never thought of it that way, man. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. So exactly. So we arrive in Bumba in Zaire and, you know, now known as the Congo. And the first thing she's going to do is the only time she's going to

to leave us. Every trip what she does is she leaves us to take a boat in a village called Bumba to take one of the great river journeys of the world. It goes from Kisangani or from Kinshasa to Kisangani and it's this huge floating market and just

this one tug, an old German riverine tug and these steel platforms and we slowly go down the way and there's no roads in this area. So all of the local tribes people come out of the Amazon or sorry of the equatorial jungle and they trade their crocodile skins and monkeys

or whatever potions they have with you. And she thought, like, this is a journey, it's an experience you cannot miss. So she leaves us there that day and she leaves us just enough money and just enough, you know, malaria tablets and all to do us the five days we're going to be on the river before we reach her

in Kissengany, which was the old Stanleyville, from Leopoldville to Stanleyville. And rubber plantations. Exactly, exactly. The darkest, darkest shesh of slavery. Yeah. and human trafficking. And so that first day,

we all, we all got, we rent out two rooms in just this old shack and we all sleep on the floor of the two rooms. Like at this stage, we've been three months in a tent.

So, so, you know, sleep on the floor of a room was luxury. And I went out and just, to my utter, just ignorance and stupidity, someone offered me,

it was actually a plastic bag like a spa or a super value bag of cannabis. It was a pure shopping bag of cannabis. I think it was like, a hash or weed? It was weed. It was weed. Okay.

A very heavy crystal weed. Like, but loads of bush with loads of, ah, but yeah, but loads of sticks and everything else to it. But anyway, I brought this home back to the, back to the, um, to the shack we were in. And by this stage, a huge divide had to enter the group. Those who never wanted to talk to any Africa or engage were absolutely petrified. And the others wanted to do a bit. And we, anyway, the ones who were willing to engage a bit, we smoked some of that.

But it turned out to be somehow laced with. something. It just made us all hallucinate a lot. And we woke up the next day, we conked out, woke up the next day, and everything we owned was stolen from us, everything. Oh, wow. Okay. Now, any old Africa hand, anyone who understands

Africa realizes immediately exactly what happened. I didn't know this for weeks. You're in a military dictatorship. A military dictatorship, the military control everything. They see every foreigner. They see every person who comes in, a particularly a foreigner. They're the ones who give you the drugs. Of course they are. The ones that are going to

knock you out and then they're going to take all your money but I didn't know that so I innocently went down to the police station next day oh dear God there was no police station turned out was just a military encampment and they were just stoned their eyeballs on things and this man Hercule he I explained to him in French

what's happened and he says oh you know this is terrible it's a catastrophe don't worry you will now seize Aeerian justice and he went down to the local sort of township and the ghetto and he picked he just randomly picked three boys dragged them back he got his are in his soldiers to drag them back. And they started beating them in front to me, beating them over

the head with his butt of his rifle. And again, I was this innocent kid. I had no knowledge how to deal with this. And eventually, I begged him. I said, I don't want that. I just want to find our passports. But when they got so exhausted from beating, they sent us away again. And we went back to the next day and said, you know, have you found the things? And after the next day, they said no, the next day, they said they need money. We had no money to, they said they needed, you know, money even just to get diesel to put into the Jeep to look for the robbers. We had no money, but we begged the other 10 people, you know, the other half of the group who ate us to give us their money. And anyway, we got locked into this thing, that we were, about a week without, eventually our money ran out after about three days.

We gave it all to them. There was no signs of passport. And this is, you cannot move anywhere without your passport. You cannot go, you know, by this thing, there's been no malaria tablets. And I'm guessing there's no Irish embassy to call up or what's the crack. There was no nothing. No, the only embassy was down in South Africa at the time. But we thought, okay, we'll find out

Are we talking the 80s here or the 90s? We're talking 89 slash 90 So the first, the Gulf War had just begun, okay? Desert storm was going on And so what happened was that all of the countries, about a week before this happened, all of the Arabic countries around us, Algeria and others, Tunisia,

had all closed their borders. So no one was getting through. So actually, normally there would be another NGO or charity group or needed an overland truck behind you, but there was none of those. And then we also realized that there was no, that there was no diesel in the country. Like, this is the last days of Mobutu,

the dictator Mobutu's regime. The entire country was bankrupt. So there was no money. There was no diesel. There was no way out. We were the only truck to have come through. You know, a foreigner truck to have come through in three months. What emotions are going through your body at that point?

Well, the weirdest thing was we were, we only went there because Belinda had told us, the river barge was coming the next morning and we were going to get on that river barge for the five days. So next morning, when we realised we were robbed, the other ten people go down to the river to get on the river barge. But they realised the river barge wasn't there. And the river barge wouldn't come

and it hadn't, it hadn't been there for two months because there was no diesel. And it couldn't be there for another three months because the dry season had come early. So Belinda had lied to us. She had gone down to the port to Chekko was there and actually had abandoned us on purpose and fled with the truck. So

So it was really, really dark. So we couldn't even ask her for help. There was no way of getting any help. And did you, one little thing that's popping up for me too is when you spoke earlier there about there, a divide is a margin between you and the group. And one thing that I find interesting is when I hear about, we'll say, these English people not wanting to speak with the locals being racist, did you find, did anything colonial come up in you? Did you reflect on the fact that you don't come from a colonial,

culture and these people do come from a colonial culture and this is now being reflected in your actions or were they just a shower of cunts? No, no. I mean, I totally heard that. Like the pride they had about getting to Uganda and Kenya and Tanzania, the places that had been colonized by the English, it was all about this idea that we are superior, we are a colonial race. You know, and I mean, I was called Paddy and sort of, you know, all those sort of jokes about me drinking and things were there. It was just classic. That mindset that is in, you know, know, a large suede of England was very strong. Because, like, the moment you said the Congo to me,

like the first thing that comes up to my head, it's Roger Casement. And then I get this lovely feeling of Roger Casement was the one to highlight the crimes that happened here. So my association with a place like that, I get this lovely, wholesome feeling in my heart of the Irish, the Irish impact on the Congo is one of compassion and calling out injustice.

Absolutely, absolutely But we saw that At every single border we passed We saw that Because the the visas That the English people were having to pay Were about two or three times as high as mine In fact, a lot of my visas were free

And they never tweaked Because the African people are going This fella's Irish Exactly, exactly, yeah Wherever I went, I was just welcomed It was that lovely feeling you get Yeah, that has a little Another thing I'd love to ask you about,

Mancon is so one thing that I'm fascinated with and I have a feeling you'd know a good bit about it are you familiar with Bob Quinn's Atlantean theory and the relationship between Ireland and Africa historically I am indeed yeah exactly yeah that's very rich fascinated with that right um it did your trip to Africa did you what do you think about that can you explain for the listeners what the Atlantean theory of Irish origin is and reflecting it regarding your journeys to Africa. Yeah, one good way of looking at it is even

a lot of people know, you know, that the Irish word for a black person is Far Gorham. And, you know, there's a few different theories. The blue man. Exactly, the blue man.

