In memory of Manchán Magan

Manchán Magan was an author and thinker, who was a friend and frequent guest on this podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you've felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by Hers. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And Hers now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options, Hers makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget. If eligible, you'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/eligible to get personalized, affordable care that gets you. That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash eligible. Forhers dot com slash eligible.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Weight Loss by Hers is not available in all 50 states. Wegovy is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wegovy clinical study information, and restrictions, visit forhers dot com.

• 0:58Speaker 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.

• 1:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dance abreast the heron's chest, you temporary Emmets. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast.

• 1:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's difficult to, to record a podcast this week because of the, the sad news that Mankon Magan has died. Mankon was a friend of mine.

• 1:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's been a guest on this podcast more than anyone else. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Magan was very sick, very ill.

• 2:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  But I didn't expect him to die as soon as he did. He died five days ago on the 2nd of October. Magan was, he was a writer, broadcaster, documentary maker, environmentalist. He was all of those things, but most importantly, he's completely and utterly irreplaceable. And I don't say that lightly. The work that Magan was doing around the Irish language, how that then relates to our mythology, our stories, and then connecting that with the environment, biodiversity, in the context of climate collapse.

• 2:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  We've lost an incredibly unique brain, a really, really unique brain. He could listen to a fucking tree and he'd hear the story that the tree was telling him. As mad as that sounds, that's what Magan could do. He was a beautiful, wonderful lunatic. And we're in bad need of lunatics, compassionate, thoughtful, eccentric people who don't even think outside the box. People who live in a spectrum of reality where boxes don't exist. So there's not even any thinking outside the box. Boxes don't exist. Magan was one of these people, incredibly unique. And now he's gone and I'm very shocked by it because I didn't know it was going to be that quick.

• 3:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I spoke to him last year, when he first told me he had cancer, he said, "They're saying maybe four or five years." Then I heard from him, maybe...

• 3:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Around August, couple of months back. And he was speaking in a much more positive way, almost as if the cancer had retreated. And then the last time I chatted to him was maybe about two weeks ago, a week ago. And that's when he told me that the doctor said he didn't have much long left. Now, I did not know it meant days. I didn't know it meant fucking days. But he said, yeah, the doctor said I don't have much, much long left. And that was the last chat I had with Man Khan. And I'm kicking myself, I'm regretting it because

• 4:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  I didn't have an authentic chat with him.

• 4:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  I got, I got frightened. It was, I got frightened by the fact that he told me that he was dying and then didn't know what to say. And then I retreated into a humorless solemn politeness. And I regret that because that's, that's not authentic. Me and Man Khan would have fucking crack. What I regret is, the reason Man Khan was contacting me is the actor Gabriel Byrne was trying to get in contact with me through Man Khan. And then I went all fuck because

• 5:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've written Gabriel Byrne into a, into my fictional fucking universe over the course of nearly 20 years, like ridiculous shit. Like I had an idea where Gabriel Byrne was trying to shrink himself down to a subatomic level so that he can be intravenously injected into Daniel Day Lewis. And then there was a music video with a two foot Gabriel Byrne puppet. And then I wrote a piece of short fiction in fucking 2019 called The Skin Method, where Gabriel Byrne can visit earlier versions of himself by snorting bags of his own skin. And I've done all that really fucking publicly and now he wants to contact me. And I'm like, oh shit. A, about what?

• 5:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And B, is he finally gonna, is he finally gonna tell me what the fuck are you doing? Why, why are you writing all this mad shit about me? I wanted to say that to Man Khan. Cause he'd have laughed his arse off at the utterly ridiculous situation I found myself in. But I didn't. I di- I didn't say that to him at all. Instead, I just gave some type of stock polite response of, oh, please send him on my details. And I wasn't authentic with my friend. I gave him this facade of politeness instead because I was scared and frightened about what he'd just told me. And I also didn't use the opportunity to tell Mancon what he fucking meant to me.

• 6:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Two weeks ago on the podcast, when I, when I said that Mancon was, was seriously ill, then I said on this podcast, I spoke then about how important Mancon was and how much I respected him and what he meant to me. But I was kind of half doing that in the hopes that he was listening instead of saying it to him directly. And then there's that thing of not knowing, oh, that was the last time I ever spoke to my friend. That was the last time I ever, ever spoke to him. That was it. And I wasn't my authentic self in that moment. I let fear and nervousness get the better of me.

• 7:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the other thing that bothers me about doing that is I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of that and it feels very lonely and isolating. If you've ever, if you've ever, ever had someone, lost someone close to you, or if it's been tragic, like for me, I lost my dad when I was quite young, fairly suddenly, got a sudden illness. And everybody, everybody knew this and everyone felt very sorry for me. And when I'd be meeting my friends, people that I know, they're either avoiding me or really scared and nervous when they chat to me because from their point of view, they just don't, they don't want to make me any more upset.

• 8:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Uh-oh, his dad's gonna die soon. Better not bring it up. But instead what you get then is a nervous politeness, a sorry for your troubles type of strange politeness. And people are only doing their best when they do that. But it does feel very alienating and lonely, incredibly lonely. And I have to assume that being seriously ill, terminally ill, is the same. It inspires the same fear in other people. Where all you want is authentic friendship and contact from the people that you know.

• 8:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is what you're looking for, but you can't get it because what you're going through is too scary for those people, so they retreat into, into politeness. And that's what I did, that's what I did the last time I spoke to Magan two weeks ago. I gave him a veneer of solemn politeness and not authenticity and crack. And I really regret that. And what I'm gonna take from the situation is mindfulness around that, that's. Then, cause look, life is suffering. Death and tragedy are unavoidable. And I know that a person close to me is gonna find themselves in an incredibly difficult

• 9:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  situation. And I, I have to accept responsibility for my feelings of fear and make sure that I'm authentic with that person, that I don't deploy veneer of politeness. And that I make real, authentic, human connection with the full spectrum of human emotions, tears and laughter included. So I'm navigating grief this week and confronting this. I took for granted the last words that I had with a friend. And it's frustrating too to see. Jesus, that the whole country's in mourning over Magan.

• 10:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  The outpouring of love and respect and admiration from all corners of Irish society. This is huge fucking news. And it's frustrating because it's like.

• 10:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  It would have been nice to have a bit of that when he was alive. Man Con had respect. People loved Man Con. But nothing on the scale of what we've seen since he died. And I would have loved for him to have seen that, for him to know, fuck me, you're a legend.

• 10:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  And now we all have the, I think it's because he was so accessible. He was prolific. Man Con was always working. He always either had a book out or he was making a documentary. And because of that, because he was so accessible. I think we all took him for granted a bit. And now that he's gone. It's that cliche of you don't know what you got till it's gone. Now Man Con is gone and everyone is like, oh my God.

• 11:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can't replace him. Who the fuck is gonna step into those shoes? There's no one doing anything like Man Con was doing.

• 11:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But I know by, Man Con was like a honeybee. He was a pollinator.

• 11:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  He had an infectious enthusiasm. If you spoke to Man Con about mythology, about the meaning of Irish words. If you spoke to him about a tree, a field. You would leave the conversation vibrating with enthusiasm and curiosity. He didn't know the meaning of the word. Gatekeeping. He had such wide range of knowledge and he was generous with all of it. Incredibly generous and full of empathy when Man Con was chatting to you. It was never about how much he knew. It was about how he could communicate the thing that he was passionate about.

• 12:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  In a way that the other person could grasp and understand. So that he could share his love of storytelling or mythology with somebody else. Pure and utter generosity. And that's why I think he's, that's why I'm using the honeybee analogy. When it comes to grief, you see when someone's gone, they're gone. But they, they can still ripple on through meaning. We still have Man Con's words and his ideas. And when someone dies, especially when it's a, like Man Con was young, he was in his 50s. That's young to be dying, you know?

• 12:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, Jesus, Magan was a, he was a great old man in the making. That's the thing. He had all the makings of a wonderful old man. We all thought he was gonna be a queer, strange old man, telling stories. A proper Shannicki, you know, but that didn't happen. He just got incredibly unlucky. Very, very unlucky. But I hope people out there have been fertilized by his ideas and his way of looking at the Irish language and looking at mythology and looking at the landscape. And that people out there will carry it on, carry it on in an ecosystem. Especially if you can speak the Irish language. Like, that's the thing. I was shit at school, so I don't have much fucking Irish language.

