The Blindboy Podcast - The Irish Government is in the pocket of Big Tech and Data Centres

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

A critique of Irish Neoliberal policies via St Kevin of Glendalough . Data centres, water, and energy. Neoliberalism shifts responsibility from govermemnt to individuals, encouraging competition, infighting, hoarding, selfishness, weakening solidarity, and rewarding self interest over collective action. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Insert your head in the bent hens rectum, you sweltering Emmits. Welcome to the Blind by podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, a steaming queva, a 10-foot decklin, you know the crack. As he can guess from the title of this week's episode, we are in the midst of a very unpleasant heat wave here in Ireland, which is going to last. It's been going for about six days

and it's going to last for another 10 or 12 which is rare we rarely get almost a fortnight of sustained dry sunny weather Irish weather is chaotic unpredictable irrational jacket in the morning because you're freezing

t-shirt in the daytime because you're too hot and then umbrella by 3pm because it's lashing rain and then maybe hailstones in the evening just for the crack with a bit of sun at the end. So much of our small talking conversation is about the weather. Like I remember a couple of years ago I was doing an ad campaign for a brand of Irish tomato ketchup and they were launching barbecue sauces and the specific messaging of the campaign was how easy it was to take their barbecue sauces indoors if it happened to rain in the middle

of the barbecue, because that's how you have to have barbecues in Ireland. You have to prepare the barbecue in such a way that everything can be moved indoors in under 15 minutes if that's what needs to happen. So, two weeks of sustained dry, hot weather, we don't know what to do with it. And you can't enjoy it because our weather system is based on punishment. Like I have a larger theory that one of the reasons that Irish Catalysis, Catholicism, which defined a huge part of our culture up until maybe 10 years ago and some of it still left. Irish Catholicism focused very heavily on sin, repentance, shame about sin, self-punishment, confession, and a great sense of guilt about enjoying anything.

that if you were to enjoy something, then there must be some type of penance as a result of this. The trauma of 800 years of colonization plays its part, but even 500 years before any colonization, we were renowned for a version of Christianity that placed emphasis on asceticism. Fasting for days, sleeping on rocks, not sleeping for days. immersing in cold water, self-punishment. The Irish ascetic monks of the 5th and 6th centuries and 7th centuries basically believed that any enjoyment of life was sin. And the only way to get into heaven was to live your life

under the same miserable punishment that Christ went through when he was being brought to the cross. Like what examples could I give you St. Kevin? St. Kevin of Glendalock lived... We'll say the year 500. He was a monk. He was a hermit. Lived up in Glendalock in Wicklow.

This area is known as the Garden of Ireland. If you were to go to Glendalock now on a sunny day like this, you'd have a spiritual experience because it's so beautiful. It's like something out of a dream. It's how the Garden of Eden is described. You're high up this winding mountain in Wicklow. The air would be thick with that beautiful smell of trees and flowers and a cooling wind, calming bardsong floating through the air, and then you just reach this.

Absolutely perfect crystal clear lake. It's a glaciated lake, so it was once a glacier. So there's a perfect symmetry to everything. And when you're on the banks of that shallow crystal mirror lake, lake with the mountains either side. The fact that it's a glacier really matters here. So you're talking 20,000 years ago, this lake or river freezes through the valley. It grows and expands and then 10,000 years ago that melts away.

So then you're left with a landscape that feels unnaturally symmetrical, visually harmonious, as if it was deliberate like someone created it. the feeling you get when you go to Glendalock. It's so beautiful. I've been there. It's so beautiful. You have a spiritual moment. You pause.

You think about what life is. You look at the abundant beauty. And you'll naturally drift towards thinking about, did somebody create this? Is there a higher power that created this? Because there's too much beauty. This environment here is uniquely attuned to me as a human being

and what I consider to be beautiful. that's what Glendalock is. Now of course you can't enjoy it because everyone knows this. So if you were to go there today, you'd be scrambling through busloads of tourists and there would literally be queues 50, 50, 60 deep of people waiting to get that perfect Instagram shot

at the bed of that lake. And that's where Kevin lived in the year 500. As a hermit, because in the year 500 it was a difficult place to get to. There weren't tour buses. incredibly isolated, surrounded by the type of natural beauty that makes you believe that a god exists. And I can only imagine how beautiful it was in the year 500 with no pollution and a perfectly intact system of biodiversity. It just, I can't even imagine it.

