The Blindboy Podcast - Jocular Guff

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Facebook vs Christ, an in-depth look at the Irish Famine and Magdalene Laundries Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh Yart, Oh Long Johnson, what's the crack with ye? I am still, I've got my microphone backwards lads, there you go, my microphone was backwards and do you know why my microphone was backwards and you know why my microphone was backwards because i'm still in my temporary studio and my microphone is covered with a stupid glove and i couldn't see what was the front and what was the back um however i have adjusted my studio slightly in that i'm now lying down on a couch while I speak into the microphone which will allow for a more measured and relaxed pacing of my tone which I needed because I don't know I got a bang of anxiety

of last week's podcast a little bit not anxiety but I felt my rhythm was frantic because of how I was sitting. I got some lovely feedback off you. You really enjoyed the story about being on the plane with Jedward.

And one person on Twitter even made a William Hogarth inspired illustration of us on the plane with Jedward. And that made me chortle. In a second now I'm going to pull the foreskin of this glove up over the microphone and you might hear the velcro. There you go now. That's much better. That is much better.

The glove's foreskin was getting in the way of the sound. I'm very pleased with that sound now. That is much better. The gloves foreskin was getting in the way of the sound. I'm very pleased with that sound now. So this week's podcast is going to be a live podcast. And I don't know, like I've explained it before, sometimes I feel a little bit of guilt putting out a live podcast in case it interferes with your podcast hug but I do assure you that the live podcast that I'm going to put out today it's one of the best ones I've ever done it was really really fucking interesting I loved it and I loved doing this live podcast so much that I was a little bit pissed off I wasn't in the

audience because I was really really interested in my guest and what they had to say so we're going to get on to that in a while but what I want to do now is as you know I've been looking for a sponsor for this podcast now the real sponsor of this podcast. Is basically ye. The listeners. Because. As you know I have a Patreon page. And a lot of ye.

Fucking go on to Patreon every month. And you give me the price of a pint. To sponsor this podcast. And I love that. Thank you so much to everybody. And if you would like to. Sponsor this podcast. And I love that. Thank you so much to everybody. And if you would like to. Sponsor this podcast. Via Patreon.

Just go to patreon.com. Forward slash the blind boy podcast. And. If you're feeling generous. Give me the price of a pint. Once a month please. If you're feeling that way inclined. Because it's loads of work.

It's like five hours of fucking podcast a month. Which I love doing it. But I also like getting a couple of quid for it. If possible. And if you don't want to give any money. That's grand. You can continue listening for free. I listen to loads of podcasts for free.

I'm appealing to your soundness. This is egalitarian. podcast for free i'm appealing to your soundness this is egalitarian i managed to get uh for the next one or two podcasts or three a little sponsor um and it's an irish company that has come forward to sponsor the the question segment of this podcast and the company's name is wolfgang digital and they're an independent irish digital marketing agency and i haven't a fucking clue what that means i don't know what that means i don't know what digital marketing agencies do something with computers probably but fair play to wolfgang what i do know is that they have an office and everyone in the office is a big fan of the podcast and they were listening every week and

enjoying it and they were like let's sponsor blind boy for a couple of episodes and fair play to them because they're a small fucking company so they came up with a you know a small few quid and said let's sponsor them for a couple of episodes so fair play to wolfgang digital um so what they're going to do is wolfgang have gone to the office and they're going to ask me a question a sponsored question and i'm going to answer it but also they're launching a video blog called Wolfgang Bites so if you're interested in it search for Wolfgang Bites on YouTube and how this is going to work is they're going to ask me a question then I'm going to answer the question and they then I think are going to make a video on Wolfgang Bites that relates to the question that I asked

so fairly creative fair play to them I've never heard of a sponsored question segment before so the question they're asking this week in the next few months Facebook will reach

2.2 billion users and surpass Christianity the largest community of people in the history of humanity when this happens will Mark Depends what you mean by influential. Do you know what? Oh God. That is a toughie. The message of Christ, obviously. Did Christ fucking say anything new? Do you know what I mean?

There's nothing really that Christ said that's new. It's all a bunch of shit. I mean, Ten Commandments now, and they're 4,000 years old. That's bunch of shit. I mean, Ten Commandments now, and they're 4,000 years old. That's some raw shit. You know, Ten Commandments are pretty fucking... That's some new shit. But Christ's message was generally,

here, be sound, will ye? And then the martyrdom thing, but... You know, Christ had been done before he was just really good at it and had a class beard Facebook's message or rather not so much Facebook's message

because Facebook doesn't have a message what Facebook has is it's a way of operating on a previous podcast I spoke about Carl Rogers' theory of the real and the ideal self and what Facebook has done

it's created a mechanism for human beings to create highly curated digital avatars of our ideal self actually do you know what fucking religion did that too didn't it a little bit

actually yeah not necessarily Christ but if you look at we'll say the Catholic Church in Ireland if it allowed people to have this If you look at, we'll say, the Catholic Church in Ireland, it allowed people to have this ideal self facade of Christian perfection. Do you know?

That was a big thing in Ireland. You know, go to Mass every Sunday. Let everybody in the community see you at Mass with your perfect family. And in your best Sunday clothes. With your rosary beads. And going to confession. And obeying very closely the sanctimonious rules of Catholicism. And wear that ideal face publicly in church.

And then go home. And. I don't know. Fucking drink. Or. Cheat on your wife. Do a bunch of unchristian shit. Box your son.

Steal from people. Yeah. Christianity. Essentially. Allowed people to have this ideal self and that's what Facebook does as well it's except Facebook's avatar is digital

you have your digital avatar of the perfect version of you and Christianity did the same thing except not digitally in a space called church on Sundays so there is a similarity

so I won't say Facebook is more influential than Jesus because he's too iconic but probably more influential than Christianity right now I mean now Christianity's got a couple of thousand years on

like has Facebook started any wars yet Christianity has started quite a few wars I mean the Arab Spring Facebook was responsible for that fucking hell that is a good question

that's got my mind kind of spiralling yes the Arab Spring Facebook and Whatsapp who are owned by the same company were quite instrumental in how the Arab Spring and the Arab Revolution and the current refugee crisis came out of the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War. So Facebook and Christianity are kind of, yeah, they're close competitors.

But to say that Facebook is bigger than Jesus, that's just too hot takey for me. He's too iconic. Jesus that's just too hot takey for me he's too iconic I mean go anywhere in the world with a photograph of Christ and they're going to have an idea of who he is or a crucifix can you say the same thing for a Facebook logo

has Facebook done the missions down in Africa I don't think it has yet because there's too many communities without internet. But Christianity has done that mission. It remains to be seen. And, because of the Cambridge Analytica business recently, is Mark Zuckerberg going to be crucified? So, thank you to Wolfgang Digital for that question question and for giving a little bit of sponsorship this

week so now i'm gonna i'll take a question from a human being jimmy mehan asks blind boy what do you think of the recent surge of internet influencers tweeting about the upcoming referendum i've seen you tweet on the matter and you were quite abruptly shot down so my question is what's the difference between an influencer voicing their opinion versus a campaigner or politician voicing their opinion um well first of all uh a politician politicians are elected representatives so politicians don't really get to have

opinions as such because they must represent the voices of their constituents that's the shitty thing about politicians it's like once someone gets elected their tongue is essentially tied because they represent their constituents em selected their tongue is essentially tied because they represent their constituents um

