Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast The Irish Government is in the pocket of Big Tech and Data Centres About this episode 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 https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 10,226 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:34 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
1:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Insert your head in the bent hen's rectum, you sweltering Emmetts. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, a steaming cuiva, a 10-foot Declan, you know the crack. As you 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 gonna last. It's been going for about six days and it's gonna last for another 10 or 12, which is rare. We rarely get almost a fortnight of sustained, dry sunny weather.
1:49 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 3:00 PM because it's lashing rain. And then maybe hailstones in the evening just for the crack with a bit of sun at the end. And so much of our small talk and conversation is about the weather. Like, I remember a couple of years ago, I was doing... 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.
2:33 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 fifteen 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 Catholicism,
3:04 Blindboy Boatclub? which defined a huge part of our culture up until maybe ten 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 eight hundred years of colonisation plays its part. But even five hundred years before any colonisation,
3:42 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 fifth and sixth centuries and seventh 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 it give you, Saint Kevin?
4:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Saint Kevin of Glendalach, lived, we'll say the year 500. He was a monk, he was a hermit, lived up in Glendalach in Wicklow.
4:37 Blindboy Boatclub? This area is known as the Garden of Ireland. If you were to go to Glendalach now, on a sunny day like this, you'd have a spiritual experience because it's, it's so beautiful. It's, 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 bard song 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.
5:20 Blindboy Boatclub? So there's a perfect symmetry to everything. And when you're on the banks of that shallow, crystal mirror 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. That's the feeling you get when you go to Glendalach. It's so beautiful.
6:03 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 this is, 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 Glendalach 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.
6:48 Blindboy Boatclub? 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
7:31 Blindboy Boatclub? abilities of a fucking goat. That hole is called St. Kevin's Bed, because that's where he lived.
7:38 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 hegeographies, 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 hole 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 hole. Now, really, he's just an autistic kid. That's, he was, he's an autistic
8:23 Blindboy Boatclub? kid who's obsessed with Kurt Cobain, and he wants to dress like Kurt Cobain and live like Kurt Cobain, and all he wants to talk about is Kurt Cobain and listen to Nirvana's music. Except Kurt Cobain 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,
9:05 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 neurodivergent, becomes hyper fixated on this. He goes, well, fucking Christ is like Kurt Cobain. He's the best in the whole world. I'm gonna live in a mountain and try and experience the crucifixion. Except it's not gonna be someone whipping me or nailing me to a cross. I'm gonna let nature do that to me. I won't eat, I won't sleep, and I'm gonna get battered by sleet and hailstones. And don't bother trying to tell me to come down because this is my hyper fixation. There's nothing else going on. It's the 500s. I'm actually meeting the unique needs of my nervous system up here. Fuck off.
9:49 Blindboy Boatclub? 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.
10:14 Blindboy Boatclub? Which I love. The otter robbed his nirvana CD and fucked it into the, 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 Donegal, 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 Donegal, just to go into this miserable hole and visit hell,
10:56 Blindboy Boatclub? in the same way that, I dunno, Mark Zuckerberg today might go into the jungles of Peru and do ayahuasca. But one of the, one of the reasons I think that Ireland gravitated towards this particular self punishment, self mortification, having shame or suspicion around enjoying anything, it's cause 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 gonna 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.
11:36 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 plate. 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
12:17 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 gonna make sense to those people. The other thing too, 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
13:02 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 parfums 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
13:45 Blindboy Boatclub? 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, 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 Dalriata. 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.
14:23 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 Ischgabaha, the water of life, whiskey. And they would have achieved a level of shitfaced 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, in some of the old texts from the 8th or 9th century, no later, about the 11th century.
15:06 Blindboy Boatclub? In the marginalia, you've got the monks talking about how hungover 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 the 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 gonna come in about two weeks' time. So we find comfort in misery, in good old predictable grey misery.
15:49 Blindboy Boatclub? This morning, the government has issued a hosepipe 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 hosepipe to conserve water. And they're also encouraging people to rat out their neighbours. If you see a neighbour, tell on them and the neighbour can be fined up to 5,000 euros 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 on the environmental impact of artificial intelligence on the world.
