The Blindboy Podcast - Mythology, Rewilding Forests and indigenous knowledge with Manchán Magan

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Manchán Magan is a writer, documentary maker and folklorist. We speak about the relationship between Irish mythology and rewilding forests, as well as similarities between Irish Mythology and Aboriginal Australian Mythology Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Perose the brosed throat, you drooping owners. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. If this is your first podcast, maybe go back and listen to an earlier episode. I have a wonderful treat for you this week. Returning to the podcast is the magnificent Mancón Magan. He's a documentary maker, he's a writer, he's a folklorist, he's an etymologist of the Irish language, and he's someone I just adore speaking to. I love speaking to Man Con. Because we're both curious about the exact same things. And I love checking in with Man Con every six months or every year.

And finding out what he's been up to and what adventures he's been on. And I always come away learning something new and also Man Con is someone I check in with when I'm reading about Irish mythology or Irish folklore and I check in with him because of his understanding of the Irish language. I don't speak the Irish language unfortunately. I had a bit of a shitty time in school when I should have been learning it and I just haven't found the time as an adult to relearn the Irish language. So Man Con does speak the Irish language fluently and because of this he has an understanding of Irish mythology and Irish folklore that goes far beyond what I can grasp by simply reading English translations.

He goes right back to the words and what they mean and the roots of words. So we had a free-form conversation. We had a conversation about Irish mythology, folklore, the relationship and importance of Irish mythology with the ecosystem with the environment, with forests and also Man Con recently spent

time in Australia where he was welcomed by Aboriginal Australian people so that they could exchange knowledge between Irish folklore and Aboriginal folklore and to find the commonalities between the two. Man Con has a new book coming out in September which is called Wolfmen and Waterhounds

and it's about the myths, monsters and magic of Ireland. I think it's directed at younger readers. But check out any of Man Con's books, like 32 Words for Field or Banshee's Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature. And his podcast, The Almanac of Ireland. Check out anything Man Con is doing because he's a very fascinating person who's incredibly passionate about what he does so let's go straight into the chat so man con thank you so much for coming back

onto the podcast i don't even really have a plan for today i i think this is your fourth time or something being on the podcast and i i just like ringing you up whenever and just finding out what the fuck you're up to. We've had such great chats, but each chat we've had has made me think about things differently afterwards. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I get enriched. The first thing I want to ask you about is you do have a new book coming out, right? Is it September, is it? Exactly, yeah, towards the end of September. Yeah, so I got a picture book coming out right is it september is it exactly yeah towards the end of september yeah so i got a picture book an illustrated book yeah because i just had a quick look at you set me

um a look in advance and it looks really interesting you're having a crack at mythology this time irish mythology yeah exactly so if you know if the first book i was doing i was looking at all the insights that are in the irish language and then I did I did sort of a children's book of that of that called tree dogs and banshee fingers looking at the particular nature words and how nature words in Irish make us see things in a different way just because of the way our ancestors used to look at nature they looked at it almost like a child so like a duanala you know as a spider and duonala means it locks of the wall so they were obviously just staring at things and thinking this is what reminds me of it or like i like how uh you know a groan oak is a is a hedgehog so groan oak it could mean like

little ugly things so they just thought this it was just ugly is groan yeah isn't it or groan groan is groan and then groan is ugly. Do you know what I find interesting there about hedgehog in particular, right? Go on. Hedgehogs were brought here by the Normans. Huh. Yeah, we didn't have hedgehogs. They were brought here by the Normans in the 11th century because they used to eat them. They used to eat hedgehogs.

So I find that interesting that because to call it a little ugly thing there's a little hint of contempt there yeah spiders are ugly too but a spider's been there all the time it's this thing on the wall there's respect but now you have this new little animal that's part of an invading army and now all of a sudden it's it's an thing. And I like that. I like what that reveals about this is a colonizer's animal. That's beautiful. That is gorgeous. Yeah, I never thought about that. Huh.

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense. It does. And yeah, and I just love the way that we drop all these hints and codes into our past, into words. And we don't even know. we use the word every day. We don't think actually someone was trying to communicate something about a concept or about something that was important to them

that just dropped it into the word. Is that very unique for the Irish language? I don't think, no, I don't think so. I think languages do that. I think people, I mean, humanity, all they're trying to do is keep, is amass the sort of the group wisdom of their people and then bring it forward. And they do it in every way. I think they put it into landscape.

They put it into words. They put it into story. Well, yeah. And so, but after I'd looked at language, I thought, okay, well, actually there's even more knowledge in the landscape. So that was like, you know, the last book I think we were talking about was Listen to the Land Speak, looking at the knowledge that's in the landscape. But then I wanted to do sort of an illustrated kid's view of that book, you know, version of forts or old or just caves or caverns or even just time warps in in the landscape and so i just collected maybe about 18 or 20 of these around ireland and put them put them in this illustrated book which calls which wolf men and water dogs um and what's weird is I've just listed 18 of them, okay? And I can probably guarantee

there's nobody in Ireland who's been to all 18 of those places. No, no. I mean, because I saw with the book you went county by county. So is it correct to say with the book so you've gone county by county and what you're searching for

are mythological sites that have a connection with the other world. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Places that our ancestors said either spirits came through or humans could pass back to the other world. And in fact, you know, they're everywhere. They're in every single parish. It's so hard to pin them down. But as you said, I decided to do a journey, a sunwise journey around Ireland, going to some of these key sites. And how many of these sites

then became Christian sites? Hmm. Probably about 67, 80% of these. Like, it's weird. But you know, every well, every well was, as we talked about in the previous podcast, was an entranceway to another world. probably 95 percent of those were christian saint patrick

purposely went and christianized them um so it does make sense like if these are the areas that are sort of our pagan ancestors worshipped and knew they could access that obviously the church is going to come in and say oh no jesus and the virgin mary can come through those those places too because something i've been thinking about a lot recently um whenever i i my interest in mythology is always from a climate perspective i i always look at mythology as a product of the human animal and i i think that mythology is it exists in humans to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity. That's what I think the nature's intention for mythology is. You have these humans here and they have language and they create this mythology about the environment because ultimately what it does is it keeps us in a regenerative, respectful way with the environment. It makes it something to be feared rather than to be exploited.

You get me? Yeah, yeah, totally. And something about, I think Christianity was real bad for the environment. And this is just a little hot take I'm working on. But the early church, right? I'm talking first, second century Christian church. They really didn't like demons. Demons were a big part of early Christianity.

Demons as in angels that had fallen from hell. Yeah. And all throughout Christendom, so all of Europe, all of the Middle East, as Christianity spread, obviously what Christianity was coming up against was paganism and pagan sites tended to be a very much about nature connected with an outdoor site and in the early church consecration became a thing creating an indoor building so that you could bless this and protect it from demons and the church wherever it went would see something like a holy well or a holy tree and doesn't necessarily have to be in Ireland

anywhere around Europe and they said no that's wrong this outdoor nature shit that's where demons have freedom we need to build a little church consec consecrated, blessed. And the only thing demons are afraid of is Christ, the blessing of Christ. And I see that as a moment where humanity demonized nature effectively and fetishized buildings. Lovely, lovely. Yeah. But even, you know, do you remember that according to Pliny and Caesar and all, they said that the place that our ancestors worshipped, in other words, that the Druids of the Celtic people were in these nemata or nematon or nemata, which is like a sacred grove or clearing in mainly in an oak wood. When you mentioned Pliny there now, are you talking about Pliny speaking about Ireland? Yeah, Pliny the Elder, exactly. The historian and geographer who would have written about Ireland in, I think,

the second century. Did his dad write the world's first encyclopedia? No, no, Pliny the Elder is the older fella, so he wrote the world's first encyclopedia.

That's right, exactly, exactly. Yeah, Pliny the Younger wasn't as great a scholar as him. Yeah. Yeah, he was just so curious about the world. And, you know, he included places

in Ireland that were important. So back then, there was places in ireland um that were important so back then there was some sort of some sites in ireland that they thought were important enough that one green on an alec green on sport up in up outside dairy so it made it as far as rome they knew about this in rome exactly exactly and then you know but then and ptolemy was the other great mapper of the world and he was from alexandria and egypt so when you're talking about rome you're talking as much about Northern Africa, too, because, you know, the Mediterranean was a small pond. They were going across. So Pliny was born A.D. 23.

So Pliny was born 23 years after the birth of Christ. So within his lifetime, he was interested in Ireland and knew about Ireland as a pagan place. Yeah, exactly. And he was particularly, I mean, particularly they were interested in those Celtic groups of Northern Europe and they were the same, like the ones that were in Britain, in Ireland and Northern France, they seemed to have the same practices. And he was the one who was saying that they worshipped in these oak groves. He didn't actually mention oak, but it was groves in big woodlands and it's considered to be oak. And so know then we come to uh to to to like you will you you take a leap

a thousand years and you see those big gothic cathedrals and what are they but basically stone manifestations of oak forests you know these huge trunks and the branches coming up in the middle and meeting in the center so it's always like never thought of it that way. I always saw churches as more of a cave thing, but now that you explain it with the huge big pillars in the middle, it is quite foresty. Yeah, so probably it started with recreating a cave, but maybe it was like within their DNA. They weren't even aware that their ancestors 2,000 years ago

had sought these groves in big forests to do their ceremonial rituals, and then they just, you know, they instinctively, they recreated them. But then the other amazing thing is the early church in Ireland, it's all about oak trees. So, you know, obviously St. Patrick's the main man, but then Cullum Killie in Derry. Where is he? He's in Derry, or Dyrra, which means oak tree. And even like Cullum Quillie, his name,

Cullum, the dove of the quill of the woodland. The dove of the woodland. And then Bridget, where is she? She's in Cildara, in Cildare. Cildara, the church. That's, you know, quill and quill are different. Quill can be a church and it can be a woodland. But there, Cildara, the church in the oak woodland.

