The Blindboy Podcast - Manchán Magan

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

I chat with writer Manchán Magan about the origins of Irish words, and the psychadelic origins of Irish Folklore. Manchán has just released his book, 32 Words for Field (Lost Words of the Irish Language) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Corral around the kettle you henpecked decklins. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. Got some new listeners this week because I did, I made an appearance on the Adam Buxton Podcast. Adam is someone who I've admired for most of my life because I grew up watching him on TV in the Adam and Jo show and I had the privilege this week. Of being a guest on the Adam Buxton podcast.

So check it out if you haven't heard it. We spoke about how. Art movements like situationism. And Dada. Can have influence on comedy. It was very enjoyable. If you're a new listener to the podcast. Because you heard me on Adam Buxton's podcast welcome you delicious cunts welcome um what i always say to new listeners is go back

and listen to some earlier podcasts rather than going deep into this one start off with some earlier blind boy podcasts and familiarize yourself with the lore of this universe um rather than going conkers deep into this you know for regular listeners what's the crack how you getting on i hope you've been having a charming lockdown and quarantine that you're not being too hard on yourself that you're embracing the the current chaos of the universe that you're not being too hard on yourself that you're embracing the the current chaos of the universe that you're embracing that which you can't control and focusing on what you can control what i do have for you this week is some escapism okay i've got some real podcast hug escapism for you to listen to this podcast this week and switch off from whatever

the fuck is bothering you and lose yourself in the universe of the podcast hug all right first i'd like to read you a little excerpt of something when i was a young fella of about six or seven the neighbors had a yank cousin called jake over to visit he was sound enough and he had ties of the turtles which i'd never seen in ireland one day i says to him are you going to the shop you are and jake gets this pure bousy look across his lip like i was trying to pull the piss why are you telling me to go to the shop? I'll go to the shop if I want to, he says. I was only asking.

I wasn't telling you to go to the shop, Jake, I said. I'd no idea what had gotten him upset. Now my da was over by the gate listening in with a smirk. Later on he says to me, that thing earlier with the young yank when he thought that you told him to go to the shop do you know why he couldn't understand you? and my da then explained to me a theory about the way Irish people speak English

a theory which was given to him by his da my grand da lived on a bo-reen below in West Cork that was on the way to a creamery. He was a member of Tom Barry's IRA flying column and would constantly watch and take note of whoever passed. Regular Irish people would traverse with their horses loaded with buckets of fresh milk and would come back with horses packed with buckets of fresh milk and would come back

with horses packed with butter in their saddlebags. This was a brisk fast-paced road, no time to stop and chat because milk would go sour in the sun and butter would soften on a horse's shoulders. It was for this reason that British soldiers would stop and harass anyone who walked the Bahrain to interrogate, to rile, to get horses pure greasy with sweaty yellow butter. A small injustice, a show of power and an opportunity to make a person emotional enough to lash out and say the wrong thing. to lash out and say the wrong thing. My grandad would notice that when an English soldier questioned the man on the way to the creamery no answer would be right or wrong.

Any answer meant a long wait and your papers inspected regardless. Their standard rules of human interaction had broken down and to give an answer as Gaeilge would be met with violence. So the Irish people figured out an in-between a yes and a no at the same time a quantum superposition of an answer

an answer that would cause the soldier to say stupid paddy gibberish and usher the person off before the butter melted down the horse's shoulders. And this here was my dad's theory as to why I asked the American, are you going to the shop you are? It was an absurd post-colonial way of arranging a question that had its roots in years of interrogation from the English. Now I'm not saying that's the case. This is just a story that was passed down to me. But as an adult, I learned that there was a name for how I speak, how I arrange sentences and for the words that I

use. Hiberno-English, a resistant way of speaking the English language, a language we never asked for. As an author and a musician, I often find myself writing words as if they're music. I search for melody and rhythm on the page. Jazz and blues are African American forms of music, born out of the resistance of African songs to European instruments. Musical notes exist in the African scale that don't exist in the Western scale. These notes are in between the Western notes, and these in-between notes give jazz and blues an emotional complexity that the traditional Western scale cannot deliver. The playful, bold and fluid way

that Hiberno-English resists traditional English does the same thing. This improvised musicality to how we think and speak provides me with a deep literary confidence to explore the in-between, literary confidence to explore the in-between especially when the writing process presents me with resistance so what that was there was that's a forward that i wrote for a book called a dictionary of hiberno english and hiberno english is the english that we as Irish people speak. We speak our own version of Irish. And that little story there, that's what my dad used to say to me. My dad used to say, we speak Irish in a confusing way because of 800 years of interrogation. And it's just my dad's version of it,

based on what his dad told him. It's a folklore tale i suppose but the dictionary of hiberno english it's gill books who are the book company that published my first two collections of short stories this dictionary of hiberno english was made by dr terence patrick Dr Terence Patrick Dolan and he was a professor of English and he compiled this massive dictionary of Hiberno English words words that are