• 13:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  But if you properly understand the Irish language, if you're fluent, and you can use that then to find the true meaning of places, laws, the land, how it relates to biodiversity. If you can do that, continue on Magan's work. Let it ripple and pollinate and fertilize. Cause it's not about old mythology. It's not just about old stories. If you keep the stories alive, then you keep respect for the environmental life. And we need that to survive as a species. And what Magan showed me, he showed me that there's

• 14:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  every fucking tree and lake and well and mountain and valley has a name and it has a story. And this story tells us how we as human beings must live sustainably with the ecosystem. And this isn't just an Irish thing. This is in indigenous cultures all around the world and Magan was great for that. Like, his thing was Ireland, but he used to fuck off to indigenous tribes in Canada, New Zealand, in Australia, in America. I mean, the work that he used to do in trying to trace the, the Irish language

• 14:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  thousands and thousands of years to fucking India. And the great thing about Magan was his madness. He wasn't an academic. And I'm not shitting on academics. Academics are, are essential. Like, I wouldn't be able to read old mythology if it wasn't for the academics that are translating it. But because Magan wasn't an academic, he wasn't tethered by anything. So his imagination around the Irish language, or the roots of it, or stories from mythology, his imagination could run fucking wild. And I know that used to piss off some academics because sometimes maybe Magan's wildness wasn't

• 15:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  very accurate, but his wildness and eccentricity, that's the honeybee. That's the excited honeybee. That's what inspired people and fertilized people with ideas. So look for this week's podcast. I couldn't do a podcast this week. I knew whatever podcast I'd do this week, it had to be about Magan. But I certainly couldn't go off doing any hot takes or anything like that. So what I'd like to do in memory of Magan this week is I want to play the first ever interview I did with Magan. I've had Magan on loads, like six times.

• 16:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like when I thought Magan had maybe a year left, what I wanted to do was to sit down with him with a microphone and a camera for like five hours. And just me and him chat and record everything, everything about his life, his viewpoints, to have this, this record. We didn't get to do it, but the first ever chat that I had with him, which was six years ago, that's the thing, it was six years ago. It's the closest that I've come to, to that because he speaks about his life.

• 16:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  I didn't, I knew who Magan was before my first chat with him. But this chat, this was the one where we became fucking friends. This was the one where, like, I'm, I'm fucking autistic, so I don't click with a lot of people. I can count on one hand. The people who I can truly like, I can, I could speak to this person for hours, exact same frequency, adore speaking to him. That's a very small amount of people that I can do that with because I'm artistic. Man Khan was one of those people. In, in his, the past year or so, he started referring to himself as neuro spicy.

• 17:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I don't think Man Khan was diagnosed with neurodivergence, but he's, he's neuro spicy as he referred to himself. And he was a loner, deeply passionate about ideas. I'd imagine Man Khan was neurodivergent in some way. And often I find, and other neurodivergent people will find this, when I click with a person, when, when, when I can chat with a person and there's no fucking small talk and all we're doing is speaking about ideas and we're on the same frequency, often I find out later that that person is actually neurodivergent. That's called, it's called double empathy. It's a theory that autistic and neurodivergent people, autistic people mainly,

• 18:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  don't necessarily have a deficit in, in empathy or social understanding or communication. But it's more of a reciprocal thing that's when autistic people and non-autistic people, that communication can be difficult. But when autistic or neurodivergent people speak to other autistic or neurodivergent people, conversation moves quite smoothly. And that's a theory called double empathy. And it's, it's a view of neurodivergence. And that's my lived experience. Communicating with strangers for me is quite a lot of effort and it's tough going. It's difficult, very nervous when I'm doing it.

• 19:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  But sometimes I'll meet a person and that doesn't exist. We're on the same frequency, we can chat for hours. It's amazing. It's just exchange of ideas, non-stop, back and forth, like a game of tennis. Most of the people, and like I said, I can count that on maybe two hands. Most of those people who I've had those conversations with. Have turned out to be neurodivergent. They found out, same as me, they got diagnosed as adults. And so my lived experience there is that this double empathy thing is real. I had that with Mancon. We could just fucking chat for hours. So that, so I wanna play the first chat that me and Mancon had for this week's episode. I've improved the audio

• 19:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  on it. And, look, I've got nearly, I've got almost 500 podcasts over the course of eight years. I don't like replaying all content, but in this situation, I'm making an exception because I want this episode to be about Mancon and Mancon's memory. Before we do that, I'm gonna have an Ocarina pause because I don't want to interrupt the chat. And also, I'm contractually obligated to promote gigs. Every podcast, it's unavoidable. I don't have an Ocarina. What I do have is the lid of a yogurt here. Lovely tin lid of a yogurt. I learned something this week. I was in my office, eating this yogurt the other day,

• 20:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  and I was like starving and didn't have a fucking spoon. So I'm like, how am I gonna eat this yogurt without a spoon? Can't use your fingers with yogurt. It's not happening. So the only implement I had to eat this yogurt was a hammer, I had a claw hammer. And I said, fuck it. Let's try it. A hammer is metal, like a spoon. So I put the hammer into the yogurt. Try and suck the yogurt off the end of the hammer. Never again. Awful, awful, very unpleasant and depressing. And then I figured out, actually, you can, you can shape the lid of the yogurt so that it becomes a bit of a spoon. So that's what I'll be

• 21:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  doing from now on. But here's the yogurt lid, pause. You're gonna hear some fucking adverts for some shit, alright?

• 21:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Crinkly.

• 21:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Beautifully crinkly.

• 21:39Speaker 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.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  If you've felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by Hers. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And Hers now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options, Hers makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget. If eligible, you'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/eligible to get personalized, affordable care that gets you. That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash eligible. Forhers.com/eligible.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Weight Loss by Hers is not available in all 50 states. Wegovy is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wegovy clinical study information, and restrictions, visit forhers.com.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notification screaming at you. It just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. No more, "Wait, who talked to this customer last?" And if you're worried about after-hours leads slipping through, QUO's optional built-in AI agent can answer questions and even book appointments while your team's offline.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  It's the number one rated business phone system on G2, and over 90,000 businesses already trust it to stay reachable. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/tech. That's Q U O dot com slash tech.

• 24:17Speaker 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.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  If you've felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by Hers. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And Hers now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options, Hers makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget. If eligible, you'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/eligible to get personalized, affordable care that gets you. That's F O R H E R S dot com slash eligible. Forhers.com/eligible.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Weight Loss by Hers is not available in all 50 states. Wegovy is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wegovy clinical study information, and restrictions, visit forhers.com.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notification screaming at you. It just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. No more, "Wait, who talked to this customer last?" And if you're worried about after-hours leads slipping through, Quo's optional built-in AI agent can answer questions and even book appointments while your team's offline.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  It's the number-one rated business phone system on G2, and over 90,000 businesses already trust it to stay reachable. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/tech. That's Q-U-O dot com slash tech.

• 26:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, whatever, if you enjoy listening to it and you turn up every week to listen to it, please consider paying me for the work that I do, because this is my full-time job, and this is how I earn a living. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Listen for free. You listen for free. Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast, and I get to earn a living. Very quickly, my gigs.

• 27:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Last gig at 2025. This month, Halloween night, 31st of October, the Poca Festival in Mead. Some Halloween fun come along to that. Then 2026. The 23rd of January, I'm in Waterford in the Theatre Royal. On the 4th of February, I'm back in Vicar Street up in Dublin for a lovely Wednesday night gig there. On the 12th of February, I'm up in Belfast in the Waterfront Theatre.

• 28:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  On the 15th of February, Galway, beautiful Galway, there in Leisure Land. And then fucking 28th of February, Killarney, let's do a bit of the Ainek. I'm currently trying to sort out my website so that it has all the dates of my gigs on it. I've been trying to build a fucking website for, I'd say nearly 25 years. I've never had a successful website, ever. Something has always gone wrong. I'm almost there now, after 25 fucking years.

• 28:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Any more gigs, loads, but I can't be arsed, that's enough. There's a tour of, of England, Scotland and Wales there, in October 26, ages away.

• 28:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  At fain.co.uk forward slash the blind by podcast, alright? Now, I wanna get into this chat with the very recently departed Man Con, Megan. Um, this conversation is from 2020, it's the first time I spoke to Man Con. The reason I've chosen this particular conversation is it's biographical. All the other chats I had with Man Con, they're about ideas, they're about his work. This one is about his life. One thing I wanna point out, this chat is from 2020, uh, before I found out that I was autistic.

• 29:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm, I'm a little bit interrupty. Autistic people struggle with interrupting other people. I struggle with interrupting other people, but since I learned that I am autistic, I'm a lot more mindful in conversations to not interrupt the other person. Before receiving a diagnosis, this wasn't hugely in my awareness. So if you listen to this and you find yourself getting a bit pissed off with me interrupting, please don't mail me on Instagram about it. This is a conversation from nearly six years ago and I'm working on the interrupting thing. It's, I'm aware of it and I, I try my best not to. I'm better now than I was then.

• 30:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But anyway, this chat, not only is it two people becoming friends, it's a chat about Man Con's life. And when I listened to it during the week, it made me realise what we've lost, the person that we've lost, the wonderful person that's gone. And

• 30:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  yes, we should feel sad, but I want this to, to inspire you to be pannened by the honeybee and continue on Man Con's ideas and work for biodiversity and meadows and caves and mountains and trees and rivers. Cause I, one thing I'm sure of, that's what he would have wanted.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  I wanna kinda, I wanna kinda start on, on a, an autobiographical level, right?