16:30 Blindboy Boatclub? And in this report, June 2026, 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.
17:11 Blindboy Boatclub? So Ireland, 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 centres. They're flocking here, they create very little jobs. The UN report showed that data centres in Ireland use 21% of our electricity. Compared to 4% in the US and 1% in China. So data centres are using 21% of our electricity?
17:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And 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.
18:32 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 employing a lot of people, that belongs to a billionaire, a multi-multi-billionaire.
19:17 Blindboy Boatclub? That's costing you personally 360 euros on your electricity bill.
19:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Electricity prices in Ireland are forty percent above the EU average. The average Irish household electricity bill, about fourteen hundred euros a year. About four hundred euros of that is caused by fucking data centers. Now, my podcast wouldn't exist without data centers. You're, you're, 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, facilitated by Ireland over the past twenty five years. But just, there's the figures for you, let's.
20:07 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, Elon Musk owns Twitter, Twitter is now a racism machine. This is all deliberate. I mean, the, the next, if, 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 onto marginalized people, tell them about data centers. Tell them that data centers are costing them three hundred and sixty euros a year on their electricity bills. Data centers in Ireland, they're gonna grow by thirty percent by twenty thirty. There's eighty two in operation, there's fourteen more being built right now.
20:48 Blindboy Boatclub? There's, there's a lot of misinformation out there around the climate. So unfortunately, it's, it's hard to get the average person to give a shit about climate change, to care about biodiversity, climate collapse. I 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, the effort to, to use imagination to understand what's going on and therefore to care.
21:28 Blindboy Boatclub? And then you're also fighting well-funded disinformation, like even around solar panels. If, 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 solder panels on their roofs and I've seen their fucking bills, especially people who have solder panels and a battery. Their yearly bills are being reduced by eighty to ninety percent. 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 centres as well. What do I give a fuck about a, what is it, a warehouse full of computers? Why do I care about that?
22:11 Blindboy Boatclub? The extra three hundred and sixty 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 who 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 one thousand pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI over in America have shown that the FBI now have started to move their focus towards people who are getting angry with data centres. That is being perceived as the new quote-unquote terrorists to watch out for.
22:54 Blindboy Boatclub? It follows Donald Trump, which I believe was February, his National Security Presidential Memo VII, 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 twenty thirty, vandalising a data centre will be considered terrorism and people will be charged under with terrorism offences. Like you're seeing with the anti-genocide protesters who are... Vandalizing warehouses of drones. The text in the DHS report, the actual text is,
23:39 Blindboy Boatclub? "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, it's so ironic that the billionaires, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, are funding all this anti-climate disinformation and funding disinformation that shifts anger towards immigrants. The other thing that data centers do, specifically in Ireland,
24:23 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 McGrath, 2024, which is before the AI boom. So first off, data centers use, the 57% of the water
25:07 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 do 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 Meath in Clones, which belongs to Meta, Facebook, and this
25:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Data centre uses more water than any other data centre in the world. That data centre 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 centres saying, but what about the jobs? That's why we had 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 centre, 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.
26:26 Blindboy Boatclub? So this week, there's a heatwave, there's a shortage of drinkable, drinkable water. So the government has instated a hosepipe ban, where they're encouraging people to rat their neighbours out, where you can be fined 5,000 euro. Surely it's the, the data centres, why is the government not going to the data centres, to the big corporations and saying, the people here need, need access to their water? The, the human beings need access to water during the heatwave. 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.
27:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Neoliberalism turns people against each other. When public services become privatized and run for profit, they become scarce and people become a little bit meaner. I mean, housing is fully financialized 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 centres are costing each individual person 380 euros a year on their electricity bill?
27:55 Blindboy Boatclub? The cheek of the government to talk about a fucking hosepipe ban and rat your neighbour out? Instead of asking, how should society organise?
28:05 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 heatwave. 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 a 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.
28:47 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 beholden and in the pockets of the big tech companies that don't pay tax in this country, that avoid tax in this country. Now, 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've, I, I did a podcast on salads in, in 2020.
