The Blindboy Podcast - Pavlova Gonad

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

A cultural history of Irish faction fighting Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is the fucking crack, you binbag currentians? How are you getting on? Welcome to episode 85 of the Blind Boy Podcast. Great response to last week's podcast, which was about emotions. It was about the nature of emotions and what have you. But a great response to that. Thank you very much for all the lovely DMs and comments that I got from it. And people saying that some of the information was helpful to their lives and existence. I had one person on Instagram say that last week's podcast caused them to quit their job. So fair fucking play i hope that it works out in a meaningful fashion and it not in a

michael douglas and falling down type of way i hope i didn't inspire that i hope i just inspired that person to try and seek another job that gives them a sense of meaning which would be a good thing meaning which would be a good thing not michael douglas and falling down please um there's actually i wanted to do a hot take episode at some point which if you haven't seen falling down with michael douglas give it a look a very very good film from the early 90s i suppose you'd call it a cult film you would you know not a lot of people remember it, I'm not a huge fan of Michael Douglas, Michael Douglas famously, claimed he got fucking throat cancer,

from giving lick outs, not a huge fan of Michael Douglas, I just don't like the films he's in, I think he overacts a lot, that's just me, but in Falling Down, he's amazing, it's just, it's a man in in los angeles who just decides he doesn't want to just quits his fucking job and goes on a murderous rampage

um very good tense film with a nice build-up I do enjoy it excellent use of what you'd call golden hour which is when you shoot a film in either at dawn or at sunset in order to get a particularly orange

sideways light and Los Angeles has a great example of this, this is why Los Angeles is always kind of orangey in films, Falling Down is a good example, but I had a hot take, I want to do an episode on it that the roots of the film Falling Down

how it's structured is how Grand Theft Auto video games are structured, that would be a future hot take podcast once I leave it brewing in my head a bit more. New listeners. If you're a new listener,

go back to some of the older episodes. Maybe even go to the start. Oh, I've got a gammy vape. Sorry about the cough. New listeners. Go to the start of the podcast. Don't just start now. even though we have this desire to start things that are new, you can listen to a podcast from a year ago, won't matter, so this week's podcast was going to be about something completely different,

I had a hot take planned, but a different hot take than the one I'm going to go about something completely different, I had a hot take planned but a different hot take than the one I'm going to go with this week, because the one I'm going to go with this week, I ended up researching into it accidentally, I fell into a bit of a good fucking internet hole, like when I get a decent hot take and a decent hot take for me means when when i go into a type of flow but the flow is a research flow when i when i'm on the internet you know start off on wikipedia go to some articles whatever and i find myself really enjoying what i'm reading really engaged really interested researching but the type of research that it feels like I'm being creative it pops off different creative

parts of my brain even though I'm not engaged in a creative activity that's where hot takes come from it's where not just hot takes come from. That's where. Short stories come from. Like I know from any creativity. If I'm. Reading and researching something. And I'm so truly engaged in it. That I've. Kind of lost sense of my surroundings.

I know. That that is my mind. Storing all that information I'm reading. For the benefit of my unconscious and one day could be three years time it will bubble up as a creative idea and I know that feeling so tonight I ended up reading about tenements because the Irish minister for housing Eoghan Murphy the government like there's a huge housing crisis in Ireland, a massive housing crisis, and the government at the moment are trying

to put forward this suggestion that Irish people should get used to living in accommodation where, we'll say, it's a huge building, multiple people, multiple families, but you essentially just live in a room, you sleep in a room, but the living area, which means the living room and the kitchen and the toilet, that these spaces are communal. So you have multiple families sharing the same living space and the Irish government are now seriously rolling this out as a suggestion to solve the fucking housing crisis and it's it's an incredibly insulting suggestion because

what the minister for housing is suggestion suggesting there is we've had that before and it that type of living they were called tenements okay and tenements were like they came about in the industrial revolution when society as a whole moved from you know an agrarian population where people were widely dispersed in the countryside to all of a sudden everyone living in cities and working in factories all of a sudden you have this huge density of people so around the kind of late 1700s 1800s tenements come about which is poor people working in factories with very little rights working from six in the morning till fucking 10 at night and then living in these tenements multiple families sharing living spaces sharing

kitchens if they had them and sharing toilets and tenements were so bad in the late 1900s and early 20th century they were so bad that any modernized development in public housing that came about in the 20th century was a direct response to how bad tenements were. Like flats and apartments were a response to Jesus, this tenement situation is fucking disgraceful. All it does is spread disease and filth and poverty and crime. This is an inhumane way for people to live we must never repeat this that's the history of 20th century housing so now the

irish fucking housing minister is essentially proposing tenements but under a different way he's trying to package it like an episode of friends you know it's like you get to be ross and you get to be rachel sure they just you know hung out in the same apartment and went to a coffee shop and they were gorgeous all of them wouldn't you like that it's like no it's going to be tenements sir you're fucking dope so i started researching tenements um and i ended up in a hole a good internet hole an internet rabbit hole we call it and i'm i'm a bit of a digital hipster so when i go into internet holes i enjoy a bit of wikipedia okay i do enjoy a wikipedia hole is fine but it's it's it's the hipster in me i don't like reading

like if i go to the wikipedia article on tenements i'm like this this is interesting but the hipster in me feels like i'm listening to rihanna and i don't want to listen to rihanna i want to listen to some 80s disco music so I end up doing this type of digital hipsterism. Where a good internet haul for me is when I'm looking at reading books from like the 1700s or 1600s. There's a lot of really good like free books and either on amazon kindle or on google books that were written 200 years ago and you can consider them to be original sources and they're kind of hard to find but you can still find them if you know how to look so when i get into a really decent internet hole i'm getting stuck into these really old books and it makes me feel like it's the hipster in me it's like wow i'm i'm i'm discovering something new here

