The Blindboy Podcast - What made things so difficult for Irish millenials?

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

I explore the symbolic death of the Celtic Tiger which culminated in a marsupial being given drugs in a dublin nightclub Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Drink from the tidal of the green bus to Dublin, you suntan dultons. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I hope everyone has had a charming week. My voice was fucked for last week's podcast. I have a swollen tonsil. An unexplained swollen tonsil that's making it difficult for me to pronounce consonants. It's slightly better this week. Hopefully it won't cause any issues. And if it does, I'll have to start talking like a 2FM DJ. Because if I force my voice like this,

guys, it's a lot easier to talk. When you speak in this way, it's so unnatural that you can't tell if I have a problem with my throat. Because the speech is so performative you have no frame of reference for it. The Jesuits. The Jesuits are coming back. He was beaten to death by the Jesuit monks. I'm still gonna do that podcast by the way. I'm gonna do that podcast about the history of radio voices. I'm actively researching it but I don't want to do it until until I have my hot take I don't want to just do a simple history of radio voices I'm still actively probing it so for this week's podcast I want to do

kind of a hot take exploration around certain themes last week I mentioned the Celtic Tiger and I mentioned Irish Celtic Tiger nightclubs and I want to speak about an incident this week which a lot of people don't remember. It's not remembered

but it's a very bizarre incident that happened and I consider this incident to be the moment the Celtic Tiger ended in Ireland. The Celtic Tiger was a period, an extreme economic boom that happened in Ireland from the mid 1990s up until the late 2000s. And I'm a child of the Celtic Tiger. And I remember the Celtic Tiger. Now the phrase Celtic Tiger was like kind of a joking laughing phrase that economists used about Ireland. A tiger economy was usually in reference to Asian economies in the 1960s and 1970s, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan,

these countries that rapidly expanded economically were known as tiger economies. So then when it happened, Ireland, in the mid-1990s, global economists started to call us the Celtic Tiger, because it was kind of seen as funny that Ireland was economically successful it was kind of seen as amusing because globally the Irish people were not seen as like business people or economically successful before we joined the EU Ireland would have been seen as a place full of farmers, drunk people and artists and revolutionaries. An eccentric mythologised land which commanded a great deal of goodwill

but not necessarily respect. The idea of Ireland being economically successful was funny, a bit like the Beverly Hillbillies. Do you remember the Beverly Hillbillies? It was this American comedy about these very, very poor hillbillies from the southern states of America who suddenly get wealthy and find themselves living in Beverly Hills. That's kind of how the world reacted when they found out that Ireland's economy was booming. They called us the Celtic Tiger. It was funny. It was amusing. It was ironic. It was the way that established countries laugh at the nouveau riche. So they called us the Celtic Tiger.

And then we called ourselves the Celtic Tiger. Because as well well we were also kind of shocked that Ireland had a booming economy. This was very very new. Most of our remembered history is being colonized by Britain. 1990 was only 140 years after the fucking famine. Post-independence in the free state of Ireland was very, very poor with nothing but unemployment and emigration. Like my father was born in the 1930s in rural Cork. My dad grew up in what you'd call a developing country, a third world country. And his generation just emigrated. And same with the generation after that, they just emigrated and same with the generation after that they just

emigrated like Ireland never had baby boomers the generation that was born into economic prosperity immediately after world war ii there was no boom after world war ii in Ireland it was just the same old shit people emigrated my brothers were born in the 60s and the 70s. Their generation just fucking emigrated too. But if you were born in like 1973 to 1979, then you got to experience the Celtic Tiger as an adult. So the Celtic Tiger generation, who are now approaching their 50s, I'm guessing, lived in a time of great economic prosperity and Ireland had never experienced this and we didn't know what to do with it

and things got very very silly like I was a kid but I remember ridiculous things like there was a block of flats in Limerick and every week the owner of the block of flats used to arrive in his helicopter to collect the rent. There was just money everywhere, and even when I was in school. Lads used to leave school at 16 just to get a job in Dell.