There's a few different theories. Some people would say because, you know, dove, black is always connected with the devil and there's always dark things. And even a black horse would never have been called couple dove.

It was called couple down mostly. But there's another theory for that. And that is, the Irish people would have known black people. Like there was, there was a, you know, a Berber, no, what is it, a Berber, Movenfort. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, found that there's a skull of a monkey fucking 2,000 years old. Exactly, that's it.

Yeah. Which, you know, most likely that came from North Africa, could have been the one that came from Gibraltar, but it was from Africa. And then even in a bog in awfully, there was a Bible with papyrus papers, clad in papyrus papers. So either that book was either brought from Egypt, or at least the papyrus definitely came from Egypt. So we know there was contact. I mean, we just know that the roots were, you know, what Bob Quinn saw so easily was that there are these amazing trade routes. It is very easy to go from the west of coast of Ireland, from the Iron Islands, down

along France and Spain, and then right around into the Mediterranean where you get to Egypt. And even like in the Pharaoh's time, there was a canal that linked before the Suez Canal, you know, that links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. the pharaohs had systems of canals. They didn't never last very long because the sand would pile in again. But there were ways of getting in ancient times to the Red Sea

and to get to the Far East. So we know the Irish people were amazing sailors. We know they were going up to the Pharaohs, going up to Greenland, maybe even going across to North America. And how long ago are we talking here? Are we going back a thousand years, 2,000 years? Yeah, so I mean, let's say with that Bible,

we go in just 1,500 years. As you said, with Navon Fort, you're going down 2,000 years. And after that, there's no sort of historical record, but we just know, well, the next link you're going is, so, you know, the likes of the passage graves, New Grange, you're going to 4,500

BC. What Bob Quinn showed so clearly, if you go to Tunisia and you go to Morocco, you're seeing those same standing stones, you know, these monoliths, you're seeing stone circles, you're seeing the remains of passage grave type buildings.

And they are identical to the ones that are found in Ireland, in Cornwall, and in Britain. Like, yes, it could just about be coincidence, but it's a weird coincidence. It seems there was this common culture. So the Bedouins too... And Quinn's theory, Quinn goes straight. Quinn just says that Irish people are essentially African people, that we... He says that we don't come from Europe, that we come from Africa via the sea. Exactly, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and like, so, you know, I'd just done a TV series on ancient DNA. And, you know, what is showing now is that the original settlers of Ireland were dark brown-skinned, brown-haired, and blue-eyed. Now, that mix doesn't exist in the world anymore. But it was an exist, it was a people that were found in sort of Egypt and in the far, in the Middle East. So they, we know for certain, from DNA evidence that the first people who came here were people basically from Egypt and from the Middle East, you know, who'd come out of it. the Atlantic route. Exactly, exactly.

So Bob Quinn is finally, because the thing with me and Bob Quinn, whenever I would bring Bob Quinn up with historians, he was kind of rubbish as a kind of offensive thinker. Yeah, and it was finally, about four years ago, Michael Viny did a great article where he just said, look, this is the proof. It has been shown by the latest sort of technology in DNA sequencing that he was right all along.

Wow. Yeah, and it was interesting. So those first people who, as I said, were blue-eyed. What other connections is there, Mankan? I've heard like Shano's singing and similarities, but Shano singing and almost Islamic call to prayer from North Africa and stuff. Yeah, and again, you know,

it's hard to definitely prove these things, but just listen to the two. Listen to the Shano singing. And then, as you said, the call to prayer, Arabic sing. It's these long cadences, this sort of rolling on a vowel. But there's words. Like, the Irish fur confidence or trust is Munein.

And if you, the Arabic word is Mwina, Mwina. The Irish for knife is Skiyam. And if you go to any Arabic country, they'll tell you, it's either Sikian or Sikina or Sikina, but maybe most strongly, or Gara, Gara is to cut, you know, in Irish, and Gara is to cut in Arabic.

Kala, an Irish for port. Chala is the Arabic for port. But maybe the most strongest of all is the Shamrock. The our ultimate symbol of Irishness, you know, shown on St. Patrick's Day, it's the shamrog or the shamar but it happens to be the exact same word in the Arabic word of shamrack

and it's shamrack in pre-Islamic Arabic culture and those in pagan Arabic culture a shamrack was a particular tree-leafed plant okay a tree-leaf plant and each one of the petals of that leaf represented one of the pagan gods

like are you going to say that's coincidence that it happens that pre-Arabic pre-Islamic Arabic culture has this called Shamrak, a leaf that represents the tree. We know three was the key idea in pagan Irish or pagan early Irish and Celtic

belief and they happen to use the same word for it. Like, that's uncanny. That's phenomenal. Yeah. And it's nothing weird. We know that we were everybody, you know, that we were trading people, that people migrated constantly. I think in so, you know, this book I've written, the 32

words for field, I look at that, but the thing that blew me away most was the connection between Ireland and India. Like, they are just so strong. And again, why would you have these connections? And that baffles me, like, that's fucking baffling. Yeah. That's quite far apart.

And again, we just need to get out of our mindset. We are so in the mindset of nationalism. In fact, we're coming to the last, to the death grasps of nationalism now. Previously, people were a migratory people who just moved and traveled, depending on the circumstances, and it looks like we're going back towards that.

So it makes absolutely sense that all cultures would have been interlinked. But why particularly was India and Ireland, why the connection is so strong? And it's really because, you know, we know that we're sort of an Indo-European culture. So our culture sort of came from basically the middle of Europe, or more towards the east of Europe and the Middle East, okay, that area.

Now, that culture, that sort of Celtic culture or Indo-European culture, which our language is based on, was pushed to the margins, okay? That's why the Irish language is still to be found only in the north of Scotland and you know the west of Ireland and then places like Puerto like Brittany and Galicia. Wow. But then

that's... So you think of it as something continual and consistently being pushed west. Exactly. Being pushed west and being pushed east. So that same culture, all the same elements of it are still... Oh, fuck. Yeah, they're still alive which is why you would get like the Brehen-Wor laws are like

identical to a lot of the old Indian laws. Why are the word Ara, the noble person, you know, our minister in the government is the same word as either a noble in Sanskrit. Or why Brehev and Brahman are the same word, the same root.