i'm i'm reading this book and i might only be the sixth person on the internet to open it or something like that you know so i ended up in one of these holes tonight and found some really fucking interesting shit that just started sparking the hot take part of my brain so i have some stuff planned for you that i want to talk about um if you're interested in any what recommendations could i give you like because i went through a period there about five years ago. I'd gotten a Kindle as a present, but I didn't have any money to buy any books for the Kindle. So I ended up, like there's loads and loads of free books on Kindles. Most of them, unfortunately, are really shit erotic novels. You'd be surprised what you can find actually

there's erotic literature on kindles and i think it's it's generated by artificial intelligence i don't even think a human writes it but if you go deep enough into free erotic literature and kindles there's you'll find erotic books about dinosaurs fucking humans not a bother but i digress the best free kindle books are just really really old textbooks and encyclopedias and things like that the 1811 dictionary of the vulgar tongue is a fantastic free fucking book that you'll get on google or kindle and what it is it's it's it's a dictionary of language that would be spoken in the streets we'll say posh brits would have written it and it was them trying to understand the language of we'll say the peasant classes and it's it's fascinating because you find

so many words like this was 1811 so so many words we use today it will have the word in there and then it'll have its roots so so many of them they're mainly irish words that were anglicized are words from what they'd call thieves cant which i believe is romany language i think thieves cant and then a few others so the 1811 dictionary of the vulgar tongue is good and there's another book that's free called english as it's spoken in ireland by a fella called WP Joyce so you can get them online for free and they're good crack

so tonight I ended up this one wasn't free actually I think I ended up paying for it but I found this old book and a load of other really really old ones and the book that got me started was what was it called now two seconds it was a history of of uh political violence in ireland amongst the peasantry we'll say i think it's called uh irish peasants violence and political unrest from 1780 to 1914.

So I ended up looking into this and finding some really interesting shit. And what initially attracted me to the book was the political unrest, the political element of violence by the Irish peasantry. So that's what I kind of went in there for. But then I came out of it with something different and I will probably do a separate podcast on the political element of organised violence

in Ireland and I'm not talking about I'm not talking about the shit we kind of commonly talk about you know the wars of rebellion but much more sporadic grassroots community violence within Ireland, usually against landlords and different eccentric groups that come about and how that interacts with folk culture. That's a separate podcast.

What I want to talk about this week is the Irish tradition of faction fighting which is something I hadn't thought about faction fighting since school because I remember in Jesus' sixth class history a teacher talking about faction fights and the history and tradition of it in Ireland and I kind of left it at that and didn't really think of it until today when I was reading. So where my interest kind of starts and what excited me is an initial kind of effect I came across that's rooted in Limerick. And Limerick is going to feature a lot across this hot take so in Limerick there's a famous Limerick uh character called Sylvester O'Halloran

and Sylvester O'Halloran like there's a bridge in Limerick named the Sylvester O'Halloran bridge near the old courthouse it's a small little walkway bridge. So I always have known this as Sylvester O'Halloran Bridge, but only in recent years I've battered my hole to figure out who Sylvester O'Halloran was. Well, Sylvester O'Halloran was a world-renowned Irish surgeon from Limerick who operated in the late 1700s. So I think he died in like 1808 or something so he was a surgeon in the 1700s which is kind of just at the time of the enlightenment you know if you're a surgeon in the 1700s that's fairly fucking hardcore because before the enlightenment you weren't allowed

to operate on corpses you know that the religion really kind of determined what you could and couldn't do with a dead body so medicine suffered but at the time of the enlightenment it became okay all of a sudden to dissect corpses and learn about surgery so sylvester o'hannoran from limerick as a surgeon and a doctor is a kind of a a world renowned pioneer in medicine what made it even more class is that he was a catholic and he was operating as a surgeon during the penal laws which you know the penal laws were these, it was a massive, a massive political and social system of racism against Irish Catholics in our own country. That forbade Catholics from owning land, passing land down to the fucking, down to your children. Being in political life, you know, a Catholic couldn't become a politician, a Catholic couldn't,

wasn't allowed to receive a proper education, so this is what makes Sylvester O'Halloran as a world-reloaned surgeon at the height of the penal laws so class, and it's why he's got a bridge named after him in Limerick, and why the world owes its debt to Sylvester O'Halloran from Limerick,

and why he contributed to medicine but what I found particularly fucking interesting is Sylvester O'Halloran made particularly particularly meaningful contributions to the study and understanding of head injuries and the reason sylvester o'halloran in the 1700s had such a great kind of knowledge and something to say about head injuries is because of the amount of head injuries that he was operating on in limerick city in the late 1700s so what i learned is that there was a lot of people getting their heads smashed in in the area of munster right tipperary limerick claire north cork in particular a lot of people were getting their heads bashed in and sylvester o'halloran as the main kind of surgeon and physician

on his day-to-day he was the person who had to stitch their fucking heads up I have some direct quotes now I'm going to be doing a couple of direct quotes during this podcast and there's a weird thing that podcasts do when they have to do direct quotes where like I listen to Irish History Podcast

which I fucking love and I recommend you listen to I've had Finn O'Dwyer from Irish History Podcast on as a guest before but when fin reads out quotes direct quotes what he does is he puts an echo on his voice which is gas so when i'm reading out a quote with this podcast what i'm going to do is i'm going to read quotes out in the voice of your drunk limerick aunt because why not so this is what sylvester o'halloran in 1789 i believe had to say about fighting in limerick no part of the world can have such abundant material for