English but uniquely Irish and it was out of print right I I ended up seeing it online about a year ago two years ago and going fuck me I want a copy of this book and I couldn't seeing it online about a year ago two years ago and going fuck me I want a copy of this book and I couldn't find it online and I went to Gil Books and I said

do you even have a copy of it because ye published it years ago and they're like we don't even have a copy of it so I said to him you need to fucking republish this book this dictionary of Hiberno English words that has you need to re-release it you need to get this fucking book because it's a shame for that has, you need to re-release it, you need to get this fucking book, because it's a shame for it to be out of print, re-release the fucking book,

and I'll write the foreword for it, and I'll tell everyone on my podcast about this wonderful dictionary, the only one in existence, that has got thousands and thousands of Hiberno-English words, words like words words like queer or which i explained a few weeks back are words that i grew up using like gaul calling someone a gaul or a gaul sometimes the word gaul was a name for a fanny and gaul like you're like what the fuck does gaul mean g-o-w-l and we just thought it was a limerick word it comes from the the Irish word gavall to mean junction or other words I would have grown up saying I'd call the guards a shade or a woman was called a bior and these words then they come from from Shelta, which is the language of indigenous Irish travellers. So, this book, the Dictionary of Hiberno-English,

it's not my book, but it has my name on the front of it, because I wrote the foreword. But the book is by Terence Patrick Dolan. It's in shops at the moment. Go out and check it out. Also, I don't profit from sales of the book. I took a small fee for doing the forward to it but mainly this is me just doing the right thing putting my name to the book so that it gets reprinted and it doesn't get lost because that would be a fucking

shame you know um because i don't know it just broke my heart to think that a resource like that is out of print you know you don't want to lose like Hiberno it's the way that we speak English it's our way of speaking English it's a post-colonial way of speaking English you know it's the rose that grows from concrete the Irish language was taken away from us by the British

and we were forced to speak English and it's like you can force us all you want but we're going to find our own way to speak English that's Irish and that's what Hiberno English is and finding out what words mean you know what does a word mean and why does it mean that? Why does it mean the thing it means? It's called etymology, right? And my guest this week has just released a book which is about the etymology as such of the Irish language of Gaeilge.

And my guest is called Mán Chán Magan. And Mán Chán wrote a book 32 words for field and what it is is like it's a meditation on the Irish language it's a meditation on certain Irish words I mean it literally it comes from the Irish

language has got 32 words for field and Man Con's book is an etymological meditation on this and it's the book says the richness of a language closely tied to the natural landscape offered our ancestors a more magical way of seeing the world before we cast old words aside let us consider the sublime beauty and profound oddness of the ancient tongue. That has been spoken on this island.

For almost 3000 years. So I had the opportunity. To speak with Mankon. And I recorded it. I'm getting really good. At recording. Long distance chats. And making them sound like.

We're sitting in a kitchen together and achieving that podcast hug i'm really looking forward to showing you this fucking interview because man con isn't just someone who's interested in the etymology of the irish language he's also a travel writer he's someone who has been all around the world and is is a very thoughtful compassionate person and an incredible storyteller an incredible storyteller and he's got amazing things to say about his own life but also if you're into irish mythology man con has got some incredibly interesting theories about irish mythology based on his understanding of the irish language and he's got some theories about the roots of the fucking Irish language

that are going to blow your head off. So, without further ado, here is my chat with Man Con. So, I suppose we'll crack into this. I want to kind of start on an autobiographical level, right? We're here to talk about your new book right which is 30 32 words for field 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 one a coin which is the evocative of my name which was beautiful it was like you you delved into the most beautiful irish

so you know the way there's a you know when you're calling someone's name there's like a hamas or a fodrick but man con is my name or but then in up and down eagal it becomes a wana hine or a wanking which is uh you didn't you didn't quite go that far but it was a lovely a lovely accidental irish beginning to it um one of your your first one of your first books right were you the travel books i want i want to 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 gonna 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 little kid literally like 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 anxious no um 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 um 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 leave insert 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's either these voices giving that that freedom that i had or otherwise it was depression and so at the age of about 17 or 18 would you did 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 so i just felt there was no stopping me i was like almost angelic do you know and then this is and you can believe like that and you're

in school you can get away with it luckily i didn't get bullied i was just ignored but then when you when they tell you 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 the constrictions of society basically did not work with your personality and the constrictions of society would bring on uh a sadness i didn't fit in exactly and so i i fled i knew that i'd end up in st pat's if i stayed in 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 Yeah you've got a fucking serious lineage man your grand uncle is the O'Reilly my great great yeah that was my great great great uncle is the O'Reilly and then Sheila Humphries