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you know, you just said that, you know, the way you said, I wanna kinda start with. But the way you said it made it sound exactly like a Wannachon, which is the evocative of my name, which was beautiful. It was like you, you, you delved into the most beautiful Irish. So you know, the way there's a, you know, when you're calling someone's name, there's like a Hamas or a Fadrik. But Man Con is my name, or a Monachon. But then in Up in Donegal, it becomes a Wannachon or a Wanking, which is, uh, you didn't, you didn't quite go that far. But it was a lovely, a lovely accidental Irish beginning to it.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  Um, one of your, your first, one of your first books, right, where you, the travel books. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna speak about your travel books first, right? Like, what's the journey? What do you hope? Do you say to yourself, right, I'm fucking off to America for six months and I'm just gonna write about what I see? Do you, do you have, like, what, what are you looking for there? Do you fear that you'll come away with nothing?

• 32:05Speaker 05

  No. So what happened was, like, I was one of these kids who would have, like, heard voices in my head when I was young. Like, I was this idyllic kid.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Literally, like, like, as in mental illness?

• 32:15Speaker 05

  No, not a mental illness, but nice voices. I mean, you know, someone could have called it a mental illness, but it was never, I mean, I, I did go to psychiatrists, but I think that was because I was just anxious. No. Um, I was, like, I, I had this herb garden, so I didn't really fit in in the real world. But I just had these gorgeous, like, you know, reassuring voices and words and dreams, um, that I could escape into. And that works out really well. Basically, like one of those spiritual kids. And that works really well until you become about 18 or 19. And then, you know, suddenly the school tells you, um, you're doing your leaving search and you're gonna have to, uh, you know, get a job, you're gonna have to get a mortgage and, and do that.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  And I realised that I couldn't do that. There was no way in my life that, um, I could, uh, you know, knuckle down like that. Cause so it's either these voices giving that, that freedom that I had, or otherwise it was depression. And so at the age of about seventeen or eighteen.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  Would you, did the voices mean, is that like a calling? You've, you've felt the sense of a calling?

• 33:16Speaker 05

  No, no, it didn't. It was just, I was really happy. I was deliriously happy and felt absolutely free.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I just felt there was no stopping me. I was like almost angelic, you know? And then this is, and you can believe like that in your school, you can get away with it. Luckily, I didn't get bullied. I was just ignored. But then when you, when they tell you you have to go into the real world and, you know, do all these things, I thought I couldn't do that. And then depression comes. And you, you get that with a lot of these sort of, you know, dream minded kids. So.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  So the, the constrictions of society basically did not work with your personality and, and the constrictions of society would bring on, uh, a sadness.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  I didn't fit in, exactly. And so I, I fled. I knew that I'd end up in St Pat's if I stayed in, in Dublin. And that would have been fine had I done that. But I realised that there was another way. And so I was, um, my, because my family were Republican revolutionaries back long ago. We used to learn, um.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, you've got a fucking serious lineage, man. Your, your, your grand uncle is the O'Reilly.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Ex- my great, yeah, that was my great.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Grand uncle is the O'Reilly. And then Sheila Humphries is your grandmother?

• 34:25Speaker 05

  So, and then my grandfather was director of arms, Don Lo Donhu for the IRA.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  So there was a rule in, the rule in the house was you always learned French and German, just so that you could import guns, if you, you know.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  We've been doing that since about eighteen ninety. So luckily I was brought up in the, I mean, I left school in the eighties, was a recession. But because I had German and French, I was able to just go off to Germany and work in a, in a hypermarket. So I had money, money at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and I just went off. And then I could see with this money that there was. Trucks leaving, crossing Africa, going across Africa, overland. And it was going to cost three grand, no, one thousand euros, one thousand pounds for the year. Uh, for six, sorry, for seven months. And I thought, this is it. I will finally be free. I'm gonna, I'm gonna understand that the bigger world is out there. I'll escape the, the claustrophobia and the confines of this suburban Dublin world.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  So I, um, so that was, that was the big idea. And I just went off to Africa. Uh, just, you know, I was so desperate. It was this.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  What was your first, what was your first trip, uh, like decent trip abroad? Like you went to Germany, but what was your first decent trip abroad where it's an artistic experience as such, you're gonna, you're gonna not only travel, but experience and also journal your, what's happening?

• 35:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I was nineteen years of age. It was about two months after the German trip. And I get on this truck, this ex, this ex-army overland truck that's leaving London and driving the whole way to Kenya. So it's going to go through France, France and Spain. It's going to go down through Morocco, through Algeria, to the centre of the, of the Sahara Desert.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  How do you even find that? How do you, how do you even find that man gone?

• 36:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were these little ads at the back of the, uh, of the, of the British newspapers, of the Guardian or the Observer. And they said, like, three grand for seven months. But I found a dirt cheap company that was doing it for one grand for the seven months. And they just put twelve tents on board. They put twenty people. They just bought the truck from the British Army for about seven grand. Um, put, I think, four-wheel-drive tyres on it, put sand mats and just sent it off across Africa.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  And, and who else was on this with you? Who, who, who are the type of people that want to do that?

• 36:34Speaker 05

  That's a great question. They were not who I thought, who I thought would be on it would be other free-thinking, open-minded people who wanted to explore the world, other people who was, who were as dreamy and idealistic and ridiculous as me. But, uh, it turned out, and they probably were on the trip that costs three grand, but because I was on this one grand trip, it wasn't them. It was basically the, the dropouts, the dregs. All of us were just people who didn't function in society and people who wanted to escape. So there was one.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  Game.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was one bloke, he had been in the British Army three times in Northern Ireland. And there was a rule that if you ever went back the fourth time, he, you know, you were, you'd be, you'd die. There was this superstition. And he had done things like, in the first few days, he'd be boasting to me, yeah, you know, we used to do this thing. We, he had a great idea. When Bobby Sands was on hunger strike, he would drive his, he'd get a, he'd hire a chipper van and drive it up to the ventilation shaft in Bobby Sands' cell. So that, so that Bobby would be here, would be smelling like fresh fish and chips.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  And that was, that was.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  How did that feel to you, man? Like, your grandmother went on hunger strike?

• 37:37Speaker 05

  Exactly. And I spent my nineteen, the nineteen eighties helping my granny. She was still in contact with H Block and Maze prisoners during the eighties. So you know, the, the comms, these Rizla papers that were sent in and out of. She, when her eyesight go, you know, bad.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Oh, they used to write tiny little notes on Rizla papers and like hide them under fingernails or wherever you could.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. Swallow them or whatever, yeah. Um, but my granny would get these letters from the, from the prisoners and then she'd have to write back. But her eyesight wasn't so great anymore. So she'd like dictate the, the little letter to me and I would then write it in minuscule handwriting on the, on the, on the Rizla paper. Um.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  One, one question there, Mancon.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Well.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  So if your granny is like, so she's actively involved with communicating with, with the provisional IRA and provisional IRA prisoners. Did that mean that you were being watched or, or for you to like go to London and fuck off to Africa? Like surely MI5 would be keeping an eye on you.

• 38:33Speaker 05

  Ah, I mean, I was so innocent and, and young and nineteen. So my granny was living with us in the, in the granny flat of our house in Dublin, in Dublin four.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  She's being watched, surely.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  She's been watched.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  If you're.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, that house was being watched and like, not only watched, but I remember during the last, the great Maze escape, you know, the special branch came to her door. Because she'd had, um, in the past, she'd had prisoners that were on the run, H Block prisoners that were on the run, staying in the house. And it was sad, like my dad was this finagale, quiet finagale farmer from the, well, you know, he was a doctor, but from a farming background from Longford. Absolutely redmondite, a committed pacifist. But because he marries into this Republican family and this lovely house that he's bought, you know, in Dublin. He, and he, he pays for the granny flat and now my granny has these, um. You know, these prisoners hiding out in it. And the one time my dad was incredibly peaceful and, you know, just a quiet.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Did your dad know that these these men were prisoners?

• 39:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh yeah. The only time I heard my dad roar was, he went downstairs to check on my granny once. He'd tell, he'd say the rosary with her every evening in Irish. Even he even learnt Irish just, you know, to, because the Irish was so important to the family. And he goes down and he recognizes who's who's hiding out near Coal Hole. And he just screams, you know, not in my house, he says. Um, so, yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  But he recognized the person from the news, like?