such a study as ireland and foremost in ireland for frequency of head injuries, in Munster, the valour and fiery spirit of the people, their resentment of anything slighting or insulting, their addiction to strong drink. From these hitherto unrestrained causes, it is that many of our fair patrons and hurling matches terminate in bloody conflicts. I have had no less than four fractured skulls to tree-pan on a May morning, and frequently one or two. So Sylvester O'Hannoran in the mid-1700s was mostly dealing with Limerick people getting their heads bashed in from sticks and this was because of the huge tradition in Limerick, Tipperary, North Cork and Clare in particular of what's known as faction fighting. So what faction fighting was, it was a cultural tradition. You see it on on who you listen to when you listen to a British person describe

the Irish tradition of faction fighting it's tinged in in massive racism this is where the stereotype of the fighting drunk Irish comes from that the Irish are this race of violent fighting people who will do nothing but drink and smash each other's heads in, in acts of violence. But when you read the Irish accounts of faction fighting from the day, it's like it was much more of a celebration and a skilled sport. Yes, you know, as Sylvester O'Halloran is saying

people were getting their fucking heads smashed in but it wasn't fights out of anger it was like organised matches between huge groups of people where you'd fight with sticks

now these sticks are what we would call the you know, the term shillelagh. Shillelaghs are weird because we don't associate fucking shillelaghs with Irishness. Or in Ireland, we don't think of shillelaghs. They're one of these things that they're mostly remembered within Irish America. Irish Americans have much more of an affinity or an idea in their heads about shillelaghs than actual Irish people do. We don't really think of shillelaghs anymore. You might have had the odd owl lad with a black thorn stick but shillelaghs were a big deal in Ireland in the 1700s. Now a lot of it was because the aforementioned penal laws in the penal laws

it wasn't really acceptable for an Irish Catholic to have a sword gentlemen carried swords in the 1700s, it was normal for a posh gent to walk around with a sword on his belt more for ceremonial reasons at that point, but

the peasantry, the Irish peasantry you couldn't have a fucking sword so the Irish peasants had sticks made from black thorn or oak with a cudgel at the end like this big the knob of a tree so a stick about a meter long with a hard bit at the end so faction fights from the Irish perspective were very organized fights between huge groups of people, gangs or factions, where they would engage in incredibly skilled combat, but also trying to bash each other's heads in and seriously injure each other with drink involved. Faction fighting had rules.

involved faction fighting had rules like i'm not arguing for you know the saying that it's a good thing to be smashing heads off people i'm not trying to say that but what i am trying to do is i'm trying to decolonize faction fighting instead of presenting to you the british oppressive uh colonial racist narrative of out of control drunk paddies smashing each other's heads in let's look at what faction fighting actually was and some people say some of the rules yanks will call it shillelagh law like we don't even know what the word shillelagh means it doesn't appear to be rooted in gaelic it's probably a very old irish word that got completely lost and was replaced with an anglicized pronunciation that we now call shillelagh because shillelagh is not an irish fucking name it's not a gaelic name but some of the the actual rules to a faction fight if a faction is greatly outnumbered members of the more numerous

faction must join them in order to even the sides out so if your faction has six lads or sorry six people and the other faction has 10 then two you'll have to even the numbers out between both factions, even though you're supposed to be opposed gangs. So, first off, that to me does not suggest that faction fighting has happened out of intense anger or spite, because otherwise you wouldn't be saying, your gang has more than mine, can we have two a year people to come to our gang to even it out? have two a year people to come to our gang to even it out that's quite an honorable thing and points more in the direction of it being a sport than it being wanton fucking violence rule number two if a third faction is involved they should join with the less numerous faction number three no attacking of one man by more than one man so even though there could be 200 people in combat it must be one and one at all times throughout the combat if one man unfairly attacks another man his own faction will

attack him so if you don't obey these rules if you're in a gang and you break one of the rules your own gang will attack you to defend the honour of these the rules of this sport essentially the weapons used should be evenly matched sticks versus sticks etc number six depending on the situation virtually any weapon can be used including swords stones and farm implements although guns are to be avoided. Number seven punching wrestling and kicking are allowed in some cases. Number eight no striking of women even if they strike you because women were involved in these faction fights too it wasn't a male affair if women wanted to be involved they were

allowed to be involved but as you can see there there is a rule saying even if a woman hits you with a stick you can't hit her back so that's you know that paints a different version of events to the like i said the british narrative of it being wanton violence like i'll read you out now an account um this i believe is from 1810 right and this again is a faction fight that happened in the heart of limerick city in 1810 but the account comes from an english priest a reverend who happened to be visiting so this account of the faction fight it's not sympathetic it has

I'm sure a lot of it is true and I don't think he was being a prick but again the anti-Irishness is present he doesn't understand what's happening basically but here's a priest's account of a huge faction

fight in limerick in 1810 notwithstanding all their improvements here still remain many vestiges of barbarity county against county and often for reasons the most insignificant to engage in pitched battles i chanced to be a spectator of a battle of this description in Limerick, which in ferocity surpassed anything I had seen, and which indicates that at a distance from towns civilization is making but little progress. The battle took place in consequence of a misunderstanding a few weeks before between two men at a neighbouring fair. In consequence hundreds on each side engaged and that too the very first holiday. Having therefore according to agreement met to fight at Limerick they began about half an hour after prayers but were separated by the magistrates. In the evening however about five the whole street again being full of people, I observed one fellow, surrounded by hundreds, without a coat, raising his arm and grasping a

thick black-torn cudgel, about four feet long. He swung it around his head, pronouncing aloud, Jesus be praised, Jesus be praised forever. After which, an opening of the crowd being made, he ran down the street with hundreds after him armed with cudgels to meet the opposite party in a few minutes hundreds of cudgels in all directions were implied the women as busy as the men i observed one woman put a stone into the mouth of her glove which she tied fast to prevent the stone coming out and then knocked a man on the head by which he came to the ground. Many of the women having tied stones in the corners of their cloaks and pocket handkerchiefs were implied in the same way. To the disgrace of the inhabitants many of them