And then the centre of Cullum Quill in the south was in Durrow. And what does Durrow mean? Dara Vog. It means the plain of the oak woodland. And then the centre of Cullumkill in the south was in Durro. And what does Durro mean? Tára fáil. It means the plain of the oak tree. So all of these early Christian sites are still trying to say, actually, these are sites connected to an oak clearing or an oak cathedral,

an oak spiritual centre in the forest. So when we're speaking about early Irish Christianity there, we're talking in the region of 1500 years ago. Exactly. Yeah. And something I'd love to ask you about, and this is even, are you familiar with the writer Liam O'Flaherty? I am. Yeah.

So like I was reading a lot of Liam O'Flaherty recently. Now he's not that long ago. Liam O'Flaherty recently. Now, he's not that long ago. Liam O'Flaherty was writing in about 1920 onwards. And Liam O'Flaherty was from the Aran Islands and he wrote a hell of a lot about nature. And something that broke my heart when I was reading Liam O'Flaherty's stories was

when he spoke about how many animals that he would see in his environment, it felt like he was lying. He would talk about looking at a lake in 1920 and this lake bubbling with fish on the surface. And me as someone in 2023, I was like, you're talking out of your arse, man, you're exaggerating. And that made me feel really sad because I don't think he was lying.

I think there actually were that many animals 100 years ago that this was the reality he was writing about. And when you speak there about the early Irish church and all the woodlands, I mean, do you get a sense when you read this stuff from 1500 years ago that we're talking about an Ireland that looked differently because we had more forests. Yeah without doubt like I mean you know as you know you used to look at woodlands in the podcast before how there were periods where we had more and then less and then

more and less with I mean. I mean we're a rainforest we're supposed to be a rainforest that's what Ireland is supposed to be. And that's only and that's only an insight that we've only got really in the last 10 years it's been amazing yeah it's actually the the work about realizing this atlantic the temporal or atlantic rainforest and the work that home tree is doing to regenerate it and and on and on there um but yeah like i mean they say that actually 100 years ago was almost the lowest point of our woodland because you know since then we have the you know the from the 1920s on arthur griffith and shin fein were really determined to to replant the the island but there were still places there wasn't obviously big woodlands but there were still those river valleys that had kept um you know that had kept some of the old

growth alive because it was difficult to extract the trees. Exactly. I was up in San Francisco and I was in a beautiful redwood forest up in the mountains and they said straight up, the only reason this redwood forest exists is it was too awkward to take the wood out. That's it, exactly. So it's called, you know, in Canada and the States, they're called

the watersheds, protect the watersheds. And it's the same. So I'm involved in this charity, Home Tree, in County Clare. We've just bought like 270 acres of the Malm Valley in Galway. And it looks, in Connemara, just to rewild. Because you can't say reforest, because

you can't come in. So we have the only, the biggest organic native tree nursery in Ireland. I didn't know about this, Mancon. Tell me about this. So it's called HomeTree. It's called HomeTree. Where do you get your funding? How do you get money to buy a lot of land?

So we came out of it. We started up in Ennistyme in County Clare. And we started really small. We just gathered whatever trees we could, whatever money we had to buy a few patches in County Clare. And then just people got behind us and some organizations did and um now we're we're sort of we're just putting out the call for for i mean it's kind of hard because every time you buy a woodland it's going to cost thousands like you know this one probably 750 grand we have that we're looking at another land in fact fact, you saw it this week.

There's been a lot of talk about the counter past. Yeah. 10 million. Yeah, exactly. 1,500 acres. So we're always looking, how do we find these? In fact, in some ways there is money there, but it's to try and find,

you can get money from benefactors, which have no strings attached. Then there's corporate clients who are offering us money money but then you have to look at greenwashing then there's like yeah there's even like the government like you know the government has been really helpful to us and really supportive of us they can't be giving us money immediately um actually here's a question there regarding the greenwashing because i'm going i'm going why the fuck would a corporation want to give mancon a lot of money to build a forest and they can't make money off it? I'm assuming there is that certain corporations, they could make a donation like this and then that goes against their carbon footprint or something.

Yeah, I mean, the one thing you see, yeah, like what they would love is that they would buy, give us money to buy land. And we'd say they were sequestering a certain amount of carbon. Now, HomeTree, this organization does not do that. We don't go anywhere near carbon just because you can't make claims like that you can't make promises there's going to be really good credits come come along stream like so at the moment carbon credits that idea is too simple it's probably been thrown out the window but now the next thing they're moving on to is biodiversity credits where it's not just you know you're managing to keep carbon how much biodiversity are you keeping but the next step again is social and biodiversity credits so what social impact are you doing by planting this woodland or rejuvenating this woodland how do you measure that like in some

parts of the world mangrove woodland a mangrove forest along a coastline will protect all of the people on the coastline from sudden storms so you have a guaranteed social benefit to those people. In Colombia, at the same time, if you stop, well, even in Ireland, if you plant woodlands that are stopping floods, that are going to stop cities becoming flooded, that's a definite social benefit. But it's all really complex and it's going to take computers and it's going to take think tanks and groups to come together

with a really good way of pricing the benefits of woodland so for the moment we don't we yeah if a corporation comes to us we say we're not going to give you any by guaranteed biodiversity you know um prize or value on the land but you're welcome to tell clients that you're supporting this what i was going to say let's say with these 270 acres in Connemara that we've just bought, like it's stripped. It's absolutely bare, shorn upland that had too much sheep on it for too long. So we're going in there.

Okay, so we're talking Connemara because I'm thinking with Connemara, I view Connemara as quite barren. That's what comes to me when I think of Connemara. I do think of barren. But also I'm aware a lot of that barrenness

is because sheep which are not wild they're domesticated have just eaten everything so you're left with a strange little desert exactly exactly and we might say now okay we don't have any sheep on the woodland on the uplands as we did and that's fair but the fact is that the uplands are in such such weak condition now that it doesn't take many sheep to go in and just strip any little sapling that's going to grow so you know it's just because the system is so weak that it's hard so as i said when we buy this land we want to restore it we that does not mean going buying a load of you know oak saplings bringing them in from europe of risky provenance we want to get those oaks and the

you know one of the alder and the rowan whatever we're going to plant up there from really old growth trees in ireland irish yeah we're going out collecting the seeds ourselves have this organic native seed nursery but even that ideally you're not doing that ideally just going to the watersheds and so we if we walk this whole going to the watersheds. And so if we walk this whole... Going to the watersheds. What does that mean? So we walk the 270 acres. It all looks barren,

but there are these places at the creeks or at the streams. Oh, wow. Left of a rock, you'll find one little willow bush or a hawthorn bush or one alder or a mountain ash that has managed to survive.

Oh, my God. That's beautiful and very depressing at the same time. Yeah, but it happens really quickly because beneath that soil will be the original mycelium of the ancient woodland that was there. So all you need to do is keep some grazers away from that

and all those spores and seeds are ready to take over again and it can happen very quickly. Within 10 years you'll be amazed by the And it can happen very quickly. Within 10 years, you'd be amazed by the impact it can have. I'd love for you to speak a little bit about that there, Mancon,

because that's really interesting what you said there and people might not know about it. So what you said there, so you're looking for watersheds. So you're going to go around this barren area in Connemara and you're going to search and go,

there's a spot there that nobody has fucked with and there's a few native trees but what you also mentioned there was you're interested not only in the tree but the fungal network underneath that tree, the network of mycelium

and mushrooms. Can you tell us about that and why that's important? Yeah, because I suppose we are beginning to realize the beauty about science now, science for 300 years has been absolutely saying, just look at what you can look under the microscope. That is the only thing. In other words, atomize everything, break everything into categories. And only in the last 20 years, it seems every single scientific field is realizing the unified theory.

It's only about when everything is part. It's how a whole system, a biodiverse system is connected to everything. So we look at a tree and we think a tree is important. But let's say those redwoods in South America, sorry, in San Francisco. What's just as important is the incredible root systems and mycelium systems that are giving and that are underneath the soil. And there's a vast array of bacteria and interconnected species that are feeding the soil and that are feeding the mycelium, which are this fungal network, which are then in turn feeding the roots that are then feeding the trees. And just to simplify this, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just thinking of listeners.