there's a lot of influencers not fucking saying shit about the repeal the referendum as well it it's it kind of gets my goat a bit one of the reasons that we'll say this podcast has difficulty finding sponsors, right? Like I should be awash with sponsorship, but I'm not. Like one of the reasons is because I have political opinions. And when you express political opinions or talk about something like mental health, advertisers just freak the fuck out. They don't want that they want vanilla um influencers they want influence who influencers just who just talk about makeup or just talk about consumer things and don't have like fucking boy bands you know boy bands don't

express opinions they're not the boy bands aren't allowed to have girlfriends they just they are what they are and they do what they do and that makes them safe it means they're not volatile um a sponsor would consider me to be volatile because they don't know what opinion i'm going to express or what i'm going to say and how that could end up with their brand in hot water do you know so a lot of influencers say fuck all and

ok on the one hand they're trying to earn a living but on the other hand have a bit of courage stand up for something have a bit of backbone at least come out and say do you know what i'm really vacuous and i have no opinion on anything i don't give a shit about politics and i don't think it

affects me at least come out and say that but that's not the case there's a lot of influencers keeping their mouth shut being clever and not kind of supporting or backing things even something like mental health do you know if if you are an influencer and you have a lot of young people uh listed listening to you then chances are a lot of them have mental health issues so i think you should consider it your duty and responsibility to educate yourself around it and do something to reach and help them because you could be saving a life and that's better than sponsorship sometimes isn't it huh so i think now I'm going to get on to the live podcast soon now. Before we get on to the live podcast,

let's have a brief pause for the simulated ocarina whistle. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at TorontoRock.com.

On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother.

Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. 666 is the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that?

The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. if you're a new listener i'm not going to explain to you what the ocarina pause is i'm gonna just let you guess so the live podcast that i'm gonna go to now it was recorded a couple of weeks ago in the Sugar Club in Dublin. And it's with a historian called Finn Dwyer who presents the Irish History Podcast, which it's a fucking brilliant podcast. I love it. It's, I think it's the first podcast I ever listened to. I'm not actually a massive podcast fan. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. But when I first gave it a lash,

about 2013, I was just like, what are these podcast things? What's the deal? Let's see what it's about. And I was confronted with the i still have a tickly cough from two weeks ago i apologize i was confronted with the sheer fucking choice of fuck it what am i going to listen to a podcast on there's so many out there so i just typed in to the podcast app to the itunes

itunes app in 2013 irish history and the irish history podcast came up and it was fairly early in the irish history podcasts like finn was only posting maybe once every three months so I threw it on and I was enamoured I loved it I loved hearing Finn talk about Irish history and I could tell as well that he he writes his podcasts out first

and reads what he writes which is a huge amount of fucking work you're talking 20-30 000 words and i loved it i fucking loved his podcasts but he was only putting them out like i said every couple of months so i decided i'd reach out like five years ago i reached out to him and i said look i fucking love your podcast um it was giving me the podcast hug at the time but i didn't know what it was i kept going back to it for a feeling of solace and calm but i said to him your audio fidelity is fucking terrible i know a thing or two about audio do you

want to send me your podcasts before they go out and i'll run them through some processors and stuff and make the quality better so finn sent me on one or two fucking podcasts years ago and i fucked with the sound and i gave him advice on a mic or whatever and since then the irish history podcast has grown massively and he's got a patreon page and he's doing fantastically. Audio fidelity has improved. And he's putting content out regularly. And it's an excellent podcast. So I jumped at the chance to have him as a live guest. And we spoke in depth about, mainly about the Irish famine.

And about Irish history. And it was a pleasure talking to someone as passionate and as knowledgeable as he is on the subject and it was also a pleasure for me

as a long time listener of the Irish History Podcast to hear somebody who usually reads out scripted material to hear him talk in a conversational passage

conversational passage fashion off the top of his head and to hear his opinions him talk in a conversational passage conversational passage fashion off the top of his head and to hear his opinions because he's a pure historian so his podcast doesn't have opinion it just has history

so it was great to get a some political discussions and the audience fucking loved it you could have heard a pin drop all night. It was, I think, the most captivated audience I've had so far for a live podcast. So the interview is like, I think it's about an hour and ten minutes long and I'm already after ranting out of my hoop for 20 minutes here. So this week's podcast is quite long.

And hopefully the live podcast does not interfere with your podcast hug it's really interesting give it a lash and i'm going to be back next week where i'm most likely doing a live podcast from Spain. And I'll keep you posted on that. All right. Subscribe to the podcast. Leave a nice review. Leave a rating. And enjoy this live interview with Finn Dwyer about history, which is class.

I love medieval history. Yeah, ask Dwyer. But it makes it kind of weird. Like, my experience is that most people. I love medieval history. Yeah, ask why. But it makes it kind of weird. My experience is that most people don't like medieval history. There's a limit, we say, to the amount of people that like medieval history, but the famine, people love the famine. For good or bad, people love that famine. Because it was something interesting you were saying earlier.

We were talking about Irish-Americans, and we'd say there's one thing already, you know the Irish slaves myth? I've spoken about that, about there were Irish people were sent to Barbados and the Caribbean to work as indentured servants, right? Labour was forced on them. But nowadays, American racists say, my grandparents were slaves too, get off your ass.

Yeah, for sure. They're using our history basically to be racist goals but you said that you find it with the famine too that it's like the yanks when you get mails they seem to want give us more hardship give us more hardship

people want this sense of our history it's like a misery competition where our experience must be the worst. And it's like, lads, we have got a terrible history. We don't need someone else's. There's no need to go out and find an even worse one. But you get this in terms of the famine.

The famine is so they can give out about the Jews. That, I think, brings on to the most controversial subject around the famine, I guess, in what you call the famine. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, I know for a fact now, as soon as I put this podcast out, 20 comments underneath, you call the famine and if you don't that's the thing like i mean i know for a fact now as soon as i put this podcast out 20 comments underneath you mean the genocide do you know what i mean like you can't use like that's something i want to talk about you know yeah for sure for sure and i'm sure many people have said to you finn was it a fucking famine or a genocide you cunt tell us what it is what it is. There's probably even someone here tonight who the vein in their temple is pulsing now.

But I think to explain it, there's probably two different things to this. And maybe this will help people a bit in terms of the first question is who's responsible? Yeah. And the second question then is what was it? We did it to ourselves. We're lazy. It was our own fault. The second question then is, what was it? So in terms of... We did it to ourselves. We're lazy.

It was our own fault. And to cut a long story short, who's responsible? It's the British government. They were the government in control of the day. And you get like revisionists who try and go, oh, well, it's a lot more complicated. At the end of the day,

they're the one who set the policies. They're the ones who had control, who decided to change policies, which certainly, for example, in 1846, they adopted a policy that made the whole situation a lot worse. So if we want to... No, but here's the thing. Was the adoption of that policy,

were they trying to help and they fucked it up out of ignorance, or was it straight up, we don't give a fuck? I think this is part of the reasons why what was going on at the time makes some people uncomfortable today, because what the British government were doing is pursuing an ideology which was one around... This is the laissez-faire. It was liberalism. We have neoliberalism today.

They were doing what lots of people today... Straight up. The economy is a wild animal. We must not interfere in it. Some of these people genuinely thought that if you allowed the free market to operate, that would help the Irish people and that private merchants would import loads of cheap food. Now, that's a massive simplification.

But it was motivated from this idea. I guess to explain it, everyone talks about free trade or liberalism today. In the 1840s this was this almost radical new idea that people in England in particular were like zealots around this idea that it was going to be the panacea that would create the greatest empire in the world and that Britain would lead the world with this. So

in a lot of ways when the famine started here they saw this as an opportunity it's like almost we can test out these ideas here's a fucking test tube for and that's where your racism comes in yeah that's where like would they have done that is a system of fucking oppression right there yeah oh yeah for sure would they have done it to the people of sheffield if they had a family that's the thing like i think it's fair to say it's famines they like they certainly would not have done it in England, I think it's fair to say.