shouted and applauded those that were most active calling them by name from their windows bravo well done while they hissed at those disposed to be quiet in the evening great numbers of boys some of them not above 12 in imitation of the men were fighting in good earnest with sticks scarcely any sticks from them it was 10 at night before the streets could be cleared. In a public house into which I had stepped to see what was doing, a crowd being about the door, I found numbers of both sexes

implied in clipping the hair clotted with blood from the heads of the combatants. And several shirts in the house red and stiff with blood. Man is perhaps the only animal that bleeds at the nose doing hand so that's a priest describing an actual huge faction fight he saw in limerick in 1810 and it sounds fucking amazing like you've first off hundreds of people in the street kicking the

fucking shit off each other but then you've got the women picking up rocks and tying the rocks into their fucking gloves and baiting lads into the heads with their fists and rocks behind them or getting the ends of their dresses and putting the rocks into the end of the dress and smashing people across the head with rocks on the end of the dresses and the reason i'm like i don't want to be fucking judgmental about this because like this is 1810 like my own attitude now to be honest like I'm i'm someone living in 2019 i i don't know what it's like to be a limerick fucking a limerick person in 1810 in the slums and tenements of limerick i don't know

what the fuck that's like this is a world where you have people living under the penal laws you have a population with zero education in 1810 deeply religious with no access to health care huge infant mortality rates under the boot of colonialism very low life expectancy I can't in 2019 begin to empathise or understand what their attitude is towards violence morality

their own mortality propriety, I don't know and you know you have to be cautious what's the the difference between that and like that priest has been a bit of a prick are you telling me that the English bishops weren't blessing soldiers that went off into war and did the same shit you know by all accounts the Irish there would have viewed that as a sport. And the people spectating viewed it as a sport. And they were celebrating the ones who were really getting stuck in and baiting heads.

And they were denouncing the ones who were being chicken shits. And it appears to operate as a sport known as a faction fight between two factions. And I can't in 2019 empathize with it i i i'm gonna have to i want to take it at face fucking value i don't want to take the british colonial narrative where that english priest right there is talking about how civilization has fallen that's the language of, look at these savages, we must teach them, we must show them how to learn, but sure, like, the Brits are doing the same fucking thing with their armies, they just have nice uniforms and horses and medals, and that makes it okay, so I'm not going to take any side on that, I want to view this faction fight as a legitimate, pain expression of irish culture i want to view this faction fight as

an expression of like okay no matter what time you live it is toxic to smash to smash someone's head in with a fucking stick okay let's not portray that ultimately as as healthy that's that's never a good thing that expression of physical violence but i want to look at it post-colonially and from a psychological perspective and a sociological perspective and i want to view that type of organized expression of anger and anger at the fellow ir Irishman when you're fucking colonized and you're under the penal laws and you have no hope and society says you're not allowed to exist that energy has to go somewhere and I think the faction fighting that's where that energy went into into a disciplined

type of sport where if you look at it from the outside appears to be barbarous and appears to be savagery but in the pained heart context of an Irish Catholic in the penal laws in the slums of Limerick in 1810 is understandable that's where I want to go with my reading of it now before we go into the Ocarina Pause, to add substance to what I'm kind of saying there, one thing we find when you read up about faction fights in Limerick around that time and in Clare and in Tip and North Cork,

they tend to happen, a lot of it around fair days or hurling matches. And now, hurling, which is the Irish national sport, and I'm not really into sports, I don't have the gift of understanding sports, but at the same time I do have a lot of respect for hurling because it is a native Irish sport that's thousands of years old and but the thing is when people who aren't from Ireland witness a Harlan match they do see it as violent it's it's terrifying I've seen French and Spanish people see Harlan like this is the

fastest field game on earth and it looks like a giant fight and harleys or harls depending on what part of the country you're from these sticks look like weapons and this isn't a coincidence because faction fighting and hurling in the 1700s 1600s 1800s they were interconnected in a way now my hot take is because there's this narrative and it's always the fucking brits that say it brits in an arrogant way will say the british took the irish the uncivilized unorganized irish game of hurling and gave it structure and rules because hurling now happens on a pitch it happens in a defined area on a pitch with i don't know what 15 people each side i'm not sure 15 people each side will say and then one ball a slitter before that was the way hurling would happen you could have 50 people on either team and everyone had a hurl and you'd have one ball

and there was no pitch a hurling match could take place across multiple fields it could take place across six miles of basically 50 people on one team 50 people on the other baiting a ball miles and miles over the countryside it would also often end in a faction fight with the harley being used as the weapon because harleys do look a lot like shillelaghs and my hot take i view that again in the context of colonialism what what that reminds me of is there's a form of Brazilian martial arts called capoeira. And capoeira, it's about 400 years old and it was developed by African slaves on Brazilian sugar plantations. Now, if you've ever seen people performing, fighting capoeira style, It's a very strange type of fighting. It looks like dancing.