is your grandmother and then my grandfather was director of arms Donal O'Donoghue for the IRA Yeah, that was my great-granduncle. Great-granduncle is the O'Reilly. And then Sheila Humphreys is your grandmother. So, and then my grandfather was director of arms, Donal O'Donoghue, for the IRA. Wow. So there was a rule in the house which you always learned French and German just so that you could import guns, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we've been doing that since about 1890. So luckily, I was brought up in the, I mean, I left school in the 80s. There was a recession. But because I had German and French, I was able to just go off mean I left school in the 80s there was a recession but because I had German and French I was able to just go off to Germany and work in a in a hypermarket so I had money 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 over land and it was going

to cost three grand no 1,000 pounds for the year uh for six sorry for seven months and i thought this is it i will finally be free i'm gonna i'm gonna understand that the bigger world is out there i'll escape the the claustrophobia and the confines of this suburban dublin world so i am so that was that was the big idea and i just went off to africa you know i was so desperate. It was this. What was your first 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 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-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 centre 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 uh of the guard of the british newspapers of the guardian of 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 about seven grand, put, I think, four wheel drive tires on it, put sand mats and just sent it off across Africa. And who else was on this with you? Who who were 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 was who were as dreamy and idealistic and ridiculous as me but uh it turned out and they probably were on the trip

that costs three grand but because i was on this one grand trip it wasn't them it was basically the the dropouts the dregs all of us were just people who didn't function in society and people who wanted to escape so there was one escape yeah 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'd die. There was this 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 on hunger strike, he would hire a chipper van and drive it up to the ventilation shaft in bobby sands's cell so that so that bobby would be here it would be smelling like fresh fish and chips oh my god that was how did that feel to you

man like your grandmother went on hunger strike exactly and i spent my 90 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 risla papers that were sent in and out of she when her eyesight got you know bad oh they used to write tiny little notes on risla papers and like hide them under fingernails or wherever you could exactly exactly swallow them or whatever yeah um but my granny would get these letters from the 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 Risla paper. One question there, Mancon.

So if your granny is like, so she's actively involved with communicating with the provisional IRA and provisional IRA prisoners. Did that mean that you were 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 uh i mean i was so innocent and young and 19 so my granny was living with us in the in the granny flat of our house in dublin she's being watched she's been watched if you're yeah that house was being watched. And like, not only watched, but I remember during the last,

the great May's 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 Fine Gael, quiet Fine Gael 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 he and he pays for the granny flat and now my granny has these um you know these prisoners hiding out in it um and at one time my dad was incredibly peaceful and you know just a quiet did your dad know that these 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 tell he'd say the rosary

with her every evening in irish even he even learned irish just you know to because the irish was so important to the family and he goes down down and he recognises who's hiding out in their coal hole. And he just screams, you know, not in my house, he says. So, yeah. He recognised the person from the news, like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't good, like. Holy fuck.

Yeah, it's like, you know, when you have a mother-in-law, you know, people say they have a problem with mother-in-laws. Well, I mean, people have problems with mother-in-laws, but if you're fucking, if you're hiding mcginnis or something in the coal bunker yeah 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 realized this Irish language that had been given by my granny as this beautiful treasure and cultural sort of um heirloom actually had an agenda you know that it wasn't some way a political weapon of war so this would be why I would have I would have you know gone off traveling and I mean the 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 tax fights there were just the drugs and our first day on our first day in africa we arrived in morocco in the little town of chef schwan having driven through france and spain and um some of the

bedouins come up to offer us we started we set up our tents you know the little old triangular army tents set a light of fire were there any hash smugglers with you that sounds like a hash smuggling type of thing um there was no i to be fair no i was the only one who got involved with grass smuggling later but there weren't one none. 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 came up to us all and he offers us firewood. And the others are just super disgusted and suspicious

and they just call him, they start calling him a raghead and said, get him away, all he'll do, he's dirty, he'll steal. And I realised I was stuck on this truck for seven months with these absolute racists it's absolutely who didn't you know only had english and like 70 those countries were were um were french-speaking countries so it was a pretty it was a pretty dark trip um 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 K Smithman exactly

exactly if you're ever going to have a life-changing experience it'll be in the Congo we arrived there and um we had this woman who was driving us Belinda an amazingly strong woman I call her something else in the book um but uh 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 twelve trips and yeah what's the danger like here man con like what's the level of going into the congo on the back of a truck it to me i'd be like that sounds a bit scary man so on all of our previous trips someone had died that's the level one like what type of death like i mean through disease through being killed through being kidnapped maybe 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 the ones who've read who are careful we're just people who are totally un uncomitted, unkempt. So sometimes it was for... The last one they were on, an old man just got a heart attack 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 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. Anyway, they did and they smashed, he smashed his head open, he died.