Dell was this massive factory in Limerick. All of the Dell computers in the 2000s for all of Europe and the world were being made in Limerick, and they were just throwing out jobs, well-paid jobs and people used to leave school and work in Dell and do 16-hour shifts and earn mad amounts of money and people in trades as well. If you were a bricklayer, if you were a welder, back in the Celtic Tiger, if you were doing one of these jobs, you became seriously, seriously wealthy. And it was expressed all around you as this perpetual sense of progress, consistent and continual progress. There was cranes and buildings everywhere,

brand new cars. During the Celtic Tiger, got a brand new car each year and I remember this because of the bruises on my arm. I remember walking to school just after Christmas holidays in early January and when we used to walk to school the game used to be if you saw a car with a brand new reg you got to punch your friend into the arm and I remember it from 96, 97, 98, 99 each year you'd get punched into the arm more in early January because people were just going straight into the car dealerships and buying a brand new fucking car and trading in the old one. By the time it got to 2000, we just stopped playing the game. And for me, how the Celtic Tiger was most expressed

was the Celtic Tiger nightclub. This is what I alluded to last week. Every town and city in Ireland had massive nightclubs that were full every day of the week. I can't remember the year, might have been about 2004, 2005, but like you could have huge international DJs

just gigging in the local Limerick nightclub on a Wednesday night. Like I remember like Deadmau5, who was fucking huge, just like played a nightclub in Limerick on a Thursday night. They flew him in on a private jet and paid him a quarter of a million euros and just said, here, play Limerick on a Thursday night. They flew him in on a private jet and paid him a quarter

of a million euros and just said here play Limerick on a Thursday night. This is how much money we have. We're going to make it back in a week. It was non-stop full nightclubs every day of the week from six in the evening until two in the morning and that was it. That was a given. I was too young to go up to Dublin but I have to assume Dublin was even madder. Like you'd Tuesday night a packed nightclub with maybe 2000 people and chocolate fountains and fire breathing dancers

as a given. And loads of strip clubs. And you might see celebrities hanging around Limerick. Your man Hughie from the Fun Loving Criminals be walking down the road with a fucking breakfast roll on a Wednesday morning and Dane Powers you'd see Dane Powers walking up O'Connell Street.

It's not fucking Diana Ross but you get my point. Fucking Kelis. I saw Kelis in Limerick. She just came to Limerick to hang out. Kelis. I'm wearing my school bag and there's Kelis. So I suppose what I could compare it to is for a very, very brief period in the late 90s and 2000s, Ireland was a little bit like how Dubai is now.

Like not to the scale of Dubai, but what I mean is there was so much cash in Ireland There was so much cash in Ireland that there was a large incentive for internationally famous people to just come here and hang out. Or even get paid 50 grand just to be in a nightclub. Like a really shit Dubai. But it was quite surreal. And of course the ultimate expression of Celtic Tiger irrationality. I mentioned this before on a previous podcast I believe. But the drink of choice was a shot called Goldschlager. You'd have people slamming down 200 fucking euros

onto the bar top buying everybody shots of Goldschlager and Goldschlager was a drink that contained flakes of gold and Irish people used to think if they drank Goldschlager that the flakes of gold in the drink would slit the insides of their throats and they'd get drunk quicker and that was the maddening drink of the Celtic Tiger and of course then in Limerick there was the the double edge to that blade

because with that money there was obviously a huge market for drugs and with drugs then came gangs so one of the reasons Limerick has such an unfair reputation for being a dangerous, violent place is because for a few years during the Celtic Tiger there was a gang war legitimately a pretty bad gang war between five or six gangs.

And lots and lots of shootings. And lots of murders. There was like three people murdered in one weekend. In separate unrelated incidents. Which when I look back now. That's a bit mad. In a city of a hundred thousand people. But having said that.