They're spinning on their heads to kick each other. There's a reason for that. Slave colonies in Brazil, when an argument would happen, people wanted to fight. They wanted to settle arguments with their fists. But the slave owners and the overseers of the plantation they would not allow any fighting because if two slaves get into a fight and one of them breaks their arm then you're down a fucking slave so slave owners would not let brazilian slaves fight and if they saw any fighting they would punish them with whipping so Brazilian slaves developed a form of fighting

that if you're if you're an overseer and you're trying to look at the slaves what they would do is they'd start playing music and they developed a form of fighting that from a distance looks like dancing so that's why Brazilian capoeira is the way it is and that's why people fight to drums it's so it's to confuse the overseer to let them see from a distance we're not fighting, we're just having a dance, in the meanwhile they're kicking each other into the head but you can't see it

that's that right there is pure post-colonial post-colonialism for me is the struggle that a culture has when it isn't allowed to develop because there's rules there the rose that grows from concrete the concrete is the power structure but the rose is that force of life and it'll find its way out there and capoeira is that it's a rose that grows

from concrete it's still fighting but it's this new different way of doing it because there's strong rules i view hurling and faction fighting in a similar way the irish wanted to express their faction fighting and what better way to do it than to allow the onlooking aristocracy and the British ruling class and the penal laws let them think that this is a game with a ball and confuse them and yes there is a ball and yes there's 50 of us and we're whacking it across a field and yes we want to win but it's also a great excuse to walk around with your fucking wooden weapons and still express have a drink and express your culture and smash the heads off each other because that's how a downtrodden culture felt its knee its its way to express itself in the in the early 1800s that's how i do view it and i also find it quite interesting the use of harleys as weapons

like even my granddad in west cork in the 1920s when he was in the ira when they would when him and his in his column would train militarily obviously you know the black and tans are all over the countryside if the black and tans find them with guns they're getting shot dead so the ira in the 1920s they didn't they didn't use guns to train they used harleys so they would walk around the place with harleys and if the soldiers stopped them they'd say we're just playing harlan but then as soon as the soldiers leave the hurley becomes a gun and they practice formations and they practice marching and they practice ambushes

using the hurley as a gun so it's it is worth looking at and investigating the similarity between hurleys and shillelaghs and the dual purpose of a Harley also being a weapon now that past fucking 10 minutes was from someone who knows fuck all about sports so anyway before I continue on with this hot take

let's have a little ocarina pause so the ocarina pause is when there might be a digital advert inserted into the podcast so I play is when there might be a digital advert inserted into the podcast so I play my Spanish ceramic whistle as a warning Of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe girl is to be the mother.

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podcast a guest i had on this podcast before david mWilliams, the economist, who is a lovely chap. He's just started his own podcast recently, which I think is called the David McWilliams Podcast. So give that a listen. Yart. So back to the faction fighting. One thing that's interesting about the factions around Munster in particular, because... Faction fighting, it was was it was wide around Ireland but it is very much a Munster thing it was it was quite prevalent in Munster

so in the Limerick faction fight that I read out the account of there from 1810 that was between two gangs or factions whatever way you want to call them same thing and all the different factions they had different names they had different ways of identifying themselves different ways of dressing all these little codified ways to like like sports teams to say i'm with this faction I'm with another faction so you had there was factions called Limerick had the Caravats and the Shanovists

the Caravat a Caravat is a Gaelic word Caravat means like a tie do you know what I mean I suppose it comes from cravat there has to be some type of association with cravat because cravat is a thing you wear around your neck but a caravat is like a

tie that you wear around your neck shana vest i don't know what that means it looks anglicized s-h-a-n-a-v-e-s-t-s. Because it says Shanna. Shan. Tends to mean. Comes from the Gaelic. Meaning old. I don't know what the vest part is about. Does it mean old vest?

I don't know. Was this gang called old vest? My favourite of the fucking Limerick gangs. From the 1800s. Or the factions. That riot that I read out there that the English priest saw that was between two factions known as the three year olds

and the four year olds and the biggest gangs in Limerick were the three year olds and the four year olds which firstly is fucking hilarious there's a friday and level of beauty to that because you're fighting like fucking infants and you're called the three year olds and the four year olds but where the name comes from is it was a feud that started in a village called Athai in Limerick, two men had a disagreement over the age of a pig

and they couldn't decide what age this pig was. So they became the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds, which I'm guessing, if you were present on the day and you got involved in this fight over how old this pig was, you were either on the team of the pig is three years old or the pig is four years old and then you divide into two separate fucking groups and you have a huge fight and the two gangs are born on this day and that day as the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds and those that gang lasted nearly well into the 1850s and i nearly fucking weeped when I read that I just thought it was so fucking

beautiful it's so beautifully limerick the humor of that that is fucking ridiculous it's so surreal limerick but also what made my heart flutter is you know it's a disagreement about the age of a pig, which ends up resulting in this war, but that, that by itself is so fucking Irish, you can trace that back to, like, the greatest epic Irish battle that we have in, in mythology, in Irish mythology, and this is like a thousand, fifteen hundred years old, more, the Tain Bó Cúilne which is an epic Irish story about a huge battle that happens across Ireland and Cú Cholainn is involved and Queen Maeve is involved and essentially what it boils down to is it's Queen Maeve and some other fella I can't remember the other fella's name but it boils down to a disagreement over who owns the most cows and Queen Maeve is like I have the most cows

and the other fella's like no I have the most cows and then there's one bull, the Tán Bó Cúinaná which is the brown bull and this is the most prized bull in Ireland and this massive battle wages all across the island of Ireland. So that this brown bull can be won. The Cattle Raid of Cooley it's also called. I don't know what the Tarnbo Cúilne means. I think it means the Cattle Raid of Cooley.

I think that's what it means. But what you have is this giant war. This pitched battle. 1,500, 2,000 years ago, that happens over who owns the most cows and who's got the best cow. And then in Limerick, in the early 1800s, you have these two gangs engaged in pitched battle because they can't decide the age of a fucking pig. And there's something really powerful about that in terms of just the genetic memory of Irishness. I find that really beautiful and really apt. The culture and tradition of faction fighting, it kind of ended with the famine.