Jesus. Otherwise, it was just malaria or bilharzia 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 it um and so when we arrive anyway in zaire in the in con in the congo she 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 have no money.

They want to get money. And the best way of getting bribes out of people is, you know, to get crime and they actually have a crime and then you have to pay big 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 that makes sense yeah so exactly so we arrive in bumba in Zaire and um uh you know now known as the Congo and the first thing she's going to do is the only time she's going to leave us she 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 Kissing Kissingani or from Kinshasa to Kissingani

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 it's going we're going to be on the river before we reach her in kiss in um in kissengani which was the old stanleyville from leopoldville to stanleyville and rubber plantations exactly exactly the darkest

darkest of slavery um yeah and human trafficking and uh 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 sleeping on the floor of a floor of a room was luxury um 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 was it hash or weed it was weed it was weed okay very heavy crystal weed like but loads of bush with loads of 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 to the shack we were in and by this stage a huge divide had

had to enter the group those who never wanted to talk to any african or engage were absolutely petrified and the others want 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 um and we woke up the next day uh 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, 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. station turned out it was just a military encampment and they were just stoned their eyeballs on 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 see zaarian justice and he went down to the local sort of township and uh the ghetto and he picked he just randomly picked three boys dragged them back he got his army and soldiers to drag them back

and he started beating them in front of me beating them over the head with his the 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 their passports but when they got sort of so exhausted from beating they sent us away again and we went back 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 of course 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 they had the other half the group who hated us to give us their money.

And anyway, we got locked into this thing. That we were, it was 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 stage we had no malaria tablets. And I'm guessing there's no Irish embassy to call up or what's the crack? There was no nothing. The only embassy was down in south africa at the time um but we thought okay we'll find another way out but the 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 an overland truck behind you, but there was none of those. And then we also realized 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, 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 when we realized we're robbed the other 10 people go down to the river to get on the river barge but they realized the river barge wasn't there and the river barge wouldn't come and 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 check it was there and actually had abandoned us on purpose and fled with the truck. 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 um 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 the places that have been colonized by the english it was all about this idea that we are superior we are a colonial race um 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 were there it was just classic that mindset that is in uh you know a lot a large swathe of england was was very strong

because like the moment you said the congo to me the, 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 impact ongo is 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 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 uh they they never tweet because the african people are going this fella's irish exactly exactly yeah yeah wherever i went i was just welcomed it was it was that lovely feeling you get um yeah that has another thing i'd love to ask you about man con

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 uh 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 is always connected with the devil and is always dark things. And even a black horse would never have been called couple dove, but 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, you know, a Berber, no, what is it? A Berber monkey. Navin Fort. Exactly, exactly. They found that there's a skull of a monkey fucking 2000 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 Abag in Offaly

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 routes 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.

There was, the pharaohs had systems of canals. They didn't ever 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, you know, to get to the Far East. So we know the Irish people were amazing sailors. We know they were going up to the Faroes, 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, two thousand years?

Yeah. So, I mean, let's say with that Bible, we go in just 1,500 years. As you said, with Navan 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, Newgrange, you're going, you know, 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 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've just done a TV series on ancient DNA.

And, you know, what it's 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 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 and from the Middle East. So 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 Africa. Who took 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 rubbished as a kind of a fanciful thinker. Yeah, and it was finally, about four years ago, Michael Viney 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's interesting. So those first people who, as I said, were blue-eyed... But what other connections is there, Mankon? I've heard, like, Shano singing and similarities heard like Shano singing and similarities with 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 singing. It's these long cadences, this sort of rolling on a vowel. But there's words like the irish for confidence or trust is munine and if you the arabic word is mwina mwina the irish for knife is skeel and if you go to any arabic country you'll they'll tell you it's either sikian or sikina or sikina but maybe most strongly or gara gara is uh to cut you know in irish and gara is to cut in arabic kala and irish for port hala is the arabic for for port um but maybe the most strongest of all is the shamrock the our ultimate symbol of irishness you know shown on saint patrick's day it's the shamrog or

the the shammer but it happens to be the exact same word in the arabic word of shamrak and it's shamrak in pre-islamic um arabic culture in other words in pagan arabic culture a shamrak was a particular tree leafed plant okay a tree 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 uh pre-islamic arabic culture has this called shamrak a leaf that represents the tree we know three was the key moment key idea in pagan um 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 um 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 connections between ireland and india like they are just so strong and again why would you have these connections that baffles me like that's fucking baffling yeah that that that that 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 do we

know that we're sort of an indo-european culture so our culture sort of came from the basically the middle of europe or more towards the east of europe and the europe in 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 you think of it as something continually and consistently being pushed west exactly pushed west and being pushed east so that same culture all of the same elements

of it are still fuck yeah they're still alive which is why you would get like the brehan war laws are like identical to a lot of the the the old indian laws why the word ara um the noble person you know our minister in government is the same word as, the noble person, you know, ara, minister in government, is the same word as adiya, a noble in Sanskrit. Or why brehav and brahman are the same word, the same root.