Jesus. They come from Brif, from mantras, or even Idhas, you know, Idachas or Iddas, learning. That's the same word as the Vedas, the Indian Vedas, which is, you know, the Indian lore, the central lore. And that Vedda, again, even the word drew, druid. Drew comes from Drew,

an oak, and then vid, which is the Ved, which is the Vedda, the learning, the learning that is connected to the oak which is the same like we are the same people

yeah it's beautiful now one thing when I hear the term Vedas that's like one of

the earliest religions that we know of and it's also one of these religions that quantum physicists and the people

who are at the cutting edge of physics who are trying to understand the nature of what reality is and like

things like reality being a simulation they'll often say it has a lot of similarity the real early, early Vedic scriptures

and their view of the universe. Do you, have you studied or looked at any, I don't know, ancient Irish religious, but like pre-Christian, Irish religious views? Are they similar to Vedic stuff? Is there anything going on there? So as you said, like there are Brahmins, very early type of Brahmins chanting in parts of Karela and Tamil Nadu

in the south of India in the forest there. and the mantras they have, the chants they have aren't words. We don't understand them anymore. They are pre that. They're almost, what linguists say is they could be the sounds that were based on the first guttural sounds

that humans made before they developed linguistics. Developed language. Yeah. Now, it's hard to find that same level of ancientness in Irish or even in the sounds that made up Irish. Like, one of the things that I'm trying to get at in the book is that Irish, like, you know, we sort of know that the Celtic culture only arrived in Ireland,

that culture, that Indo-European culture that went to India, came to Ireland. It only came here probably about 500 BC, so 2,500 years ago. Here's a big question for you. When people say the Irish are Celts, is that naive or incorrect? No, it's correct.

So what we do know is that the people who built, so those first blue-eyed hunter-gatherer people, the blue-eyed, really dark-skinned people, they're not us. They were hunter-gatherers who came here and they were wiped out. okay. Then the next Oh, fuck, okay. Yeah.

We killed, well, we might have killed them. Or probably temperature, you know, conditions killed them. The next group of people were the people who built New Grange and, you know, the, the, um, nouth and doubt and not true and all of these amazing places. Obviously, an incredibly sophisticated people who understood, um, astronomy. They're not us. They're not us either. There's no, there's almost no DNA connection between us and them. They died out too.

an incredibly complex community culture that, I mean, there's a trace elements of them still in us, but not much. A Neolithic culture, it only, you know, there's not very much of it in our DNA. So who we are is we're the Bronze Age people, the people who came after that, and we were brought farming

and we brought knowledge of bronze from again, the Middle East, from North Africa area. And then we were them, and then we were mixed. We were joined by these Celts who arrived. So because they, people, the Bronze Age people, would have come like four and a half,

4,000 years ago, four and a half, five thousand years ago. Then the bronze, the, the Celtic or Gaelic people came two and a half thousand years ago. So we're a mix between those bronze age people and that new culture that came in. But, you know, as you said,

this idea of the Vedic and that knowledge. So in our language, it's hard to get a sense of the sounds that came. But definitely there are words in Irish that make it clear that our minds, step, before modernity took over, totally accepted that sort of quantum nature, that otherworldly sense of there being no limitation to the physical reality. Like there's a word in Irish called Criher. And Criher means a tiny particle or a spark of flame or a light or a tiniest portion of

something. But it can also mean a subatomic particle. And it can mean vulnerability, the vulnerability and the insubstantiality of solid objects. So when we look at it. the world now in our rational objective mind, our pre or post Newtonian world, we think of everything as solid. But of course, a world, a people who believed in the other world, who believed in counter, which is this area, this

region, this place, an altar, which is the other world. And there was always only a thin veil between the two. For them it was clear that things could look solid but could also be utterly insubstantial. And quantum physics today will tell you that solidity is an illusion. Everything is made

up of essentially waves, quantum waves. exactly exactly yeah so so you know career can be a swamp it can be the trembling of the land it can be an earthquake it can be the crumbling surface of cloudland when dry after rain it's basically accepting that idea of quantum that the things can be solid and not solid at the same time oh the ambiguity oh it's beautiful yeah yeah yeah have you looked into the influence of we say psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and things like that on ancient irish cultures like i've heard that if you look at the the art that's on front of New Grange, especially the abstract art they were making, the lozenges and the spirals, that that was the type of vision one would receive if they were to eat the type of

mushrooms that grow out of cow shit around that area. Yeah. So, and I heard Billy Moglin discussing this with you. And he does it with such control, you know, because there's a degree, there's a degree of uncertainty about all these things yet, and yet all our potentials. So, What do we know? Like, we know, for example, look at the folklore. You know the main idea of Finn McCool getting the wisdom,

the salmon of knowledge? And how does he do that? He goes to Kumnus well, or there's a few different water sources that he goes to, he picks up the salmon, he burns himself, he sort of burns and he cooks the salmon and creates a blister or he burns himself.

And that word for the blister is called bullegis, bubble of insight or bubble of knowledge. And it's also used for the words of the hazelnuts that drop from this magic tree that is overcome as well and when the bubble of knowledge are also called Kno Krihan

which is sort of a hazel of insight and it falls into the water and it makes them water magic and so when the salmon is in it makes the salmon magic and so when Finn McHul gets it he either sucks and so it's a bubble of knowledge a bullagis or a krill crimand

a hazel of knowledge and then when he gets it he gets another bubble of knowledge the blister of knowledge which again bubble and blister is the same word it's all buligous and that word bulig is also used for some particular

type of mushrooms because of course those two were known to impart wisdom and to impart magic and when they say wisdom immediately what I'm hearing is people who have

psychedelic experiences DMT Iowashka and then they come back from it with a greater knowledge and understanding of self and reality as is often reported So are you saying that

like you reckon there's a way to interpret the story of the salmon of knowledge where it's like Fiona McCool just did a lot of mushrooms and met the elves in the machine

It's a shamanic trip, exactly And like why is the Bridon? Why is it the salmon? The salmon is a speckled animal Yeah What else is... Samons don't eat acorns That's one thing

I know the salmon's Here's two things that Keep me awake at night About that story The salmon's name is Fintin Which is a ridiculous name for a fish And then secondly he eats acorns Yeah but you know

You do know what Finn means in Sanskrit and in early Irish it means the wise one it means white it means seeing through it means seeing through the darkness to the light you know

like Bowen the Bowen River you know the Bowen River which is the white cow goddess the Boin River is a the river was so sacred that she was represented well the Boin or the Boin there was the most sacred goddess

in early Irish culture and she was represented in physical form by the Boean River and so she is so loomous that's not the same cow that's up in the stars Is it? Exactly.