It's twenty years on. And Limerick is not like that and Limerick is not like that. Limerick is not like that at all. It's a very, very safe place. And even back then, you're talking about maybe only 300 gang members in the whole city, but all at war, so it made the headlines and made Limerick appear to be quite a dangerous place. But what I'm getting at is that the period of the Celtic Tiger was fucking mad. And the farther we get from it, the more surreal I realise it was. Like Limerick is really only recovering now.

Like it's a strange feeling to spend my childhood in a city that was bustling and busy and prosperous. and busy and prosperous and then to suddenly see that end overnight and become empty from about 2010 onwards like I'll never forget Christmas 2011 being in the main street O'Connell Street in Limerick and this was Christmas week which for most of my childhood

you could barely walk in the city because there were so many people. But Christmas week 2011, it was fucking empty. Because so many young people had emigrated and anyone who was left just simply didn't have the money to be out doing Christmas shopping. And I remember the eeriness of not hearing any cars at like three o'clock in the middle of town on Christmas week and all I heard was the beeping of traffic lights with no traffic and no pedestrians and all around was like abandoned shopping centres or huge multi-storey car parks that were half built

and the developers went bankrupt and they couldn't even afford to take the cranes out so it's a strange feeling to grow up somewhere prosperous and then see it die and only recently the past couple of years has life started returning to Limerick City Centre in particular this summer. Limerick City Centre at the moment is fantastic loads of restaurants, outdoor seating, people enjoying it. Wonderful to see. This weekend was magnificent.

But one of the shittiest things about the Celtic Tiger, especially for my age group, for millennials. So I was a child and a teenager throughout the Celtic Tiger. So I got to see it, but I never got to participate in it. It was just this thing that was happening around me and also collectively Ireland because we'd never had this prosperity before Irish people just assumed that this was going to continue like this forever. When I was like 14, 15 my older brothers who would have been teenagers in the 80s like they used to tell me about

emigration and the dole they'd say wow aren't you so lucky that you or none of your friends are ever going to have to emigrate or go on the dole you're in the Celtic Tiger Irish people just thought that these were things of the past that this was in Ireland's past that it would never return

but the other shitty thing that the Celtic Tiger did, specifically to people in my age group, is it gave us deeply unrealistic expectations of where we should be in 10 years, and then it was suddenly stripped away. So when I was 16, the expectation during the Celtic Tiger

of where I should be when I was 26 was the average 26- 26 year old at that point should be on their first house. No word of a lie. During the late 90s and the 2000s Irish people were getting mortgages at about the ages of 25-26. The banks were just handing out mortgages to whoever got them and people weren't thinking about saving. It was just like, yeah, a mortgage. Fine, I'll take that. And people in their 20s, when they were being given these mortgages,

the banks weren't like, here's your home for life. It was like, oh, you're 25. Yeah, this is just your first little house. You'll pay off this mortgage really quickly. And then maybe when you're looking at your 30s, then you'll get your real house, your big one. And then you'll have two houses and two mortgages and you'll be able to pay them both off. No problem, because everything's going to be brilliant forever. So growing up as a teenager in the Celtic Tiger and not just me everyone else who was my age like if you were born in the 80s or the early 90s

and you remember this shit that was the fucking expectation that you had in your 20s by your mid-20s you're going to have an incredibly well-paying secure career job and you will be on your first house this was drilled into us as the parameters of successful adulthood. Also what was drilled into us was once you become 18 you are a fucking adult. That's it. 18 years of age get the fuck out of your ma's house. Get into the workforce. When I was in secondary school there was people who just

couldn't wait. They were 16 years of age. 16 was the legal age that you could start working. So they just left school at 16 and went straight into a really well-paying job up in Dell computers or working as a welder or a bricklayer. And I'd be in fifth year of school, fucking 16 years of age. And my 16 year old friend drives past me in a brand new Honda Civic. And he's got a full time job and a brand new mobile phone and an apartment in town that he rents out by himself. The security and trappings of adulthood at the age of 16 or 17. So that was actually quite a lot of pressure. Like I went to college instead. I went to art college at the tail end of the Celtic Tiger. But if you were in college,