That fight from Limerick, that huge big pitched battle, that was 1810. So that's a good 30 years before the famine hits. And those people were poor. And they were in slums but they weren't starving. It wasn't the fucking Irish famine. The great genocide. Whatever you want to call it. That took our population from 8 million to 4 million.

that took our population from 8 million to 4 million. The... It was the... Look, it was the fucking eradication of the Irish by the British. That's what it was. Look, that's what I think it was. I know I had Finn Dwyer on the podcast before. It's a hard one to call. But the British powers that be

really, really allowed half our population to die and didn't intervene. And they did the same shit in India. But the famine kind of ends the era of faction fighting. Because when you are starving to death and everyone around you is dying, you won't be able to celebrate with these fights. It's not going to happen. People didn't have sex during the famine.

Their bodies weren't functioning. Okay. This was a proper proper fucking famine. With people eating grass and starving. Dying on the roads. So faction fighting kind of ends. Around the 1840s in Ireland. There's not a lot of.

Eyewitness accounts of faction fights, but one thing I did find that was interesting was a Limerick man, and this would have been recorded in 1920, I believe. Now, this man was 85 years of age at the time, so he would have been a child in Limerick at the time of the faction fights, but they did interview him and they asked him, do you remember the culture and tradition of faction fights and i'm gonna read this out because i find this really fucking interesting because like i said there's two sides of the narrative about

faction fights there's the british side which is we are drunken savages who kick the fucking heads off each other and then there's the irish side which is this was a celebration it was a sport i know it seems strange to you but try living in our shoes and let's see how you have fun so this man called richard denning here's his account as long as i can remember one of the first things i ever heard spoken of around the fire was the faction and the fights that went on between the different factions. I remember it well though I was young at the time. I don't know at all what started the factions the first day. I knew people who were of different factions yet they were very friendly to one another. They used to have great preparations for the faction fights, selecting and dressing sticks. They used to fight with two sticks. The bull chawing was about four feet long. Sometimes they used to put lead

in the top of the stick or the blacksmith would put a band of iron around it. This made the end of the stick firm and heavy and a stroke from it would break a bone or split a skull. The other stick was a short one about a foot long and it was very short now. The purpose of this stick was to stop the other one. Some people used to prefer to fight with the bull tying alone. They used to practice with the sticks from their youth and some men became so skilled at it that the two of them could fight and never touch each other. In each district there was a special faction, or maybe the one faction might be spread over a great area.

There was a faction called the Three-Year-Olds, and another called the Four-Year-Olds, and they were spread all over the county. I used to hear that these two factions came into being as a result of an argument that arose over the sale of a pig. two factions came into being as a result of an argument that arose over the sale of a pig. This was mostly in East Limerick in Tipperary but it was elsewhere also. I remember seeing a man below in Ratkeel one day and he was drunk and he says I'm a four-year-old he used to say waiting for anyone to say that he was a three-year-old. The faction that my father, God rest him, was in was the Koolene faction. There was another faction called the Black Mulvihills. These two factions used to often try to strengthen one another. It was a law around here that if a man married a girl from the Black Mulvihill faction, he'd have to fight with the Black Mulvihills. And it would be the same if a Black Mulvihill man

married a Koolene woman so that right there that's straight from the fucking horse's mouth that's an owl I'd been interviewed in 1820 talking about the culture of faction fighting around Limerick and Tipperary in the 1800s you know and that man is straight up saying this this was not there was what wasn't animosity there was this was not there was what wasn't animosity there was sportsmanship they there was a friendliness about it even though it was an expression of violence and i don't know like i mean what's like you look at mma that's two people kicking the fucking heads off each other they're not using sticks they're not trying to kill each other i mean in these situations obviously someone's gonna fucking die if you've got a stick with iron at the end of it you smash someone's fucking head in someone's going to die but

this didn't appear to be an act of hatred or violence or vendetta it appeared to be much more of a sport what i find really interesting there now is like and this is my first time hearing about this is tonight when he spoke there about the faction known as the black mulvihills that if you weren't a black mulvihill and you married a woman who was belonging to the black mulvihill you had to fight the Black Mulvihills, that reminds me of our song that we wrote years ago, the Rubber Bandit song, Roshina Wanna Fight Your Father, I don't know where that song comes from, where does that song come from, yes, that song comes from a story, a lad we knew in Limerick who was having sex with a girl on her couch and her dad

came in and he stood up to the father wearing the condom on a boner and claimed the father to a fight and this was a Limerick story about a lad we knew that's where Roshina I Wanna Fight Your Father comes from but I'm interested

in there's some similarity there this is that part of me that's interested in epigenetic memory you know how elements what part of myself and mr chrome found that story so exciting and so funny that it needed to be regaled and turned into song and is that our limerick irish genetic memory through the years something about that guiding us towards that particular story as being the one that deserves an epic romantic story and works as an irish thing i don't know that's just me searching my brain searching my unconscious but i find that interesting.

So where I want to kind of go with this now is faction fighting in Ireland, it ends around the time of the famine. And it doesn't really reemerge that much after the famine. But where does faction fighting go? Well, it ends up in New York. In the 1830s, the 1840s, there was massive, massive migration of Irish people to New York who were escaping the famine.

And the vast majority of Irishish people who went to new york like i think in 1840 one in every three people in new york spoke gaelic they didn't even speak english they were irish speakers so there was massive massive amounts of incredibly poor irish peasants in New York. Now, where they all went to, it was an area in Lower Manhattan. I believe it's now quite close to Wall Street. And this area was known as the Five Pints District of New York. It's now gone. It was the Five Pints.