Jesus. They come from breh, from mantras. Or even iddas, you know, iddachas 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 veda, again, even the word drew drew it drew comes from drew an oak and then vid which is the veda the learning the learning that is connected to the oak which is the central core like we are the same people yeah it's beautiful now one thing when i hear the term uh 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 people who are at the cutting edge of physics,

who are trying to understand the nature of what reality is and things like reality being a simulation, they'll often say it has a lot of similarities to 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 uh views are they similar to vedic stuff is there anything going on there so as you said like there there are um brahmins very early type of brahmins chanting in parts of karela and tamil nadu in the south of uh of india in the in the forest there and the the mantras they have the chance they have aren't words we don't understand them anymore they are pre that they're almost what 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 in in in irish or 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 it only came here probably about 500 bc so two and a half thousand years here's a big question for you is when people say the irish are celts is is that naive or incorrect uh no it's correct um so what we do know is that the people who built so those first blue-eyed um 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 trial 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 um 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 astronomy they're not us either

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 element of them still in us but not much that neolithic culture it only it you know it's only it 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 um and brought we were

brought farming and we brought knowledge of bronze from again the middle east from north africa area um and then with them and then we were mixed we were we were joined by these celts who arrived so because they those people the bronze age people would have come like four and a half four thousand years ago uh four and a half five thousand years ago then the the bronze the the us 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 say 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 mindset before modernity took

over totally accepted that sort of quantum nature, that otherworldly sense of there being no um no limitation to the physical reality like there's a word in irish called kriha and kriha means a tiny particle or 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 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 of 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 so 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 cloud land when dry after rain. It's basically accepting that idea of quantum, that things can be solid and not solid at the same time. Oh, the ambiguity. Oh, it's beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going to take a slight break from the interview now to do our ocarina pause. I've got a shaker and an ocarina this week each week we have a little pause in the podcast because adverts advertisements are digitally inserted into this podcast by a cast and i don't want an advert coming in and giving you a fright so what i like to do is give you a little bit of a warning so we're going to have a combined shaker and ocarina pause so when an advert comes in you don't get startled 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 no don't the first o-men i believe

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Um, is there... So one thing that I've heard before is... Have you looked into the influence of, we'll say, psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and things like that on ancient Irishish cultures like i've heard that if you look at the the art that's on the front of newgrange especially the 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 yeah 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 that 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 Cunlis 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 buligis 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 every when the bubble of knowledge are also it's called kno kritten which is sort of

a hazel of insight and it falls into the water and it makes the water magic and so when the salmon is in it it makes the salmon magic and so when Finn McCool in it makes the salmon magic and so when phil mccool gets it he he either sucks and so it's a bubble of knowledge

a bulligis or a quill crimment 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 bulligis and that word bullig 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 ayahuasca and then they come back from it with a greater knowledge and understanding of self and reality as is often reported exactly so are you saying that like you you reckon there's a way to interpret

the story of the salmon of knowledge where it's like Fionn MacCool just did a lot of mushrooms and met the elves in the machine. It's a shamanic trip, exactly. And like why is it the bredon? Why is it the salmon? The salmon is a speckled animal.

Yeah. And salmons don't eat acorns. That's one thing. I know the salmons... Here's two things that keep me awake at night about that story the salmon's name is fintan 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 Bowen River is a, the river was so sacred that she was represented. Well, the Bowen or the Bowen was the most sacred goddess in early Irish culture. And she was represented in physical form by the Bowen River. And so she is so luminous. That's not the same cow that's up in the stars is it exactly exactly so luminous because billy who we were talking about there yeah 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 is the was the milky way referred to as a cow 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 Bowen River the Bowen River is so nourishing so the Bowen God

is a mother goddess okay the Bowinda she's a mother goddess she nourishes her people with her milk now she is represented in physical form

by the river the river of the Bowen which nourishes its people with the water okay and so powerful is she that at night she shines up

into the night sky and becomes the Milky Way. Balach na bó fina. Fucking hell. 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? Isn't it lovely? 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 that if you ask people long ago about Knout and Doubt and Newgrange,

the prehistoric tombs along 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 shine are then being mirrored back in the land in stone and circular form um on into the ground and the final thing of that is bowinda the mother goddess the most powerful god she's the exact same god as go vinda as the indian form of krishna so go shit go bow is a cow in irish as 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 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 and like go to academics like how these are essentially hunches that you have and it's overwhelming like it's 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 we that then becomes um truth what is that truth is not above reason but beyond it like so i as i said we started this with i was a disillusioned kid with a you know an over idealistic kid i went

off traveling i 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 cow shed in India and visiting a dirty part of your brain.