Trees basically have their own internet. Trees basically have their own internet. Or if you don't want to use the word internet, for me, what I view the mycelium structure underneath a forest, that's how, it's the social network of a forest. Communication happens amongst these plants and trees regarding resources, chemicals, nutrients, predators. A forest does communicate with itself and all the things in that forest. And this is what the mycelium does. Does that sound right? Exactly. That's right. So there was a beautiful

book called The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Vellleben, which cast a clear eye on this. Some way we've gone a little bit too far in this. So scientists, again, 10 years, in the last 10 years, have realized some of these concepts like that there was a mother tree, and a mother tree could decide what nutrients and sort of healing properties she could give out to other trees in the woodland, and she could pick which trees she give and not to to others. So basically, the trees were working, as you say, in this idea of the worldwide web of all of them feeding each other. Now, some of those claims have been disproven a little in the last five years. So realizing, okay, not that they're not true,

but we just don't have the proof to realize exactly how much each tree is communicating with each other. But definitely we're realizing that actually there is a lot more going on, both mainly through the root system, because the roots then are connected to the mycelium and the mycelium is a totally different thing. It's the network of funguses. it's when you lift up an old stone or a dig in the soil and you might see all these little um these little white strands of mushroomy type

strands and they are they're bringing sugars from different plants but they're also seeming to communicate knowledge about a pest that'll be in one tree and maybe probably encoding that into a chemical into a maybe a sweet or sour or some chemical that the other trees read it's all like it's a new field and they haven't some of the more popularized books have taken leaps that haven't really been supported by science but what we do know is that yeah there's a lot more going on and so a tree is not just a tree it's a whole family under the ground above communication we're having and if we want healthy woodlands we need to support that whole allow that whole um complex interrelation uh continue and for that it's just it's you know the old days had i had i'd been involved in the tree charity 20 years ago you would have just planted a tree in the soil and left it. Yes.

And what I find fascinating about all this, Mancon, is it also ties in with your work around mythology. It ties in with your work around folklore. You just said there, you know, speaking about the mycelium structure in a soil and how communication happens within an ecosystem under the soil between plants. And you said there, this is all new. And it's like, you said there this is all new and it's like in a way it is but also it's not it's deeply pagan and one of the things western rationalism

and like which i would include christianity with what the type of western rational thinking real evidence-based empirical thinking which you would have accumulated with the enlightenment where we get modern science which obviously is amazing and it's incredible and brilliant also too it it kind of it excludes stuff that sounds a bit bonkers what you're talking about there regarding the you know trees can communicate with an underground fungal network that sounds mad that sounds airy fairy that sounds like something you immediately want to rubbish it sounds

like it's not evidence based and now we're finding out science is going actually I think this might be true and I reckon long long ago they kind of knew this yeah yeah well just think of the word druid for druid druid means druvid And I reckon long, long ago, they kind of knew this. Yeah, yeah. But just think of the word druid.

For druid, druid means druvid. Dru is the oak tree, or it also means the center axis, the center spine. And vid is knowledge of wisdom. So it's the oak tree or the central spine or axis, or axis mundi, which could access wisdom and so that's basically it's the same concept as the spine in yoga the drew the oak tree and the spine are the same and the axis monday the axis monday means the axis of the world you know the the center point to which everything connects and the way the reason that was considered to be an oak tree or a sacred magic tree because the oak tree has its trunk in this world its roots in the other

world and then its leaves branching up into the heavens into the celestial orb and you can either call that the spiritual heaven or just the sun it it was a concept was it like an understanding of photosynthesis it was an understanding that our energy came from the sun the whole energy of the universe of this at least yeah of um this this this this particular solar system comes from the sun it feeds into the trunk it feeds into all of us and then uh it goes down into earth and then the earth brings up its mycelium its wisdom from the center so this century the concept of a druid the concept of yoga of the spine in yoga which you know it's it's the it's the same idea they come from the same root and druid is as much a sanskrit word as like an early irish word

um are all connected everything was about the tree and you remember in ireland the center point talking of um my book about portals and thresholds the center threshold in ireland is ishna is the center of the hill of ishna between mullingar Athlow, the centre point, the navel of Ireland. So it was the point to which all of the energy could come from the different realms, from the above realm, the middle realms and from the below realms. uh there was a tree the center tree you know billa means the center a sacred tree so every region had its bill i think you might we talked about those before but the center sacred tree of all the trees in ireland was billy ishnick the oak tree or the who decided that was this because this particular tree was clearly old and massive there's a there's a birth story about that tree and it's that um a magical being called tre olyngd tre ochr and now that's just it sounds like a like a beautiful word but when it's hard for us to decipher but tre olyngd tre ochr tre ochr we understand ochr ochr is the Irish for key

so the triple key or the three keys tre olyngd o Ullingd is a word we don't understand in modern Irish. It means fullingd, to endure or to suffer, but also to carry a burden. So it's tre ullingd, the strong burden of the three keys or the three keys of the strong burden or the strong sufferer. Now, what that means, none of us will know. But I think if all of us went for a big walk or took some mushrooms or went in meditating, we might each get our own insight of what's trying to be communicated in this magical figure that brought the magical trees to Ireland. Okay, so this man, Trae O'Connor, it's said that he wandered, he came to Ireland. He was coming from where the sun sets in the far, far west. And he was on his way east to where he had heard that a man had been crucified on a Axis Mundi tree, on a sacred cross tree in the east, in Palestine.

So obviously, obviously, that's just a Christian addition to it. But he arrives in Brunaboyna, which is the most spiritual center of Ireland. And Angus, the great god, is there. most spiritual centre of Ireland, and Angus, the great god, is there, and he welcomes him. And Angus says, what are you doing here? And all of the community are petrified because this trailing trail, or Ucker, is a giant. He's so big that the entire sky is beneath his

legs. So it's a figure who's so big that the entire sky goes under his legs, and all they're worried about is how they're going to feed how the community is going to feed this giant because you know the whole idea among pre-modern societies is hospitality if anybody turns up you need to look after them for at least three days um and they think how can they even feed him for a day and he's they and trailing treacherous don't worry about me i have this sacred bow in my hand, the sacred branch.

And on the branch, there was an apple, there was a hazel, and there was an acorn. So an acorn, an apple, and a hazel. And he says, this is all I ever need, and this is all you will ever need. So basically, it's the origin story of the coming of the woodlands to Ireland. Wow. And so he could feed himself on the nut, but the coming of the woodlands to Ireland. Wow. And so he could feed himself on the nut, but that hazel that was going to feed him from given protein, but also was given a given wisdom. It was the original quill treatment that we talked about, the hazel that bubbled up through the waters.

And I haven't, I need to still listen back to when you talk about this idea of the bubbling water you know in america the sparkling water like the idea of our wells the whole thing yeah the the thing that gave them the power was that there was these bubbles of insight bubbling through them and you know as we've as we've realized now that fishermen off the west coast of ireland know that there's wells still off the coast of Cork and Kerry that bubble up from beneath the Atlantic Ocean and give them life-giving water. So anyway, this idea of

the bubbles is a key thing. So your man Trey Ucker, Trey Ulling, Trey Ucker has this branch with the fruit of the apple tree that is going to give them sweetness, the protein of the hazel and also the wisdom of the hazel and then the apple tree that is going to give them sweetness, the protein of the hazel, and also the wisdom of the hazel, and then the acorn that will give all, you know, the reason that the oak was the most important tree was because it gave you the strongest wood for making

barrels, for making boats, for making houses, but it also gave you the tanning, its skin, its bark for tanning and for dyes and it gave you the oak gall the little round balls that grow on the oak which are used for ink so all of the great books wow those you know the manuscripts were all made with ink from the oak so the oak was not only spiritually important but it's it's what you just spoke about there when we were speaking about your project, Rewilding. What is the social impact? So the social impact of an oak tree to ancient Irish people was massive. It wasn't just a spiritual tree.

This helped people survive and live their lives. Exactly, yeah. Let's just pause the conversation right there now. Because I'd like to have a little ocarina pause before we continue. I'm in my home studio so I'm not in the office recording this week. I'm in my studio.

So I do actually have my ocarina. So I'm going to play my ocarina here. Now if you've got a dog, the dog might get startled by this ocarina. But I'm going to play my ocarina and you're going to hear an algorithmically generated advert. 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 girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother.

Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real.

It's not real. Who said that? The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care.

From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. Not a very good ocarina. Shit ocarina this week, lads.

I haven't played this ocarina in fucking ages the OG ocarina is lost I'm down a number of ocarinas whatever's happening someone's coming in and stealing my ocarinas I had about 10 of them when he left with one so that was the ocarina. I had about 10 of them. Money left with one.

So that was the ocarina pause. You would have heard an advert. I do the pause so you don't get suddenly startled by an advert. Support from this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. If you enjoy this podcast,

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paying, is paying for you to listen for free, so everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. My voice is slightly hoarse this week because I've been recording my audiobook. All week I've been recording my audiobook. So my voice is fatigued. Also directly funding this podcast and any independent podcast. The reason it's important to directly fund the podcast that you enjoy is it keeps, it means advertisers don't have any creative control.

The reason television and radio is awful is because advertisers have control over the content. You can't have that when a podcast is independently funded. I can just tell advertisers to fuck off. I haven't done gigs in a few months. I think my last gig was like March. I've been laying off the gigs so that I could finish writing my book. But I'm back gigging, doing live podcasts. At the end of this month, on the 26th of August,

I'm in the Cork Opera House for Cork Podcast Week, the Cork Podcast Festival. Come along to that gig that's going to be wonderful fun, Saturday night fun. Then on the 28th of August, I'm up in Dublin on Vicar Street. Fuck all tickets left for that. Like literally under 10 tickets left for that. But that'll be an enjoyable gig. But if you can't get tickets for that Vicar Street gig,

I am back in November for my official Irish book launch. So come along to that Vicar Street gig. Then, on the 1st of September, I'm over in Birmingham at the Mosley Folk Festival, if you're around for that. What else have I got here? Dun Laoghaire is sold out. I'm in Monaghan on the 30th of September

up at the Patrick Cavanagh Festival the Cavanagh weekend and then and these aren't on sale yet but I'm going to tell you I've got a UK tour in November to launch my book I cannot wait to do this

now these tickets aren't on sale yet they won't go on sale for another week I believe I think it's the 16th of August. But I'm going to tell you where I'm going to be gigging. In the UK in November for my UK tour. Right? And I won't tell you the dates, but it is in November.