29:32 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 centres. I mean, here's my rule. I follow the feeling of flow. I follow curiosity. I follow a feeling. If at any point I'm reeling myself back and going, no, no, no, we were 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 a long podcast listening weather, even though I'm conscious of the fact that I know it's fucking winter in Australia also.
30:18 Blindboy Boatclub? In my fucking office, the air conditioner shut off at 6pm. Because the office is built for neurotypical people who work nine to five. 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, the air conditioners are going to shut off in about an hour and this place is going to become boiling. Oh, 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 I, who I've named Rod Stewart.
31:02 Blindboy Boatclub? 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. 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.
31:24 Blindboy Boatclub? When I asked the building, when I asked the building management to leave the air conditioners on longer.
31:31 Blindboy Boatclub? But it's about to get hot in here. Here's the Ocarina, you're going to hear some adverts for bullshit.
31:41 Blindboy Boatclub? 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.
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35:32 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
36:06 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a seagull 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/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if you listen to it every week, if it brings you entertainment, math, 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.
36:48 Blindboy Boatclub? 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
37:32 Blindboy Boatclub? type of public broadcasting. It's privatized public broadcasting. I mean, what am I gonna 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/theblindbypodcast. 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
38:11 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 going. I'm off for a while. I got off for the fucking gig last week, a very big slot at an Irish festival, and it would have clashed with one of my kid's birthdays, their birthday party. I'd have had to leave halfway through.
38:49 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't think I even had to think about it. I mean, that's what it's about really, isn't it?
38:55 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 gonna think about if I'm lucky enough to get to my deathbed? You think on my deathbed, I'm gonna 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 gonna be thinking about and remembering that little birthday party. And that's what's important. That's what fucking life is about.
39:39 Blindboy Boatclub? 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,
40:24 Blindboy Boatclub? then over to Wales on the 20th, the New Theatre in Cardiff, up to Coventry then on the 21st at the Warwick Arts Centre, Bristol on the 22nd, Guildford at G Live on the 24th, London, which is sold out, Glasgow, sold out, Gateshead, can't wait to go to fucking Gateshead, Teesside, found out that Gateshead is actually odd Anglo-Saxon. It means goat's head. I wanna learn why that's the case. And then finishing it off in Nottingham on the, what is that, the first?
41:03 Blindboy Boatclub? The 1st of November there in Nottingham. So, and also, so those gigs are setting up quick. You get the tickets at feen.co.uk/theyblindbypodcast. Suggest some guests to me. Any interesting people for any of those gigs. Get onto me on Instagram, @blindbybowclub, 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, at the Town Hall on the 9th of April. Then Melbourne at the Palais Theatre.
41:45 Blindboy Boatclub? Brisbane, powerhouse, parts, 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 it was 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 gotta do. We gotta 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.
42:28 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 Pause, 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 point towards... Okay, so this is a fact. Fine Gael, 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 Eats. It was found that...
43:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Uber wrote part of Fine Gael's election manifesto.
43:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Fine Gael 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 that up. Journalists applied for Freedom of Information Act, and that's true. And what did they want? Why are you writing Fine Gael'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 licence. 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.
44:01 Blindboy Boatclub? Uber wrote Fine Gael's election manifesto because they wanted Fine Gael to change Irish law on their behalf so that anyone could become an Uber driver, like it is in America. In America, all you gotta 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. You can walk there in 10 minutes, it's in Limerick City. Uber are here in Limerick City paying 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.
44:43 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 Finagale or Finafall and says, look, we're going to create jobs in this city that's fucked, but we want something back.
45:26 Blindboy Boatclub? 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.
46:06 Blindboy Boatclub? If you're a delivery driver for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, that's your job. You're not actually an employee of those companies. You're self-employed 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.
46:50 Blindboy Boatclub? 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,
47:32 Blindboy Boatclub? 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.
48:17 Blindboy Boatclub? 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-employed? 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 E, your takeaway is about to get more expensive.
49:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Here's why. RTE again, why your takeaway is gonna cost more even after July. That there is what the social theorist, I think he was a fucking social theorist, Louis Altuser, that's what he would call the ideological state apparatus. I use Altuser a lot. Altuser argued that so capitalist society is fundamentally unfair. But we all go along with it and toe the line and don't question it because of the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. Repressive state apparatus, police, courts, justice system, prisons, the army. These things exist to, not necessarily to protect people.