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't good, like, um.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Holy fuck.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like, you know, when you have a mother-in-law, you know, people say they have a problem with mother-in-law.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, people have problems with mother-in-laws, but if you're fucking, if you're Martin McGinnis or something in the coal bunker.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Different story, man.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  So bringing over the wrong cake.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that, I mean, I'm getting distracted in one way, but that meant that my relationship with the Irish language was complicated, but I might go back to that in a second. But one reason that I, so I fled because I said, I was this idealistic person, I go off to Africa, but there's a few reasons why I'm fleeing. Also because I realized this Irish language that I'd been given by my granny as this beautiful treasure and cultural sort of um heirloom actually had an agenda, you know, that it was in some way a political weapon of war. So this would be why I would have, I would have, you know, gone off travelling. And I mean, Africa, that Africa trip turned out terrible. Everyone, like I mentioned, the bloke who was the British Army, but everyone was worse. There were people who had been embezzling, people else who were running away from hacks.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  But it's, there were just the drags. And our first day, on our first day in Africa, we arrived in Morocco in the little town of Chefchuan, having driven through France and Spain. And some of the Bedouins come up to offer us, we started, we set up our tents, you know, the little old triangular army tents, set the light a fire.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  Were there any hash smugglers with you? That sounds like a hash smuggling type of thing.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Um, there was no.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  Uh, to be fair, no, I was the only one who got involved with grass smuggling later, but there weren't one, um, no, they were all better, they were all fine in that terms. Um, but there was, uh, on the first day, anyway, this better one came up to me and he said, it came up to us all and he offers us firewood. And the others are just super disgusted and suspicious and they just call him, they started calling him a raghead and said, get him away, all he'll do is dirty, he'll steal. And I realised I was stuck on this truck for seven months with these absolute racists. It's absolutely, who didn't, you know, only had English and like seventy percent of those countries were, were, um, were French speaking countries. So it was a pretty, it was a pretty dark trip. Um, it turned out to be the best thing for me in my life and I had this utterly life changing experience when we got to Zaire, to the Congo.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  And anybody that, you know, Zaire is the heart of darkness. It is where Conrad, where Kurt Scott stuck. If you're ever gonna have.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Roger Casement, mate.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. If you're ever gonna have a life changing experience, it'll be in the Congo. We arrived there and, um, we had this woman who was driving us, Belinda, an amazingly strong woman. I call her something else in the book. Um, but, uh, she, all she wanted to do was keep us alive. On every, she had done about twelve trips up into there, maybe, or seven, between seven and twelve trips.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And yeah, what's the danger like here, Mancon? Like, what, what's the level of going into the Congo on the back of a truck? It, it, to me, I'd be like, that sounds a bit scary, man.

• 42:44Speaker 05

  So on all of her previous trips, someone had died. That's the level.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  What, what type of death? Like, I mean, through disease, through being killed, through being kidnapped?

• 42:53Speaker 05

  Mainly stupidity, you know? If the, we are, as I said, the dregs of society. We're not the ones who know about Africa. We're not the, the ones who've read, who are careful. We're just people who are totally uncommitted, unkempt. So sometimes it was for, it was some of the, well, last one they were on, he, an old man just got a heart attack in the middle of the Sahara and they had to bury him there. The time before that, she had begged them not to go on, not to take the inner tubes from the truck and start, um, you know, riding the rapids on a river. And one person smashed.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  What type of request? Don't take the tubes off the truck and go into the river.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, but they, anyway, they did and they smashed, he smashed his head open, he died. So.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  So, so, or otherwise it was just malaria or um Bill Hartz or some disease. So the.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Did you get your, like, I I'm trying to gauge like the level of innocence that you'd gone into this situation. I mean, did you get your injections?

• 43:47Speaker 05

  Uh, yes, I did, actually. I never had injections after that. I know that my other trips, but I did for that because I think they insisted on it. Um, and so when we arrive anyway in Zaire, in the, in Congo, she, she makes one, she has one other request for us. That none of us will ever buy or take drugs because, you know, every single military dictatorship there, all they're trying to do is get their hands on white people for some crime and it's just so easy for them to find drugs on you.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  What, why is that? What, what's the incentive for them to capture a white person with drugs?

• 44:18Speaker 05

  It's just, you know, they, they, they have no money. They want to get money and the best way of getting bribes out of people is, you know, to get someone with a crime and they actually have a crime and then they have to pay big, big amount of bribes.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  So we have a nineteen year old Irish lad here, we're gonna sentence him to death. And now all of a sudden the UN is involved or something.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Wow, I never thought of it that way, man. It makes sense.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so exactly. So we arrive in Bumba, in Zaire, and um, uh, you know, now known as the Congo. And the first thing she's gonna do is the only time she's gonna leave us, she, every trip what she does is she leaves us to take a boat in a village called Bumba to take one of the great river journeys of the world. It goes from Kissangani or from Kinshasa to Kissangani and it's this huge floating market. And just this one tug, an old German riverine tug and these steel platforms. And we slowly go down the way and there's no roads in this area. So all of the local tribes people come out of the Amazon or sorry of the, of the equatorial jungle and they trade their crocodile skins and monkeys or whatever potions they have.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  And with you and she's like, this is a journey, this is an experience you cannot miss. So she leaves us there that day. And she leaves us just enough money and just enough, you know, malaria tablets and all to do us the five days that we're gonna be on the river before we reach in Kiss, in um, in Kissangani, which was the old Stanleyville, from Leopoldville to Stanleyville. And. Rubber plantations. Exactly, exactly. The darkest, darkest shit of slavery. Um. Yeah. And human trafficking. And so that first day, we all, we all, we rent out two rooms in just this old shack. And we all sleep on the floor of the two rooms. Like at this stage, we've been three months in a tent. So, so you know, sleeping on the floor of a, floor of a room was luxury.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Um, and I went out and just to my utter just ignorance and stupidity, someone offered me, it was actually a plastic bag, like a spar or a super value bag. Of cannabis. It was a pure shopping bag of cannabis. I think it was like. Was it hash or weed? It was weed. It was weed. Okay. Very heavy crystal weed, like, but loads of bush with loads of, yeah, but loads of sticks and everything else to it. But anyway, I brought this home, back to the, back to the, um, to the, the shack we were in. And by this stage, a huge divide had, had entered the group. Those who never wanted to talk to any African or engage were absolutely petrified. And the others wanted to do a bit. And we, anyway, the ones who were willing to engage a bit, we smoked some of that.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  But it turned out to be somehow laced with something. It just made us all hallucinate a lot. Um, and we woke up the next day, uh, we conked out, woke up the next day and everything we owned was stolen from us. Everything. Oh, wow. Okay. Now, any old Africa hand, anyone who understands Africa realizes immediately exactly what happened. I didn't know this for, for weeks. You're in a military dictatorship, a military dictatorship, the military control everything. They see every foreigner, they see every person who comes in, particularly a foreigner. They're the ones who give you the drugs. Of course they are. The ones that are gonna knock you out and then they're gonna take all your money. But I didn't know that. So I innocently went down to the police station next day. Um. Oh, dear God. There was no police station. It turned out it was just a military encampment and they were just stoned their eyeballs on, on things.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  And this man Hercule, he, I explained to him in French what's happened. And he says, oh, you know, this is terrible. It's a catastrophe. Don't worry. You will now seize Aryan justice. And he went down to the local sort of township and the ghetto and he picked, he just randomly picked three boys, dragged them back. He got his army soldiers to drag them back and they started beating them in front of me, beating them over the head with the butt of his rifle. And again, I was this innocent kid. I had no knowledge how to deal with this. And eventually I begged him. I said, I don't want that. I just wanna find our passports. But when they got sort of so exhausted from beating, they sent us away again. And we went back the next day and said, you know, have you found the things? And after the next day, they said, no. The next day, they said they need money. We had no.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  We had no money to, they said they needed, you know, money even just to get diesel to put into the jeep to look for the robbers. We had no money, but we begged the other ten people, you know, the other half of the group who hated us to give us their money. And anyway, we got locked into this thing that we were, it was about a week without, eventually our money ran out after about three days. We gave it all to them. There was no signs of passport. This is, you cannot move anywhere without your passport. You cannot go, you know, by this time, there would be no malaria tablets, so we.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  And I'm guessing there's no Irish embassy to call up or what's the crack?

• 48:44Speaker 05

  There was no nothing. The only embassy was down in South Africa at the time. But we thought, okay, we'll find another way out. But the.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  And are we talking the eighties here or the nineties?

• 48:53Speaker 05

  We're talking eighty nine slash ninety. So the first, the Gulf War had just begun. Okay. Desert storm was going on. And so what happened was that all of the countries, about a week before this happened, all of the Arabic countries around us, Algeria and others, Tunisia, had all closed their borders. So no one was getting through. So actually, normally there would be another NGO or charity group or an overland truck behind you, but there was none of those. And then we also realized that there was no, that there was no diesel in the country. Like, this is the last days of Mobutu, the dictator Mobutu's regime. The entire country was bankrupt. So there was no money, there was no diesel, there was no way out. We were the only truck to have come through, you know, a foreigner truck to have come through in three months.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  What emotions are going through your body at that point?

• 49:42Speaker 05

  Well, the weirdest thing was, we were, we only went there because Belinda had told us the river barge was coming the next morning, and we were going to get on that river barge for the five days. So next morning, when we realized we're robbed, the other ten people go down to the river to get on the river barge. But they realized the river barge wasn't there. And the river barge wouldn't come, and it hadn't, it hadn't been there for two months because there was no diesel, and it couldn't be there for another three months because the dry season had come early. So Belinda had lied to us. She had gone down to the port to check who was there, and actually had abandoned us on purpose and fled with the truck. So it was really, really dark. So we couldn't even ask her for help. There was no way of getting any help.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  And did you, one little thing that's popping up for me too, is when you spoke earlier there about there a divide is a margin between you and the group. And one thing that I find interesting is. When I hear about, we'll say, these English people not wanting to speak with the locals, being racist, did you find, did anything colonial come up in you? Did you reflect on the fact that you don't come from a colonial culture? And these people do come from a colonial culture? And this is now being reflected in your actions? Or were they just a shower of cunts?