If you walk along that lake, there's a sheer cliff face. And then if you look at that cliff face, you see a little hole. to get into that hole you'd want to have the mountain climbing abilities of a fucking goat that hole is called St Kevin's bed because that's where he lived in a miserable little hole on the side of a mountain in the Garden of Eden

up in Wicklow living in the walls of an old glacier and the stories we have about Kevin they were all written after he died as what's called hagiographies which are fictions about our saints and of course this is the bit that I love because this is

Irish literature. This is old Irish literature, but the stories about Kevin were, he'd just sit motionless in this hall on the side of the mountain in St. Kevin's bed, and he wouldn't sleep, and he wouldn't eat, and he'd be battered by the elements, and he would shun the beauty around him to be as miserable as possible in a hall. Now really, he's just an autistic kid. He's an autistic kid who's obsessed with Kirk Cabain, and he wants to dress like Kirk Cabain and live like Kurt Cobain and all he wants to talk about is Kurt Cobain and listen to Nirvana's music, except Cart Cabain to him was Christ. You're talking the year 500, so he was one of the early elite, lucky Irish people who had just

received the new technology of writing and reading. And now he's reading about this fella called Christ and reading about the desert fathers. Who were the desert fathers? You're talking like 10 years after Christ dies. Christianity isn't really even a thing. You had these monks and ascetics and hermits in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, who fucked off into the barren nothingness of the hot desert to live in caves and mortify themselves. The Irish tradition came from that. We didn't have hot deserts.

We had holes in the side of glaciers. So St. Kevin, who's definitely norodivorgent, becomes hyper fixated on this. He goes, well, fucking Christ is like Kirkcabain. he's the best in the whole world. I'm going to live in a mountain and try and experience the crucifixion. Except it's not going to be someone whipping me or nailing me to a cross.

I'm going to let nature do that to me. I won't eat, I won't sleep, and I'm going to get battered by sleet and hailstones. And don't bother trying to tell me to come down because this is my hyperfixation. There's nothing else going on. It's the five hundreds. I'm actually meeting the unique needs of my nervous system up here.

Fuck off. And the stories are that he would be so deep in meditation with his hands out that birds would come and lay eggs on his hands and then the animals would start feeling sorry for him so an otter used to come

and catch fish and deliver it into his mouth and then one day the otter robbed his Bible which I love the otter robbed his nirvana CD and fucked it into the lake and he gave it back but these are our saints, miserable cunts

We became famous all around Europe for this unique misery. Up in Donny Gaul there was a place called St. Patrick's Pargatory. It's still there. People still go there to pilgrimage. You'd walk barefoot on sharp rocks and deprive yourself of sleep and then climb into this freezing wet hole until you visited hell. And it was such a miserable hole that the rich people in Europe, the equivalent of the billionaires in Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries,

used to travel to Donigal just to go into this miserable hole and visit hell in the same way that I don't know Mark Zuckerberg today might go into the jungles of Peru and do Iowashka but one of the reasons I think that Ireland gravitated towards this particular self-punishment

self-martification having shame or suspicion around enjoying anything it's because of the fucking weather we're a little island in the middle of the Atlantic When it gets dry and hot you know that the weather is going to enact revenge. It's that simple. All through this week

there's no clouds. The surface of the entire country is heating. It becomes dry. It becomes like a hot plate. It radiates that heat up into the sky. But at all times there are these winds, the prevailing winds, the south-westerly prevailing

Atlantic winds, and they prevail because they're always there. So at all times this band of cold, wet air is passing over Ireland. When we get dry and hot, we turn into a hot place. The heat rises up,

pushes those prevailing winds high into the sky. They cool and then turn into fucking rain. So the hotter we get, the worse, the deluge. And in the 5th century, when the early Irish Christians got their hands on the fucking Bible,

and start to read about the Garden of Eden. Everyone's enjoying the lovely weather, eating nice food, fucking each other. And then boom, it rains for 40 days and 40 nights and everything is washed out. God punished humanity with the biblical flood. That fit perfectly with our weather system. Enjoying the sun.

And then the punishment of relentless, cold, hard rain, that's our weather system, that's what we have. So of course the Bible is going to make sense to those people. The other thing to, I would argue, the Irish were the first to discover a real fucking hangover because we invented whiskey. The early Irish monks from the year 500 onwards were preserving the technology of writing because Rome, Europe was collapsing and the infrastructure was collapsing with it. The money was collapsing.

Ireland was not collapsing. The monks, Irish monks, were travelling around Europe, picking up whatever books, they could get their hands on that were written in Greek and Latin and bringing them home to Ireland. The Muslims had discovered distillation, mostly to extract essential oils from flowers to make perfumes and medicine, but incredibly advanced technology in chemistry of how to distill. The Muslim work was translated into Latin and Greek, and then Irish monks, who were just taking whatever books they could find when they were over in Europe and bringing them back. came across these texts about distillation.

So the same Irish monks who were practising this extreme asceticism, this self-punishment. Now this was probably happening in the north of Ireland or, you see, up until 900, the western part of Scotland was actually part of an Irish kingdom called Dalryata.

That's where they speak Gaelic up in Scotland and why we don't know if whiskey did it start on the shores of Scotland or start on the shores of Ireland, but it was probably up north somewhere. The monks were already brewing beer. And then some monk looked at this text about ancient Arabic, Muslim distillation, and decided, fuck it, why don't we try that? Except, let's see what happens when you do it with beer.

And they did. And what came out was Ishgabaha, the Water of Life, whiskey. And they would have achieved a level of shit phase. that had never been achieved before, that you couldn't get from wine, that you couldn't get from beer. They were getting whiskey drunk from maybe 40, 50, 60%, 80% whiskey. And we know this, because you can read about it in some of the old texts from the 8th or 9th century, no later about the 11th century.