Exactly. So luminous question. Because Billy, who we were talking about there, he's got some stone in his garden or something, but up in the stars using some ancient fucking Celtic archaeology or something, there's the milky way, was the Milky Way referred to as a cow or something in ancient Irish astronomy? You have it, you have it.

So the Boein River is so nourishing. So the Boing God is a mother goddess, okay, the Boingda. She's a mother goddess. She nourishes her people with her milk. now she is represented in physical form by the river the river the boine which nourishes its people with the water and so powerful is she

that a night she shines up into the night sky and becomes the Milky Way Balachna Bo Phila the way of the white cow exactly now so this is what I this is what has me interested now so the ancient Irish are referring to this as cow as

milk how in English are we looking up at the Milky Way and referring it to the way of milk the fucking milk highway way. Isn't it lovely? The way some trace of the knowledge gets kept, but then it sort of gets mushed up and confused. But just to finish that point, the final things I love about that is if you ask people long ago about Naut and Doubt and New Grange, the prehistoric tombs along the Boyne, they will tell you that they thought that they were mirror image of planet constellations. So not only is the Boyne River being reflected up in the night sky to create the Milky Way,

but actually some of those star constellations are then being remirred back in the land in stone and circular form on enter the ground and the final thing of that is Boinda the mother goddess that was powerful god she's the exact same god as Govinda as the Indian form of Krishna

so go Bo is a cow in Irishas we know go is a cow in Sanskrit Vinda is a finder a looker a seeker it is like the same culture the same gods we are one and when you're studying this stuff are you coming at this from the position

like you're not an academic yeah I am not no I have no expertise in anything so you're just a curious person a curious person looking into this shit like do you ever take this stuff and try like go to academics like how these are essentially hunches that you have

and it's overwhelming like it's phenomenal as you said it's like how the fuck can this be a coincidence, but how does it go from this wonderful coincidence into being something that's accepted or has research put behind it and something that then becomes truth? What is that? Truth is not above reason but beyond it. So I, as I said, we started this with I was a disillusioned kid with, you know, an over-idealistic kid. I went off traveling and went off to Africa, I went off to South America and I went off eventually to India, moved into an old cow shed and like spent about eight months there

going to parts of my brain that one shouldn't really have access to I sort of dropped out Tell us about that Tell us about being in a co-shed in India and visiting dirty part of your brain Well I'll finish what I'm saying I will though

So I wanted to make sense of my life You know so after I came home from India And I'll explain that I built my little strawberry house in Westmeath And I just the world didn't make sense I wanted to make sense What I want from this book I've written

Is just people are lost People are disillusioned and disconnected It just happens that our culture and our language and our old religions and beliefs can root us back into the world to make sense of who we are, of what we are in this chaotic, chaotic, crazy world. So I don't want to engage with academia. Like I did a degree in UCD years ago in Irish, and at the end, I remember the professor said to me, I see a great career for you in academia. No one has done, no one has looked at the GH, you know, in the genitive of Donegal Irish. And that's a world we don't need to cross into. Billy Marklin can manage the two things.

He can do academia and he can do the walk the wild side. What I want is to bring these ideas like because they'll nourish us. They'll make sense of the world. Yeah. Should I tell you about India? I'd love to know about India.

Actually, how did Africa end? How did you like you were stuck in the Congo, your passport is gone and now you're here on a podcast talking to me. So what happened that you ended up, things working out all right? I got, um, so I, you know, that would that mean, that five days are seven days in Zaire, we went without food, we went without water, that was the best time of my life.

I suddenly realized I know now why I'm alive. I felt more vibrant and more alive and I thought, I want to live a life which is, does not have rules or limitations that based on my greatest aspirations. And that's partly because I was just, you know, a teenager with two big ideas. But maybe, and also we were slowly working away. through the bag of cannabis that could have helped just to alleviate the pain, the hunger pangs. But in that, on Zaire,

I ended up getting Bill Hartzia, which was no cure for. I had to drink the river water of the Congo. And he said, you got, what? It's this little slug or snail that goes into your body, into an orifice, and it slowly does you no harm

for the first few years, but every year it creates a little shell around itself and it goes into your kidney normally, and it creates a shell around your kidney, and eventually it turns your whole kidney into stone. basically it's like the what was that mythic the gargant from the

from the outside it turns into stone and there was no cure for it at the time but luckily I came back and my mom and sister I go to the Tropical Medical Bureau and they they had a cure was invented about two months later and so I was cured

so oh wow okay so then I finish I go back to finish my degree I go back and do two years in college and then I go off to Africa sorry to South America and I ended up running a hostel on the Ecuador

on an organic farm in the Ecuador-Peruvian border in a place that was famous for San Pedro for this mescaline cactus and the Israeli soldiers used to all come straight off after their three or four years of conscription and come to my place to take this San Pedro. So were you running like a retreat where people could do San Pedro cactus?

No, I was just asked to look after the hostel and the farm, the farm workers. And it turned out that people happened to go there for San Pedro. Yeah, but we'd always tell them not to take that on the land and we wouldn't give them information about where it was

got, but they would go off into the forest. But eventually people would have bad trips and I would be called upon to hike up

into the Amazonian cloud forest and take them back from the tree they didn't strip naked or thrown all their money away and then I'd have

to ring up the Israeli embassy and say one of your kids has gone missing. It's meant ever since I've I have huge sympathy

for Israel just because those kids who become the worst aggressors of Palestinians I just son they were this they were mixed up teenagers

who didn't know who didn't know how to say no and their lives were ruined for the oppression and the brutality that they had inflicted to be institutionalised and to be common killers

essentially unthinking killers uncaring yeah yeah so anyway I finished but I was trying to search for something

that made sense to my life in Africa I failed I got distracted in South America I got distracted and so eventually my sort ends up

in India what is the nature of a distraction for you I want I believe that there was God inside me. I believe that there was this source of utter creativity

and love and you know assurance. And so, you know, you just get caught up in conventional thinking or self-doubt or just, you know, distractions of, you know, I think drugs is a distraction. I think gossip is a distraction.

I think loads of things as a distraction. I wanted to just get in touch with my mind. So how were you for drink? What was your relationship with drink like? I know, I, you know, I could, I just, luckily, I can just drink two points and I don't have a need to drink more. Okay, yeah.

And I never took huge amounts of cannabis or, you know, despite those about cannabis stories. Yeah, after, before India, I ended up on a big organic cannabis farm, looking after the children in Vancouver, in British Columbia. So there was, just because cannabis,

people who are thinking left field who are marginal liminal thinkers tend to be in that world, but I just wasn't, I wasn't particularly interested in the drugs. So, and I went off to India, to India, determined to find a cave in the Himalayas because I heard, you know, that's where the purest energy was.