Maybe in the highlands of Scotland, there was a famine in the 1840s in the highlands of Scotland. It wasn't as severe for lots of reasons. But I think in terms of what happened here, racism is at the core of it. But we would have just had the fucking penal laws as well. So it was quite clear.

Yeah, there was a culture there that saw Irish people as second class. The view was probably, dirty, rotten rotten Catholics they won't stop fucking each other there's too many children but that was the vibe like oh for sure like lazy rude people um let's put a bit of manners into them this might sort them out this might civilize the Irish almost I mean I mean Trevelyan Trevelyan's quote is always the one that puts chills through me and Trevelyan he was what was the role that puts chills through me. And Trevelyan, he was... What was the role that he was given?

He was the head of famine relief, was that it? So Charles Trevelyan is the top civil servant in the Treasury. And he is a permanent official, so he basically has a huge amount of influence over how famine relief and money in general is spent. But also Trevelyan is a bit of a control money in general is spent but also Trevelyan is a bit of a control freak in general so he tends to, during the famine

get as much control over the situation even down to really minute stuff going on in places out in the west of Ireland he wants to control that and he's getting these letters back and forth and that's not very economically liberal he's a real ideologue as well and what would have been his ideology very economically liberal.

He's a real ideologue as well. And what would have been his ideology? His quote was the famine is an act of God and it would be effective in reducing population. That underpins a lot of what they think. I think it's important to say they're not trying,

they're not setting out to kill Irish people. These people don't tend to care, though, one way or another, if the Irish population drops. There are, for example, like revisionists will point out a letter from Trevelyan where he's working 15 hours a day and he's writing about all these poor people dying in the west of Ireland that's all well and good. And they show that to show oh he must have cared. Yeah he must have cared

but then we look at what he did because that's the most important thing like everyone that's not really useful to say oh he had these moments where he didn't like the fact that all these people were dying it's more about what the policies that they implement and pretty consistently like for example maybe a good one is in 1847 they're kind of

getting tired of it and they just decide they'll announce that the famine is over and then the famine is over and jesus christ it was obviously bringing a lot of international attention and getting quite embarrassing that's something i'd like to know um like as britain as like that was the height of the fucking empire yeah like were they not embarrassed i mean were they're not embarrassed not looking on and going ah look at the brits are doing like well like we say with fucking when roger casement made a big uh case out of the belgians and leopold and what and the you know the abuses that he was doing in africa and the brits funded casement in doing that so they could whip the Belgians and go,

look at the Belgians being pricks in Africa. There's not the same outcry, I don't think, say to parallel that. Yeah. That's not to say, though, that there isn't an outcry. There's an outcry from North America where there's huge amounts of Irish people already gone there. And as they're hearing...

The incident with the Turks want to give us a lot of relief and embarrassed what's-her-face, the Queen. Yeah, so the Sultan of Turkey originally wanted to send over £10,000 worth, I think it was £10,000 worth of food. And the British consulate in Constantinople contacted them and went to look you're gonna make us look bad yeah down that so I think eventually to fit in with international protocol they drop it to a thousand pounds and did they like kind of I heard this

snake elite just fucked all this food up into dry down a lot of ships and for this reason today a drada local soccer team has got the cross and that the crescent the Islamic crescent is that it yeah yeah is that because of the Turks it'd be a great story but no it predates that way back into them what is the reason I aade and came back with a kebab and it was a was it a crusader thing no I I don't know the full origins of it but it dates as far as I know to the it could be the visit of King John turned so visit a King John of course and John Richard his brother would have been crusading and

all that carry on yeah like I don't know Yeah, like, I don't know the specific origins of it, but See, that's the problem with a fucking historian. Like, I'm over here, hot taken all over the place, making wild assumptions. Couldn't give a shit. And he's here being I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that. Fucking hell.

If we turn off the mic, does it? Fucking King John did the mood landing. And what you're doing at the moment, you were saying as well, is that you do a bit of fucking, what do you call it, walking tours of the famine around Dublin at the moment. Yeah, yeah. Which is interesting because I think of the famine as outside the pale.

Yeah, I think we all have this idea of the famine affecting, I suppose Skipperine is the most famous place. We all heard the song. Cheer for the dead of Skipperine. Fame to claim. Look, you've made poor old Eamon unhappy. But the famine affected the entire country. I guess the best way to explain it is if the economy implodes, which is what happens during the famine affected the entire country. I guess the best way to explain it is if the economy implodes,

which is what happens during the famine, if you cut off the food to three to four million people, a lot of other things are going to go wrong. For example, no one can pay rent. But it does affect Dublin. It affects Dublin for lots of reasons. For example, you get loads of rural migrants flocking into the city. They're trying to come to Dublin for work.

They're trying to maybe emigrate. But you get this... The population of Dublin actually increases during the famine. But that... Was that because of people trying to get... Yeah, that doesn't mean that Dublin was having a whale of a time during the famine and everyone was just getting on. There were a lot of workhouses and things like that.

Yeah, there's a lot of... To be honest, the history of the famine in Dublin, there's a lot of dark stories. So, for for example one incident or one example i can give you there's a hospital in dublin it's gone now used to be called the lock hospital down there behind the strange college and that was where uh women with venereal diseases were treated and in the 19 in the 1840s basically dublin prostitutes would go there to get treated for venereal disease so during the famine the number of people going into the lock hospital increases by 25% and most of that are just a huge increase as well of rural women so you have the because of like sailors and things coming in the siphon has come

over from the new world yes yeah like it? Yeah. It was a new disease for us. Well, say about the famine, it's pretty well established, but it's a pretty horrific... What were the main STDs at the time? Syphilis is the one that they all talk about. Yeah. Because it does... What? It's a legitimate question.

And that's the face falling off one. Yeah, there's actually... I did this project in Kilkenny. It is? There's a... I did this project in Kilkenny workhouse there about a... There's a I did this project in Kilkenny workhouse there about a there's a

I was involved in making a audiovisual guide for the workhouse so you can go around an audiovisual guide to medieval syphilis go on sir

but there was a guy in that workhouse who died and all this part of his skull had actually been corroded by syphilis so by the end of it like he was he died during the famine so like the bone yeah yeah yeah so

he would have been uh hallucinating by the end of it and he was living in a workhouse uh during the famine where there's a huge number of people dying sick so you can just imagine the hallucinations that guy was having like it was like life was bad enough that you could see it but when you're seeing it could they effectively treat treat it back then? No, what they used to do is give people mercury. Yeah, that's great. And one of the side effects of syphilis is that you get hallucinations. Yeah.

And the... But the problem is that mercury also does that, so they couldn't tell. Whether it makes it better or worse, obviously they don't do it today. They can treat syphilis. That's not from personal experience. But they can treat syphilis very effectively today.

But in the 19th century, they didn't really know what they were doing. I didn't know what it was. Mercury could, in some ways... How were they administering the mercury? Was it injections? No, you could take tablets, and sometimes they'd actually put it directly onto the wound,

and it would actually make the wound recede, but obviously if you're taking a hell of a lot... They used to use a thing called a mercury sock, where they'd dip it in mercury and put it up over your arm and let the mercury soak in. But... Fucking hell. Yeah.

So, grim. But that's just one chapter of the famine in Dublin. How would the health service, like if the government were that laissez-faire, like who was running the hospitals? Who was paying for those hospitals? Like who gave enough of a shit about incredibly poor prostitutes to give her treatment?