In the marginalia, you've got the monks talking about how hung over they are. And in the 13th century, there was a king, a king who died in Ireland because he drank so much whiskey. So now we have this substance unique to Ireland where it's deeply fucking enjoyable and you get to get langers. But then the next day you can have a hangover that's so bad that it kills you.

And that again, it all ties in with Garden of Eden, the flood, the weather. If you enjoy anything, expect punishment, penance. So anyway, we can't enjoy the hot weather because we know what's going to come. In about two weeks' time, so we find comfort in misery. in good old predictable grey misery This morning the government has issued a hose pipe ban

which I'm very annoyed with For the next 10 days I believe it is You're not allowed to use a hose You can't use a hose pipe To conserve water And they're also encouraging people to rat out their neighbours If you see a neighbour telling them

And the neighbour can be fined up to €5,000 If you turn on your garden hose I'm infuriated by this because it is pure and utter neoliberal ideology and I'll tell you why. Last month the United Nations did a report

and the environmental impact of artificial intelligence on the world and in this report June 26 so this is the entire world they highlighted Ireland as a cautionary tale of what can happen

when too many data centres are built Ireland is beholden to gigantic tech corporations Google Amazon, Facebook, Uber Apple they all have their corporate headquarters in Ireland

because we have a very low tax rate of 12.5% corporate tax rate. Some of them don't even do that. They're able to do some type of fancy fucking legal money laundering where they pay less than

1% tax. So Ireland And we allow the wealthiest corporations in the world to launder their money and pay no tax. And in exchange for that, we get some jobs. Now what's happening is it's not just corporate headquarters that are being built, it's data centers. They're flocking here. They create very little jobs. The UN report showed that data centers in Ireland use 21% of our electricity.

compared to 4% in the US and 1% in China so data centres are using 20 fucking 1% of our electricity Now just to piss you off because it's so frustrating to see the online discourse

with people blaming immigrants riots in the streets because people are angry about immigrants here are the figures and these figures are from another report that was commissioned by Friends of the Earth. Data centres are using 21% of Ireland's electricity.

So what? Who cares? Why do I care what a data centre electricity it's using? There's loads of electricity. Who gives a shit? Do you hate it when your electricity bill comes in? Are your electricity bills really fucking high? And you get that feeling of

I don't understand this, what's happening. I'm really confused and angry. This electricity bill, increasingly, it's starting to look like a loan repayment on a car. This electricity bill is starting to look a bit like a mortgage. The fuck is going on here. Data centres are adding 360 euros a year onto your electricity bill in Ireland. 360 euros onto your electricity bill. That's the estimated cumulative average for every household in the country.

Electricity is a finite resource. Fossil fuels are burned to create that electricity. That costs money. There's a giant building over there that isn't paying any tax, that isn't implying a lot of people, that belongs to a billionaire, a multi-multi billionaire. That's costing you personally. 360 euros on your electricity bill. Electricity prices in Ireland are 40% above the EU average. The average Irish household electricity bill about 1,400 euros a year. About 400 euros of the is caused by fucking data centers. Now, my podcast wouldn't exist without data centers. This is uploaded to some server somewhere that's in a data center.

Your photographs that you take go to a data center. The internet is on data centers. I get it, but there's also a new class of fucking billionaires who are billionaires because they don't pay any tax. Facitated by Ireland over the past 25 years. But just, there's the figures for you, lads. I mean Elon Musk owns Twitter Twitter is now a racism machine

This is all deliberate I mean the next If you're listening to this now And you have these figures And you can go and check them up The next time you hear A family member or someone you know Who are infuriated by the cost of living

And then managed to shift that somehow And to marginalised people Tell them about data centres tell them that data centres are costing them 360 euros a year on their electricity bills. Data centres in Ireland, they're going to grow by 30% by 2030. There's 82 in operation, there's 14 more being built right now. There's a lot of misinformation out there around the climate.

So unfortunately, it's hard to get the average person to give a shit about climate change, to care about biodiversity, climate collapse or just don't see widespread engagement or use of imagination when it comes to these issues

just why should I give a fuck about bees who cares about bees I kill insects all the time who cares about them or fish in the river who gives a fuck they'll get new ones they'll keep growing back

I'm not seeing widespread engagement with the issues and then the effort to use imagination to understand what's going on and therefore to care and then you're also fighting well-funded disinformation

like even around solar panels if I mention solar panels on Instagram the amount of people who get in my DMs calling it a scam I know people in Ireland who have solar panels on their roofs and I've seen their fucking bills especially people who have solar

solar panels and a battery their yearly bills are being reduced by 80 to 90% like I've seen it I've seen people's bills it's real but there's still people online caught in it bullshit because there's so much money being put into the disinformation. It's hard to get people to give a shit about data centers as well. So I give a fuck about a, what is it, a warehouse full of computers, why do I care about that?