And someone told me... Hold on a second. How do you... How do you hear there's a cave in India with pure energy, I'm off there? Like, what do you mean? Well, a Taito Boker, a French Taitro Boehner from the circus

I met in Colombia. And he told me about this... That was, after... Anyway, I won't get into it. You know, the screamers in Ireland, the only primary cult, the primary No, I don't

I'll tell you no in time I spent time with them in South America but I was this man this title booker

from France told me about this place called Papazali or Al Mora and he said if you go there make sure you have a return ticket

because otherwise you will never leave he said make sure and so I immediately I went to India that's when as soon as I got home

from South America earned another maybe did six months in a supermarket in Germany to earn more money and went off there and I

of course I only took off was single ticket. There was no way. I did not want to leave if I found this bliss. And I tried to find the cave. I couldn't find that cave or any cave. Now you'd know internet. This is this pre-internet. Yeah, exactly. This was 96. So I suppose a few people had internet. So when you were arriving in India saying a French tightrope walker told me in South America that there's this cave and you had to rely upon the local people to know if the cave existed. Yes. And it's not, it wasn't so hard before the internet because of that backpacker system. Like I could still.

I could find anyone in any country in the world. I know that. But you just go, you pick up a copy of Lonely Planet. You go to those places they're in. We're all talking about the same things. It's a total third. It's a different university. Like prison is a university.

That backpacking circuit for new thinking and concepts. Like everything, I have no mortgage. I live in a straw bale house. I am utterly free. All of that I learned backpacking. People tell you the secrets of not, you know, I didn't want to get tied down to the system. I learned how not to traveling.

So all I need to do is arrive in Delhi. talk to a few people in a hostel they'll put you on to someone else you'll find someone else and I heard about someone who was I heard about an immortal yogi who was a hundred and eighty years living in one cave I was going to visit him

and you just hear about people so I go up to Almora and at the same time though I have there was an Indian man it was a German man who knew India and he happened to tell me that there was a leper station up there and he wanted me to check on the leper station

to see I was so in the end I ended he gave me a job in the leper station as chief medical officer. I had no knowledge of medicine. So I ended up in Almora. I was met a chief officer of a leper station

and although because I couldn't find the cave, I found a cow show. What were your responsibilities? If you're the chief officer of a leper station, what are your responsibilities there? I mean, are you given any resources? I mean, leprosy is contagious as well, isn't it?

It is. It's pretty contagious, but it's very easy to cure now. Thanks to a tablet invented by an Irishman in Trinity College in the 50s called one type. There's now multiple

multi-therapy remedies, three different types. He invented one. All you need to do is take those tablets for six weeks and you're cured. The problem is no one wants to be cured. In India particularly

or in Africa and any other culture, in all of the holy books, leprosy is the disease that is mentioned most in the holy books. So you are most likely get alms and charity if you have leprosy. So the lepers in India...

Oh my God. So is it a system of poverty that's so great that if you become a leper you might more likely get room and bored or food. You're sorted. Your needs are sorted forever. You'll always get alms if you're a leper. So, but

and particularly as complicated because in India, there's the karmic idea. You have been given leprosy in this lifetime. It is not up to you to interfere with the God's destiny and cure that leprosy. But of course, the German man who told me about this leper station, he had a rational

Western mindset and he knew he could cure these people in six weeks. So all I had to do was once every 10 days, go down to Almora and oversee them, there's in Pappas Ali, go down to Pappasali and watch the people take the tablets, forced them basically to take their tablets. And I do that

every 10 days. Luckily, they were far clever than me. They'd always either spit it out or throw it down. No one ever got cured in my, in my whatever, seven months there. But, so I do that. And meanwhile, because I couldn't find a cave, I found a cow shed. So I would, so once every 10 days, I'd go down to Leper Station and otherwise...

Did the cave ever exist? Oh yeah, there's plenty. So Gandhi went up and meditated in a cave in this area. Like a lot of the great gurus went up to this area. It's an area But this particular cave that the French tight rope walker told you about, was that a real cave or was it like

many caves? I wasn't quite sure. People were telling me there was, I knew of four different hermits and anchorites who were living in different caves above me in the area. But I could find no cave that was free that I could move into. Now, here's another question I just want to ask you

caves and meditation Yeah So I went up to A cairn up in Sligo Is it Nakhneray? Yeah Well Nogne Re is Queen Maves Hill But it's the one

Is it Karen Oh jikas Yeah You know It's not Carrow, no It's Carrow Keel No

Carrow Keel and the other Caron Moore I think of the name of it It's right Byrne Moore That makes sense No Right beside Nockneray

Yeah You can see And And I didn't know much about Karen's and I went, I was in Sligo on a gig and I was bored and I said, fuck it, we'll go up there and I didn't know what to expect

and it was, I've got tinnitus now but it was before I had tinnitus and I walked into the cairn and I experienced a silence that I'd never known like this freaky silence and I asked someone there and they said yeah that they say that they used to meditate in there that the stones are arranged

so that you experience this extreme silence so that you can be alone in your meditation is that why these caves is that what was special about these caves was an auditory thing that too so you know and science is now showing

that if we put the right resonance into our head and those they say that Lockeru and the other caves in Ireland are tuned to that resonance that actually you can track with an MRI machine that it changes the brain patterns of our brain and brings us to an awareness

that sort of alpha waves more alpha waves than beta or something so that we have a grander awareness So that is definitely an element. We can change our consciousness by vibrating in the right space and all these caves seem to have been created in such a way that it can do that. But I think in the Himalayas, the reason why, like I generally did, I mean, I think I got enlightenment or any wisdom I now have, I got it in India.

And why does everyone get it in India? Why did I get distracted? And, yeah, did I forget my search in Africa? Forget my search in South America. I got in India. Some people say it's the rocks. there is some type of electromagnetic frequency in the Himalayan the rocks in the Himalayas

and again you can now calculate that using high tech sensors and it sort of facilitates the mind to open up different elements of it and that would have sounded hippie-dippy but actually scientists are now proving this in MRI labs you put different frequencies into the brain and suddenly different parts

of the brain are tuned up and open to things I think that's why the caves I mean look I'd be with it I'm someone who meditated and look shit's happened me during meditation um awareness is like I I haven't I'm not someone who does psychedelics but I've had experiences with meditation that sound like when people describe Iowashka as just um I'd be meditating and all of a sudden I awaken from it with this deep understanding of oneness I remember coming out of a meditation once and the first thing

as I opened my eyes, it was by a river. I saw a nettle and I just felt extreme love for this nettle, a real empathy and understanding that whatever the fuck me and the nettle were, it was the same. You know what I mean? Oh, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. God.