London. Liverpool. Manchester. Coventry. Fucking promoter has me sounding like the Luftwaffe. London, Manchester, Liverpool, Coventry. And then up in Scotland, I'm doing Edinburgh. Alright, so that's where I'm going to be gigging.

I didn't gig those places the last time I toured. I want to gig some new places. Especially Edinburgh. Usually when I gig Scotland, I gig Glasgow. I haven't been to Edinburgh in years, probably a decade. I don't think I've done a solo blind boy show in Edinburgh yet. So I can't wait to come to Edinburgh in November. And the rest of ye, look, Glasgow, who's missing there?

I'm not going to Wales this time. A few places missing. I'll be back. Alright? London, Manchester, Coventry, Liverpool, Edinburgh. That's what I'm doing in November. And I can't wait to do a podcast for the wonderful Kraken Tans. Alright?

Then, Belfast on the 18th of November you know the crack, alright I'm doing all this because my book my book Topography of Hibernica, my new collection of short stories that I've been writing for the past two fucking years that I can't wait to show you, that's coming out in November, so

I'm doing this tour which is half podcast tour, half book tour so back to the chat with Man Con. And the second part of this is utterly fascinating because Man Con speaks about the time that he spent in Australia recently, learning about the indigenous mythology and folklore there. He traveled there as a folklorist, and he was invited by indigenous people to share stories and knowledge with them.

Something I do want to flag is I am conscious that it's me and Man Con. Neither of us are indigenous Australian people and we're both speaking about indigenous Australian mythology. Man Con is someone who handles this with respect and he communicates knowledge that he has learned from spending time with aboriginal people but also i carry in my awareness that you know we got to be careful you got to be if you're not from another indigenous culture you got to be careful when speaking about their mythology and their customs and their beliefs because even when you're even when you have the best intentions you can be colonial without even knowing it the last time i toured australia which was before the fucking pandemic just before the

pandemic i did speak to indigenous australian people there and recorded podcasts. But then what happened? Big silly fucking eejit. I put my recorder in my luggage and whatever happened on the flight, it zapped the hard drive. So I lost a load of fucking interviews from 2019. But when I do go back to Australia, don't know when that will be. Hopefully next year I will be speaking to some indigenous people

about mythology and culture but I'm saying this in case any indigenous Australian people are listening it is in my awareness that myself and Man Con are not indigenous Australian people even though we're speaking about your mythology and I hope we do it justice

and that we're respectful and it's great this is a great neil mckitter of the book who wrote the book uh irish trees he had the idea you look at america and the native indians in america first nations people the buffalo was their sacred animal and their most practical animal and it's it was it was sacred because it was practical and it was practical because it was sacred. You know, the native people could make everything from the buffalo, from the horns, the skin, the milk, the meat, in the same way as we could make everything from the oat. So it was our most practical and our most sacred. This is where I'm getting at with my little theory that I believe mythology exists to keep humans in line with system of biodiversities.

mythology exists to keep humans in line with system of biodiversities. So if you have an oak tree and you have lots of stories about it, and it's very, very important, then within those stories is a great respect. And when you have a great respect for an oak forest, you don't exploit it. You work with it regeneratively. Yeah, no, without doubt, without doubt. Another one of the sites that I look at in this new book is Loch Derina Derina Davadia in County Cork. Now, Loch Derina Davadia just looks like a ridiculous name. I don't even know how local people in it.

Sort of beyond Glengariff, up in the mountains, you have this place. But you translate that into Irish and immediately it becomes very clear to me. Loth ddín an dá vó ég. So L Loth d'Odín an dda fó ieag. So Loth the lake, d'Odín dear, it's that word oak again, of the little oak tree or the little oak wood, an dda fó ieag

of the twelve cows. And so you think, okay so here we have the two central ideas of spirituality in Ireland really, the cow and the oak wood in the same place name and there's a story attached to it that there was this magical cow who appeared out of this lake once to look after a woman in absolute need so there was a woman whose husband had died and she had a rake of children and they were starving and she was in absolute penury and no one could help them in the community were really worried about them. And suddenly this magical cow emerges out of the lake

and not only does she give her, does the cow give her, the woman and her family, endless milk, strong, life-giving milk, nutritious, rich, creamy milk, but the cow also gives 11 calves and each of those calves is just as nutritious and their dung feeds the soil. So this family are suddenly gone from being dirt poor to being incredibly rich incredibly wealthy

their land is fertilized by the cow dung they have milk they have enough calves to sell to other families and to use as dowries until one day the mother uh the old widow, she hits the cow. She beats the cow. And the cow is so startled by this that she lets out a whale and calls her other 11 calves back to her. And they all go back into the lake and drown themselves in the lake again. And without doubt, it's trying to communicate to people. Nature will give abundantly, will give everything you need. But if you abuse or mistreat nature she can leave on a spot and this is also you find stories like that too attached with a lot of holy wells like if you wash your clothes in a holy well the well can dry up like what i find interesting when

i was doing research on wells is is that wells are treated as as people almost you can offend a well you can piss a well off um if you if you fish from a holy well i read that that will piss the well off um if you bathe in a holy well if you murder someone in a holy well that the well will dry up and there's your fresh water gone oh yeah i've just i've just finished i made it i've made an eight-part series for tj Carhart about Holy Wells that I think is going to be broadcast. Fuck off, really? When's that out? I don't know. I haven't heard. I thought it was going to be autumn, but I haven't heard any

dates, so it might be spring now. But, yeah, as you say... Fair play to TG Carhart, man. They make good shit. They really do, yeah. I mean, that's brilliant. To commission a programme. Here's an eight-part TV series about Holy Wells in Ireland. I mean, we need that. Exactly, exactly.

And there's a lovely, I'm just down in West Cork, but they got really excited. They have the most holy wells of anywhere in Ireland in Cork. And there's just a lovely new hardback book called The Holy Wells of Cork, which is great.

But you know, so there's 3,000 holy wells in Ireland. There is no country in the world that has that amount of trees. And not just per head of people. You know, no country has 3,000 sacred wells. And when you say wells, are you looking at this as well from a geology point of view? Because a well, effectively, it's a natural spring that brings up minerals. That's what it is from a geologic point of view.

Are we unique in having lots of that? Or you mean the fact that you put spiritual, these are spiritually important portals to the other world? Exactly. So we've 3,000 sacred wells. We probably had a lot more of them at one point. But they were filled in aggressively as part of colonization too. The landlords would fill in a well, you know, they would really do this

to offend people oh that's i mean and you can imagine having us spend months going around the country filming wells a lot of them you are you're basically having to you know you know bash back a load of brambles or my cradle wall that was there everything has been done to try and forget these walls often as you say it's a developer wants to control that land like there's one in the airside retail park up in dublin oh i'd say if you're a fucking developer you shit your pants if there's a well there that's like you're not building here buddy so i'd say they go out of their way to cover them up exactly exactly yeah but it's amazing that so many have been kept alive and that so many are being revived there's people like i mean chloroquister was particularly amazing there was a very very good facebook group over the last few years and people

reviving and refinding new wells and opening them up again and like what's that there's no benefit there's no financial benefit what's why are people doing that they're feeling this thing that's rising from below us this awakening maybe the mycelium is coming and wanting to communicate and say let's recreate business you're not going to get healthy water woodlands and they should get healthy water streams oh wow i never thought of that oh my god so if you're rewilding an area it is actually in your interest to to bring back the holy wells to bring back the natural springs exactly exactly because fuck me and you know but in the bur is, you know, the wells were often have these peys, these serpents in them. So, and the serpent would appear often on a particular day,

a saint's day, often at either dawn or night. And that serpent was the energy force that would, you know, come out of the lake and sort of give its force. But like, the serpent would appear sometimes in one well and sometimes in another to show that they were connected, that you could get from one otherworldly place. And there's this geographer

who has been doing research in that interbar and putting dye into a particular well and seeing where it would come up. Wow! Seeing where they connected, yeah. And so he was doing this for a while. And a few years ago, he put water into. And so he was doing this for a while and a few years ago he put water into a well and he said,

okay, next day he'd go and check another well to see how to come up. But it hadn't. It was actually, he was in a B&B, opened up the front windows of a B&B

and looking out at a harbour in Cartyclare and suddenly he saw his blue-green, his green dye right throughout the bay, right throughout the sea.

So the water he'd put into a well had gone down into his water system and then gone out to the Atlantic Ocean. And that was the first time we had this concept of why all of these supernatural wells in Ireland, like Cundas Well, are said to be beneath the Atlantic Ocean and how they bubble up their pure water of life. ocean and how they bubble up their pure water of life because of course at some point those wells go out underneath the ground underneath the limestone that's off the atlantic ocean and then bubble up there so giving these sources of pure water uh that the people would have on land also to fishermen out at sea so actually you're not only uniting the rivers and the streams and the water systems with the forest but actually they go out underneath the Atlantic and then come up through the Atlantic too. That everything is united. And the myths were trying to tell us these stories in stories like Cundinars Well,

like these supernatural wells that were said to be beneath the Atlantic Ocean and that, you know, the people who are seeking wisdom would go out and find. That is amazing. One thing I mean to ask you about, because I actually don't know the answer to this question, like werewolves in Ireland, because wolves is in the title of your new book. Werewolves, do we have mythology around werewolves?