and this is nuts, during the Celtic Tiger, if you went to college, you were kind of made to feel like a bit of a loser because your friends who aren't in college are driving brand new cars and earning 1500 quid a week people thinking about mortgages at the age of 22 and being able to walk into a fucking into a bank and getting them it was a lot of pressure and that for me too that was a major contributing factor to the extreme anxiety that I experienced around that time. Because one of the themes of my anxiety when I was like 18 or 19 was, I don't feel like an adult. I'm scared to be a fully autonomous adult with a car and a job and an apartment. That's terrifying. I don't feel capable of that. And within the context of the time, society was calling me a failure for not doing it.

And of course, I look back now too and I go, Jesus, I was autistic as well, but I didn't know it. And autistic people, especially when they're teenagers or early adults, tend to be a little bit more emotionally immature than their peers because navigating the social fabric is difficult. But that was the deal during the Celtic Tiger. You hit 18 and you're a fucking adult. And the reason that you're an adult is because the trappings of adulthood are actually available to you at 18 if you want them. You can have a job and a car and an apartment and get it all really quickly. No problem. Straight out of school. But one of the shit things about being a millennial. So if you're a millennial, that means job and a car and an apartment and get it all really quickly no problem straight out of school

but one of the shit things about being a millennial so if you're a millennial that means that you're between the ages of 27 and 40 i think it is so if you're right now in 2022 between 27 and 40 you're a millennial and that means your earliest years you were brought up around the conditions and expectations of the Celtic Tiger but your adulthood was spent in the recession. It means that we have been primed to consider ourselves to be failures. We were conditioned and told that by your mid-20s you must have a career and you must have your first fucking mortgage. Did anyone do that? Not really. Maybe if you became a surgeon or something. Here's the statistics. In Ireland, 60% of people born in the 1960s and early 1970s own a home by the age of 30. 30% of people born

in the 1980s own a home by the age of 30. All of this is outside of our control. The recession was not your fucking fault if you were born in the 80s or the early 90s. But the Celtic Tiger set us up for a set of expectations that we could never meet so we collectively feel like we failed. And this isn't just Ireland.

This is most millennials who experienced the great recession what are the fucking home ownership statistics for generation z we'll say which are people aged 27 and younger I think I couldn't find even find home ownership statistics but in 2020 70 percent of people under the age of 30 in Ireland still live with their parents. And this is too why I think when you take the notion of adulthood, like earlier there I said when I was a teenager in the Celtic Tiger, when you were 18, you're a fucking adult.

That's it. Society, you are an adult. But then we had to change that. adult, that's it, society, you are an adult. But then we had to change that. Like millennials now and the oldest millennials are 40 years of age. In the media, millennials are still referred to as young people. Like if you've been looking at the news during the week, you saw that story about the Finnish prime minister. She's 36 years of age and she went out and had a lot of crack at the weekend. She had a party and had a laugh and videos of it leaked. That's all that happened.

But she's 36. What I found astonishing was the media were referring to her as a young person. 15 years ago, a 36 year old would not be referred to as a young person in the media. But as a society, we've had to infantilize millennials. Like I still get phone calls from radio and TV saying, blind boy, will you come on and speak about what it's like for young people in Ireland? And I'm like, I'm in my thirties, lads. I'm not young people. What the fuck? Why would I come on speaking about young people? And no one can give a solid fucking answer. the fact is is as a

society we have to call millennials young people because if we don't we have to collectively ask the question of oh fuck there's a bunch of people here in their 30s and 40s who don't have the trappings and security of adulthood they don't have careers they don't have property they haven't been able to get pensions they're're all living together, closely, in rented accommodation like they're 22. Is this a failed society? And the powers that be know that they're doing this. And I'll give you a prime example. We've had a huge scandal that's unfolding in Ireland

as we speak about a politician called Robert Troy in Ireland who is our Minister for State. Now I've got to be careful how I say this because he's being quite litigious. So this politician is a landlord of multiple properties and from what I've read in the papers it would appear that he's been quite forgetful and careless in declaring his position as a landlord of multiple properties. And some people are wondering if his position as Minister of State and also being a landlord of multiple properties actually means it's a conflict of interests. Because also the thing is, is that he's Minister for State. So his actual job encompasses overseeing how companies in Ireland adhere to their legal obligations. So that they are not careless or forgetful.