The extra 360 euro that everyone's paying on their bills, what more do you need to care about now? There it is. Every person in the country should know that figure, should know why it's being caused and should go, hold on a second, that's how I should be angry with. And the billionaires know that this is about to come. How do I know they know? Because two months ago in May, there was 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department

of Homeland Security in the FBI over in America. I've shown that the FBI now have started to move their focus towards people who are getting angry with data centers. That is being perceived as the new quote-unquote terrorists to watch out for. It follows Donald Trump, which I believe was February. his national security presidential memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to start targeting anyone who holds anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-capitalist beliefs.

It's part of the DHS's counter-terrorism strategy, so now they're moving away from fucking Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And now it's going to be, by 2030, vandalising a data centre will be considered terrorism and people will be charged under it with terrorism offences. Like you're seeing with the anti-genocide protesters who are vandalising warehouses of drones. The text in the DHS report, the actual text is, the chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest,

an anti-tech violent extremist activity. So vandalizing a data center, they want to frame it as terrorism. because if you frame it as terrorism, then you can get life in prison as opposed to, I threw a brick at a warehouse, which is just petty vandalism. And I just find it so ironic

that the billionaires, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, are funding all this anti-climate disinformation and funding this information that shifts anger towards immigrants. The other thing that data centres do specifically in Ireland

is they use huge, huge amounts of water. in order to cool themselves down. So the data centers in Ireland, they're already using more electricity than all of the houses combined. So 20% of electricity use, 80% of that comes from industry. But houses, data centers are using more electricity than all of the houses in the country. So regarding water, data centers in Ireland need to cool down. Now I'm taking these figures from a report called water used by data centers in Irish context by Dr. Trina McGraw,

2024, which is before the AI boom. So first off, data centers use, the 57% of the water that the data centers use is potable water. That means clean processed drinking water. Water that your taxes have paid to clean. Water that's supposed to go to your house, data centers use 57%. When the data centers need the most amount of potable water,

when it's really hot. Right now, this week, that's when data centers need the most water to cool down. Right now, the water that's supposed to go to your drinking tap, there's a data center up in Mead, in clones, which belongs to Meta, Facebook. And this data center uses more water than any other data center in the world. That data center is cleverly called a campus.

Campus sounds like it's full of, sounds like a college. Campuses are great things, aren't they, full of people, employed doing things. So if you hear someone defending data centers saying, but what about the jobs? That's why we have the low corporation tax rate. Without the multinational corporations, we wouldn't have all the jobs.

According to the Friends of the Art Study, most of the jobs that are created for a data center, they're the construction jobs. They're short term. They're for the building of it. And then after that, it's just a building full of computers

that needs a bunch of water and electricity, which our tax pays for, and the building doesn't pay tax. So this week there's a heat wave, there's a shortage of drinkable, drinkable water. So the government has instated a hosepipe ban where they're encouraging people to rat their neighbors out where you can be fined 5,000 euro.

Surely it's the data centers. Why is the government not going to the data centers, to the big corporations, and saying, the people here need access to their water, the human beings need access to water, water during the heat wave. So can you either stop or can we tax you massively to compensate the people who are being impacted by this? That's not what's fucking happening. What's happening instead and this is classic fucking neoliberalism. Neoliberalism turns people against each other. When public

services become privatised and run for profit, they become scarce and people become a little bit mean. Housing is fully financialised now. People compete for housing now. People compete to rent. It doesn't have to be like that. It is like that because housing is no longer about providing people homes. It's about turning a profit. Neoliberalism turns political problems into personal responsibilities. It shoves it down on the individual. So the government's responsibility, the cheek of the government talking about cost of living when they know that data The centre's cost in each individual person 380 euros a year on their electricity bill.

The cheek of the government to talk about a fucking hosepipe ban and rat your neighbour out. Instead of asking, how should society organise a climate policy or an energy policy? The messaging is, what should you do differently? And what

you should do differently is just don't water your garden. Don't wash your car. Don't fill up. the paddling pool for the kids. Inconvenience yourself there during the heat wave. And if you don't, you'll be fined 5,000 euros. And we're asking your neighbours to tell on you too. Oh and by the way, it actually doesn't matter of fuck. It actually doesn't make that much of a difference. If anyone does turn their hose on or not, because that's not what's causing the shortage.

What's causing the shortage is those big fucking data centres. But if we put this big messaging out, and we attach a fine to it and make it seem like a really serious crime you see this feels like we're doing something this looks like we're doing something about it doesn't it we're doing fuck all because we are beholding and in the pockets

of the big tech companies that don't pay tax in this country that avoid tax in this country that's a big statement the government are in the pockets of big tech how do I qualify that do you know fuck it let's have an ocarina pause this week's podcast

This week's podcast was actually supposed to be about the history of salad I've spent three days deep fucking research I did a podcast on salads in 2020 I wanted to update that podcast

I've managed to trace the history of salad to a 12th century recipe about how to make bombs out of piss I've ended up being too annoyed by data centers I mean here's my rule I follow the feed and a flow

I follow curiosity, I follow a feeling. If at any point I'm reeling myself back and going, none or nowhere we're going to talk about salads this week, I'm not doing my job. I can talk about salads next week. The reason I won't throw the salad information into the end of this podcast is it's a large hot take, and I just don't think it's long podcast listening weather,

even though I'm conscious of the fact that I know it's fucking winter in Australia. Also, in my fucking office, the air conditioner shut off at 6pm. Because the office is built for neurotypical people who work 9 to 5, not for autistic people who have no problem whatsoever, spending 19 hours in the office focusing on something that I'm passionate about if that's what I want to do. So the air conditioners are going to shut off in about an hour and this place is going to become boiling. Well, there's Rod Stewart, the spider on my window.