So both mermaids and werewolves, we're not very sure about. These could be things that came in with the Normans. Mermaids and werewolves were big things in mainland Europe. And you could understand why in Europe, particularly like stories coming across from Germany and from Poland, where they really were, you know, massive packs of wolves were a big problem. And in particular, murderous wolves. I mean, clearly we know we had wolves in Ireland, but not that idea of these. And in the Nordic as well, they had a lot of seals and those mad creatures in the sea, you know.

Exactly, yeah. And I mean, both are very well, particularly mermaids have really romantic concept. And so anything that's very romantic, it tends to be, you know, the romance languages, Europe, mainland,

like the Latin and the French were big into these love stories and everything and romantic ideas. Whereas Irish, our stories tend to be, they're more real or more gruesome or more... Well, I think that's the weather. I just think you're going to do more riding in ancient Greece.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, in Ireland, it's wet and grey and cold all the time. Whereas in ancient Greece, it's just like, yeah, fuck it, what else are we going to do? Jesus, Irish mythology isn't very sexy compared to the mythology of other worlds. And if it's a sunny, bright place,

I think just people want to ride more for crack. The other thing is though, we don't really know our mythology anymore. Oh, there's the other thing. Yeah, you're dead right.

Purified by the 19th century church, actually. Yeah, you're dead right there. And so it's only in the next 10 or 20 years, those scholars are going to go in and give us a total different sense of what our stories were actually saying.

What do you mean by that? What's going to happen in 10, 20 years? All the information is there. All the texts have, well, as you say, okay, some of them would have been cleansed by the church. But really, we have an enormous body of manuscripts, of early texts, that were translated with a particular mindset

just to show that either that it was all about strong men you know particularly in the late 19th century early 20th century when there was an agenda

we were taking back our myths to create a war of independence and it was brilliant that we picked Kul Cullen and we picked Finn McCool

and these warriors who were willing to sacrifice themselves because that's what Patrick Pierce and Eorah Lian all want. But there's a whole new, particularly women are going to...

You look back in the stories, even us with our, you or me, with our very limited knowledge, we look at the time of McCool and we think, there's a powerful woman behind every one of those men. In fact, the women are setting the whole scene. The men are just these chess pieces on a board and, the women are setting the whole scene. They are, the men are just these like chess pieces on a board

and the women are actually setting the whole thing. So we might be going back and seeing this. And like, you know, and the key thing about Queen Maeve and the town of Buckwine is no one could do anything.

There was no king could be in the country without first having, going into her bed and sleeping with her and her deciding that he was up. Wow.

Holy fuck. I didn't know that at all yeah and so none of this was overly emphasized and there's a new you know generation of scholars hopefully now younger scholars women and men are going to go in and actually refine the actual the resonances and truth and other underlying currents in our stories and i'm assuming that's happening in like UCC, the early medieval Irish literature department and stuff like that. People who can open these texts and read old Irish. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And something that really excited me was, you know, the only person who retold our stories recently was in 1994, Mary Heaney, in other words, Seamus Heaney's wife, came out with a book, Over Nine Waves. It was the first retelling

of the myths in decades. And it was a beautifully clean, it was almost as if the New Yorker had rewritten the stories. And they're beautifully told, very clean. And so she had done this

a big service. And so I have this, the Almanac of Ireland, in my podcast. And I have an interview with her, I don't know, so next few months. But she had done this big service.

And, you know, then there was this other woman who i've always heard about i've never met until about three weeks ago called marion dean and marion dean was going through the old stories like the birth pangs of crew cullen so there's a story of of um cunifor the king was riding out with his huntsmen and he saw that there was this flock of magical wild birds that were eating every single item around them they were basically grazing the the kingdom dry like locusts and there were magical birds and they were chained with golden chains or it's golden silver chains between them

all so the king sets his greatest hunters and they don't they try and chase down these wild geese or wild ducks that are they're eating away everything but what that seems that it's a it's a it's a poetic way of talking about winter you know there was a darkness is coming across the land and everything is dying and everything has been eaten back to the bearer okay so these gold and silver birds are um are winter kuchon goes up follows them gets lost and arrives in a magical house. And it's said the magical house has this person called Dag Tíor in it. And anyway, it's the birth story of Setanta, Cú Chulainn. But Marion Dean, she's the first person to realize, no, this isn't just a farcical story about geese.

It's the coming of winter. It's another nature story that you're talking about. This is trying to give information about how to live um in a sustainable respectful way with nature and the woman in the house jack tira marion dean's the first person say what does jack tira mean tear you know means land land and ja is good it's good land she's basically the mother earth she's the mother earth who comes in and few people try to sleep with her don't manage to have a healthy baby. And then when a farmer who is connected to the gods and connected to the spiritual world and honoring nature, when he sleeps with her, Cú Chulainn is born. So I got so excited about this, Marion Dean, because I just thought the first person who's going back to the stories and realizing they're not just for kids, they have wisdom in them. And then I realized Marion Dean

is the wife of Seamus Dee. So the two, the great poets in them. And then I realized Marian Dean is the wife of Shemistee. So the two, the great poets in Ireland who set up Field Day, you know, the center of poetry in Northern Ireland against,

this is in Derry, during the Troubles, Shemisteen, Shemisteen, Shemisteen and Brian Freel. And now the wives of two of them,

of Shemisteen and Shemisteen are actually doing the key work on decoding and demystifying the Irish mystery, the Irish sort of mythology. And hopefully they are the first generation. I mean, Marion Dean is now in her 80s.

But my hope is they're going to spark this new younger generation. And from now on in, we will get a whole deeper sense of our myths of how just as you're saying how they're connected with nature how they were trying to tell people to live in a way that was not only sustainable and in honoring nature but in honor of the spirits too i'm hoping the future is bright and like i said my my big thing with this is to bring this shit back so

that people have a respect for the land, a respect and a fear and to do it in a way that's modern and like I don't think, I don't mean let's bring it back so that people are superstitious again or believing in pishogs but to understand

the mythology of the land and how it relates to biodiversity and that these aren't just stories, that this is the these are the stories of this particular land and you must listen to them like i did a podcast recently about um yellowstone national park you know about it in yellowstone where they brought the wolves back yeah yeah i do and the river has changed the course of the rivers. Yeah. So I did this podcast and I told people in Yellowstone, the land was fucked. They didn't know what was happening. They didn't know why it was like this. Species were dying off. So they brought back wolves and then the wolves changed the behavior of the deer. And then the deer stopped spending too much time around the riverbeds and destroying the roots of trees.

And just by bringing the wolf back, they transformed an ecosystem. And then what I did is I looked at the mythology of the indigenous people local to that area. And they were the Crow Nation. And if you look at the fucking mythology of the Crow Nation, who's the most important animal? The fucking wolf. So they had it. The Crow Nation knew it. Their most important animal was the wolf within the the

crow nations um origin mythology the wolf creates everything and that could be thousands of years old and then scientists in the 90s go oh let's bring back the wolf with modern science and then the crow nation are going told you so you know and it is fucking beautiful and you see it everywhere and i tell you one thing as well that really that got me thinking about this it's it's it's something that you said to me in a podcast that we did is you you said that mythology is is the the fruiting body of the human unconscious and i keep viewing that as is the mushrooms and the mycelium and when people take magic like a lot of mythology i reckon does come from people doing mushrooms and when you have an not even mushrooms when you have any

experience even meditation and i know this from my own personal experience, what people always report back is I got a sense that everything's connected. Whether you meditate heavily, whether you do ayahuasca, whether it's mushrooms, LSD, people come back and say something told me every single thing is connected. Yeah. something told me every single thing is connected yeah you know and even when you're talking about the oak tree there and how the druids spoke about the oak tree and you know the the roots were connected with the other world and then you have the trunk in this world and then you have the leaves up in the heavens i couldn't stop thinking about sigmund freud's model of the human unconscious that's the model of the human unconscious. That's the model of the human unconscious. The roots that are underneath, that's the dream world. That's everything we don't know. Then the trunk in the middle, that's our pre-conscious. That's what we can

recollect right now. And then the top, the trees, that's our conscious mind. That's what we're thinking about right now. But it's still that same model of everything there underneath the surface. And then you bring in Carl Jung, who was a huge respecter of mythology. You know, Jung was all about the unconscious. That's the collective human unconscious, that we all share an unconscious mind. All human creatures share an unconscious mind.

And this is why mythology all around the world is quite similar. Yeah, isn't it interesting that we took Freud on closer to us because it was a more easier to understand package. Way rational. Freud is rational and you've got it with science, whereas Jung is saying, shut the fuck up, Carl Jung, you lunatic. So yeah, Jung is going to have, Jung will have resonances that we will grow.