So the general idea is that everything should be done by charity. Is that, like that's it. If you want to help someone, does a... Because didn't, did the Magdalene laundries come out of that? treatment so the the general idea is that everything should be done by charity is that if you want to help someone does a because didn't did the magdalene laundries come out of that yeah i know the good stuff they all existed there was magdalene laundries existing existed in dublin way back in i think the first was set up in the late what i heard was because what i heard is magdalene laundries when they started were actually a good thing because the lives of women who had to go into i I'm going to say sex work because I don't like saying prostitution. The women who went into sex work at the time, they used to live in hedges around garrisons.

Yeah, yeah. And they had no life whatsoever. Living in a hedge, making their money, servicing soldiers. whatsoever, living in a hedge, making their money, servicing soldiers and the Good Shepherd was set up, the Magdalene Laundry essentially, to give these women homes because they were dying and needed them and then of course it just turned

into what we know as Magdalene Laundries which were not crack. Yeah, I think I think we can trace back though, like it's one of the things I address or stop on the tour is this, so there's a up in Stoneybatter there's a

place Stanhope Street and there was a laundry or what was effectively a laundry there now it wasn't technically called a laundry but it effectively was but the women going into these during the famine and like the official it was a house of refuge and its

official kind of reason for being was to uh provide uh or to rescue women from famine and infamy infamy being um that's what they call it infamy infamy yeah but i think that lays out how these women were treated so in the in that institution if you went in there you could go in there and say during the famine you can get food so they're better off than living in a fucking hedge you are but there's a huge amount of stigmatism that goes with that so for example those women were forced to cut off all contact to their previous lives they had to be like nuns or such almost monastic and they're forced to work it's not like the idea today of like uh when we talk about famine relief it's like we're talking light years even to say for example if you want to talk about workhouses, they're the same thing, set up to essentially help people,

but it's all about shame and shame in the poor. And what type of work was done in a workhouse? Could be lots of different things. To be honest, during the famine, a lot of that just collapses because they're overwhelmed. So, for example, the North Dublin workhouse is one of them, and the official capacity of that was 2,000, is a the North Dublin workhouse is one of them and that the official capacity

of that was 2,000 but by the end of 1847 it was 4,000 people in it now it had been slightly expanded but it gives you a sense of like

but what were they doing hammering nails fucking but they they used to the idea was that they'd do things like break rope

things like that but during the famine pretty much all the internal functioning of these places in a lot of cases just collapsed and it was just a place full of people getting soup pretty much like there's a there's a yeah it's a it's they're horrific places because they are actually trying to help people a lot of them in particularly in the east of the country are relatively well run out in the west there's lots of examples of landlords actually uh cutting back the budget of workhouses but that's a different story but um in they're trying to help people but

you get disease so for example in the north of course yeah jesus like once disease breaks out in the workhouse you've got 4 000 people in a place maybe the size of a whatever a hospital today the um and they're all sleeping in dorms by May 1847 there's 40 people dying every week in the North Dublin workhouse and then those people are just buried in a mass grave yeah tell us the story about the soup competition

the what was it man you mentioned it before a celebrity chef trying to make the best soup for the family I'm serious it's true it's

by 1847 they'd made an absolute balls of handling the famine that's a technical term that we use to describe so basically they were spending about half a million pounds a month on these public work schemes. So the idea was...

Pieces of famine roads. Yeah, so what they want is, they want the free market to function. Yeah. The problem is that the people they want to buy the food have no money. Yeah. So what they do is,

what we do is set up all these pointless work schemes, make them work really hard, even though they're starving. For a bit of money. And we'll actually pay them not enough money to buy food so they'll actually starve to death anyway. So by February 1847 the government officials in Ireland are right into London going look this is actually making the whole situation worse so they go okay look we're going to start out something different. So they launched this public or they launched this big massive system of soup kitchens

all across the country and it's actually very impressive the way they rolled this big, massive system of soup kitchens all across the country. And it's actually very impressive the way they rolled this out. People often argue that the British government couldn't have dealt with the famine. But actually, when they opened up the soup kitchens, they opened them up really rapidly. But anyway, they have this big, I suppose what you call today, media launch. And they get in this guy, Alexis Sawyer. The guy actually was like the jamie oliver of his day he'd written all these uh cookbooks like for the working classes

and this kind of thing real like well-known guy and he kind of gets interested in this so he comes over to ireland and uh he designs this model soup kitchen where he can feed a thousand people uh an hour and he designs designs these soups. Now, the soups are just like basically water with a few bits and pieces floating around in them. Anyway, but they have this great launch and they have it down just in front of Collins' barracks there on the Croppies' Acre.

And you couldn't make this stuff up. What they do is they get the great and the good of Dublin down. So they get the Crandall chief of the dublin down so they get the chief uh the commander-in-chief of the british army edward blackney they get lord besper the the lord lieutenant and they're all down there and they have this kind of soiree and then they have the soup kitchen opened up and before anyone has anything the elite of society go down and kind of look around and test it out then they get a hundred example paupers from the Mendicity Institute and bring them down

and let the rich then watch these people. Oh my god. And then at six o'clock in the evening there's all these other people starving to death surrounding it and eventually they're let in. And even though the soup kitchens actually were quite effective this obviously was roundly

condemned. Now when I say the soup kitchens were effective, they were effective for six months until they shut them down in September 1847. And why were they shut down? They were shut down for lots of reasons. But the main one is the British government had this idea that Irish property should pay for Irish poverty. So Irish property is landlords.

So what they're going to do is tax the landlords to pay for the Irish poor. Problem is there's not enough money in the country to even pay for it. Most landlords just refuse to pay it. Well, not most. A lot of them kind of refuse. A lot of them are living in England. So that's where the workhouses come under huge pressure then.

So they're supposed to be funded by these local taxes, but out in the west of Ireland, there's just not enough money in those areas anymore. If you've got like 50%, 60% of the population who need relief. Because I think it's hard to envisage, but like in 1845, three to four million people lived on a diet almost exclusively of potatoes. Like that's literally you're eating very little else. And it's really nutritious, actually.

Yeah, my buddy was saying that like potatoes, one of the one foods where it's like, you can just eat that and be grand. Yeah. No, it does. Like, it hits all the, you won't be deficient in anything, you know. Irish people are actually marginally taller than anyone else in Europe at the time. Well, now. Because of the potato consumption.

That's what, did I see? When it was plentiful, when it was plentiful, we were actually doing okay nutritionally, weren't we? It comes back to what we talked today about food sovereignty and things like that. You can't have a functioning society dependent on one crop because if that fails, we all know what happens when that fails and it's not

very good. But the amount of potatoes they used to eat though is phenomenal. An adult male labourer would eat about 13 pounds of potatoes you used to eat though is phenomenal. You used to eat like, adult male labour would eat about 13 pounds of potatoes a day. What's that in kgs? I don't know, it's about 50 or 60 spuds anyway. Jesus Christ.

Fucking hell. You might have a bit of buttermilk in with that. If you live at the coast, you might have a bit of fish. But yeah, it's pretty much potatoes. That's something I'd like to know. If you live at the coast, you might have a bit of fish. But, yeah, it's pretty much potatoes. That's something I'd like to know, okay? Now, I know that, like, fishing and hunting was pretty much outlawed. And what happened if you were on the coast? Like, the odd periwinkle or an old muscle or something?