And you know what I mean? It's like I just sat down for 20 minutes and was with my own thoughts. And now all of a sudden a nettle feels like a family member. And it was real. Whoa, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I believe, and I know to start,

is that the Irish language also has that idea, just in a single word in many words, like in the word like skim. So skim means a tiny speck of flower, but it also can mean a tiny piece of dust or any small particle, and it can mean whitewash on a wall, and it can mean dust on a mantelpiece.

But skim has also these, so you've got all these things, basically a tiny particle, again, like Creher, it could be a sumatomic particle, but also means it means a fairy film that covers the land

and it means succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep. So one word can bring you A fairy film. Is this like I had Eddie Lennon and he was speaking about like a goo

that fairies leave in areas? No, sorry, I'm the wrong word, I suppose a film, more a veil, more a sort of a go, you know, that haze in the early morning that you see.

Okay. That makes you feel that the world is. you're seeing beyond. It just seems it seems that the edges are a bit mushy. It's the magical hour

of the morning, the early morning when things feel magical and breathy. Exactly. And that you can almost pass through the physical into another realm.

Exactly. That thing. That thing. Yeah. But the cave, yeah. So, as you said, so I couldn't find a cave. So I found a cow shed.

So what I would do instead is all day I'd walk in the Himalayas where in the Rhododendron forest. The rodendron grow the size of trees over there. And I grow there. And then I'd get back into my cow shed at night because there was a man-eating mountain line. and out at the time.

So most of the mountain lines were high high up in the Himalayas, but this one had come down a bit lower. I mean, I was pretty high. I suppose, well, I thought of what I've been about 2,000 meters. And so he'd come down and he'd get a taste of human flesh.

So he had to be inside. But during those walks in the daytime, I was, like you with the meditation, I was able to access realms of my mind that I had never done until, you know, since I was like a six-year-old in my herb garden

and haven't been able to since I was just going out to places but I have a sort of strong mind I know I'm not going to get lost in them you know I think a lot of people with my sort of my mind tendency towards mind would end up in mental

institutions because you go over too far I seem to be able to go to those rounds and then pulling myself back so I was going very far out into places and but the only time I said you mean places internally yeah looking yourself.

Yeah, exactly. Really just gorgeous place where every just things like you with the nettle, everything seemed utterly united and there was this sense of euphoria. There's absolute love and white wash of white light and euphoria.

Were you meditating while doing these walks? Were you conscious of your breathing, things like that? No, no. In fact, I've only started meditating during COVID. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

You mad. I know. Just because I had that access, I suppose. But my only problem, once, I was. soon as well, I was following Ayovetic medicine while I was, only one strand of it at the time

which meant drinking my own urine, copious amounts of my own urine. Not anyone else's luckily, but my own. So when I went down to Almore, to the leper station every ten days to, you know, to check on the lepers, I'd also write a fax

home to my mother. I was sort of a dutiful son. So I, and my dad had just died. How are you getting on, man? Drinking my own pace. I'm scared of a mountain line. That was it. Exactly. But that wasn't where. But no, I wanted reassure her. So I didn't say that. Instead I said mum. Has granny got any more oil placementers in the house? No,

I wanted to reassure her. So I said mum, in Irish actually, but I said, you know, everything is brilliant, mum. Don't worry about me. Everything is one. I see that we are all unified. Every leaf and every raindrop is one and there's light connecting all of the universe and all we are blissfully happy and there is gorgeousness and there is only

unified connection. So she believed that her sort of overeducated youngest son had gone round the twist, had gone mentally insane. You know, some people would say I had. I'm convinced I hadn't. But she sent my brother on this mission of mercy to rescue me. Now my brother, my brother was a very serious, pragmatic man. He was in the film industry. And this was, he was working in the, this is 95, 96, the years that far and away

were made. He was locations manager on that and on devil's own with Brad Pitt and on all those big movies. So my mum says, go over to India and rescue Monkhan. He's lost the plot. So my brother was busy with all the things. He didn't want to do that. But at the same time, he really could see himself he was just location's manager in the big Hollywood movies he wanted to direct

and he thought that he could direct a TV series and 1996 was the year that TG Carr, phanophile announced they were going to set up TGCAR, a brand new Irish language

television station so my brother hatches the plan that he's going to direct the first ever travel channel in travel program in Irish and I'm going to present it so he comes out

and he's very serious in prognac comes out in a full safari suit, as though he was a director of, you know, Born Free or something with a load of heavy duty equipment. Actually, it was the very first edition of a Sony Sony, no, it was a HD, no Sony digital

camera, um, Digi, whatever, those little digy tapes. And it was not HD, it was over Digi. And, um, one ship digital camera. And he convinced Sony that he was going to make the first ever TV program with it. He comes out, comes out to Delhi, then goes up to Almora, then finds his way to Papa Zali and asks him the local Shai Shop, where is

Moncon living in the in the cow shed and he finds me and like I'm not in a good way like I am being you know I've been drinking my piss for a long time now I am far out and sort of glorious parts of my brain and he's just disgusted

I'm wearing like dirty old t-shirts and sweaty smelly sweatpants and he's just like and my hair is a mess and he says Moncon we're making a TV program I have not wasted my time I haven't come the whole way out here and got this gig from TG Carr so that you can screw it up so drags me down to Al Mora, he washes me, he gets my hair cut, he buys me a new shirt and

trousers and puts me in front of the camera, his little new digital Sony. And of course, I'm only too happy to be put in the camera because I have loads to tell people how we are all unified and how drinking piss will cleans your insights and how everything is won and everything is gorgeous. And Ruan watches this, my brother watches this and he turns off the camera. And it's just, I can see the sadness, the, just the break and broken heartiness. He's put so much work into this. He's convinced TG Carr, who have no idea who he is or who I am, that this is worth taking a punt on.