Well, I'll finish what I was saying. I will though. Go on. 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 straw bale house in Westmeath and I just the world didn't make sense. I wanted it to make sense of my life you know so after after i came home from india and i'll explain that i built my little straw bale house in west meath 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 career for you in academia no one has done no one has looked at the gh boy you know in the genitive of donegal irish and

that's a world we don't need to cross into luckily billy mcglynn can manage the two things he can do academia and he can do the walk the wild side but what i want is to bring these ideas out because they'll nourish us they'll make sense of the world yeah but like should i tell you about india well i'd love to know about india what like because like actually how did africa end how 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 what happened that that you ended up things working out all right i got um so i you know that would that mean that five days or 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 our way through the bag of cannabis that could have helped just to to alleviate the pain the hunger pangs but in that on zaire i got i ended up getting um bilharzia which was no cure for i had to drink the river water of the congo and it's how you got what it bilharzia it's this little slug or snail that goes into your 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 gargon from the outside, it turns you into stone. And there was no cure for it at the time. But luckily I came back and my mum 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 finished 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 um uh 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 conscription and come to my place to take this the san pedro um 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. Okay. And it turned out that...

But people happened to go there for San Pedro. Yeah, but we'd always tell them not to take that on the land. 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 you know one of your kids has gone missing it's meant ever

since i've had i have huge sympathy for israel just because those kids who become the worst aggressors of palestinians i just saw they were these they were mixed up teenagers you know who didn't know how to say no and they were their lives were ruined for for the oppression and the brutality that they had inflicted um to be institutionalized into becoming killers essentially exactly on on thinking killers on caring yeah yeah so anyway i i finished but i will basically i was trying to search for something that made sense to my life in africa if i failed i got distracted in south amer. 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 believe that there was God inside me. I believe that there was this source of utter creativity and love and assurance. 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 thought i think drugs is a distraction i think gossip is a distraction and loads of things are distraction i wanted to just get in touch with my my mind so how are 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 pints and i don't

have a need to drink more okay yeah and i never drug i never took huge amounts of cannabis or you know despite those my cannabis stories um yeah after before india i ended up on a big organic cannabis farm we're looking after the children in vancouver in british columbia so they're always just because cannabis people who are 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 drugs.

So, and I went off to, to India, to India, determined to find a, 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 Indiaia with pure energy i'm off there like what what do you mean well a tightrope walker a french tightrope walker from the circus i met in columbia and he told me about um this uh that was after anyway i won't get into it you

know the screamers in in ireland the only the only primary cult the primary no... No, I don't. I'll tell you another 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 Almora. 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 immediately I went to India. That's when I, you know, 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 a single ticket. There was no way. I did not want to leave if I found this bliss and I tried to find the cave and I couldn't find that cave or any cave. Now you'd know internet.

This is pre-internet. Yeah, exactly. This was 96. So I suppose a few people had internet so 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 okay 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 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 to traveling so all i need to do is arrive in delhi talk to a few people in a in a hostel they'll put you onto someone else you'll find someone else um and i heard about someone who was i heard about an immortal yogi who was 180 years living in one cave. I was going to visit him. And you just, you 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 how it was. So in the end, I ended up,

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 chief officer 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 of a leper station and although because i couldn't find the cave i found a cow shit responsibilities what 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 is uh contagious as well isn 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 OneTow. It's now multiple, multi-therapy remedies, three different types. He invented one. All you need to do is eat, 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, or in africa in 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 to get alms and charity if you have leprosy so the lepers in india oh my god so you're is it a system of poverty that's so great that if you become if you become a leper you might more likely get room and board or food.

You're sorted. Your needs are sorted forever. You'll always get alms if you're a leper. So, but particularly it's 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 leprosation, he had a rational Western mindset and he knew he could cure that leprosy. But of course, the German man who told me about this leprosy 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 El Mora and oversee them. It was in Pepazali. Go down to Pepazali and watch the people take the tablets. It forced them basically to take their tablets. And I do that every 10 days.

Luckily, they were far cleverer 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 um but uh 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 tightrope 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 about caves and meditation. Yeah.

So I went up to a cairn up in Sligo. Mm-hmm. Is it Knocknarray? Yeah. Well, Knocknarray is Queen Maeve's hill, but it's the one, is it cairn? Oh, gee, because, yeah. You know, it could be. It's hill, but it's the one, is it Cairn, oh gee, because, yeah, you know,

it could be, it's, no, it's Carrow, Carrow Keel, no, Carrow Keel, and the other,

I can't think of the name of it, it's right beside, Cairn Moor, that makes sense now, right beside Knockneray, yep, you can see that, and,