Our minds will grow to try and understand what young young ian um i thought was trying to communicate i think quantum physics is what's going to bring what the the the discoveries that are happening with quantum physics at the moment and in particular like quantum weirdness and stuff that's really really strange i think that's going to make carl jung's work seem less mental when he speaks about things like synchronicity and meaningful coincidences and things like that. Like when you were talking about the Crow Nation then, it just brought me, everything you're talking about now. So last time we were on, I was talking about a bit about the connections I had with these Cree elders, these Native American groups in

Edmonton, Alberta, and how they were making me see the world in an entirely different way. And they were reaching out because they said, you in Ireland have the same mythology as us, that everything is connected. You need to go into deeper understanding of it. And you need to, yes, of course, follow what I'm talking about, follow the scholars, what they're doing. But actually, you need to go out into the land

and either breathe or meditate or take mushrooms and find that wisdom. But then since we've been talking i've i've like had an even more profound experience by going to spend time with native from an era sorry about aboriginal elders i wanted to ask you about this you've spent time in australia recently and i'm mad to hear what happened yeah like almost everything we have talked about so far in other words about the holy wells or the water under the tree, under the land and the importance of trees, the Aboriginal elders were telling me the same things in their culture.

So there's a thing called the Irish Aboriginal Festival that happens every maybe two years in Fremantle, just north of or just outside Perth. I've been there. Yeah, it's a lovely place. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's run by, it's called Cadogo Hand in Hand Festival, run by this woman, Joanne Robertson. And she's been working, she's had an art gallery, so she's been working in Aboriginal artists for 25, 30 years. And she decided she could see all of these connections mythologically and culturally between Irish people and Aboriginal people from way, way back. But also, you know, in the last 200 years the interconnections both positive and negative that the Irish and Aboriginal

set up so she wanted to have this event this event to sort of to recognise that now in some ways you could say

there can be no connection between Irish and Aboriginal because Irish and Aboriginal Aboriginal culture goes back 65,000 years of continuous stories continuous culture where Ireland

quite isolated isn't it exactly exactly and so Ireland, you know, I mean, we're the Bronze Age people where our culture goes back four, four and a half thousand years. Neolithic going back

six, six and a half thousand years. So the first hunter-gatherers who came here were 10,000 years ago. But I go out to Australia last March and I wake up, you know, get a quick, whatever, an Emirates flight. I wake up next morning

and Joanna's, i'm in her house and she says amankan there's a an elder on the veranda waiting to speak to you so dr noel nanop one of the key elders of the nungar nation of the nungar budjar of this play of this the traditional placeholders people of perth and freemantle is there and he just wants to tell me things he had heard i was coming to ireland and he went to australia and he wanted to give me an insight and so he says we're looking out over the bay and he says look out there he says there are three um estuaries out underneath the ocean there and he says i know that because my people who are here uh 40 000 years ago when it was still land remembered

oh my good fucking God. And again, only in the last 10, 15 years have the geological departments of the local universities gone out, done underwater, surveying and realized exactly what the aboriginals people were saying was true, was there. And then he started, he took me to a river and he started talking about the waggle. And the waggle is the river serpent that carved out the river. He started talking about the waggle, and the waggle is the river serpent that carved out the river. And it went the whole way down to Wadandi region

to the sea and salt people down in Margaret's River, whatever, three hours south of Perth. So he, Dr. Noel Nanop, put me in touch with Dr. Wayne Webb and his son, Zach Webb. Again, other cultural lore keepers, elders of the people of this slightly different, again, a Nungar language, but down in Wadandli country. They started talking about the same wagga, the serpent.

And they were telling me these stories, a serpent carved out the river and then fought with the sea serpent. I knew these stories because we have the exact same stories in Ireland. In fact, even this new book I'm writing, we talk about the Ceannóinach. Ceannóinach is the serpent serpent of Loch Derg who carved out the rivers that were, they carved out first the lake and then created this magical hole into the other

world and then carved out the rivers. But there's a main story about the Shonan. The Shonan was created by this Ulfeist, again Ulfeist means great serpent, who carves out the river of the Shonan and gets to Loch Rhee, meets some other beasts there and fights so much that they carve out the hole of the Shannon, gets to Loch Ree, meets some other beasts there and fights so much

that they carve out the whole of Loch Ree and then goes down eventually to the sea in the Shannon Estuary in County Clare. The exact same story told thousands of miles apart. And then they start telling me... That's fucking nuts

because there is no way that indigenous Australian people and indigenous Irish people had any physical connection. It's too far apart. Yeah. Yeah. So so how is that happening? How is when like Zach Webb, Dr.

Zach Webb tells me about Cairnup. Cairnup is where the ocean meets the sky and it's where the spirits go to rest in between lives. Now, Tiernan Ogh is often said to be at the end of Mag Mel. Mag Mel means Mag is a plain mill of honey, the plain of honey. It's basically that golden strip of sea where the sun sets, you know, in the West and there is this roadway, this trackway of golden light of the setting sun. And that was the road to tiernan oak mothmail it's basically the honey strip the honey strip that leads to tiernan oak so we have tiernan oak in some stories being on the horizon beyond where the sun sets and here in wedandi country in south in the south

and west of western australia they have the karnup the exact same concept and every day at first i couldn't believe it that i was these elders were reaching out to me and journeying to come and see me and i am nobody i mean you know i'm a journalist i don't i'm not a scholar in anything they probably have more respect for you than academics man con because the thing with academics is is their academics tend to be very tied to their universities and they're scared to talk and they're scared to be creative and that's no disrespect to academics but they tend to be that's too mad my reputation is on the line whereas you're a lay person with a passion so you're a lot more open

yeah you and i can get away with things because as you say we you and i both know amazing peoples in academia but they wouldn't dare write about some of the things that they'll talk to you about just because are you talking about mushrooms you know the shit you're saying they're magic mushrooms they're just not going to go mushrooms. You know, the shit you're saying there about magic mushrooms, they're just not going to go there because they will privately when you're having a coffee with them. But it's like,

I can't put my reputation and my university on the line for this type of carry-on, you know? Yeah, because there are people ready to bring them down. There's only a certain amount of tenure in universities and it's easy if you, yeah,

you put yourself too far above the power of it. Isn't it? They say medicine advances only with the death of every great old professor once the old professor dies then there's room just like in a forest you know the woodland survived once one of these great old trees fall down and then they've provided enough nourishment in the soil in the academia as well for these new ones to flourish but as you say so like um i was so you know what was interesting was every day like i i

mean i made i've made tv programs about you know about south america about india about africa but all over the world but i had no idea that there was continuous culture that goes back 65 000 years anywhere on the world let alone in australia that's the only thing we took a quick question there man con right um did Were these people who had writing or was this transmitted via oral culture? It was oral culture. It was in stories. And the elders, the lore keepers,

were able to keep this information alive. So there was no writing. And in fact, only in the last six months there's been new archaeological finds that are showing potential, that their culture goes back 120,000 years. That's very preliminary, you know, for the moment. It's just one site.

And just one other thing I'd like to ask you about as well, Mancon, because you spoke about this on about three podcasts ago with me, but I want to know if you encountered it this time. And it's something that to me is so alien i have difficulty getting my my head around it but as i understand it don't uh indigenous australian people have they got a way of walking the landscape whereby the very act of walking the landscape that that somehow they can retain knowledge using that way of walking or that they're able to retain stories massive stories through a way of walking exactly yeah

and as you said i've talked about that to you and i've written about and i had no understanding of the profundity of it until i went out there i mean my head is too western my head is too fucking western to get that i know but blind boy if you went out there if you i don't know if you saw the things and if you experience the things i've experienced um first they're called the song lines you know and they are this way of encoding information about everything mainly about how the landscape the information that you need about the landscape if you're traveling across it in other words where the water holes are like it's so interesting me talking to them about our sacred wells and them talking about their water holes and how sacred the water holes are and so much of aboriginal art

it's about symbols showing you where the water holes are and of course the first thing and i get them water holes are a bit more important in australia than they are in ireland that i imagine like for for survival exactly exactly so the first thing that the colonisers did often, they polluted the waterholes. Fucking gowls. Exactly. For the crack or just out of ignorance? No, no, for the crack, to know how do we kill off a people,

just pollute the waterholes. Jesus Christ. In the same way, there's this great American academic on Irish holy wells. She has a book coming out this year called Dr celeste ray she's over in america but she's realizing do you know the way you any river we were so proud of our water mills in ireland so there's either there'll be flax meal or flour mill or anything else um a lot of those were an attempt to to basically pollute and industrialize the sacred wells are you know our river source our wells

were the sacred so yeah put in a fucking industrial plant basically put in intel besides you know the put in a water mill or a um you know a lot because i wanted a paper mill was always a polluting thing um so sometimes it was just it happened the water source was there and they needed they used that as electric you know to let to use that as a power source for industrial, for industrialization of products. But also there was an idea, let's take away the sacredness of this well or this water source by putting...

Let's rationalize the river. I mean, that's what you're doing. Let's rationalize this. What does that river do? It spins a fucking big cog and that's where bread comes from. That's exactly it. And it's owned by somebody. This is capital.