And if he continues as a minister, then that sends the signal to every business in Ireland that you're allowed to be careless and forgetful. So it's a bit like a fireman in a petrol station lighting a cigarette in each hand on a hot, dry day with a car boot full of fireworks. That was hyperbole and satire. You can't sue me for that. But this politician, Robert Troy, he needs to fucking resign. This man needs to resign immediately. I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think he's going to get pressure from his party Fianna Fáil to resign because a load of our politicians are landlords and if he resigns that sets a precedent and now we can look into all the

properties of all the politicians that are landlords and we can see if all of them have been careless or forgetful about their properties that they're landlords of. And if they have, then they would have to resign too. But anyway, this Irish politician, our Minister for State, Robert Troy, if you go to his website, one of the first things it says in the website is as a young person, you were born in 1982, Robert. You're 40. website is as a young person you were born in 1982 Robert you're 40 you're not a young person also this is how you know Robert Troy isn't a young person when you when you go to his website on the right hand side he has an automated twitter feed which live

updates anytime he's getting mentioned so when you his website, it's just a bunch of tweets listing out the reasons why he needs to resign. And that's old man shit, Robert. That's an elderly taxi driver with giant text messages on his phone so he can see it with his glasses on. A young person wouldn't have shitloads of tweets calling for them to resign on the landing page of their own website. They'd be more technologically astute than that. You're 40, Robert. I'd wager that you've laughed heartily at a passive-aggressive minions meme on a Facebook page. So now we have 40-year-old politicians who are identifying as young people.

A multi-property landlord minister for state so the infantilization of millennials is deliberate and systemic because it's a hell of a lot easier to say that young people don't have pensions young people don't own property young people can't get mortgages young people are living with their parents but I started the podcast saying I want to interrogate the moment that the Celtic Tiger ended and for me the moment the Celtic Tiger ended

begins with the drugging and possible sexual assault of a marsupial here's a sample of a news report from October 2010. A party prank that's provoked outrage. Last Saturday during a 30th birthday celebration in West Dublin, an animal believed to be a kangaroo was released onto the dance floor. The theme tune to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was played in the background as a man handled and swung the animal. The Clarion Hotel said their staff believed it was a large dog and called security to remove it.

But by the time they arrived, the animal had disappeared. Garthy say they're investigating reports that the animal died following the incident. So that was a very dark incident that happened in October 2010. It's a news story that has been wiped from the public consciousness. I remember when it happened, it was big news for about two days.

That was the exact moment the Celtic Tiger died. But it wasn't a tiger that died. It was a wallaby. There was a wallaby. There was a 30th birthday party in Dublin in October 2010. And somehow, the lads who were running the party managed to get their hands on a wallaby. It wasn't a kangaroo, it was a wallaby.

A wallaby is like a small, it's a marsupial, very similar to a kangaroo. They're from Australia. I think New Zealand have them as well. But a fucking wallaby in Dublin in a nightclub. And I remember at the time it represented everything that was idiotic and excessive and drug-fueled and drink-fueled about the Celtic tiger. Someone took shitty footage of it on a gammy 2010 phone.