I didn't know much about Cairns, 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 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 said 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 the right resonance into our head and those they say that lock crew 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 uh created in such a way that it can do that but i think in

the himalayas the reason why like i genuinely did i i mean i think i got enlightenment or any wisdom i now have i got it in india and why does everyone get in india why did i get distracted and um yeah did i forget my search in af? Forget my search in South America? God 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 hippy-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 so i think that's why the cave i mean look i'd be with it i'm someone who meditates 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 ayahuasca as just um i'd be meditating and all of a sudden i awakened from it with this deep understanding of oneness i remember coming out of a meditation I awakened 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. 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 yeah yeah and i believe and i know i'm distracted, that the Irish language also has that idea, just in a single word, in many words, like in the words like skim. So skim means a tiny speck of flour, 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 the crayon it could be a sumatopic 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 Lenhan on he was speaking about like a goo that fairies leave in areas. No. Sorry, I have the wrong word. I suppose a film...

More a veil. More a sort of a... 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 could almost pass through the physical into another realm exactly that thing that thing yeah um but the cave yeah so as you said so my 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 rhododendron grow the size of trees over there and i grow there and then i walk i'd get back into my cow shed at night because there was a a man-eating mountain lion out at the time so he had most of the mountain lions 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 i would i've been about 2 000 meters um and so he had come down and he had to 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 before never done until you know until 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 my mind tendency towards mind would end up in in mental institutions because you because you go a bit too far i seem to be able to go to those rounds and then pull myself back so i was going very far out into places and but but the only time i said would you mean places internally yeah within yourself yeah exactly really just gorgeous place where every just thing like you with the nettle everything

seemed utterly united united and there was this sense of euphoria this 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 like that? No, no. In fact, I only started meditating during COVID. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. You mad cunt.

I know, but just because I had that access, I suppose. But my only problem was, once I was doing as well, I was following Ayurvedic medicine. Well, I was. Only one strand of it at the time, which meant drinking my own urine, copious amounts of my own urine. Fair play to you. Not anyone else's, luckily, but my own urine copious amounts of my own urine fair play to you

not anyone else's luckily but my own so when I went down to the to Almora to the leper station every 10 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 and my dad had just died how are you getting on man

drinking my own piss I'm scared of a mountain lion that was it exactly but that wasn't but no I wanted to reassure her so I didn't say that

instead I said mum has granny got any more oil prisoners in the house no I wanted to reassure her so I said mum in Irish actually but I said

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 is light

connecting all of the universe and all we are blissfully happy and there is gorgeous. And there's light connecting all of the universe and all. We are blissfully happy and there is gorgeousness and there is only, you know, unified connection. So she believed that her sort of overeducated youngest son had gone around the twist, had gone mentally insane. And, 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 home with red brad pitt and on all those big movies so my mom says go over to india and rescue mankhan he's lost the plot so my brother was busy with all the things he didn't want to do that but the same time he really could see himself you know he was just locations 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 car finna file announced they were going to set up tg uh tg car 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. Fucking hell. And he's very serious and problematic. So he 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, no, it was a HD, no-duty equipment. Actually, it was the very first edition of a Sony, Sony, no, was it HD? No, Sony digital camera. Digi, whatever, those little digi tapes. And it was not HD, it was over digi.

And 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 Papazali

and asks in the local chai shop, where is Mankan living in the cow shed? And he finds me and like, I'm not in a good way. Like I am, you know, I've been drinking my piss for a long time now. I am far out in 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, Malkan, we're making a TV programme. I have not wasted my time. I haven't come the whole way out here

and got this gig from TGK so that you can screw it up. So he drags me down to Elmora, he washes me, he gets my haircut, 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 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 cleanse your insides and how everything is one 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 that the just the break and broken heartness. He's put so much work into this. He's convinced TG Carr, who had 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 screams at me. He roars at me. And he says, for fuck's sake, Monk, I have not come this way.

You better get your act together. So he turns on the camera again and I just spank 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 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 you see this kid who is just god love him he's just lost he you know could easily be an institution is his eyes have that far away look he's just lost you know he 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 TGK in China in Africa in South America in south america in greenland just all over the world um and uh 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 was uh sort of funny and uh comedic um and then but then one thing i 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'd say, hearing voices, but looking at it from different cultures he says that hearing voices in our western medicalized culture is immediately seen as a bad thing but there's other cultures around the world where hearing voices is not stigmatized and in these cultures where hearing voices isn't stigmatized the people the voices that people hear are actually quite nice but in societies like ours where it's medicalized and and said that it's a bad thing or labeled as