Still doing well. The sun is setting here in Limerick City. Beautiful, gorgeous, orange sunset, long shadows. And there's a spider on my window who have named Rod Stewart. Doing fantastic, but I know what time it is because of the angle of the sun on Rod Stewart's body and then the size of that spider's shadow on my wall. I fucking love it.

it. But as soon as Rod Stewart's shadow gets as big as my hand, then the air conditioners turn off. I'm going to write that into an email with no context. When I asked the building, when I asked the building management to leave the air conditioners on longer.

But it's about to get hot in here. Here's the ocarina. You're going to hear some adverts for bullshit. I have to be gentle with it. I unlocked a new tinnitus tone at the weekend because I was making jungle music. So I need to give my ears a rest. There's a sea-gull outside. the window that's been circled by a lone starling.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if you listen to it every week, if it brings you entertainment, mirth, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living.

It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay for all my equipment. it's how I pay all my bills. This is my vocation. I adore this. I love it. One of the first things I do every morning when I wake up is reflect on gratitude.

The gratitude that I have for the fact that this is what I do and I fucking love doing it. And it's only possible because this is listener funded. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. You get four podcasts a month. And if you can't afford it, if your electricity bills are too high and you don't have that, just listen for free, listen for free. Because there's going to be someone else who can afford it and they're paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a very fucked up neoliberal type of public broadcasting. It's privatized public broadcasting. I mean, what am I going to do? Ring up RTE. can I have an hour a week on the radio RTE to talk about data centers in St. Kevin

funded by the taxpayer? No, RTE is beholden to advertisers. Patreon.com forward slash the blindbuy podcast. If you're becoming a new subscriber, don't do it on the Apple iPhone app because Apple take 30%. So do it on a web browser or a browser on your phone. And also just a shout out to the fucking

fair play to Patreon this week. the CEO of Patreon Jack Conte announced that any content that is on Patreon cannot be scraped by AI so if artists are posting on Patreon

or posting anything on Patreon AI cannot scrape that work which is a big move upcoming gigs I don't have anything gone I'm off for a while I got offered a fucking gig last week

a very big slot at an Irish festival and it would have clashed with one of my kids' birthdays their birthday party I'd have to leave halfway through and I don't think I even had to think about it

I mean that's what it's about really isn't it? I mean I could take the festival gig it was about 15,000 people it's hard to turn gigs down when I'm in this a long time I know what it's like to play for 15 people and I've worked very

hard to get to a position where I can get offered 15,000 people. But what am I going to think about if I'm lucky enough to get to my deathbed? You think on my deathbed, I'm going to look back and go, fuck it, I wish I did that gig. No. If I'm lucky enough to have a deathbed and lucky enough for my adult children to be present, I'm going to be thinking about and remembering that little birthday party. And that's what's important.

That's what fucking life is about. that's meaning and love and staying true to my fucking values but also thank you to my fucking patrons so that I can make that decision because there was a time where turning down a festival gig in the summer when it's difficult to do your own gigs in the summer because of the festivals there was a time where I simply would not be able to turn down a festival gig there'd have been no gas in the boiler

So my next gigs The Tour of England, Scotland and Wales Which is setting out I can't fucking wait to do that tour I'm still buzzing from that wonderful Sheffield gig two weeks ago I'm kicking off the tour in Brighton on the 18th of October

Then over to Wales on the 20th The New Theatre in Cardiff Up to Coventry, Del on the 21st at the Warwick Art Centre Bristol on the 22nd Guilford at G Live on the 24th London which is sold out

Glasgow sold out Gateshead I can't wait to go to fucking Gateshead Teaside found out that Gateshead is actually old Anglo-Saxon it means Goatshead

I want to learn why that's the case and then finishing it off in Nottingham on the what is that the first the November there in Nottingham so and also so those gigs are setting out quick you get the tickets at Vane.com.

forward slash the blind by podcast. Suggest some guests to me. Any interesting people for any of those gigs? Get on to me on Instagram Blind by Boat Club and suggest some guests please. Then April 27. The tour of New Zealand and Australia, which is very nearly fucking sold out. Thank you so much to the people of New Zealand and Australia.