No, but seriously. No, no, no. And actually, fishing wasn't actually illegal. You could do it. And there was actually loads of communities who, say, in 1845, are well positioned to ride out the famine because they can fish, and fishers obviously can survive on fish. So that did exist for people who were in the right location. Well, the problem is, though, is that in 1845,

in the first year, the famine isn't actually that bad. Now, when I say that bad, it means you're going to starve, but probably not starve to death. And what a lot of people are doing is they're planning for the next year. So what they start doing is pawning anything they have. So pawn shops are making an absolute killing. Pardon the pun. And it's the day.

But the problem is in 1846, the crop fails even worse. So these people who were dependent on getting all this equipment back, so they pawned all their boats, their nets, all this kind of stuff, and they're planning that after the harvest of 1846, they'll be able to get all this stuff back. But unfortunately for them, what happens is the crop failure in 1846 is even worse so they don't have the money now to go back in and get back their stuff from pawn shops and they're absolutely

there's a very famous account of an english quaker james hack chook in the akka he visited akka island in 1847 and he talks about standing on the cliffs and seeing these huge shoals of fish and the people on akka are looking out at these huge shoals of fish but they're not able to like it's this horrific situation there's plenty of food and they just can't go out to catch it fucking hell so like yeah

one of the answers to that is why couldn't the Irish fish because they were too poor to even go out and get the there's kind of this idea that they were too stupid to do this the more you describe it as well because we got out this started with the question of

genocide or famine right yeah and the more and more you talk about we'll say the things that the Brits did they were so ridiculous

that it's like what they were doing it was the test tube for sure like I mean these fucking pilot schemes, and we don't know whether it'll work or not, but it doesn't matter.

Sure, give it a crack and we'll find out, isn't this now the opportunity? Yeah, I think what's important to remember is we kind of think of, obviously, in Ireland, there was never a famine as bad as that again after. But what I'm describing here is actually just a famine. And these happen... What about the earlier ones,

like the one that Jonathan Swift wrote a modest proposal about, which was 1740? There was a famine in 1740. It's known in Irish history as the Year of Slaughter. Yeah. And it was actually worse in terms of... About a third of the population probably died in 1740. What started that one?

That was poor weather. Was it spuds? Well, not entirely. There was also the failure of other crops. But that wasn't in many ways as severe because it happens, the Great Famine lasts about five years and you could argue probably even 10,

you know, emigration lasts way into the 1850s. Evictions are huge up until 1854 so it's a very long time this crisis lasts in our society but i guess what i'm saying is what happened in ireland in the 1840s isn't a unique event this happens across the world and even today obviously there's local factors about how these play out but that's why i think but why do why is the great famine, the great Irish famine the one that we hate like the world knows about?

There's two reasons. One is it actually is one of the worst famines in modern world history in terms of proportionality. Give us a runner up Mao Stalin they did Well of course yeah yeah but I mean one around at the time There's famines in India in the late 1870s,

which is a very close model on what happens here. And the Brits would have been regulating that as well. Exactly, yeah. And literally they don't learn anything from... Well, they do learn, actually, probably. They don't have a problem because Indians probably fall even lower on the racial hierarchy in their view, and it's obviously, 10 000 miles away yeah

and then there's another terrible famine at the turn of the 20th century as well like so but these that what i'm saying here i think is that a famine is a terrible thing we don't have to call it a genocide it doesn't mean the british government aren't responsible um but if we were to say it's the exact same thing as the fucking, the slaves, the Irish slaves. It's like, we don't have to, they're not technically slaves. They're indentured servants. It was terrible. They had fucking awful lives.

They were sent away against their will. They were forced to work. But however, at least they were considered human beings and their children weren't property. That's the thing, isn't it? That's the key. The next generation of your family can go on. Yeah, if you were African, it's like's like number one you're not considered human number two your kids are slave their kids are slaves there's nothing you can do that that is a system you're born into yeah the irish person

had a life as horrible as them but they were out of it in 10 years yeah and a lot of them became slave masters themselves you know exactly yeah like i don't think there's it's the same thing like terminology is very important yeah and it doesn't if you want to talk about the personal experience like saying the personal experience of a of an indentured slave or indentured servant and it is shocking but history is not just about one person's life because we can never tell anything if we just talk about every individual's lives we have to look at the overall experience and the overall experience is that after a certain amount of time you are free

yeah and it's one of the things that annoys me about we'll say the people who want to be perpetrating this slave thing because like black people in America don't have a problem with slavery because it's something that happened to their great great grandfather they have a problem with it because

they still suffer at a system right now that they can trace back to it whereas the Irish are all over the fucking White House so clearly we didn't do you know what I mean it also didn't happen the Irish didn't just get to the White House the last decade or decade before that

it's a gradual thing. But we've also been there 100 years, in and around. Exactly, yeah. Cannibalism in the famine. This is a... I used to make a podcast on the Middle Ages and I came across lots of records of cannibalism in famines then. And actually, cannibalism is a thing that just happens in famines

but traditionally at least in Ireland no one wanted to talk about this because we were kind of this noble people who had this terrible wrong done to us and we just kind of lay down and died and everything we did was and I think what's really important about when we bring up things like we were talking about the Loch Hospital earlier on and we talk about cannibalism now is this is part of our history and it's it's a very important thing to understand that these things happen but there's a couple of recorded cases of

cannibalism and one of them was uh happened well there's three recorded cases around clifton in galway and um one of them in particular a a very well-documented case at the time, was a man called Patrick Diamond. And she was able to trace Patrick Diamond. He only died in 1894. But Patrick Diamond lived beside the seashore near Omi Island, and a human body washed up on the shore. And Patrick Diamond was hungry, and he went to work on the body.

And his neighbours came down when he had removed the organs and put them into a bowl, and he was going to eat them, and they stopped him. But this, eventually, the rector, Ballin and Slow, heard about this, and he wrote the newspapers and publicised it, and the British government heard about it, and the British government, the prime minister of the day was a man called Lord John Russell, and Lord John Russell couldn't deny this because this Protestant rector was a very, very respectable man.

So he said that this man, Patrick Diamond, just had a voracious appetite. And that's why he did this. And the Times newspaper in England used to refer to him as the fat man or a fat man. But what happened there, there was a kind of a series of uh articles that appeared in newspapers in the following um kind of months after this came out and a very sad letter came from a curate in spittle and that curate wrote about how he said that this is a tale all too familiar to him that he had seen this and there's another case of a family and were they eaten? Dead people? Yeah, it tended to be. There's no evidence of people murdering.

There's circumstantial obviously cannibalism is something that brings with it terrible guilt. Starvation makes people insane and I don't think in any way that we should be kind of like, that's what I'm saying this is part of our history. I don't think anyone in the room is

judging a person from behind but it's, but I guess that's what I'm saying is that this is part of our history and it's not something we should shy away from. Not at all, that's the thing there should be no shame about fucking history if bad shit happens you elevate it so you learn from it. There's not much

to be learned, don't eat lad but like. There's a very famous be learned off Don't Eat, lad. There's a very famous article actually written by one of the leading historians on the famine called Eating People is Wrong that addresses this. You said something backstage

which I quite enjoyed. You were talking about when the Irish went to America and the discrimination that they faced and how you see so many parallels in that with, say, modern attitudes towards Islamic refugees

today. Oh, for sure. You can literally take the racist attitudes that Irish people faced, appalling racism when they went to the US. They were considered like, I guess part of it comes from, if you think about it, a lot of these people have sold everything they have here to get on these ships.

They go over, their ships' disease can break out. They've been living on these tiny ships for weeks on end. So they're smelly, they're dirty, they're often diseased, they're desperate. So, you know, in many ways, the ideas that you hear about refugees today were projected onto them. But also Irish people were seen as this other. So things that you often hear about, say, for example, Muslims today would be things like that. They won't mix. That was said about Irish people right through the 19th century.