It was put onto YouTube I believe. It was very definitely a grainy image of a load of Celtic Tiger looking men in bootcut jeans and pink shirts hugging and dancing with a poor little wallaby and it was widely believed at the time and most likely what happened it it was never conclusive the wallaby appeared to have been given either ecstasy or cocaine i can't find any evidence online of this now but i remember from the time there was also a rumor that

someone had like sexually assaulted the wallaby or inserted something into the wallaby and it died and the body of the wallaby was never recovered we never got a solid answer people were very angry at the time because this is a horrendous way to treat an animal. Everyone was just going, what the fuck are you doing with a wallaby? Where the fuck did you get a wallaby? The fuck is there a wallaby doing inside the nightclub? The story disappeared because three weeks later, that's when the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, came to Ireland and Europe gave us a rescue package, bailed out our banks that was a few weeks later that's when the recession really started that's when that's when after November 2010 is

when I started to see Ireland disintegrate when Ireland became empty when 300,000 young people emigrated in one year so we all forgot about what happened to the wallaby at that party. But the night that wallaby died, because someone gave it ecstasy, was the night the Celtic tiger died. That was the symbolic moment, because it echoed and represented everything that was excessive and disgusting and irresponsible about Celtic tiger excesses.

Now I'd like to investigate more about this wallaby. Where did the wallaby come from? And the history of wallabies in Ireland. I'm going to do that after the ocarina pause. Right now we're going to have the ocarina pause. I don't have my ocarina because I'm in my office at the moment. But I do have my Puerto Rican guiro.

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Catch me on Twitch on Thursday nights. Twitch.tv forward slash TheBlindBoyPodcast. I'm on Twitch every Thursday, writing songs to the events of a video game. It's wonderful, Craig. So back to the moment the Celtic Tiger died, when a wallaby died at a 30th birthday party in Dublin in October 2010. The fuck was a four-foot marsupial doing at a 30th birthday party

in a nightclub in a hotel in Dublin? How did that happen? Why did that happen? Was anyone brought to justice? The person whose 30th birthday it was is now 42 years of age. Are you listening to this podcast? Is everyone sworn to secrecy? Whether the Wallaby died, whether the Wallaby was given drugs, whether the Wallaby was sexually assaulted,

we don't know because so many of the reports from the time are inconclusive at the time the 30 year old man whose birthday it was was interviewed and asked the fuck went on his quote was to be honest i didn't have a clue it was coming i wasn't happy with it coming in because I thought the party would have been cancelled. It came in and it went back out and I've no idea where it went or where it came from. The police came down and said the thing was on drugs and everything but no way was it after taking ecstasy and drinking. Also it says in the video footage of the incident which was shown on RT News last night a man can be seen pretending to perform a sex act on the terrified animal.

Gardie and the DSPCA are still trying to establish what happened to the animal afterwards following reports that it had died. From what I can tell, the whole thing seemed to happen so very quickly that no one really knows how it ended. Like a quote from the hotel manager at the time.

It says, the duty manager became suspicious when he noticed the commotion around the dance floor at around 11pm. He actually had to climb up onto the stage to look in. And when he looked in he noticed the box and out of it came what he described as something like a large dog. But by the time he got down through the crowd the animal and the box were gone. We have no idea where it came in or how it left. This is where it gets into a bit of a weird conspiracy. So all the information that I have

I'm taking from legitimate news sources from the time. I'm not taking it from internet forums stuff that was published in the media. The biggest culprit of you know where the fuck did a wallaby come from? How did a wallaby get into a nightclub? Is 500 metres from where the hotel was, there was a circus called the Australian Super Circus Sydney,

which had wallabies. So that's the number one suspect, obviously. If there's a fucking circus 500 meters from the nightclub that has wallabies that's the first place you're going to start looking. A report from Trinity News in November 2010 says the animal was brought into the party either in a box or on a leash and by one account it was brought in the first place because Australian super circus Sydney had no monkeys. So apparently the lads at this party wanted to rent a monkey from this circus. The circus didn't have any monkeys so they said would you like a wallaby

instead? Allegedly. The owner of this circus Alexander Shawl who I don't think is an Irish person was interviewed at the time and he denied everything. He insisted that both of his wallabies are alive and well and he would never let them go to a nightclub. He even went down to Liveline to talk to Joe Duffy about it. You know because it does look pretty obvious if you've got a fucking wallaby 500 meters from the event that you might have given the wallaby but he said no. He says the animal it might have actually been a man in a kangaroo suit. And his actual quote is, you know how Irish people drink. They can see anything.