But that's in April and I'm kicking it off. Where? Auckland. the town hall on the 9th of April, then Melbourne at the Palais Theatre, Brisbane, Powerhouse, parts as good as sold out, and then biggest gig in my career, I'm absolutely honoured to be doing this, it's a massive deal for me, never thought of as possible, Sydney Opera House, which is as good as fucking sold out, I'll be announcing sold out maybe in a week or two. So back to the podcast, which is

this is turning into another dissection of neoliberalism which we got to do we got to do because everything's disappearing including critique

Twitter's gone journalism is not what it used to be the articles and journalists that were offering decent critiques of power they're not being commissioned anymore

and if they are you're not seeing the shit in the algorithm you see an article now on Instagram you're not fucking seeing it and then you have to go

link in bio no one's clicking through. So before the Ocarina Paz, I accused the Irish government of being in the pocket of big tech. Now that's a big statement. The Irish government is in the pockets of big tech companies.

That is a big statement. But like when I say something like that, I'll point towards... Okay, so this is a fact. Fienagale, one of the two big political parties in Ireland. In 2016, there was a leak of Uber documents, Uber, the ride-sharing app,

and also Uber-Eat. It was found that Uber wrote part of Fine Gale's election manifesto. Fianna Gale are a political party representing the people of wanting to represent the people of Ireland. Why is a US multinational corporation writing your election manifesto? What? You can look at that up. Journalists applied for a Freedom of Information Act. And that's true.

And what did they want? Why are you writing Fina Gale's election manifesto? what is it you're looking for? Deregulation. That tenet of neoliberalism. There is a law in Ireland by the National Transport Authority that if you're to become a taxi driver, you must have a taxi license.

So you have to be a registered taxi driver if you want to be a taxi driver. So anytime you order an Uber in Ireland, it's a taxi driver who shows up an actual registered taxi driver. Uber wrote Fina Gale's election manifesto because they wanted Fina Gale to change Irish law on their behalf so that anyone could become an Uber driver, like it is in America. In America, all you've got to do is download the fucking Uber app,

and now you're a taxi driver. Flip side of that, I mean, where is Uber's European corporate headquarters? Around the corner. I can walk there in 10 minutes. It's in Limerick City. Uber are here in Limerick City playing low corporation tax. Initially, when they arrived in 2015, maybe a bit earlier. I mean, look, I saw it with my own eyes. Place is fucked by a recession.

And then when Uber came in, you had people with jobs in the middle of the city and then you had cafes and restaurants opening up because of that. So that there's your double-edged blade under capitalism. The corporate headquarters comes in and then that stimulates the local economy. Is that the case now? Not as much, because there's a lot of people in Uber just working from home. I walk past it every single day. I don't see the same amount of people outside in the smoking area.

Two coffee shops that existed because of Uber workers, they're closed now. So that's the complexity of this. A multinational corporation comes to Fina Gale or Fianna Fawl and says, look, we're going to create jobs in this city that's fucked. But we want something back. On top of not paying tax, we want to change legislation. So to me, that looks like that's a government in the pocket of a multinational. corporation there.

If you're going to let them write your election fucking manifesto. And just one last thing while we're on the subject. Uber eats, deliveroo, just eat. They took a big hit this week in Europe. A big hit for those corporations but a big win for workers' rights

because new regulations were brought in. So those apps are part of what's called the gig economy. It's a business model that found a loophole to basically undercut workers' rights. Rights that people had fought and died for. If you're a delivery driver for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, JustEat, that's your job.

You're not actually an employee of those companies. You're self-implied and you're a contractor. That saves money for the corporation because it means there's no guaranteed minimum wage. There's no holiday pay, there's no sick pay, they're not contributing to PRSI, no protection against unfair dismissal. complete deregulation in the service of capital, right? This happens too with renting. There's some businesses will set up a model whereby if you're renting from them,

you're not actually a tenant, it's holiday letting, it's short-term letting. So now you don't have any rights that you should have as a tenant. So that model, the gig economy model, that it exploits people, it exploits people, and finds a loophole around workers. rights, protections, me, the corporation, my right to profit is more important than your health, your mental health, your social net. That's what it is. So this week the EU went to these big corporations and said, hold on a second. So if your company, you've got all these drivers delivering food for you and you say they're not employees, but your company is controls when they work,

how they work, when they're paid, you're monitoring their performance through algorithms, you can remove the access to their work when you want. I'm sorry, but you're behaving like an employer. You're behaving like an employer. So these are employees, and because they're employees, now they have workers' rights.

So that happened in the EU this week. That is new regulation that's brought in on gig economy apps. That's a victory for human beings, that's a victory for workers. that is a good thing. I'm not a delivery driver. What do I give a fuck? Why do I care about that?

Because the company that you work for, whatever that may be, they're looking at gig economy apps and going, look at those fuckers. Look what they're getting away with. Why can't I do that? Why can't I find a loophole

so that all my employees are now no longer employees but they're actually self-implied? If those companies can do it, then I should be able to do that too. So you better fucking believe they were trying to figure out how to do it and this legislation this is a win for all workers you see but look that story up look

that story up and look for the headlines see how it's being framed is it being framed as a victory for you for everybody for workers by the media is it fuck let's look at the first three results RTE two days ago new directive for delivery workers could see price rise joe dot ae your takeaway is about to get more expensive. Here's why. RTE again, why your takeaway is going to cost more, even after July. That there is what the social theorist, I think he was a fucking social theorist, Louis Althuser, that's what he would call the ideological state apparatus. I use Althuser a lot. Althuser argued that so capitalist society, it's fundamentally unfair. But we all go along with it and tow the line and don't question.

because of the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. Repressive state apparatus, police, courts, justice system, prisons, the army. These things exist not necessarily to protect people, but mostly to protect capital. You saw it last week, the Anne Devlin Community Centre, which is up in, I believe it's the liberties, I think it's the liberties up in Dublin. Anyway, there was a derelict building, perfectly usable. It had been derelict for many, many years. So community activists went into the building, which was not being used, wasn't being rented out, and decided to set up a community centre.