They spoke their own language. They wanted to start a war in Britain, for example. In the 19th century, there was huge support in America for Irish independence. Quite understandably, these were people who had been forced from this country. They had emigrated to America during or after the famine. They didn't want to go.

So they were talking about the Fenians trying to... Exactly. But they were seen, therefore, as this violent group in society. And I was saying to you, there was this very famous sketch done in the 1880s and it appeared in a magazine in New York where you have the melting pot of American society and all the groups of American society

are all in the melting pot together, but you've got the guy dressed in green standing at the edge with a knife and it's like the one that won't mix, the Irish. So I think... And you also had two, one narrative that said about refugees and Islamic people that are living in Europe now,

the Americans talk about the no-go zones, that there's parts of Sweden and Belgium that you just don't go into. And that was in the 19th century, would have been the Five Points District in New York. And it's not just there, it's in every city. For example, Montreal in the late 19th century was known as the Belfast of North America

because of the usually quite common riots in Montreal between Irish Catholics and Protestants on the 12th of July. So I guess... So there's your Sonny and Shia nearly. But you know, there's a lot of parallels like this. I think there is a lot of parallels, and I think, like, as well, like people, today you hear people talking about, I can't remember exactly how many Syrians have come to Europe

since the war has started there. Between 1846 and 1851, 1.25 million Irish people passed through the port of Liverpool. Liverpool had a population of about 300,000 people. In New York in 1855, one in three people in New York had been born in Ireland. So if you walk down a street in New York, you're going to hear people speaking Irish. There's going to be any other group in New York are going to feel like outsiders to an extent. Yeah and that's where the nativists, the American nativists come from Yeah and I guess what I find strange

today is that people complain about a very small number of people from Syria coming into the continent of Europe whereas we're talking about hundreds of thousands of Irish people and I don't think anyone in Ireland today would go, nah you know what they should have stayed here and died. You know it's like that's the parallel. It baffles the fucking mind.

It's very baffling that we don't have that. I mean, Jesus Christ, the same people, lads, that will reply underneath the Daily Mail or the Journal and give out about refugees are the same ones that will go on a fucking very long rant if you don't call

the famine a genocide. Do you know what I mean? It's nuts. Who are your top three favourite historians? Top three favourite historians? I would say, I guess, to start with the easy one, I think Dermot Furtwold is a great historian. I think the stuff that he's written is great. I think

Brian Hanley, I don't know if people know him, he's a great historian who writes gives great perspectives on early 20th century history and then maybe someone like Mary McAuliffe, she does great research into the role of women in the

War of Independence and the Civil War. I think she's doing interesting research at the moment on sexual violence in the War of Independence and the Civil War. Again, kind of something that maybe, I think... Yeah, that's something I've never heard of. It's kind of those same things again. Like if we talk about cannibalism or we talk about prostitution or sex work during the famine, we like to think of our history as like this very simple like how much of it is is sold through a fucking narrative you know a post-independence narrative and actually a lot of this that she was even

started to form particularly on the famine starts to form before independence i mean it was like i know donovan ross and like donovan Rassa lived through the famine, but he definitely used the famine as part of how he would radicalise people. Oh, for sure. I think that's what we need to be clear about. The movement for independence

obviously did what it needed to do. So it pointed out events like the famine. and like that happens all the time but these people weren't historians so we shouldn't just go oh because someone like john mitchell say in particular like that man there's a lot that he said that we wouldn't want to uh follow given he went on to back the confederacy in the in the u.s civil war but people often refer to oh well john mitchell said it was this or that, or Donovan Ross said it

what was Donovan Ross trying to do? He was the first man to have a mainland bombing campaign in Britain he was a lunatic and he used to wear a cowboy hat but I think what we should do is what were they doing? They're not historians

I would imagine they themselves would freely accept that they were going to tell a story that would benefit the movement for Irish independence and we all do it today, everyone forms narratives. Again to bring it back to the comparison with the Islamic

refugees, it's like the extremists are the ones who are getting a certain narrative to sell a certain view to radicalise, to start a fucking war. And that's what O'Donovan Ross was doing. Is that too much of a hot take for you, Finn? Yeah, it is.

I've got a soft spot for O'Donovan Ross. I fucking knew there was something going on there. I have a soft spot for O'Donovan Ross. I have a poster in the bedroom at home. He was a cool bastard bastard but he was mad I guess what I'm saying is I don't think you can compare these people to the far right

I just wouldn't draw that analogy but I do think that you can't historians today, their job is not an interesting example of this, a historian's job is not, and actually an interesting example of this, a historian's job is not to be influenced by

what people will do with their information so for example, up until 1997, there was no histories written about the famine, so there was a famous history written in 1874 by a priest there wasn't another general history, I'm not saying there wasn't research done,

but there wasn't a general history written by an Irish person after that until 1988. And what was the... Would you raise Tim Pak Kogan, or is he someone you would... No. Move on. Tim Pak Kogan's a journalist, I guess. Fair enough.

And his book on the famine That to me seemed like something to be made for Irish Americans to give them that weeping story that they needed Yeah I think the problem with, like Tim Pakuga makes claims and that doesn't reference them.

Now if you're making a claim that's been made in 15 books previously maybe you don't need to reference it but if you're going to go out there you have to you have to back that up and i think like but it went the other way too like so there was no histories being written about the famine and then uh there was economic research being done and there was papers being written and a english woman actually called cecil wooden smith wrote a book called the great hunger in 1962 and it was laughed away by Irish historians. There's problems with it but basically she levelled a lot of blame at the British government and it was only in 1997 that a huge

amount of research happened. Now in 1997 other things are happening in Ireland like the peace process and historians since then have admitted that basically they didn't want to talk about they didn't want to rustle any feathers when the bombs might stop upstairs. Christine Keneally, for example, was accused of writing narratives that supported terrorism. Okay. And I guess what I'm saying is historians should not care about why. No. If someone is going

to take your information and use it for one reason or another, that's not my problem and it's not, I can't be influenced by what people being offended today will think about it and in the same way so for example no one talked about the famine during the Troubles because or not no

one but a lot of people didn't because or they wrote these histories that were kind of considered to be they wouldn't make any comment on the role of the British government or they'd shy away from it and it's like well look it's bloody obvious what I found is when we made that documentary

made a documentary about can you wish people up at the bar a little bit Dave's out with the yokes but what I was making I made a documentary about 1916 right and I found it difficult to find other documentaries or information out there about 1916, right?

Especially around the 50th anniversary of 1916. And it wasn't really celebrated because the troubles were kicking off. I mean, that's the female historian you mentioned there who's studying sexual violence. Mayor Pollock, yeah. Is it the War of Independence and the Civil War? Yeah, I think so, yeah. That's her general area. That will become sensitive now because of 1922 is coming up, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I think it'll be interesting the way Ireland tries to deal with... But people won't want to hear that. People will want to hear the Brits are cunts and no one did nothing wrong on our side. Rock city. You're the best fans in the league. Bar none.