So he intimated, despite video evidence, that what was at the party was not a wallaby, but in fact a man dressed up as a wallaby. But the Irish were so drunk that they couldn't tell the difference between a wallaby and a man in a wallaby suit. I've seen the video, so if it is a human in a wallaby suit, it's a child in a wallaby suit, because it was very wallaby sized. Now, suspicion was also raised about this Shull fella who was running the circus, because his brother Martin at the time was actually on trial in England for drugging two dogs

and Alexander Shull himself in Antrim in 2007 an elephant that he had died mysteriously and was incinerated before the police could examine the body and then finally Alexander Shull's wife Yvette came in

and she insisted that the wallaby incident was actually an attempt by animal rights activists going one step further that animal rights activists had dressed a human up as a wallaby and then this human in a wallaby costume got into the nightclub and all the Irish were so drunk that they thought the human in a wallaby costume was an actual wallaby. So no one really knows. But the intimation that I'm seeing from the news reports at the time is this fella who was running this Sydney circus thing was renting out animals to people in nightclubs to have a laugh with them. Which was not a common sight during the Celtic Tiger era

but I remember exotic animals in nightclubs in particular snakes. You'd often have a Celtic Tiger nightclub and you'd have a dancer with a snake which again that's pretty shitty it's a fucking snake. Snakes aren't supposed to be in nightclubs and I imagine a snake is pretty stressed out

if it's in a nightclub. In fact I remember a story at the time when I was describing the excesses of Limerick City during the Celtic Tiger. We had like three or four strip clubs which is mad to think of and there was one bar beside underneath a strip club. It was a bar called the high stool in limerick which was a wonderful bar where if you had a band there was like in the 2000s there were lots of teenagers with bands and you could go to the high stool and you could have three gigs a night of just teenagers with fucking guitars and drums and it was magnificent like that was one of the brilliant things about the Celtic Tiger actually. Because there were so many places open and so much money going around, not everywhere had to earn a profit. So you did have a couple of venues around town that just gave a space for bands to perform.

And the two main places in Limerick were Riddler's, which is now Pharmacia, and the Highstool. And I used to be going in there when I was in school and you could have like just a group of people you know who are also in school who want to have a go at having a band and it's like there's a stage get up play it's fine and you could have a bunch of teenagers in there just drinking my waddy and it was quite a wonderful creative scene but above the high stool was a strip club anyway one night this was about 2004 one night one of the strippers had a giant python as part of her act and whatever happened she lost the python this giant python had managed to slither in between the walls or underneath a floorboard but

the strip club upstairs had lost the python then like a week later downstairs in the high stool there's all these teenagers with their new metal bands and this fucking giant snake appears out of nowhere and everyone starts freaking out

and screaming and the whole building is evacuated and no one can understand what is a 13 foot python in a bar. I wasn't there for that but I remember that being a story at the time. But yes, exotic animals in nightclubs during the Celtic Tiger was a thing. Quite a shameful thing because that's animal cruelty that's animal abuse. So that's where the tale ends.

I can't I can't find out if the wallaby died. I can't find out conclusively if the wallaby was on ecstasy or cocaine or if the wallaby was sexually abused. Because the story died. It disappeared very suddenly. Everyone lost

interest. Because that's when the economy collapsed. That's when the IMF came to Ireland. And that became the big news. So the Celtic Tiger didn't die. The Wallaby died. That was the symbol of the end of the Celtic Tiger. But surely some of you remember that.