• 50:54Speaker 05

  No, no, I mean, I totally heard that. Like, the pride they had about getting to Uganda and Kenya and Tanzania, the places that had been colonized by the English. It was all about this idea that we are superior, we are a colonial race. You know, and I mean, I was called Paddy and sort of, you know, there were all those sort of jokes about me drinking and things were there. It was just classic, that mindset that is in, you know, a large swathe of England was very strong.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  Because like the moment you said the Congo to me, the like, the first thing that comes up to my head, it's Roger Casement. And then I get this lovely feeling of Roger Casement was the one to highlight the crimes that happened here. So my association with a place like that, I get this lovely wholesome feeling in my heart of the Irish, the Irish impact on the Congo is one of compassion and calling out injustice.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  Absolutely, absolutely. But we saw that at every single border we passed, we saw that. Because the visas that the English people were having to pay were about two or three times as high as mine. In fact, a lot of my visas were free and they never twitch.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  Because the African people are going, this fellow's Irish.

• 52:07Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. Wherever I went, I was just welcomed. It was, it was that lovely feeling you get.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, that has.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  Another thing I'd love to ask you about, Mancon, is, so one thing that I'm fascinated with, and I have a feeling you'd know a good bit about it. Are you familiar with Bob Quinn's Atlantean Theory and the relationship between Ireland and Africa historically?

• 52:30Speaker 05

  I am indeed, yeah, exactly, yeah, that's very rich.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  Fascinated with that, right? Did your trip to Africa, did you, what do you think about that? Can you explain for the listeners what the Atlantean Theory of Irish origin is? And reflecting it regarding your journeys to Africa?

• 52:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, one good way of looking at it is even, a lot of people know, you know, that the Irish word for a black person is far gorm. And you know, there's a few different theories.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Blue man.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Exactly, the blue man. There's a few different theories. Some people would say because you know dove black is is always connected with the devil and is always dark things. And even a black horse would never have been called couple dove, it was called couple down mostly. But there's another theory for that, and that is the the Irish people would have known black people. Like there was, there was a, you know, a a Berber, oh no, what is it? A um.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Navan fort.

• 53:22Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  They found that there's a skull of a monkey fucking two thousand years old.

• 53:27Speaker 05

  Exactly, that's it, yeah. Um, which, you know, most likely that came from North Africa, could have been the one that came from Gibraltar, but it was from Africa. And then even in a bargain, awfully, there was um a Bible with papyrus papers clad in papyrus papers. So either that book was either brought from Egypt, or at least the papyrus definitely came from Egypt. So we know there was contact. I I mean, we just know that the routes were, you know, what what Bob Quinn saw so easily was that there are these amazing trade routes. It is very easy to go from the west of coast of Ireland, from the Iron Islands, down along France and Spain, and then right around into the Mediterranean where you get to Egypt.

• 54:05Speaker 05

  And even like in the Pharaoh's time, there was a canal that linked before the Suez Canal, you know, that links the the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. There was, the the Pharaohs had systems of canals. They didn't ever last very long because the sand would would pile in again. But there were, there were ways of getting in ancient times to the Red Sea and to, you know, to get to the Far East. So we know the Irish people were amazing sailors. We know they were going up to the Pharaohs, going up to Greenland, maybe even going across to um to to to to North America.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  And how long ago are we talking here? Are we going back a thousand years, two thousand years?

• 54:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, I mean, I, let's say with that, with that Bible, we're going just one thousand five hundred years. As you said, with Navan fort, you're going down two thousand years. And after that, there's no sort of historical record, but we just know, well, the next link you're going is, um, so, you know, the likes of the Passage Graves, Newgrange, you're going to four thousand five hundred B C. Um, what Bob Quinn showed so clearly, if you go to Tunisia and you go to Morocco, you're seeing those. Stay same standing stones, you know, these monoliths, you're seeing stone circles, you're seeing the remains of passage grave type buildings. And they are identical to the ones that are found in Ireland, in Cornwall and in Britain.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  Like, yes, it could just about be coincidence, but it's a weird coincidence. It seems there was this common culture. So the Bedouins too.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  And Quinn's theory, Quinn goes straight, Quinn just says that Irish people are essentially African people, that we, we. He, he says that we don't come from Europe, that we come from Africa via the sea.

• 55:38Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Um.

• 55:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I mean, and like, so, you know, I'd just done a TV series on ancient DNA. And you know, what it's showing now is that the original settlers of Ireland were dark brown skinned, brown haired and blue eyed. Now that mix doesn't exist in the world anymore, but it was an exist, it was a, it was a people that were found in sort of Egypt and in the far, in the Middle East. So they, we know for certain from DNA evidence that the first people who came here were people basically from Egypt and from, and from the Middle East, you know, who'd come out of Africa.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  The Atlantic route.

• 56:11Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  So Bob Quinn is finally, cause the thing with me and Bob Quinn, whenever I would bring Bob Quinn up with historians, he was kind of rubbish as a kind of offensive thinker.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, and it was finally about four years ago, Michael Viney did a great article where he, he just said, look, this is the proof. It has been shown by the latest sort of technology in, in DNA sequencing, that he was right all along.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  Um.

• 56:36Speaker 05

  Wow. Yeah, and what's so interesting, so those first people who, as I said, were blue eyed.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  What other connections is there, Mancon? Is it, I've heard like Shano singing and similarities with Shano singing and, and almost Islamic call to prayer from North Africa and stuff.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, and again, you know, it's hard to definitely prove these things, but just listen to the two, listen to the Shano singing. And then, as you said, the call to prayer Arabic sing, it's these long cadences, this, this sort of rolling on a, on a vowel. And but these words, like the Irish for confidence or trust is munin. And if you, the Arabic word is muna, muna, the, the Irish for knife is ski. And if you go to any Arabic country, they'll tell you it's either Sikkian or Sikkina or Sikkina. But maybe most strongly, or Gara, Gara is to cut, you know, in Irish and Gara is to cut in Arabic. Kala in Irish for port, Chala is the Arabic for for port.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  And but maybe the most strongest of all is the shamrock, the our ultimate symbol of Irishness, you know, shown on St Patrick's Day. It's the shamrock or the the shammer, but it happens to be the exact same word in the Arabic word of shamrock. And shamrock in pre Islamic Arabic culture, not those in pagan Arabic culture. A shamrock was a particular tree leafed plant, okay, a tree leaf plant. And each one of the petals of that leaf represented one of the pagan gods. Like, are you going to say that's coincidence? That it happens that pre Arabic, pre Islamic Arabic culture has this called shamrock, a leaf that represents the tree.

• 58:10Speaker 05

  We know tree was the key moment, key idea in pagan Irish or pagan early Irish and Celtic belief. And they happen to use the same word for it, like, that's uncanny.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  That's phenomenal.

• 58:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's nothing weird. We know that we were, everybody, you know, that we were trading people, that people migrated constantly. And I think in, so you know, this book I've written, The Thirty Two Words for Fields, I look at that. But the thing that blew me away most was the connections between Ireland and India. Like, they are just so strong. And again, why would you have these connections?

• 58:42Speaker 04

  And that baffles me, like, that's fucking baffling.

• 58:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  That that that that's quite far apart.

• 58:48Speaker 05

  And again, we just need to get out of our mindset. We are so in the mindset of nationalism. In fact, we're coming to the last, to the death grasps of nationalism now. Previously, people were a migratory people who just moved and travelled, depending on the circumstances. And it looks like we're going back towards that. So it makes absolutely sense that all cultures would have been interlinked. But why particularly was India and Ireland, why the connection so strong? And it's really because, you know, we do, we we know that we're sort of an Indo European culture. So our culture sort of came from the, basically the middle of Europe or more towards the east of Europe and the Europe, the Middle East. Okay. That area. Now, that culture, that sort of Celtic culture or Indo-European culture, which our language is based on, was pushed to the margins.

• 59:31Speaker 05

  Okay, that's why the Irish language is still to be found only in the north of Scotland and, you know, the west of Ireland and then places like Pretto. Uh, like Brittany and Galicia.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  But then that's.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  So you, you think of it as something continually and consistently being pushed west.

• 59:46Speaker 05

  Exactly, being pushed west and being pushed east. So that same culture, all the same.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  God.

• 59:51Speaker 05

  Elements of it are still.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Holy fuck.

• 59:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're still alive, which is why you would get, like, the Brehnen Waro laws are like identical to a lot of the, the, the old Indian laws. Why the word ara, um, the noble person, you know, ara minister in the government is the same word as idea, a noble in the, um, in Sanskrit. Or why Brev and Brahman are the same word, the same root.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  They come from Brif, from mantras, or even idas, you know, idaches or idas, learning. That's the same word as the Vedas, the Indian Vedas, which is, you know, the Indian lore, the central lore. And that Veda, again, even the word drew, druid, drew comes from drew, an oak, and then vid, which is the Veda, the learning, the learning that is connected to the oak, which is the central core. Like, we are the same people. Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Now, one thing, when I hear the term Vedas, that's like, uh, uh, one of the earliest religions that we know of. And it's also one of these religions that quantum physicists and, and the, the people who are at the cutting edge of physics, who are trying to understand the nature of what reality is. And like, things like reality being a simulation, they'll often say it has a lot of similarities to real early, early Vedic scriptures and their view of the universe. Do you, have you studied or looked at any, I don't know, ancient Irish religious, but like pre-Christian Irish religious, uh, views? Are they similar to Vedic stuff? Is there anything going on there?