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And some of the worst atrocities happened in Kerry in the Civil War. There was nasty things thrown grenades into people's mouths and things, yeah. Like really horrific stuff done. Like there's two

terrible massacres down in Kerry. Like there's particularly horrific fighting that goes on in Kerry. And the grand scheme of things, I was actually talking

to a friend of mine, it's just a funny anecdote, where he's bringing some Russian friends and he brought them to Arbor Hill where the 1916 leaders are buried and he brought them to Arbor Hill where the 1916 leaders are buried and he was trying to explain the rising

and telling them maybe a couple of hundred people were killed and the Russian was just going, you have heard of Stalingrad? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. But the... There's a lot of stuff. I mean, another thing too that I don't hear a lot of,

and my own fucking grandfather was accused of it, but the wiping out of Protestants in West Cork after the War of Independence. A lot of them fucked off down to South Africa to carry on what they were doing to some new people. But others were fucking

shot in their beds and disappeared. Certain Protestant families that colluded with the Brits during the Troubles or the War of Independence. I'm lucky enough to have my granddad and my granduncle, they were all in Tom Barry's fine column. I have all

his memoirs to read and all the shit that they used to get up to. They used to spend a lot of their time sleeping in Protestant's houses because the Tans wouldn't fucking search them. I think the history that was, that came out, I don't know how long

it is now, this idea that there was kind of this ethnic cleansing almost that happened in West Cork, but a lot of that has been disproven since then that in that, say for example, people were being targeted maybe because they were providing information to the... That was the main reason, yeah.

But that's not a sectarian issue. There was Catholics also being killed for that reason too. Oh, really? So, like, it's... Now, to say that sectarianism played absolutely no role in Ireland in the 1920s is just daft. It obviously did. Of course, yeah.

But the question is, was there this drive, was there this move to drive Protestants from the country? For example, Cumann na Gaeil, the party that takes power, is actually set up to provide a vehicle for basically a united ruling class moving forward. What's that now? So Cumann na Gaeil, who are the forerunners of Fine Gael, the Whale who are the forerunners of Fine Gael they're set up basically in

not long after the treaty they're the ones that joined up with the blue shirts eventually yeah one of the big reasons for that is to solidify essentially the Irish ruling class at this point

what defines that ruling I have a hot take about 1916 right essentially the Irish ruling class at this point. And what defines that ruling? Because there's one... I have a hot take about 1916, right? Which is how 1916 was taught to us in schools is... You're told it was teachers, painters, poets, lawyers. These are the ones who led it. To me, what that says is... It writes out Connolly's Irish Citizen Army, first of all.

It writes out the poor people of Dublin, the people who had no work because of the 1913 lockouts, who actually went out with their fucking guns. When you establish in New Ireland, you tell people this was led by poets, painters, teachers. What that message says is

violent revolution is only a good thing when the gun is in a responsible hand. But not in the hands of that fucking, your man there with no money working in the fucking bread factory. No, no, no, he can't have a gun. The poet can if he wants to. First 10 years,

the first 10 years... Do you think that's, am I on the ball to something there? Because if you look at the first 10 years... Am I on the ball to something there? Because if you look at the first 10 years of Irish independence, it doesn't stop when Fianna Fáil come to power, but there's this war against different groups in society. So I guess this is kind of adopting

American political parlance or whatever, but there's a war on the poor. So, for example, people are shot on strikes. Post-independence? Post-independependence like for example you also have things like women have made huge advances in ireland between say the late 19th century and 1921 but by 1920 i can't remember what year it is you've got the minister for justice kevin o'higgins talking about trying to get women off juries that women aren't really able to so there's this and ke Kevin O'Higgins talking about trying to get women off juries, that women aren't really able to. So there's this and Kevin O'Higgins that he's actually shot in 1927

but he says that they have they're the most conservative revolutionaries ever to bring forward a revolution. So it kind of is, I guess what I'm saying is they are very clear about it. And because what made me speak about that is when you mentioned the common...

What is it? Common oil? Common oil, yeah. Common oil. What was this ruling class they wanted? And is it evident today? Did it work? Yes. For example, like...

Actually, Conor McCabe wrote a great book about this. Is it the farmer class? it is in part say for example in the town that I grew up in, Castle Comer that used to be a mining town there was big mines there and say for example

the landlords there were the Wandersford family now they've got a problem a lot of landlords do set up and move back to England, but obviously you can't move your mind back to England, so they're stuck here. So there needs to be a way for them. Now a lot of them withdraw a bit from public life, because they don't want to be, you want to be careful now. If you've been riding it high for like three, four hundred years, things are changing here and you don't want to push it out too far. And a lot of big houses are burnt. but they have to provide a vehicle for these people too and like that is

part of the project that like our society is going to have to be reformed you know reconfigured and that like say for example pre-independence alignments don't necessarily make complete sense anymore um like this is a very this is one aspect of what's going on in a very complex picture. Yeah. Here's a very hot take question for you. When you speak about the British policies

that were used during the famine, that big experiment, these fucking workhouses, famine roads, ridiculous things that to a logical person go, that is fucking nuts, what are you at? Is the Irish government trying to do something similar with direct provision now? Direct provision is...

I don't even think it's an experiment, because an experiment... Like, it's nuts. It's bizarre. The reason I say I don't even think it's an experiment because what would be the outcome? Like, if you're doing an experiment, you think something might work. When I look at direct provision today,

I don't see what... The only outcome is actually try and frighten other people not coming here. Yeah, when I speak to people who know people in the system or know people who work, the only ideology at play or purpose seems to be they know that the people in direct provision are sending mails back home saying do not come here like i think maybe the best parallel to what's going on in direct provision maybe over the last 20 years we've

started to come to terms with institutional abuse in this country finally and we're all shocked and we all a lot of us ask why our parents or how our parents the exact same thing finally and we're all shocked and we all a lot of us ask why our parents or how our parents and then we're all living in a society where this is happening and I'm not in 20 years time like remember I was do you know when the fucking Magdalene shit first broke on the late late

right it would have been about 94, 95 and the whole country was just like what what are you fucking serious? Like mad shit. And even like there was a Magdalene laundry in Limerick up until 96. Bradley Games who made Mousetrap. Mousetrap was being

made in Magdalene laundries in Ireland when we were fucking kids. They were farming that work out to women working in, as slaves in Ireland in these Magdalene laundries. But when that came out all of us went to our parents and said what the fuck were you doing

what were you doing there was Magdalene laundries in the city there was two of them in Limerick what was the crack were you sending your laundry there but some people were people were fucking getting their laundry washed but it's like

they would say we didn't really know what was happening the walls were too high, we didn't really know and we just accepted it as normal in 20 years time there's going to be a fucking late late show Al Porter presenting it maybe but there is going to be a late late show

in 20 years time lads, I'm telling you and the Magdalene laundry moment is going to happen and late, late show in 20 years' time, lads, I'm telling you. And the Magdalene Laundry moment is going to happen, and it'll be about direct provision. And our children are going to be asking us those questions. And we're going to say, I don't know, the walls were too high. Because that's the only fucking answer I have at the moment. It's like, I don't know a lot about direct provision. It's very difficult for me to find things out. I know something probably really bad is happening.

And one of the most frightening things I've heard about direct vision is one little girl came out about a year ago and said, some of the men look at me creepy. That's all I need to know. Do you know what I'm saying? That is all we need to know about what might be happening in there right now. And it's sanitized enough for us as a people to be able to get on with our lives and not

see it or not know what's going on I think there's a reason it happens behind closed doors I think they know I think most people in this country are decent people and I think if we knew if it was put in front of us but I don't want that to happen in

fucking 20 years the thing is, just when we talk about what our parents knew, people did know what was going on. People chose to turn away. Like, an example, there's a, I can't remember her name, the famous book written about stuff with the children, I think, details this, but like, there was Say, for example, people say, oh, we never knew about sexual abuse.

You read... We're talking about Irish newspaper archives. You go through things like indecent assault of a child. People can say, oh, well, we didn't understand and we didn't talk about these things. I don't care what anyone says. Indecent assault of a child, you know what that is. And was that...