Very quickly they were evicted, not just by the Irish police, but by masked private security guards as the police stood back. Why did that happen so rapidly? Because in Ireland, property is more important. important than people. The rights of a landlord to keep a property derelict is more important than a community having a community centre and that would be enforced by the police and the law. Even though that doesn't seem very fair, doesn't it, that doesn't seem very nice. Who are they harming? It's a derelict property. That's the repressive state apparatus. Then you have the ideological

state apparatus and these apparatus maintain control through schools, universities, family, the church used to be one, and the media, the fucking media. And this shit works. Otherwise, everyone's da in the country would be out on the streets going, what do you mean? I'm paying $3,000 fucking 80 extra euros a year because of data centres. That message isn't widely communicated in the media.

The headlines I read out there, but a minute ago, they're an example of the ideological state apparatus. at us. Instead of framing it as a victory for all workers and workers' rights, it's framed as your takeaway is going to be more expensive. You see this anytime workers try and

organize collective bargaining, anytime workers go on fucking strike very often within corporate media, the messaging is you won't be able to get your train today because these greedy fucking workers want more. Instead of, why are the workers striking?

They'll address it, but it won't be the central narrative. The media in this case is parroting the neoliberal line, making it about the individual. Here's some alternative headlines. Delivery writers gain sick pay and holiday rights. Platforms, gig economy platforms are now required to contribute PRSI for workers. There's a lot of tax there for the country. workers to receive employment protections in landmark EU ruling

those are accurate headlines about the story no no the first three here's why your takeaway is about to get expensive and then you can go farther than that when you think of a gig economy takeaway driver operating on one of these apps that's shorthand for immigrant the vast majority of these Brazilians is a huge

huge amount of Brazilians, Colombians, it's overrepresented with South American people and Central American people. What is connoted through the messaging and what I see represented in the comments underneath the posts of these articles is it's not your average person going excellent. A win for workers including me because I'm a worker. The covert messaging and how it's operating is. Fuck's sake, everything's already expensive. Now my takeaway is going up because of these immigrants.

But look at the government's new hosepipe ban. Let's look at the headlines. Irish Times. What can't I do under a hosepipe ban? And how often are people fined are convicted? Irish Independent. This is the Irish Independence headline. Homeowners can report neighbours

or members of the public who break the six week hose pipe ban. Irish Mirror. Irish Water defends shop your neighbour, hosepipe ban hotline as ban set to go nationwide. The entire messaging is about getting pissed off with your next door neighbour in the hot weather. That's all the fucking media messaging. Here's some alternative headlines that are completely accurate.

These work perfectly as headlines. Why are households cutting water use while Ireland builds more data centres? Water restrictions for families, while AI infrastructure continues to expand. here's one. Government issues hosepipe ban. Questions grow over data centres water demand. Here's why data centers are causing your household bills

to rise by 380 euro. I mean, you can do it with the takeaways. Here's why your takeaways are, but here's why your takeaway is about to get more expensive. In a story about workers gaining rights? Fuck off. And like, it's not a grand conspiracy. I know these things work for clicks

I mean there's the other thing these headlines are being written for online consumption on platforms that are owned by billionaires that make money through fighting in the comments I mean making the hosepipe bam about ratting on your neighbour

because you know people are going to do it you know people are going to fucking do it in the heat little vendettas that's what neoliberalism done it turns it turns people against each other it makes everything

scarce. It makes people more hostile. I remember when Ireland was such a safe place, everyone was so kind. What's happened? We've lost our social net and that creates an environment of suspicion and competition rather than helpfulness and generosity.

Here's another shitty thing about neoliberalism, right? So neoliberalism being when public services are no longer run by the state but instead get handed to private companies. What happens is an essential infrastructure is given to a private company

and then when that doesn't work for them when it stops earning profit they either exit the market or need to be bailed out leaving everyone fucked here's some concrete examples most of them over in the UK because of the Thatcher the UK was fucked with neoliberal policies British Rail used to be nationalised a state company not run for profit

run to provide transport to the people privatized, given to privatized in the 1990s. Because it's privatized, not every train service was profitable. So some of those private companies collapsed. And then the government had to take those services back. Massive cost of the taxpayer. Not everything has to be run for profit. Something like a rail service, a public service,

could be run purely for the idea that this service exists to get people where they need to get. where they need to get instead of extracting profits from them and when it's run like that then it becomes about fucking transport but when it's not the lines that don't earn money get shut down and now you've got people going

fuck I've no way to get home that happened in Detroit in Detroit all the buses that used to be public service buses got privatized and the private companies just went those routes

there in the poor neighbourhoods where jobs are disappearing. These routes aren't earning us any money so let's just shut them down. And you had people in fucking Detroit having to walk eight hours to their very low paying job because they couldn't afford cars. That's the type of race to the bottom that we're talking about here. And it's why that's the recent EU legislation about gig economy workers. It's a good thing for fucking everyone. The takeaway going up is a very small price to pay.