49:47 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 than people.
50:29 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 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 dad in the country would be out on the streets going, "What do you mean?
51:15 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm paying 380 extra euros a year because of data centres." That message isn't widely communicated in the media. The headlines I read out there about a minute ago, they're an example of the ideological state apparatus. 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 any time workers try and organise collective bargaining, any time 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?"
51:58 Blindboy Boatclub? They'll address it, but it won't be the central narrative. Where the media in this case is parroting the neoliberal line, making it about the individuals, the- Here's some alternative headlines. Delivery riders gain sick pay and holiday rights.
52:18 Blindboy Boatclub? Platforms, gig economy platforms are now required to contribute PRSI for workers. There's a lot of tax there for the country.
52:29 Blindboy Boatclub? Workers to receive employment protections in landmark EU rolling. Those are, 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, there's a huge amount of Brazilians, Colombians. It's, it's overrepresented with South American people and Central American people. What is connorted through the messaging?
53:09 Blindboy Boatclub? 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, for 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 or convicted? Irish Independent, this is the Irish Independent's headline. Homeowners can report neighbours or members of the public who break the six-week hosepipe ban.
53:54 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 centre's water demand. Here's why data centres are causing your household bills to rise by 380 euro.
54:39 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, you can do it with the takeaways.
54:43 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 ban about ratting on your neighbour, because you know people are gonna do it. You know people are gonna 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.
55:27 Blindboy Boatclub? I remember when Ireland was such a safe place. Everyone was so kind. What's happened? We've lost our socialness 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 baited out, leaving everyone fucked. Here's some concrete examples, most of them over in the UK because of Thatcher.
56:11 Blindboy Boatclub? 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. Privatised, given to, privatised in the 1990s. Because it's privatised, 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 to 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.
56:54 Blindboy Boatclub? Instead of extracting profits from them. And it's 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, I, I've no way to get home. That happened in Detroit. In Detroit, all the, the buses that used to be public service buses got privatized. And the private companies just went, th- those routes there in the poor neighborhoods where jobs are disappearing, th- 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.
57:39 Blindboy Boatclub? 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.
58:20 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 with its other markets. So they just got the fuck out. This isn't, we can't loophole and exploit workers anymore. So we're gone.
59:03 Blindboy Boatclub? 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, I'm not, no, we're not doing PRSI, we're not doing sick days. Fuck this, let's just exit the market. This, we can't make the same profits anymore. So they leave and you might have difficulty getting takeaways. It won't be easy, as easy as it was before. But remember I said they wrote Fianna Gae'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.
59:45 Blindboy Boatclub? The taxi industry is still regulated under the National Transport Authority. So if Uber was to 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 tenants, it's more profitable to run them as short-term lets or holiday homes. I've been banging this drum for a long time.
1:00:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Like I, I, I had a BBC series in 2019, another one-off episode in 2018 called Blind by Undestroys 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, 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, to work.
1:01:13 Blindboy Boatclub? 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, the local cafes and bars and everything that are open as a result. And if Uber goes, which I follow in what it did in, what Deliveroo did in Spain, it very well might, that is a nail in the coffin to the city centre of Limerick. Cause 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
1:01:57 Blindboy Boatclub? that our entire economy relies upon whether or not a multinational tech corporation wants to pay very little tax here, you end up beholding. 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.
1:02:40 Blindboy Boatclub? 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 bird shit 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 bird shit district, because we've been getting bird shit district tourism again this year, the council cut the trees. They cut the trees to make them smaller. So have the starlings got anywhere? No, they have not. They've been ghettoized 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.
1:03:19 Blindboy Boatclub? But the shit is not spread out on a large enough area on the Bardseyt district. So it's been 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 quiva, if you're not a 10-foot Declan, 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.
1:04:03 Blindboy Boatclub? And then you get that real slippy Bardseyt 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 song and then cycle home by the river. In the meantime, rub a dog, win't get a worm, gin you flick to a pine marten. Dog bless.
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