You find evidence of that in the papers, yeah? For example, there's a famous, now this is a different thing, it wasn't. The level of knowledge of child abuse in this country is far higher, was far higher. In the 1929 or 1930-31 there was a thing called the Carrigan Commission SAT to

investigate juvenile prostitution at the time. What came out of this though was very obvious that there was huge amounts of abuse going on of children and the government suppressed it. It was suppressed. You can actually read it online now. And was this familial abuse? No, no, no.

It was, it detailed lots of, it didn't, but it did detail certain familial abuse but it detailed lots of different, it didn't the big thing it didn't touch on was clerical abuse. Yeah, that was whitewashed and because I'm like very famously in the 40s a very famous Irish priest who had set up this thing called boys town there'd been a film made about it where he'd set up this model school or model

kind of institution for boys he came to Ireland he traveled around saw the industrial schools and made these speeches saying do not send your children to... I guess what I'm saying is it's not there all the time but this idea that this happened completely away and that then in the 90s someone comes out and says

oh my god all this is going on you knew it was happening and fair enough people were powerless to stop it because of the power of enough, people were powerless to stop it because of the power of the church and all the rest of it. But we have to be honest, and honest to the people who went through it. People did know this was going on. It's the old classic of, for evil things to happen, it takes a good person to do nothing.

For sure. And what I think is, one thing as a society that I think now we should be very cautious of is, like 2015 water protests we were all quite political we were all very angry because the economy was in fucking shit and this water charges was too much

and people actually went up to fucking Dublin and did some shit right? But now things are starting to get okay. Now people are actually looking at putting a patio out the back garden but seriously little things like that people are looking through argus catalogs now i went to fucking i know it sounds nuts lads i'll tell you this uh when the recession fucking started 2007 right i was gigging in australia in 2011 right and so that would have been four years into the

recession so I went into a shopping center in Australia and I was sitting down and something was different I didn't know what the fuck it was something just felt weird or sounded different and what it was was it was the sound and sensation of people buying things. Because I'd been in Ireland for years where people were going to shopping centres. Like, I'd been in Stevens Green. When people don't have money, they walk around slower.

You don't hear the swish of a fucking bag off a leg. You don't hear tills. I'm serious. And when I went to Australia, I noticed this activity of just capitalism and buying. And I think now, like, Fine Gael, there's something really snaky about Fine Gael at the moment, right?

Because they seem to be doing nice things. Do you know, with Simon Harris and Vradica supporting Repeal the 8th, and, like, Vradica had a status the other day where he listed out a bunch of shit he's supposed to be doing anyway, but he listed out some stuff and said just saying at the end, you know? Why are they trying to be this nice, and what are they doing in the fucking background?

Do you get what I'm saying? And we don't notice this shit when we're comfortably able to look through an Argos catalog. It's as simple as that. Argos catalogs four years ago were simply something you looked through with an aspirational kind of sense. Now you will look through an Argos catalog and go, yeah, I'll get the plasma TV. simple as that. It's something as small as that. That's what will stop you thinking about direct provision. We are a capitalist people. We live in a capitalist society. This buying things feels fucking nice. It feels

lovely. And it stops you thinking about injustices because they're not in our face. This is what will stop us thinking about homeless people and direct provision. So I think it's something for all of us to be aware of. And you can still enjoy your plasma fucking screen TV. There's nothing wrong with that um do you think the famine had a major effect on the outcome of the american civil war considering the amount the influx of people that would have went there

considering the influx of people that would have went there? Can I hedge this one and say it had a impact? Okay. It definitely had an impact. I think there was probably no way the South would ever win that war. It's just down to the industrialisation of the northern economy eventually meant that they just grinded them down. Yeah. A hell of a lot of Irish people died fighting in it.

There's a guy worth mentioning, and Damien Shields is doing amazing research into this and trying to draw attention to this fact that the amount of Irish people that fought in that war is up there with probably... I wouldn't say it's maybe the most, but certainly one of the top conflicts of the amount of Irish people fighting in it. Wow.

And is it as simple as how gangs of New York portray it? Where basically you get off the famine ship and it's here's a gun and three free meals a day. Go down and sort their shit out. We were talking earlier about how I was going to qualify things and I wouldn't just go, I don't know actually

so I'm going to have to dodge that one too but I think what is certainly a factor in this and you see it not just in terms of the army but in terms of you're talking about desperate people and they're going to do what they have to a lot of Irish people arriving

in America so they start to arrive in big numbers from 1847 onwards. And some of these people coming from Ireland are actually relatively well-to-do people. I mean, relatively. But they basically sell everything they have to get there. So when they arrive there... So the ones that got to America were actually...

They weren't the poorest of the poor. No. But they were when they arrived. The poorest of the poor... There's a good i was just i'm writing another podcast at the moment maybe it's in the last one i can't remember um but uh it's about this woman turned up in dublin in uh 1847 and she went to this place called the night asylum on bow street it was basically where homeless people in the city slept it was just a

basically a room there was nothing in it and you could just go there and sleep and this woman went there and she turns up with six kids and they let her in and they're very sympathetic to her place because she looks really poor anyways they hear money on her and they go if you have money you have to leave it here i'm gonna give it back to you and they leave and eventually they find out she's an absolute ton of money yeah and they take her to court because obviously someone who's poor couldn't have the money she was stolen it turns out that she actually had a relatively sizable farm it's like 15 acres and they her and her husband had been doing okay the husband had died a couple of months earlier she couldn't had no money to buy seed for a new crop so they'd sold everything

but basically she had been quite wealthy but to sell everything to get a passage to america she sold everything so that woman she was let on eventually that woman turns up in new york you know the chances are the life expectancy is very low as well like so So that woman, she was let on eventually. That woman turns up in New York. You know, the chances are, the life expectancy is very low as well. But like, they're absolutely impoverished. And they live in absolutely horrific conditions in New York when they arrive there.

Like, for example, there's accounts of them living in basements. Because obviously they're the cheapest. But they'd be close to the Hudson River or whatever, so they'd be tidal the uh hudson river or whatever so they'd be tidal so you'd have to leave the you'd have to leave the basement um at a certain time when the tide came in because you dreamt if you didn't jesus um but uh yeah like if you think about poor people if you can't afford to buy food in ireland you're not going to be able to afford to buy

tickets to like tickets aren't cheap like you get to Liverpool for five shillings, you get to Canada for 50, and you get to America for 70. I heard stories of some people paying the full price to get to America and then whoever's running the ship is a gaol and they just throw them off into Liverpool and tell them that's New York, deal with that.

Yeah, Liverpool was pretty notorious because I was saying earlier you've got 1.25 million Irish people passing through that place. And if it was Dublin today, or any city... The taxi drivers would have something to say about that. There's also got to be people there on the take. You've got these people coming through,

and there's always the guy... There's a huge amount of... There's articles written about how much money actually came into the Liverpool economy by people ripping off irish immigrants and people being told their ships you know because often what they'll do is they'll have bought like they'll come to liverpool they'll wait a couple of weeks to get the passage on to north america and some of them don't make it like they get stuck or they get stuck in and they get stuck in england they go to manchester or places like that or or maybe Glasgow. Fuck.

I'll wrap it up now, lads, because you need to go home. You need to go to work in the morning. You need to get up early for Leo. I'd like to thank my magnificent guest, Finn Doyer, who I think was... Finn was... You were so good tonight. I hated the fact that I was presenting the podcast. I wanted to be out there just listening for points of it, you know what I mean?

Thank you very much to DJ Willie O'Deejay. He's 19 today. And this has been the Blind By Podcast. You've been unbelievably sound, lovely people. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for the crack. Have a good

night.