Just like we've dammed all of the sacred rivers in Ireland, all of the rivers that were the goddesses in water form, in physical form, put a dam on it, stop the energy going through. And with all those plans to, you know, to take the Shannon,

take all the water of the Shannon and bring it up to Dublin. Just strip the power from it. But anyway,, you know, to take the Shannon, take all the water of the Shannon and bring it up to Dublin, just strip the power from it. But anyway, and you know, well, so I, so the song lines, as you say, is the lore of local place that was encoded into these songs that were sung as the people, as the people moved across the land. And not only does it tell about where the, where the water holes are, but it tells about geological happenings that would have happened thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It tells about different berries and flowers and roots that are available in whatever season. So, you know, the aboriginals have a different season. They either break it up into six or eight seasons of the year. And then each season will have a different color connected to it and each color will have a different wind and different plants that so once you know the once you know any element of the sea of the of the the system but either the songs or the food or the seasons they're also tied in together that you are entirely looked after that is all really encoded in these songs and i mean so many of the song lines have been have been have been have died have died off but

the elders i was meeting particularly like the role of the art like the art is so important you know aboriginal art that sells for millions in new york galleries that's another way of encoding the song lines so the song lines were sung they were also encoded in rock art like there was no such thing as art on canvas obviously not canvas until we came along so encoded in rock art. Like there was no such thing as art on canvas, obviously. They didn't have canvas until we came along. So it was always rock art

to give the information. But again, the reason we, you and I... So these weren't just pretty pictures? No, no. I mean,

and the symbols on those pictures are identical to the symbols you find in Newgrange and on rock art in Ireland. Now, most likely

they had different meanings to those symbols, but maybe they didn't. Because when we look at all of the lozenges and the scrolls and the coils in the rock art, the spirals in Irish art, we find it hard to know what they mean. We have to come up with different ideas of what they might. But Aboriginals know what their rock arts mean,

what their symbols mean. And nobody has done that correlation that comparing the two yet because no one in the australia yet there in australia there are anthropologists and archaeologists archaeologists are looking at the rock art and anthropologists in the story in no university in australia are the anthropologists and the archaeologists in the same department they're just on purpose they're dividing them and the minute you in the same department. They're just on purpose, they're dividing them. And the minute you put the rock art and the knowledge that's encoded in the land

with the myths, everything opens up. But in the same in Ireland, nobody is really connecting, you know, to a great degree, all of the archaeological evidence in Ireland with the mythological because we dismissed the mythological. It was all make-believe.

It was all useless. So what's going to happen is by, you know, amazing developments have been done in Ireland in archaeology in the last 20, 30 years, particularly because

of the building of the roads and all of the destruction of the ancient science by the roads, but also the excavation that that's led to. But no one has tied that up to see what information

from all this masses of information we have about the archaeology of Ireland, what new insights could we get by comparing that with mythology? I spoke recently to a fellow called Anthony Murphy, who he operates around Newgrange. And Anthony is, again, he's a lay person. And his whole thing is, he's an astronomer.

He loves astronomy. And he correlates astronomy with geography, with ancient tombs to bring them together. But straight up, he said to me, like the academics come to him,

the academics from the universities come to him and speak to him, but they could never say what he's saying because it's seen as too mad. He's mixing too many different genres together to come to answers.

Yeah, exactly. And luckily, so that first elder I met in Australia, Dr. Noel Nanop, he is considered to be the prime expert on the stars, on the whole astronomy of Western Australia. And even the main planetarium will have him in maybe once a month or a few times a month to give the talk. So the astronomer will give their official limited view. And then in comes Dr. Noel Nanop, who will talk about the talk. So the astronomer will give their official limited view. And then in comes

Dr. Noel Nanook, who will talk about the star. What's unique about the way that Aboriginal people saw the nighttime sky was that we look at it from star to star, and we make patterns from those stars. They look at the space in between. So they look at what's not there. So we're looking at the white lights, they're looking at the black. And when they see the black in their view of the Milky Way, they see emu, they see dark emu. Basically this big black shape that looks for all like a dark emu

when you see it. And it's just, it's the reverse way. It's basically looking at what is not there and what's there. And really that's what I had to get used to. So, I mean, I had a few enough insights

in this Irish Aboriginal festival, but when I went up north, up to the Kimberley get used to. So, I mean, I had a few enough insights in this Irish Aboriginal festival. But when I went up north, up to the Kimberley and up to the great sandy desert and the Tanara Desert, that's when my mind was blown up. Because before I went, you know, a lot of these places, there's no roads. It's just sand. I think me and Joanna had to rent like a really good Land Rover with sand mats, with extra diesel tanks, with a satellite phone, with anti-snake venom, and just go up into the wilderness where we had been invited by elders. Some of these communities, they never allow white people in.

There'll be a few government teachers and all, but otherwise there's a big sign, you're only allowed into this community if we have invited you and stop at the place. is if you've been well, if we have invited you, you know, and stop at the place. And so, yeah. But this is where these communities are where they're keeping the information live. So if you go down, if your only experience is meeting an Aboriginal person in a city, they're the ones who've already been forced into a city for some reason. They came down because they were sick. They needed a job. There's something. And the minute an Aboriginal person is off country, is not connected

with the land anymore, the power is gone from them. The life force is gone. Is this the belief system of the Indigenous people? Is this what they would say about themselves? That's what they would say about themselves. But you see it. There was one point I was in, we went to Balgo, and Balgo was an old former mission that was set up by

missionaries to try and bring in the Indigenous people from the people, the aboriginals from the wilds of the great sandy desert. It's worth noting as well to say to people, legally in Australia, indigenous aboriginal people, in the eyes of the government, were considered animals up until the

1970s. Exactly, yeah, they were under the Department of Fisheries and Nature. Which is just fucking disgusting. Yeah, yeah. But there you have it. But yet, you know, something key is happening in November of this year. In November of this year, there is going to be a vote,

a referendum in Australia about the voice, whether to give Aboriginal people the voice in Parliament for the first time. And it's a key moment. You can imagine it is in no way guaranteed that this is going to go through in Australia. And Ireland, we have an enormous role to play. Like we have every family in Ireland has relations in Australia.

Of course. We have this almost obligation, this duty to now become aware of Aboriginal issues between now and autumn. There's no, I don't think the date has been fixed but also healing because the irish catholic church did a lot of damage to indigenous australian people they really did yeah yeah exactly and we were not only we were involved with massacres too where these are let's say we came out let's say we came out with sad story we came out on you know as criminals victims of britain but when we eventually were freed from prison men you know

would set up a homestead somewhere. And if there were aboriginals there, there was massacres. They'd wipe them out and bury them in holes. And Irish were involved with that too. So there's a dark legacy. And still today, like, you know, Perth is beautiful as you saw. Fremantle is beautiful. But every person you and I saw,

you did a gig there. You did, yeah. And I did shows there. And I was invited out. We were all under the pocket of the mining company, you did a gig there, you did. Yeah, so, and I did shows there and I was invited out. We were all under the pocket of the mining company, you know? Every ticket, you know, 80% of the tickets that you, of the people who bought tickets to you were being paid directly or indirectly

through the mining company. Like every coffee shop, every restaurant, they're only there. Western Australia. It's a company town. It's a company town, exactly. And they're all, this idea, you know, wasn't fly in, fly out.

They're all on these small short-term contracts. They go into Fremantle and Perth to let their hair down for a weekend or something. They're a week off, one week off or three weeks off. And then they're shipped back up. They're flown back up north again to these mining places. So if my first two days in Australia were just these elders coming to meet me and to try and tell me their way of talking, seeing the world, prepare me particularly for what was going to happen up north and to do ceremony on me because there was going to be spirits up in the north

that they say I wouldn't be able to deal with on my own. I need their protection. When you went into their area, the indigenous... The outback. Exactly, the outback. Yeah. They wanted to prepare.

But then, so that was the first two days and then day three of this irish aboriginal festival or which happens around st patrick's day where the irish people were there because it was a sunday so they were all four okay and the stories i was hearing there was one the i was meeting was mainly the cultural people so the people who were who were out of ucc or uc NUIG having done anthropology, archaeology. So the mining companies are now having to hire huge amounts of Irish archaeologist students

to go out and to be the forerunners. There's now a rule, there was this terrible, the Ducon Gorge, there was a terrible destruction done by Rio Tinto of a gorge, of a many thousand year old sacred gorge a few years ago in Australia.

And ever since then, they're now, they have to do archaeological and anthropological research before they go in and mine them. Okay. So they need loads of young archaeologists and anthropologists. And I was meeting these people, a young bloke from Roscollen. And he said like, he had been out, he had brought the elders of a particular community out to see where the local mining company was and you know when I'm talking about mining it's everything it's from copper it's iron it's lithium it's emeralds it's diamonds everything is out there this is why Australia is rich like yeah exactly the natural resources

there is mad that's right so there's this one Roscommon lad anyway he had been out to bring these elders out to see where their next area of the mining was going to be a few weeks or a few months before. And then just about five days before I met him, he had brought these same elders out in a lovely white air-conditioned ute out along the track to see the post-mining landscape. And post-mining landscape, everything was gone. All of the sacred rock art, all of the sacred sites, these ritual places had been destroyed. And so the elder broke into tears and said, stop, stop the car. I can't go on. I can't go on.

But the elder had brought three other members of his community to support him. They pulled over and said, you have to go on. You are the eyes of our community. We have somehow, you know, this has been destroyed on our watch. We are the gatekeepers of our sacred lands that have been kept alive for whatever, 40, 50, 60,000 years. We need to see and we need to report it back. And so this bright, young 24-year-old Roscommon man, who was on way more money than he could ever have in his life before, was utterly shook when he told me. He was white.