That story has been wiped from our cultural memory. Completely gone because of the shock of the recession. So if anyone remembers that story or if anyone was there on the night, all I want to know really is if the Wallaby died. I'd like to know at least that some poor fucking Wallaby didn't get a heart attack from yolks. I'd like to know that that didn't happen and it was just a rumour that spread around on the dance floor. I thought I'd arrived at a conclusion two years ago when a very strange headline appeared in Irish newspapers in May 2020 at the height of the pandemic.

The corpse of a wallaby washed up on a beach in Dublin. And I saw it and I went, what the fuck? Another dead wallaby in Dublin? Ten years? Ten years to the date of that wallaby dying of ecstasy, what the fuck? Another dead wallaby in Dublin? 10 years? 10 years to the date of that wallaby dying of ecstasy? What the fuck is going on here in Ireland?

What's this about? So in May 2020, the start of the pandemic, people were walking early on the beach in Malahide in Dublin and came across the rotted corpse of a wallaby. Now a wallaby, if you don't know, they're like very small kangaroos. They're quite cute. They're about four feet tall.

They kind of look like gigantic rabbits in a way. They're marsupials, which means they have a little pouch where they carry around their young. They're indigenous to Australia and New Guinea. Why is there a dead wallaby on a beach in May 2020 in Dublin? where they carry around their young. They're indigenous to Australia and New Guinea. Why is there a dead wallaby on a beach in May 2020 in Dublin? Just off the coast of Dublin is this very small island called Lambay Island. It's tiny. It's an island in the Irish Sea, so it's between Dublin and England. Now this little Irish island is quite um historically significant

like in the first century I think it was a group of Roman refugees from Roman Britain settled on the island which is the closest the Romans ever came to Ireland. In the early medieval period there was a quarry there for stone axes. St Columba set up a fucking monastery there in the 500s. But today Lambay Island off the coast of Dublin has the largest population of wallabies outside of Australia. There's hundreds of wallabies. These tiny little kangaroos. Just fucking living on this island off Dublin. Wild.

And that's why that wallaby corpse washed up on the Malahide beach in Dublin in 2020. They reckon some little wallaby on Lambay Island accidentally jumped off a cliff and drowned and then washed up in Dublin. And it's not related in any way to the wallaby who died from taking ecstasy in that nightclub. So Lambay Island was purchased by the Baring family, which are like this international German-British banking family. Unbelievably wealthy.

And they bought this little island off Dublin. And sometime in the 1950s, Cecil Baring, who was living on Lambay Island, he's just like, I love animals, I love wildlife, I'm filthy rich, I have an island. I'm just going to put a couple of wallabies here because I like the look of them. So he did and he reared them. But then the population grew and grew and grew. And the wallabies are happy as fuck.

They can't swim, so they're no threat to Ireland. And there's just hundreds of wallabies on this tiny little island near Dublin. And it's actually become quite practical because since the 1970s, Dublin Zoo has got wallabies. But sometimes the wallabies have too many children and they don't know what to do with them. So Dublin Zoo just gets excess wallabies and fucks them onto this island and they live there undisturbed, wild and what I've started to do when I'm especially bored

is I go onto Google Maps and I look at Lambay Island and I zoom in really, really close and I try and find wallabies in the grass from a satellite and Google Maps so fair play to the wallabies and also grass from a satellite and Google Maps. So fair play to the wallabies. And also I think I mentioned earlier I said that wallabies were native to New Zealand. They're not. Humans brought wallabies from Australia to New Zealand and now wallabies

in New Zealand are an invasive species that are causing quite a few problems. But that's how the Celtic Tiger died. The supposed death of a little wallaby in a nightclub who may or may not have taken ecstasy. And if anyone knows any more about that story or has inside information let me know because I'm very curious about it. Or even if a journalist wants to pick it up once again. Why not?

I understand the recession and the IMF coming into Ireland was massive news. But that story just died. No one followed it up. We don't know what happened. Someone needs to find that out. Until next week. Rub a dog. Hug your mother.

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