There was an area around New York called the Collect Pond, which was this kind of marshy type of land. The Five Pints, there was an area around New York called the Collect Pond, which was this kind of marshy type of land. And they'd started off building kind of posh houses there in the late 1700s for rich people, but all the buildings began to sink because it was being built on this pond. So everyone moved out and it became... It's considered the most notorious slum that ever existed and it was populated equally by because we're talking 1820, 1830, 1840

for the five points it was populated by very very poor Irish people and recently freed African slaves and it's the old classic. It was the first New York melting pot. Irish people and African slaves, freed slaves, lived together in harmony for the first maybe 20 years.

They were... It's the thing I mentioned, that Irish people were not considered white in america in the 1820s 1830s 1840s by white i mean not the color of their skin as such but race as a social construct they were they were not considered to be white people this is evident in the racist caricatures and cartoons that the quote-unquote nativist americans were writing about the irish at the time and the british the the ruling class in new york in the 1800s were essentially the grandchildren of english people and dutch people but mostly English and they had a massive massive anti-Irishness

anti-Catholic, anti-black rhetoric and for this reason the Irish and the freed African slaves found a sense of community and harmony together from this we do get like tap dancing you know tap dancing which is like tap dancing comes from an african dance called the african shuffle it was basically in the five point slum you had irish music you know jigs and reels and then africans dancing to irish music and you often had dance competitions between the Irish and the Africans. And from this came tap dancing.

That's where tap dancing comes from. Also, there's a lot of words in African-American vernacular that trace their roots to Irish words. Like, you dig, you dig me. That comes from the Irish, I'm digging to. Do you understand? It means the same thing. So, at the start start that's what the five

points was this notorious slum like Charles Dickens wrote about it it was so bad uh with tenement housing incredibly unsafe tenement housing um and massive violence it was ungovernable so what emerges in the five points district and this is like if you want to know what i'm talking about if you've ever seen the martin scorsese film gangs of new york which is it's an okay film right i don't really like it it could be a lot more historical historically accurate it's not it's very dramatized i think it was a missed opportunity but elements of trying to capture the era are correct the five points district is gangs of New York

early American gang culture you trace directly to the factions of Tipperary, Limerick Clare, North Cork that's a fact so that's what happened to the Irish factions

and the Irish faction fighting. It found itself to the streets of the New York slums of the Five Point District. But what happens is it stops becoming a sport then because now it's more about survival because you had the nativist gangs who were essentially

working class, poor nativist Americans they belonged to political parties like called the Know Nothings they were the grandchildren of British people whose grandparents would have fought to get American independence

and they believed that they were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and America was their land and they were very much against these new freed African slaves and these new Catholic Irish. So faction fighting now became about self-defence. So

many, many gangs emerged to fight to defend themselves essentially in the five points but what they take is the traditions that you see from limerick and tipperary and and all this who i want to focus on specifically is a guy called John Morrissey. John Morrissey was from Tipperary, born in the 1830s, born in Templemore in Tipperary, which is, you know, Templemore is now where the Garda Training College is. The Irish police are trained in Templemore today, where John Morrissey comes from. And, you know, there's a roasting hot take you could

make an argument that the Irish guards as such take a faction fighting tradition because they refuse to use guns and they've got big sticks and they'll bust your head in do you know what I mean maybe that's too hot a take but John Morrissey was from Templemore County Tipperary. He would have been part of the monster faction fight scene. He comes from that culture. And John Morrissey is considered to be the founding member of one of the largest gangs in New York called the Dead Rabbits. So if you remember the Gangs of New York film, the biggest gang in it was the Dead Rabbits, and the Dead Rabbits was founded by Liam Neeson, and then Leonardo DiCaprio is his son, and he brings the Dead Rabbits again, and they fight Daniel Day-Lewis, who is Bill the Butcher,

okay, so the real man, John Morrissey, from T Tipperary who comes from the monster faction fight uh fucking culture like Liam Neeson's character isn't real neither is Leonardo DiCaprio's character both Leonardo DiCaprio's character and Liam Neeson together and a little bit of Brendan Gleeson's character the three of them together are John Morrissey they didn't exist John Morrissey did he founded the dead rabbits on monster traditions and principles and the one person that was real is Daniel Day-Lewis's character Bill the Butcher Bill the Butcher whose real name was William Poole. He was a real guy. He was a nativist, very aggressive, violent, feared gang lord who was anti-Irish and anti-black and the

Dead Rabbits and many other gangs would join together in huge faction fights to the death to fight the nativist gangs and this is the origins of essentially american gang culture but it has its roots in monster so the dead rabbits we don't know what the dead rabbits meant again it's something that's probably lost in translation that has elements of Irish slang they don't think dead means like actually dead but rather cool like dead as in cool you know that's the way that we'll say dead in Irish that's dead class and rabid it's not rabid it was rabid which means like rabid like fierce so cool and fierce is what the dead rabbits would have meant i think and they used to identify themselves by again a way that they dressed and they would carry around big long pikes with dead rabbits on the top of them or some say that they used to throw a dead rabbit into the ring

and this is when a fight would start. But essentially, these huge pitched battles, this comes from the Irish faction fight scene that you have around fucking Munster and Limerick and Tip specifically. And this lad, John Morrissey, who was a very hard fucker from Tip, starts off as a bare

knuckle boxer in the five points and becomes a bit of a legend as a bare knuckle boxer but where things get really fucking interesting with the faction fight tradition like when you think of, you know, the Italians hadn't come yet, really. The wave of Italian migration happens later. But if you look at, you think of, Jesus, why are the Mafia still going? Why is the Italian Mafia still a thing? And where are the Irish gangs? Why did Irish gang culture effectively end in the 1920s and and you could say that it ended

really in in in the 1890s because gangs like the fucking dead rabbits and shit like that that really ended at the start of the 20th century and there were irish gangsters but they were absorbed into the the cosa nostra italian tradition Well, what happened with the Irish immigrants is they, instead of forming violent criminal gangs, the roots of the American Democratic Party, Barack Obama's party, fucking Joe Biden's party, Hillary Clinton's party, the roots of the american democratic party comes from the those irish in new york who formed the violence quickly turned political

and the dead rabbits and the bowery boys and the plug uglies and all these other Irish gangs would what they started to do was to intimidate voters into you see it illustrated in Gangs of New York the film through Brendan Gleeson's character you see him moving away from being this brutal man with a shillelagh who used to smash people's heads in instead into becoming a local politician the Irishish became politicians the irish figured out that if they mobilize together in that way they can achieve political aims and the roots of the republican party then that's bill the butcher now the reason john morrissey is important john morrissey is the man who killed bill the Butcher. He murdered Bill the Butcher. So that's why Leonardo DiCaprio's character is kind of him.