the much larger price that you pay it's harder to see the cost of neoliberalism is something you feel multifaceted that you can't put your finger on it's just a general nostalgic feeling of things used to be better in the past didn't they and I don't know why make America great again give us back our blue passports reform the UK we might lose Uber over this

that's that's realistic Limerick could lose Uber over this ruling. I'm basing that on, so in 2021, so this is an EU ruling that's come in, right? But in 2021, Spain, Spain just said,

fuck it, this is wrong. Gig economy workers are actually employees and they have rights. So in 2021, Spain brought in rights for gig economy workers and then two months later, Deliveroo exited Spain. They left Spain. As they exited,

they claimed, that the law that wasn't a factor. But they said remaining in Spain would require too much investment compared but it's other markets, so they just got the fuck out. This isn't. We can't loophole and exploit workers anymore, so we're gone.

That might happen in Ireland now, because you've got Uber and Uber Eats. So Uber Eats might decide, fuck it. Ireland, no way. I'm not, no, we're not doing PRISI. We're not doing sick days. Fuck this.

let's just exit the market. We can't make the same profits anymore. So they leave and you might have difficulty getting takeaways. It won't be as easy as it was before. But remember I said they wrote Fiena Gale's 2016 election manifesto where they wanted to remove the regulations about who could and could not be a taxi driver?

That didn't change. Their lobbying was not successful. The taxi industry is still regulated under the National Transport Authority. So if Uber was the fuck off in the morning, you're still going to be able to get a taxi. It'll still be the same price. You just won't be using that app anymore.

If they'd have been successful, then that'd be quite disruptive. So the National Transport Authority Regulation protected the market there. And I hope Airbnb is next because that's a huge reason why people can't rent anymore. Because the apartments that should be available for people to become tent.

It's more profitable to run them as short-term lets or holiday homes. I've been banging this drum for a long time. Like I... I had a BBC series in 2019, another one half episode in 2018 called Blind by Undistrives the World. I think someone uploaded it on YouTube. You should be able to see it if you look for it. Where myself and a team of investigative reporters spent a year dissecting all of this stuff.

as a 2019 pre-pandemic canary in the coal mine type of business and unfortunately so much of it rang through and something I pointed out in that documentary and I'm going to point out again is I'm being critical of all this shit but at the same time I participate in it I need social media apps in order to work

I have to post on Instagram I order from Deliveroo I see the employment in Limerick City because Uber is here as a corporate headquarters and the cafes and the local cafes and

everything that are open as a result and if Uber goes which following what it did what Deliveroo did in Spain it very well might that is a nail in the coffin to the city centre of Limerick

because that's the system when the government moves towards away from public spending, away from building a social net, away from investing in infrastructure and handing everything over to these tech companies that our entire economy relies upon

whether or not a multinational tech corporation wants to pay very little tax here. You end up beholden. It's hard to get out of. So I'm going to come back next week with that podcast on salads. I did some serious research. It's about the,

Irish summer salad. It's about the salad that your mother makes when the weather is too hot, which I did. I explored that topic in 2020, I believe, but I need to update it. I listened back and I didn't go hard enough. I didn't interrogate it far enough, but I did this week in my research. So in 10 minutes time, the air conditioning stops working. So I'm going to sign off. And then I'm going to leave my office and go for a walk and go down to the Bardshit district while the sun sets and I'm going to bask in all those beautiful starlings and smell their shit.

If you want an update on the Bardshit district because we've been getting Bardshick District Tourism again this year, the council cut the trees. They cut the trees to make them smaller. So have the Starlings gone anywhere? No, they have not. They've been ghettoised into tiny trees

and I suppose that it has helped in a way, but at the expense of the Starlings, they're still taking shits. Loads and loads of shits. But the shit is not spread out on a large enough area on the Bard's Sit District, so it's being concentrated around the trunks of the trees. But the Starlings, I suspect, are in distress because they're all huddled together,

and that's what I'm hoping to get a squint at tonight. I haven't provided any context as to why I'm talking about Starling shit, but if you're not a steaming queva, if you're not a 10-foot deckling, you won't know the crack. The Starlings are back about two weeks. they've been doing loads of shits, it hasn't become an issue because the weather has been so hot.

So the shit is drying immediately. It's not stinking up the street and no one is slipping on it yet. So we won't know fully if the council's intervention was effective until it starts raining. And then you get that real slippy bird shit district where the smell awakens from the dung

and people crack their heads on the ground. So I'm going to get an earful of Starling's song and then cycle home by the river. In the meantime, rub a dog Wink at a worm Jinnia flick to a pine martin Dog bless