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  So as you said, like there, there are Brahmins, very early type of Brahmins chanting in parts of Corella and Tamil Nadu in the south of, of India, in the, in the forest there. And the, the mantras they have, the chants they have, aren't words. We don't understand them anymore. They are pre that. They're almost. What, what linguists say is they could be the sounds that were based on the first guttural sounds that humans made before they developed linguistics.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  Developed language.

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. Now, it's hard to find that same level of ancientness in, in, in Irish or, or even in the sounds that made up Irish. Like, one of the things that I'm trying to get at in the book is that Irish, like, you know, we, we sort of know that the Celtic culture only arrived in Ireland. That culture, that Indo-European culture that went to India, came to Ireland, it only came here probably about 500 B.C., so two and a half thousand years.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Here's a big question for you. Is it, when people say the Irish are Celts, is, is that naive or incorrect?

• 1:02:19Speaker 05

  Uh, no, it's correct. Um, so what we do know is that the people who built, so those first blue eyed, uh, hunter gatherer people, the blue eyed, really dark skinned people, they're not us. They were hunter gatherers who came here and they were wiped out. Okay. Then the next.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  Oh, fuck, okay.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, we killed, well, we might have killed them or probably temperature, you know, conditions killed them. The next group of people were the people who built, um, Newgrange and, you know, the, the, um, Nouth and Doubt and Knock Crew and all of these amazing places. Obviously incredibly sophisticated people who understood, um, Astron, Astron the Me. They're not us. They're not us either. There's no, there's almost no DNA connection between us and them. They died out too. An incredibly complex community, culture that, uh. I mean, there's a trace elements of them still in us, but not much. That Neolithic culture, it only, it, you know, it's only, it, there's not very much of it in our DNA.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

  So who we are is we're the Bronze Age people, the people who came after that, um, and brought, we were brought farming and we brought knowledge of bronze from again, the Middle East, from North Africa area. And then with them, and then we were mixed, we were, we were joined by these Celts who arrived. So because they, those people, the Bronze Age people would have come like four and a half, four thousand years ago, uh, four and a half, five thousand years ago, then the, the brand, the, the us, the, the Celtic or Gaelic people came. Two and a half thousand years ago. So we're a mix between those Bronze Age people and that new culture that came in. But you know, as you said, this idea of the vedic and that knowledge. So in our language, it's hard to get a sense of the sounds that came.

• 1:03:53Speaker 05

  But definitely, there are words in Irish that make it clear that our mindset before modernity took over totally accepted that sort of quantum nature, that otherworldly sense of there being no limitation to the physical reality. Like, there's a word in Irish called críor. And críor means a tiny particle, or a spark of flame, or a light, or a tiniest portion of something. But it can also mean a subatomic particle. And it can mean vulnerability, the vulnerability and the insubstantiality of solid objects. So when we look at the world now in our rational, objective mind, our pre or post-Newtonian world, we think of everything as solid.

• 1:04:35Speaker 05

  But of course, a world, a people who believed in the other world, who believed in counter, which is this area, this region, this place, and alter, which is the other world, and there was always only a thin veil between the two. For them, it was clear that things could look solid, but could also be utterly insubstantial.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  And quantum physics today will tell you that solidity is an illusion. Everything is made up of essentially waves, quantum waves.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. So, you know, críor can be a swamp, it can be the trembling of the land, it can be an earthquake, it can be the crumbling surface of cloud land when dry after rain. It's basically accepting that idea of quantum, that the things can be solid and not solid at the same time.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  Oh, the ambiguity.

• 1:05:15Speaker 05

  Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Have you looked into the influence of, we'll say psychedelic drugs, like mushrooms and things like that, on ancient Irish cultures? Like, I've heard that if you look at the art that's on the front of Newgrange, especially the abstract art they were making, the lozenges and the spirals, that that was the type of vision one would receive if they were to eat the type of mushrooms that grow out of cow shit around that area.

• 1:05:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, and I heard Billy Moglin discussing this with you.

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 05

  He does it with such control, you know, because there's a degree, there's a degree of uncertainty about all these things, yet, and yet all are potentials. So what do we know? Like, we know, for example, that, look, look at the, look at the folklore, you know, the main idea of Finn McCool getting the, the wisdom, the, the.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, salmon and knowledge.

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  The salmon and knowledge. And how does he do that? He goes to Cumnas Well, or there's a few different water sources that he goes to. He picks up the salmon, he burns himself, he sort of burns and he cooks the salmon and creates a blister, or he burns himself. And that word for the blister is called buligis, bubble of insight or bubble of knowledge. And it's also used for the words of the hazelnuts that drop from this magic tree that is over Cumnas Well. And every, when the bubble of knowledge are also called knoa kritin, which is sort of a hazel of insight. And it falls into the water and it makes them water magic. And so when the salmon is in, it makes the salmon magic. And so when Finn McCool gets it, he, he either sucks, and so it's a bubble of knowledge, a buligis or a krill kribment, a hazel of knowledge.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  And then when he gets it, he gets another bubble of knowledge, the blister of knowledge, which again, bubble and blister is the same word, it's all buligis. And that word bulig is also used for some particular type of mushrooms. Because of course, those two were known to impart wisdom and to impart magic.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  And when they say wisdom, immediately what I'm hearing is people who have psychedelic experiences, D M T, ayahuasca. And then they come back from it with a greater knowledge and understanding of self and reality, as is often reported.

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  So are you saying that, like, you, you reckon there's a way to interpret the story of the salmon and knowledge? Where it's like, John McCool just did a lot of mushrooms and met the elves in the machine?

• 1:07:34Speaker 05

  It's, it's a shamanic trip, exactly. And like, why is it the breadon? Why is it the salmon? The salmon is a speckled animal.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  What else is?

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

  And salmons don't eat acorns. That's one thing. I know the salmon's, for the two, here's two things that, that keep me awake at night about that story. The salmon's name is Finton, which is a ridiculous name for a fish. And then secondly, he eats acorns.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you know, you do know what fin means in Sanskrit and in early Irish. It means the wise one. It means white. It means seeing through. It means see through the darkness to the light. You know, like Bowin, the Bowin River, you know, the Bowin River, which is the white cow goddess, the Bowin River is a the Bowin, you know, the river was so sacred that she was represented, well, the Bowin or the Bowinda was the most sacred goddess in early Irish culture and she was represented in physical form by the Bowin River. And so she is so luminous.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  That's not the same cow that's up in the stars, is it?

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. So luminous was she.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  Cause Billy, who we were talking about there.

• 1:08:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  He's got some stone in his garden or something, but up in the stars, using some ancient fucking Celtic archaeology or something, there's the Milky, was the Milky Way referred to as a cow or something in ancient Irish astronomy?

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  You have it, you have it. So, so the Bowin River, the Bowin River is so nourishing. So the Bowin God is a mother goddess. Um, okay, the Bowinda, she's a mother goddess. She nourishes her people with her milk. Now she is represented in physical form by the river, the river of the Bowin, which nourishes its people with the water. Okay? And so powerful is she that at night she shines up into the night sky and becomes the Milky Way. Balachne bo filla, the, the way of the white cow. Exactly. Now.

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  So this, this is what I, this is what has me interested now. So the, the ancient Irish are referring to this as cow as milk. How in English are we looking up at the Milky Way and referring it to the way of milk, the fucking milk highway?

• 1:09:27Speaker 05

  Isn't it lovely? Isn't it lovely? The way some trace of the knowledge gets kept, but then it sort of gets, you know, mushed up and confused. And but just to finish that point, the final things I love about that is that if you ask people long ago about Nout and Doubt and Newgrange, the, the prehistoric tombs along, along the Bowin, they will tell you that they thought that they were mirror image of planet constellations. So not only is the Bowin River being reflected up in the night sky to create the Milky Way, but actually some of those star constellations are then shine, are then being mirrored back in the land in stone and circular form, um, on, into the ground. And the final thing of that is Bowinda, the mother goddess, the most powerful god, she's the exact same god as Govinda, as the Indian form of Krishna.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  So Go, Go, Bo is a cow in Irish, as we know, Go is a cow in Sanskrit, Vinda is a finder, a looker, a seeker. It is like the same culture, the same gods, we are one.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  And when you're, when you're studying this stuff, are you coming at this from the position, like you're not an academic, yeah?

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  I am not, no, I have no expertise in anything.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  So you're just a curious person, a curious person looking into this shit. Like, do you ever take this stuff and try and, like, go to academics? Like, how, these are essentially hunches that you have, and it's overwhelming, like, it's phenomenal. As you said, it's like, how the fuck can this be a coincidence? But how does it go from this wonderful coincidence into being something that's accepted? Or has research put behind it, and something that then becomes truth?