schizophrenia the voices tend to be terrifying wow 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 um 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 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 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 a 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're the psychiatrist said um yeah we know yes definitely other cultures accepted that um 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 she, you know, the she-oga, the she, the fairies. She means, she used to mean a fairy mound. Okay, you know, she, gwee, a gust of wind, the she, the fairies. She means, she used to mean a fairy mound. Okay, you know, she, gwee, a 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 she-oga. Now the she is the same word as the root for she-a-hawn, for peace. In fact, in Scots Gaelic, 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 siddha s-i-d-h-e now siddha that irish word the old word for fairy is the same word as siddha in um sanskrit in hinduism in buddhism and in um zoroastrianism um basically siddha 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 Siddha, 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 realised that there was a bigger dream and a bigger vision and connected themselves to 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 are constantly looking at what humans are doing and laughing at us and telling us. What do they tell us to do? They tell us to celebrate more, to feast more play to dance to party so and they 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 fairiesies? 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 we're 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 even like a word like Pukog or Pukog is a blindfold. OK, it also can mean a goat muzzle and it can mean a tin shield for putting over a a thieving cow's eyes but also but the main meaning sort of for for puhok is um i don't have that quite right puhok it is

almost puhok i'll tell you in a second is it's it's an otherworldly being that can that can appear invisible in this world an otherworldly being that can be a pookie sorry pookie is the word you still use it in english you know put a pookie a blindfold over someone um 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 cricker 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 were 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 so we are there you know to be part of it do you um 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 that 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 they're 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've 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 fly agaric 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 i have a chapter in my book about the reister the reister was kuhullin'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 scram example of that mescaline induced um you know transcendental state which which you don't get from magic mushrooms you get from fly agaric also those vikings the what were those vikings called he used to take mushrooms the berserker yeah the berserkers exactly exactly they used to take fly agaric mushrooms and it would make them incredibly angry as they went into battle and they went berserk. Exactly. And the Sami people still do. But you know the way the fly agaric 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, an expert in Wicklow, a mushroom collector, who really actually demystifies the the poisonous element of um the of the fly agaric mushroom and i also in that it's called the almanac of ireland but also i talked to billy mclynn who tells me about that gloss cave and those magical stones outside his land um and also in that one i post myself into a cave um which is the cave of transformation i only got in roscommon and i go down there for seven cave of transformation i don't know got in ross common and i go down

there for seven hours well no i don't do seven hours in the end i do about three hours um to see what transformative so the only got was the the trade the cave of transformation in in the time of cool and all the old myths where someone would go down and they would enter the other world um or why did i get onto that oh yeah berser Berserker. So the fly agaric, you know, not only that, but the Sami culture of Northern Lapland still take the fly agaric

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 goes out, 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 or 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. Wow. Okay. But that's speckle. The fly agaric, it's a classic mushroom you've seen. It's in every fairy story, you knowic 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 folk stories and you will come across it everywhere that's what it's a ref that's

potentially what it's a reference to it's a hint that to access this other world that we're talking about the fairies or with the cook or with finn mccool or the magic mushrooms or the hazelnut of insight they are um you can get to those through the fire garrick wow um so one last question because i'm time conscious now i know you need to fuck off very good um the i need to ask you about your sustainable living i need to ask you about that the house that you live in and you live in a passive house is that correct no not really so i didn't want a mortgage so i came 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 use straw whatever so i came back i had my granny the republican revolution is sheila humphrey she died and left me 10 grand so in 1997 uh i came back to ireland and had my 10 grand and looked for anywhere i could buy and find 10 acres and luckily westmeath 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 um bales straw bales of good oaten bar of good yeah barley straw and uh just use those as lego blocks like as big wheatabix to build my house and put a metal roof on it and i didn't have planning permission and i lived in for six years i told the planners that this is what i'm building and then you can i'll apply for planning for the for the next house so they gave me in their wisdom west me county council and they're just kindness they gave me

permission for the straw bale 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 the 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 a 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 um so i then i started growing my own vegetables oh no first i think i did i planted six acres of the 10 acres in oakwood 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 in and I got to put the pigs in. And then I now have hens and I've turkeys and I've 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 four point three kilowatts of solar panels in. So I'd have electricity most of the time. I thought the 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 during 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 you preserve in vegetables and shit like that are you canning things and 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 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 great brown envelope seeds and cork and seed savers in Clare,

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 con right thank you so much for that that was an absolutely fantastic chat it was so interesting um i'd love to have you on again man i'd say we 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 bowled over by the work you do oh thank you so much and I genuinely I'm just so bowled over by the work you do thank you so much man

thank you see you now alright I'll see you man have a good one bye bye oh that was absolutely lovely

what a wonderful conversation that I had there with Man Con that felt fantastic for me because I'm fucking locked up with coronavirus so I'm not seeing

a lot of people I really enjoyed that I'm gonna be back next week with I've got a couple of hot takes on the pot lads and I'm trying to decide which one I'm gonna give you but I'm gonna have a hot take next week um and I'm looking forward to getting to recording next week's podcast mind yourself have some self-compassion have some compassion for other people and like i said at the start of the podcast don't be stressing yourself out over things that are outside of your control focus on what is inside of your control all right and you'll be grand you're Hjärt. Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation

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