So he murders Bill the Butcher in real life. But then he goes on to become a US congressman. John Morrissey from Tip the Faction, becomes an actual proper US congressman. And if you look him up in the history, he's there remembered really, not as a bare-knuckle boxer, not as a gang leader, but as a Democratic Party fucking US congressman. In fact, he was a senator. He was a state senator. And that's what John Morrissey from TIP did.

and that's what John Morrissey from Tip did so from the Irish faction fight culture the monster faction fight culture the other thing that the Irish did is unions became a huge thing using the fraternity and unity of faction culture and instead forming unions and the docks we'll say amongst workers also

using the violence to like why do you think the cliche in American films is that the cops are always Irish why are so many police Irish because that's what they fucking did you have a very poor underclass

who managed to, some will say it's how the Irish found their whiteness, found their privilege, but the Irish used that violence to then become the New York fucking police and break people's heads open. As the violent New York police, you have the fire department.

You see a huge part in the Five Points District is you used to have, there was no one fire brigade. There was multiple fucking fire brigades. And the fire brigades essentially came from the different gangs that can trace their roots to the factions. And a building could be on fire. And you'd have two fire brigades in pitched battle with each other over who can put the fucking fire out so that's the legacy of these

irish head-crushing lunatics they became the foundations of violent power in the u.s the police the politicians and the kind of glassy-eyed harmony that I described there earlier about the Five Points and how the Irish and the freed African slaves lived in harmony. They did for about 20 years. They had a common struggle a common discrimination the systems of power that be did not view the Irish are the African Americans as being any different so a fraternity was found within that there was a huge

amount of intermarriage and a mixture a mixing of cultures there was no animosity you also find those irish are coming from a penal law system so that degree of massive systematic racial oppression that the irish actually experienced in ireland they they found um a common understanding with the systematic oppression that the freed slaves were then experiencing in New York. Now, how does it end? It doesn't end very well at all. It ends with the New York draft riots, which... What was happening was the American Civil War was happening down south. The newly arrived Irish are coming straight off the boat, starving, dying on coffin ships. And a lot of them were simply being led into the country,

immediately being signed into the army and being sent to fight for the government of the united states as such against the confederates down south so this led to an awful lot of resentment you also had to like if a rich not even rich but somewhat moneyed American man in New York was called to draft and it this this lad was said you have to go now and fight for the government against the Confederates down south a lot of them didn't have to go to war what they could do instead was simply pay money and get an Irishman to fight in their place and that's happened. So a lot of these Irish faction fighting men came to America

and were immediately sent to die in the war. And a draft was being brought in that was going to send more of them to war. And what happens is these Irish start to think, hold on a second, we're only going to war to free the African slaves. So then they took their anger out on the Africans and the massive violence and faction culture turned into huge lynching and the hanging of black people in new york around 1860 something i believe or 1850 but there was massive lynchings by the irish against uh black people and also from that you what emerges is a massively massively racist irish american culture where the black people are viewed as competition

for the same jobs for the low the lowest uh jobs that are available so a lot of shit that's really sick with america today and a lot of the times that you see some right-wing fucking prick with with an irish name in american politics or you see an Irish policeman shooting fucking black people today a policeman with an Irish name you can trace it all back to that it's a culture that starts there and that's well documented

so I don't want to be all glassy eyed about this lovely moment of harmony between Irish people and African Americans in New York it was a brief period you know as I mentioned with that podcast with Spike Lee that I did before Frederick Douglass the abolitionist like he was traveling to Ireland he he came to Limerick in 1842 I believe like Frederick Douglass spoke in Limerick to the Irish people

who were fleeing the famine with Daniel O'Connell specifically to say to the Irish when you go to New York you must join with the black people you're going to see freed slaves here is their story this is what they escaped you need to find fraternity with these people and you need to help their struggle. Frederick Douglass and Daniel O'Connell tried their best. That's not how it worked. As soon as they got to America, they had to violently fight for a position of privilege, which they achieved by becoming the vicious, well-practiced, violent attack dog of the grandchildren of the Brits.

And that's what happened. Alright, that was a roaster of a fucking take. Christ. As is always with a hot take, I'd say 95% of all the history that I spoke about there is correct. I might be wrong for a little bit whenever I'm freestyling, but sure, that's it. If you're listening to this podcast in an academic sense, then shame on you, sir.

The hot take for me in this podcast, what it is, it's an interesting pint. That's what I want. I want to speak and entertain, and i will never willingly mislead but i will recount from memory and add citations when i can to give you an entertaining version of history you know and that's what the hot take is i'll leave you go have a tremendous time i'll talk to you next week i really enjoyed this this was a nice little hot take it's something i'm passionate about it's new knowledge in my head i gotta get it off my chest many wide sweeping theories that i have and i hope you enjoyed it as much as i did uh doing it and it was an absolute pleasure have a lovely week go fuck

yourselves i'll be back next week don't know what i'm going to talk about Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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 center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at TorontoRock.com.