• 1:11:07Speaker 05

  Hmm. What is that? Truth is not above reason, but beyond it. Like, so I, as I said, we started this with, I was a disillusioned kid with, you know, an over idealistic kid. I went off travelling, went off to Africa, I went off to South America and I went off eventually to India, moved into an old cow shed. And like spent about eight months there, going to, to parts of my brain that we shouldn't really have access to. I sort of dropped out.

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  Tell us about that, tell us about being in a cow shed in India and visiting dirty part of your brain.

• 1:11:34Speaker 05

  I will, I'll finish what I'm saying, I will though. And so, and I want, I wanted to make sense of my life, you know? So after, after I came home from India, and I'll explain that, I built my little straw bed house in Westmead. And I just, the world didn't make sense, I wanted to make sense. What I want from this book I've written is just, people are lost, people are disillusioned and disconnected. It just happens that our culture and our language and our old religions and beliefs can root us back into the world to make sense of who we are, of what we are in this chaotic, chaotic, crazy world. So I don't want to engage with academia. Like, I did a degree in UCD years ago, in Irish, and at the end, I remember the professor said to me, I see a great career, career for you in academia, no one has done, no one has looked at the GH, you know, in the genitive of Donegal Irish.

• 1:12:20Speaker 05

  And that's a world we don't need to cross into. Luckily, Billy Magan can manage the two things, he can do academia and he can do the walk the wild side. What I want is to bring these ideas out, cause. They'll nourish us, they'll make sense of the world.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, like, should I tell you about India? Go on.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  I'd love to know about India, but like, cause like.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  Actually, how did Africa end? How, how did you, like, you, you were stuck in the Congo, your passport is gone. And now you're here on a podcast talking to me. So what, what happened that, that you ended up, things working out all right?

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  I got, um, so I, I, I, you know, that would, that mean that five days or seven days in Zaire. We went without food, we went without water. That was the best time of my life. I suddenly realised, I know now why I'm alive. I felt more vibrant and more alive. And I thought, I want to live a life which is, does not have rules or limitations that based on my greatest aspirations. And that's partly because I was just, you know, a teenager with two big ideas, but maybe, and also we were slowly working our way through the bag of cannabis that could have helped. Just to, to alleviate the pain, the hunger pangs. But in, in that, on Zaire, I got, I ended up getting, um, Bilharthy, which was no cure for. I had to drink the river water of the Congo and it's had.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  You got what?

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  It Bilharthy, it's this little sn- slug or snail that goes into your, into your body, into an orifice. And it slowly, does you no harm for the first few years, but every year it creates a little shell around itself and it goes into your kidney normally or your, yeah. And creates a shell around your kidney and eventually it turns your whole kidney into stone. Basically, it's like the, what was that mythic, the gorgon from the, uh, from the outside, it turns you into stone. And there was no cure for it at the time, but luckily I came back and my mom insisted I go to the tropical medical bureau. And they, they had, a cure was invented about two months later and so I was cured.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  So, oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:14:12Speaker 05

  So then I finished, I go back to finish my degree, I go back and do two years in college and then I go off to Africa, sorry, to South America. And I ended up running, um, uh, a hostel on the Ecuador, on an organic farm in the Ecuador Peruvian border. In a place that was famous for San Pedro, for this mescaline cactus. And the Israeli soldiers used to all come straight off after their three or four years' conscription. And come to my place to take this, this San Pedro.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  So were you running like a retreat where people could do San Pedro cactus?

• 1:14:42Speaker 05

  No, I was just, I was just asked to look after the hostel and the farm, the farm workers.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:14:48Speaker 05

  And it turned out that.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  People happened to go there for San Pedro.

• 1:14:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, but we'd always tell them not to take this on the land and we wouldn't give them information about where it was got. But they would go off into the, into the forest. But eventually people would have bad trips and I would be called upon to hike up into the Amazonian cloud forest. And take them back from the tree, they didn't strip naked or throw all their money away. And then I'd have to ring up the Israeli embassy and say, you know, one of your kids has gone missing. It's meant ever since I've, I have huge sympathy for Israel, just because those kids who become the worst aggressors of Palestinians. I just saw them, they were just, they were mixed up teenagers, you know, who didn't know how to say no. And they were, their lives were ruined for, for the oppression and the brutality that they had inflicted.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  Um, to be institutionalized and to become killers essentially.

• 1:15:33Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  On, on thinking killers, uncaring.

• 1:15:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I, I finished, but I would, basically I was trying to search for something that made sense in my life in Africa. If I, I failed, I got distracted. In South America, I got distracted. And so eventually my sort ends up in India.

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  Well, what is the nature of a distraction for you?

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  I want, I believe that there was God inside me. I believe that there was this source of utter creativity and love. And, and you know, assurance. And so, you know, you, you just get caught up in conventional thinking or self doubt. Or just, you know, distractions of, you know, I thought, I think drugs is a distraction. I think gossip is a distraction. I think loads of things are distraction. I wanted to just get in touch with my, my, my mind. So.

• 1:16:17Speaker 04

  How were you for drink? What was your relationship with drink like?

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  I know, I, I, you know, I could, I just luckily I can just drink two pints and I don't have a need to drink more.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:16:27Speaker 05

  And I never drug, I never took huge amounts of cannabis or, you know, despite those cannabis stories. Um, yeah, after, before India, I ended up on a big organic cannabis farm, looking after the children in Vancouver in British Columbia. So the most, just because cannabis, people who are, who are thinking left field or marginal liminal thinkers tend to be in that world. But I just wasn't, I wasn't particularly interested in drugs. So, and I went off to, to India, to India, determined to find a, a, a cave in the Himalayas. Cause I heard, you know, that's where the purest energy was. And someone told me.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  Well, hold on a second. How did? How do you hear there's a cave in India with pure energy? I'm off there. Like, what do you mean?

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  Well, a tightrope walker, a French tightrope walker from the circus I met in Colombia. And he told me about this, that was after, anyway, I won't get into it. You know, the screamers in Ireland, the only, the only primary cult, the primary.

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  No, I don't.

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  I'll tell you another time. I spent time with them in South America. But I was, this man, this tightrope walker from France told me about this place called Papazali or Almora. And he said, if you go there, make sure you have a return ticket because otherwise you will never leave. He said, make sure.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:17:38Speaker 05

  And so I immediately, I went to India. That's when, you know, as soon as I got home from South America, earned another, maybe did six months in a supermarket in Germany to earn more money. And went off there and I, of course, I only took off with a single ticket. There was no way. I did not want to leave if I found this bliss. And I tried to find the cave and I couldn't find that cave or any cave.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  Now, you'd know internet. This is, this is pre-internet.

• 1:18:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. This was 96. So I suppose a few people had internet.

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  So are you arriving in India saying a French tightrope walker told me in South America that there's this cave? And you had to rely upon the local people to know if the cave existed?

• 1:18:12Speaker 05

  Yes, and it's not, it wasn't so hard before the internet because of that backpacker system. Like, I could still, I could find anyone in any country in the world. I know that. But you just go, you pick up a copy of Lonely Planet, you go to those places they're in. We're all talking about the same things. It's a total third, it's a different university. Like prison is a university, that backpacking circuit for new thinking and concepts. Like everything, I have no mortgage. I live in a straw bale house. I am utterly free. All of that I learnt backpacking. People tell you the secrets of not, you know, I didn't want to get tied down to the system. I learned how not to, to travelling. So all I needed to do was arrive in Delhi, talk to a few people in a hostel. They'll put you onto someone else. You'll find someone else.

• 1:18:56Speaker 05

  And I heard about someone who was, I heard about an immortal yogi who was 180 years living in one cave. I was going to visit him. You just, you hear about people. So I go up to Almora. And at the same time, though. I have, there was an Indian man, it was a German man who knew India and he happened to tell me that there was a leper station up there and he wanted me to check on the leper station to see how it was. So in the end, I ended, he gave me a job in the leper station as chief medical officer. I had no knowledge of medicine. So I ended up in Almora. I was met a chief officer of a, of a leper station and although, because I couldn't find the cave, I found a cow shelter.

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  What were your responsibilities? If, if you're the chief officer of a leper station, what are your responsibilities there? I mean, are you given any resources? I mean, leprosy is, is contagious as well, isn't it?

• 1:19:41Speaker 05

  It is. It's pretty contagious, but it's very easy to cure now, thanks to a tablet invented by an Irishman, Tririty College in the 50s called One Table. It's now multiple, um, multi-therapy remedies, three different types. He invented one. All you need to do is eat, is take those tablets for six weeks and you're cured. The problem is no one wants to be cured. In India particularly, or in Africa, or any other culture, in all of the holy books, leprosy is the disease that is mentioned most in the holy books. So you are most likely to get alms and charity if you have leprosy. So the lepers in India-

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  Oh my god. So you're, you're, is it a system of poverty that's so great that if you become, if you become a leper, you might more likely get room and board or food?