Basically, he had witnessed, he had been involved in the destruction of the sacred landscape of people and that's what that's what did another woman told me she just helped you know build a new road into an area you build a new road into an area you get tourists coming in you get all the sacred art slowly gets either taken away and stolen and brought back to the cities but here's the thing man con like is is if if if an editor if if an indigenous editor says you can't build there mr mining company will he actually be listened to so they have a thing called his native title so they do control their own lands um and so yeah in one way they have control but all the mining company needs to do is go to another elder.

These are communities that don't have strength anymore. Alcoholism, drug abuse is so rife that people are absolutely desperate. I'd say there's real dirty shit going on. I'd say that, like, I don't... Corporations are not nice people. And when corporations want something done, they will find a way to do it illegally. Nothing stops it. Like it's so easy

to pick off the elders. You know, so many of them have such severe health problems that, you know, they're either desperate for money,

they need to get somewhere or they have a child and like the tragedy... So they've been marginalized. Marginalized in a way that their backs are against the wall. Beyond marginalized, yeah.

Like so I went into some very, very dark very dark communities that were in real, real despair. But I went into only one. This is the one that says we do not allow white people in. You know, you have to have a permission. This was yearly between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek, up in the Kimberley, up on the way towards the Pilbara. And I went into this community and it was those first signs I was hopeful. I thought these people are pretty healthy and they have an amazing school system

and trying to get good food and trying to get education. Still in that place that everybody is looking out for each other and everyone's got each other's back, you still see this white ute will turn up, a pickup will turn up of a mining company. And they're all kind of, you know, they're spread out communities. So they will, this white dude will turn up and it'll be one man with a form and with a pen

and trying to get one elder to sign. And all he needs to do is get one elder to sign in this incredibly healthy community, wherever, where alcohol is banned, where people are generally in good health. But if they can get in that easily to a place like that, you know, in the places where like in Halls Creek, we were sort of advised not to go to Halls Creek because there were every night,

the aboriginals come out with spears, we're spearing each other with fighting just because things had broken down so much. But on a Friday night in Halls Creek, the mining companies come with their royalty checks. So all of these elders have a native title they're entitled to this land so the mining companies have to pay them royalty on friday you'll get you know maybe a diamond copper titanium lithium whatever his miners will come they'll drop 30 grand in that town and they paid them just outside the pub the one pub so the pub will get 30 grand that weekend all the money goes directly through there. And then if anyone wants, if any of the mining company wants signatures,

they're just there on Monday or Tuesday morning where they've lost all their money again. The solution for the oldest continuous culture in the world can't be within Australia because everyone I met, including me, including you, we benefited from that when we went there. My flights were paid for that. My tickets, everything was indirectly or directly through mine all the universities i visited they're all being sponsored

by the money so the only chance is if the world says wait there there's only one culture in the world that has a continuous culture of 65 000 years still alive with all of this knowledge we all need to work and pay the price to protect ab culture. And so that's why the voice is a key element. And that's why, since coming home, I've now committed myself. I'm writing a book about the links between Irish and Aboriginal culture. I'm going to make a TV series about links between Irish and Aboriginal culture. And I'm going to try and get one of those big international, the big collections of Aboriginal art that were done in Sydney, curated exhibitions that sometimes tour outside to London or Sanford's or to LA or somewhere.

I'm going to try and get one of those to Ireland too. Because only once we see the art can we then begin the process of understanding the songlines. And once you understand the songlines, these stories and songs that encode all of the wisdom, both in this realm and the realms beyond for the people, do you get a sense of wow though she's the wisdom and the wealth um and their connection with spirit and the magical things i was told if i went up north i would encounter the spirits magical things would happen

the things that i could never again explain to anyone would happen and like without doubt they did without doubt um it's like one so one reason that we got up to this place that you never you know get access to is because kemet dawson who is the guni andy law man of this community of yeelie guni andy is a particular small group of people who managed to keep their knowledge alive and for him his totem animal is uh the white owl because his great grandfather his grandfather was no his great grandfather was the white owl and he knew his great grandfather and so the totem that his great grandfather left him was the white owl and so the one time that kenneth dawson came down to to my friend joanne roberts who has this kidogo art house in in in on the beach there in

beydas beach in Fremantle which is where the Irish Aboriginal Festival happens and the one time Kenneth Dawson came down they looked up in the trees above and they saw a white owl and no one had ever seen a white owl in Fremantle before they're just not there and Kenneth says

oh no no that's my great-grandfather he follows me when I'm on spiritual business so fucking hell Joanne just said, okay, just didn't know it. And anyway, Joanna and I, we fly up three and a half hours

up to Kununaro, hire this jeep, you know, it costs us a fortune with the sand mats and the satellite phone and the snake bite venom, go drive for hours and hours

across the desert to get to Balgo, then another 20 hours, long, long journeys, get up to Yealy at night to this, the road that leads into an off-track road

that eventually leads you down into the community. And we stop dead straight on the muddy road at night because there's a white owl right in the middle of the mud track. And so we stop just in time

and the white owl, just as we stop, it rises up above our, above our windscreen and over our head. And so we ring Ken Dawson. We say, we've just been stopped. We were arriving at your place

but a white owl was there. And he said, oh yeah, that's okay. That's my great-grandfather. You're being welcomed on land. You'll be safe. You're welcome to country. So we thought nothing about it. Went down, spent a magical few days hunting with them, telling stories, sharing knowledge, watching their paint, learning, learning the whole time. and as we were leaving again again at night back on that mud road

and there's a white owl right in the middle of it and so we pull up and the white owl watches us looks in her eyes and then goes beyond the head head headroom the the the um the dashboard and we drive off we then have like an eight hour drive on dark dark roads to back to Kununaru and as we're going the first five miles we encounter 27 white owls on the road on the road going flying above us we can't see I mean start stop start stop and everyone I've asked since then they said no that's an impossibility there's no one has ever seen 27 white owls they couldn't have happened so had Joanna not been there, I would have been sure I made up the entire thing.

But something profound happened that I'm still having to deal with. And again, it all ties in with fucking Carl Jung. Like Jung, like what I'm trying to get at is when you say, Jesus, the Aboriginal mythology and Irish mythology is so similar. Carl Jung would say, yeah, that's the human collective unconscious. Also, what Carl Jung would say is when you live your life with an openness to psychic energy like that,

when you live your life with an openness to your dream world, then synchronicity will occur. Meaningful coincidences will occur like that, like the owls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The psychic energy. Now, Young claimed that when him and Freud would argue about this, the books would explode in the fucking... He said the books used to explode in their shells, you know, and that's when most people go, right, well, I'm not listening to Carl Jung anymore.

He's mad. But I get what you're saying there from a Jungian perspective, completely, you know. Like even every time people had to do rituals with me each time. So when I was in first in Fremantle, they had to tell the spirits I was there and may welcome me to the country. And when I went down to Wadandi, another elder did. Then up in the north, in one place, I had a mosquito family, a great woman, did these rituals. And every time they'd do them,

they'd say these words, they'd rub, they'd get me to rub the sweat of my body into sand or into stone or into plant and then to put that into water.

And like, they said to me, okay, once we've done this, once the spirits, we're waiting until the spirits have heard, have seen you, welcomed you, and then the ritual ends. And they said, when it'll happen, let's say when I was by the river, they said, you're going to, a gust of wind is going to come up the river and you're going to feel it. And I did it down with Zach Webb there by the tide, the shore. They said, okay, step back now.

There's going to be a big wave is going to come up and wash. And that means you're, it's a welcome from the sea that you're welcome in this area. And if you don't get that, they said, we can't allow you on country. We can't allow you even in the community. And they said, let's say even if you're particularly at night, when you're gathered around the fire, if you leave the fire for any reason, you need to tell one of us that you're leaving. We need to ask the spirits or we need to accompany and even the only reason i got up to balgo like a lot of people won't go near this community in the great sandy desert because of the strength of the spirits so i had a man telling elders particularly helicopter helicopter is the

last elder he's the he's he's the last of the was the only one of the first contact people i met so first contact people he was the first of his people to ever meet white uh white people so he was sickly and his community were out in the desert they were roaming the desert and they decided no he's too sickly he won't survive and they this a chop missionary came down with a helicopter and they put him on the helicopter and so they brought him to balgo and dropped him there and he you know he was the very first of his people a few then of his aunts and uncles came in later about 10 years later i think but he's now his art is like so sells for millions in new york he's old but like his knowledge that idea of you know he's seeing a spirit world before

he's seeing a physical world but that's interesting when you tie that back with how they look at the stars seeing a spirit world before you see the physical world and then you they look at the stars. See in a spirit world before you see the physical world and then you look up at the stars and you see the darkness before you look at the stars. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seeing the beyond. And we think our ancestors in Ireland saw that. That's why we know that Tyrion and

all these other worlds were just as real to them as this real world. And I believe that was right up until the 1930s because again you can see it in the school's collection the older people there in every community in ireland were able to talk where the magical thresholds were where the fairy folk or the otherworldly beings came through in you know in their locality so that was my chat with the magnificent Mán Chán Magan that was tremendous fun

he's such a curious individual he's so passionate about what he does he's so passionate in the way that he speaks and I adore chatting to him so check out his book Wolf, Men and Waterhounds which you can pre-order, it's out in September check out any of his books

or listen to his podcast The Almanac of Ireland and I'll catch you next week for a hot take don't know what it's going to be about we'll figure that out in the meantime

and you go you go and you rub a dog genuflect to a swan blow kisses at a pine martin Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

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