And I'm about to screw it up. And he, he screams at me. He roars at me. And he says, for fuck sake, Monkhan, I have not come this way. You better get your act together. So he turns on the camera again, and I just spanked my beautiful new age rubbish again. And so it goes on for weeks. He slowly over those weeks tells me what to

say. He threatens me to what to say. And I just have to say, we're in India now, and it's lovely, and we're starting our journey. And if you see that program, I might put a clip of it up on the internet, you see this kid who is just, God love him, he's just lost, you know,

it could easily be an institution, his eyes have that far away look, he's just, like so many, you know, young backpackers you see, but luckily, Ruan, my brother, taught me to be pragmatic, that you cannot go that far out, that you need to find a way of communicating ideas. And ever since then,

that was 96, every year since then, we made a television documentary for TGar in China, in Africa, South America and Greenland just all over the world and until eventually then Hector came along and Hector says like let's make a program where you don't have this like idiot pontificating to camera the whole time

and he made a program that actually was sort of funny and comedic and then but then one thing I had one little question there because you started off by talking about when you were a kid and hearing voices and stuff right and I had on this podcast a psychiatrist called Dr. Pat Bracken

who is a psychiatrist but he's also very anti-psychiatry and he is very interested in we'll say hearing voices but looking at it from different cultures he says that hearing voices in our Western medicalised culture is immediately seen as a bad thing

but there's other cultures around the world where hearing voices is not stigmatised and in these cultures where hearing voices isn't stigmatized the people, the voices that are people hear are actually quite nice, but in societies like ours where it's medicalized and said that it's a bad thing or labelled as schizophrenia, the voices tend to be terrifying. How do you feel about that? I mean, because you seem to, even to the point he talks about

there's now a movement where people don't like to be referred to as psychotic, they don't like to be referred to as having schizophrenia, they're simply part of a community that hear voices and this is how they live and this is their life. How do you feel about that? Is it ringing true with you? Yeah, so, because I sometimes talk about these experiences to people

and they often think, okay, were you schizophrenic or were you? Yeah. I just, I never identify. I really don't think I had anything like that because I had just all, they were just such loving voices. But what you're saying,

like, is the fact that so many people have so much tension in them now and so much, you know, their voices are so full of, paranoia and darkness, is it just the reflection on a society that doesn't make sense? Like if you're living in a society that really looks like it's going to

commit suicide, then I suppose it's natural that some people would have those darkest thoughts. So let's say back to what you, the psychiatrist said. Yeah. We know, yes. Definitely other cultures accepted that there were, you could hear, you had access to other voices. But it just

happens that so too did our culture. So too did the Irish language. You know, every single traditional story, folk story, it's about an encounter with the other world. And that other world, like, okay, this is something now. So the Shi, you know, the Shioga, the she, the fairies.

She means, she used to mean a fairy mound. Okay, you know, she, gweha, gust of wind that is actually the fairies. But the she was a fairy mound, and then it became the fairies where they lived, and then it was the fairies themselves, the she or the Shioga. Now the she, it's the same word as

as the route for Shia Khan, for peace. In fact, in Scots Gallic, S-I-T-H is she, fairy, and S-I-T-H is peace, the same word, okay? Now, the old way of spelling she, fairy, was S-I-D-H-E. Now, Sida, that Irish word, the old word for fairy, is the same word as Sida in Sanskrit, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, and in Zoroastrianism. Basically, Sida is an enlightened being, okay? So you suddenly realize these fairies actually are enlightened beings. It's the same word.

There's no linguistic, you know, uncertainty about this. She is the same word as Sida, an enlightened being who, you know, a being who would have stepped out of, this is a human being who would have taken a step back from the small-mindedness of reality and realized that there was a bigger dream and a bigger vision and connected themselves something grander. So let's say these fairies, and where do the fairies live? They live underground beside humans, but they live nearby and they are obsessed with us. They're constantly looking at what humans are doing and laughing with. at us and telling us, what do they tell us to do? They tell us to celebrate more, to feast more, to play, to dance, to party.

And whenever we tell them, whenever we go to them with our small scale concerns, as all of the stories do, you know, you go when you're in time of worry or time of heartache, and they laugh at you, and they laugh at your obsession with time. So what do we know about the Siddha, these enlightened beings, the fairies, they do not accept time, which now we realize

is not true. They want us to have a bigger vision and not to be so locked up in our small-mindedness. So actually our culture from the very beginnings, from every single folk story you were told in school, is only trying to tell you one thing. You can root yourself to nature and you can root yourself

to a world that is beyond the physical, to a world that is nourishing where there is advice and guidance there. Even like a word like Pukog. Pukog is a blindfold. It also can mean

a goat muzzle and it can mean a tin shield for putting over a thieving cow's eyes. But the main meaning sort of for Pukhoog is I don't have that quite right. Puchog, it is Bahamas Pukhokog. I'll tell you it in a second

is it's an otherworldly being that can appear invisible in this world. An otherworldly being that can be a Pukin, sorry Pukim is the word. You still use it in English. You know, put a Pukin, a blindfold over someone. So it's an otherworldly being

that can appear invisible in this world. So we knew our ancestors, even our grannies knew that there were people who could jump from crither or from counter, which is this region or this place to alter the other world and that there was amazing reassurance to be got from that.

And I would just, all of our problems could be solved if we expanded our awareness to realize that bigger picture. We would no longer have the anxiety and we might have answers to a deeper connection to nature to as you said that belief that we are one with the nettle. It is there to heal us

and we are there, you know, to be part of it. Do you, one thing I found really interesting there is when you were speaking about people speaking about interactions with the fairies and the fairies laughing at them. Like, literally, when I go on to the internet and I listen to people recount their ayahuasca or DMT trips, a lot of people report visiting somewhere where time doesn't exist,

reality doesn't exist, and they meet these beings that they can't describe their crystal beings and they basically laugh at them and they have fun with them. Like, do you, the similarities between modern-day

ayahuasca DMT trips and what you just described with ancient Irish fairies, do you see a correlation there? Absolutely, yeah. And to get back to a point about that salmon that we didn't make,

what do we know about a salmon? A salmon is speckled. What else is speckled the flyagaric mushroom? The Amanita Muscara mushroom. I was thinking speckled dove ecstasy but humans make them. No, the fly agaric mushroom.

And again, what do we know about that? I have a chapter in my book about the Reistra. The Reistra was Kuhlhullen's warp spasm. When he would get totally furious or angry, he would just have fire and flames shooting out of his top of his head. His eyeballs, his pupils would dilate to the extent that they were popping out so much that it said like a heron could bite it or a crane could bite it off. It's a perfect, a scamp example of that mescaline-induced

you know, transcendental state, which you don't get from magic mushrooms, you get from fly agaric mushrooms. Also, those Vikings, the, what were those Vikings called he used to take mushrooms? The berserkerians? Yeah, the berserker.

Exactly, exactly. They used to take fly-argaric mushrooms and it would make them incredibly angry as they went into battle and they went bersarck. Exactly. And the Sami people still do. But you know the way there's some,

the fly-garic mushroom needs to be taken with great care. Yeah, because it's poisonous, isn't it? Sometimes. I have a podcast at the moment, actually. And in one of it, I talked to Courtney Taylor, a great expert in Wicklow, a mushroom collector, who really actually demystifies the poisonous element of the flygaric mushroom. And I also, in that, it's called the Almanac of Ireland, but also I talked to Billy MacLinn,

who tells me about that gloss gavon, those magical stones outside his land. And also in that one, I post myself into a cave, which is the cave of transformation, Aungat in Roscommon and I go down there for seven hours well no I don't do seven hours Neander I do about three hours to see what transformative So the Aounogat was the cave

of transformation in the time of Kuhl and all the old myths where someone would go down and they would enter the other world or why did I get onto that Oh yeah Berserker So the flyagheric You know not only that but the Sami culture

Of northern Lapland Still take the flyeric And the reason So it can be slightly poisonous It's not as poisonous as we think but it relaxes the muscles and so if it touches the heart it'll relax the heart

and you know the heart might you don't want your heart to relax you know because that means it stops and so what the Vikings used to do and what the Sami people still do is they let the deer with the reindeer eat it first and then they drink the urine of the reindeer

and then the mescaline element will have passed through in its pure state without the poison yeah wow okay but that's speckle the flyagueric It's a classic mushroom you've seen. It's in every fairy story,

you know, it's a red mushroom with white dots. And whenever you come across speckled in any of the old folk stories and you will come across it everywhere, that's what it's a reference. That's potentially what it's a reference to. It's a hint that to access these other world

that we're talking about, the fairies or with the Fouk, or with Finn McCool, or the magic mushrooms, or the hazel of insight, they are, you can get to those through the thigh agaric. Wow.

So one last question, because I'm time conscious now. I know you need to fuck off. I need to ask you about your sustainable living. I need to ask you about the house that you live in. And you live in a passive house. Is that correct? Not really. So I didn't want a mortgage.

So when I came back from Africa, South America and India, I had seen people there build their houses out of what was around them. So in Bolivia, they use reeds. In Tibet, they use stone. In Africa, they use mud. In India, they used straw, whatever. So I came back. I had my granny, the Republican Revolutionist,

Sheila Humphrey, she died, and left me 10 grand. So in 1997, I came back to Ireland and had my 10 grand, and looked for anywhere I could buy and find 10 acres. And luckily, Westmead welcomed me in. And I looked around and saw, what am I going to build my house out of? And there they were growing barley straw, barley. So I bought myself 200, straw bales of good oaten bar,

of good barley straw. And just use those as Lego blocks, like as big wheat-a-bix to build my house and put a metal roof on it and it didn't have planning permission and I lived in it for six years I told the planners that this is what I'm building

and then you can apply for planning for the next house so they gave me in their wisdom West Meek County Council and their just kindness they gave me permission for the straw bell house so that first house cost me

five or six grand I lived in it for six years and then I built the second house for 26 grand it was meant to be bales of straw but in the end I got scared and I put concrete block in this core of it

and I put grass on the roof just because I didn't know how to tile but I knew how to just wheelbarrow load of mud up onto the roof and then I put mud and straw on the outside of the concrete because it looked very angular and I built that in 2002

for 26 grand and I've been living there ever since and just in recent years I've wanted to create my independence just because I don't have a great income in any way you know I do a little bit for the Irish Times I write books but those God love it

those travel books I wrote about all those trips you know they don't sell much so then I started growing my own vegetables oh no first I think I did I planted six acres of the 10 acres in oak wood. I did that 20 years ago and God it was slow but now massive oaks. I have these big big oaks, 20 year old oaks.

And then I got pigs. I got Tamworth, the old native pig in and I got put the pigs in and then I now have hens and I have turkeys and I have whatever, whatever, five beehives and I have... So are you living off the land as such? Are you trying to, are you living in a way where you don't

need money for a lot of your needs? Exactly, yeah. So I put my, I put 4.3 kilowatts of solar panels in so I'd have electricity most of the time first thing I did you know 23 years ago when I moved here was put up the polytunnel so yeah I mean clearly things like you know

lentils and flour I'm still buying in I'd like to I'd like to grow enough you know grain just for my own bread but you're at COVID again I am growing so much more since COVID because all of those things they take up an enormous amount of time yeah so none of them I would have been doing

to the extent the scale I wanted to until this year. And are you preserving vegetables and shit like that? Are you canning things and stuff? I am, exactly. I'm doing that. And again, something I'd never done until this year was save my seed because it was so

easy, save, you know, herbal seed, flower seeds, because it was so easy to just, you know, go online and order packages. Yeah. During COVID, they were sold out, you know? And the grace brown envelopes, and cork and seed savers in Claire, they were all saying, we have none left, save your own seed. Like the shops were actually telling you, don't come to us, do it yourself. So that was a big learning experience for me this year

The power of being utterly independent Means controlling your seeds as well as your irrigation Your electricity, your food source Yeah So I'll leave you going now, man Khan Right? Thank you so much for that That was an absolutely fantastic chat It was so interesting

I'd love to have you on again man I'd say me and you could talk about fucking anything for a long time I really appreciate thank you so much And I genuinely I'm just so bold over by the work you do Oh thank you so much man See you now All right I see you man Have a good one

Bye, bye. Poor old Mancon. So that was Mancon, Megan, the first chat that we had on this podcast. And he came back five times after that. We had lots of mad chats. And he won't be back. He won't be back on the podcast, unfortunately, because now we've lost him. Please engage with Mancon's work.

His books, 32 words for field. Even a lovely documentary he made there It's on the RTE player called Mancon's Europe by train The little travel show that he recorded two years ago Travelled all around Europe on a train Keep his ideas alive His work alive Keep his books

In need of reprinting His body isn't here anymore But his ideas can ripple His ideas can ripple Like the water on the pond And his ideas are like potting on the legs of a fucking bee or shit from a bird's arse that grows into a tree. Carry on Mancon's ideas.

That's what he would have wanted. Be a fearless, fucking eccentric. That's it you get from that chat. He didn't give a shit. Curiosity came first. And people's opinions about him came second. We can all be inspired by that. All right, I'll catch you next week.

In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and genuflect to a Robin. Bless. Rest and peace, Mankan, Megan. On October 17th, I'm an angel, see the wings? Don't miss the new comedy, good fortune,

starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, and Keanu Reeves, critics rave, needs haven't sent. Don't you have a budget, guardian angel? Kind of. You were very unhelpful. Good fortune, directed by Aziz Ansari. Time to check on the skies.

It's another sunny day in Calgary. Forecast calls for high levels of economic activity. Late afternoon, we've got a burst of potential in a place ranked North America's most livable city. Tomorrow, blue sky thinking in the blue sky city should hold steady, and the outlook remains optimistic throughout the week. So come grab your dreams and enjoy watching them take hold. It's possible in Calgary, the blue sky city. For the full economic forecast, visit calgary economic development.com.

You know, I'm going to I don't know. Thank you.