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  You're sorted. Your needs are sorted forever. You'll always get alms if you're a leper. So, but, but, and particularly it's complicated because in India, there's the karmic idea. You have been given leprosy in this lifetime. It is not up to you to interfere with the gods' destiny and cure that leprosy. But of course, the German man who told me about this leper station, he had a rational, Western mindset and he knew he could cure these people in six weeks. So all I had, I had to do was once every 10 days, go down to Almora and oversee the, it was in Peppa's Alley. Go down to Peppa's Alley and watch the people, um, take the tablets, force, force them basically to take their tablets. And I do that every ten days. Luckily, they were far cleverer than me. They'd always either spit it out or throw it down. No one ever got cured in my, in my, whatever, seven months there.

• 1:21:09Speaker 05

  Um, but, uh, so I do that. And meanwhile, because I couldn't find a cave, I found a cow shed. So I would, so once every ten days, I'd go down to Leopard Station and otherwise.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  Did the cave ever exist?

• 1:21:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, there's plenty. So Gandhi went up and meditated in a cave in this area. Like, a lot of the great gurus went up to this area. It's an area.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  But this particular cave that the French tightrope walker told you about, was that a real cave or was it like many caves?

• 1:21:34Speaker 05

  Um, I wasn't quite sure. People were telling me there was, I could, I knew of four different hermits and, um, anchorites who were living in different caves above me in the area. But I could find no cave that was free that I could move into.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  Now, here's another question I just want to ask you about caves and meditation.

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Speaker 04

  So I went up to a cairn up in Sligo.

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  Um, is it Knocknare?

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, Knocknare is Queen Maeve's hill, but it's the one, isn't it, Karen? Um, oh gee, cause, yeah, uh, you know, it could be, it's, no, it's Caro. Caro Keel, no. Caro Keel and the other, Karen Moore.

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  Can't think of the name of it. Karen Moore, that makes sense now.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  Right beside Knocknare. Yeah, you can see.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  And I didn't know much about Cairns and I went, I was, I was in Sligo on a gig and I was bored and I said, fuck it, we'll go up there. And I didn't know what to expect. And it was, I've got tinnitus now, but it was before I had tinnitus. And I walked into the cairn and I experienced a silence that I'd never known, like this freaky silence. And I asked someone there and they said, yeah, that they said that they used to meditate in there, that the stones are arranged. So that you experience this extreme silence so that you can be alone in your meditation. Is that why these caves, is that what was special about these caves? Was it an auditory thing?

• 1:22:54Speaker 05

  That too. So you know, and science is now showing that if we put the right resonance into our head and those, they say that La Creu and the other caves in Ireland are tuned to that resonance, that actually you can track with an MRI machine that it changes the brain patterns of our brain and brings us to an awareness that sort of alpha waves, more alpha waves than beta or something, so that we have a grander awareness. So that is definitely an element. We can change our consciousness by vibrating in the right space. And all these caves seem to have been created in such a way that it can do that. But I think in the Himalayas, the reason why, like I genuinely did, I mean, I think I got enlightenment or any wisdom I now have, I got it in India. And why does everyone get it in India? Why

• 1:23:39Speaker 05

  did I get distracted? And yeah, did I forget my search in Africa, forget my search in South America, got it in India? Some people say it's the rocks. There is some type of electromagnetic frequency in the Himalaya and the rocks in the Himalayas. And again, you can now calculate that using high tech sensors. And it sort of facilitates the mind to open up different elements of it. And that would have sounded hippie dippy, but actually scientists are now proving this in MRI labs. You put different frequencies into the brain and suddenly different parts of the brain are tuned up and open to things. I think that's why the caves.

• 1:24:15Speaker 04

  I mean, look, I'd be with it. I'm someone who meditates and look, shit's happened to me during meditation. Awareness is like, I haven't, I'm not someone who does psychedelics, but I've had experiences with meditation that sound like when people describe ayahuasca. Just, I'd be meditating and all of a sudden I awaken from it with this deep understanding of oneness. I remember coming out of a meditation once and the first thing, as I opened my eyes, it was by a river. I saw a nettle and I just felt extreme love for this nettle.

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  A real empathy and understanding that whatever the fuck me and the nettle were, it was the same. You know what I mean?

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  Oh, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. God.

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  And you know what I mean? It's like, I just sat down for twenty minutes and was with my own thoughts. And now, all of a sudden, a nettle feels like a family member, and it was real.

• 1:25:15Speaker 05

  Whoa, wow.

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:25:18Speaker 05

  And I believe, and I know I'm distraught, is that the Irish language also has that idea, just in a single word, in many words, like in the word like skim. So skim means a tiny speck of flour, but it also can mean a tiny piece of dust or any small particle. And it can mean whitewash on a wall, and it can mean a dust on a mantelpiece. But skim has also these, so you've got all these things, basically a tiny particle, again, like creature, it could be a somatopic particle. But also means, it means a fairy film that covers the land. And it means succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep. So one word can bring you.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  A fairy film. Is this like, I had Eddie Lenhane on, he was speaking about like a goo that fairies leave in areas.

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  No, sorry, I have the wrong word. I suppose more a veil, more a sort of a go, you know, that haze in the early morning that you see.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:26:14Speaker 05

  That makes you feel that the world is, you're seeing beyond. It just seems, it seems that the edges are a bit mushy.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  The magical hour of the morning, the early morning, when things feel magical and breathy.

• 1:26:24Speaker 05

  Exactly, and that you can almost pass through the physical into another realm. Exactly, that thing, that thing, yeah. But the cave, yeah. So, as you said, so my, I couldn't find a cave, so I found a cow shed. So what I would do instead is all day I'd walk in the Himalayas, where in the rhododendron forest, the rhododendron grow the size of trees over there. And I'd grow there, and then I'd walk, I'd get back into my cow shed at night, because there was a man-eating mountain lion out at the time. So he had, most of the mountain lions were high, high up in the Himalayas, but this one had come down a bit lower. I mean, that was pretty high, I suppose, well, whatever, I've been about two thousand meters. And so he'd come down and he'd get a taste of human flesh, so he had to be inside. But during those walks in the daytime, I was, like you with the meditation, I was able to access realms of my mind

• 1:27:09Speaker 05

  that I had never be, never done until, you know, until, since I was like a six-year-old in my herb garden. And haven't been able to since. I was just going out to places, but I have a sort of strong mind. I know I'm not going to get lost in them, you know? I, I think a lot of people with my. Sort of my my my tendency towards mind would end up in in mental institutions because you because you go a bit too far. I seem to be able to go to those rounds and then pull myself back. So I was going very far out into places and but the only time I said would.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  You mean places internally.

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  Just in yourself.

• 1:27:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Really just gorgeous places where every just thing, like you with the nettle, everything seemed utterly united and there was this sense of euphoria, this absolute love and white wash of white light and euphoria.

• 1:27:59Speaker 04

  Were you meditating while doing these walks? Were you conscious of your breathing, things like that?

• 1:28:03Speaker 05

  No, no. In fact, I've only started meditating during Covid. Yeah.

• 1:28:07Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:28:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  You mad cunt.

• 1:28:10Speaker 05

  I know, but just because I had that access, I suppose. But my only problem, once, I was doing as well. I was following Ayurvedic medicine, while I was, only one strand of it at the time, which meant drinking my own urine, copious amounts of my own urine.

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  Her place.

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  Not anyone else's luckily, but my own. So when I went down to the to Almora, to the leper station every ten days to to, you know, to to check on the lepers, I'd also write a fax home to my mother. I was a sort of a dutiful son. So my dad had just died.

• 1:28:39Speaker 04

  How are you getting on, mad, drinking my own piss? I'm scared of a mountain lion.

• 1:28:41Speaker 05

  That that was it, exactly. But that was the work. But no, I wanted to reassure her. So I didn't say that. Instead, I said, Mum.

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  Has granny got any more oil replacements in the house?

• 1:28:50Speaker 05

  No, I wanted to reassure. So I said, Mum, in Irish, actually, but I said, you know, everything is brilliant, Mum. Don't worry about me. Everything is one. I see that we are all unified. Every leaf and every raindrop is one. And there is a there's light connecting all of the universe and all we are blissfully happy. And there is gorgeousness and there is only, you know, unified connection. So she believed that her sort of overeducated youngest son had gone round the twist, had gone mentally insane. You know, some people would say I had. I'm convinced I hadn't. But she sent my brother on this mission of mercy to rescue me. Now, my brother, my brother was a very serious pragmatic man. He was in the film industry. And this was, he was working in the, this is ninety five, ninety six, the years that Far and Away were made.

• 1:29:31Speaker 05

  He was locations manager on that and on Devil's Home with Brad Pitt and on all those big movies. So my mum says, go over to India and rescue Mancon. He's lost the plot. So my brother was busy with all the things. He didn't want to do that. But at the same time. He really could see himself, you know, he was just locations manager in the big Hollywood movies, he wanted to direct and he thought that he could direct a TV series. And nineteen ninety six was the year that TG Car, Fionn Fiall, announced they were going to set up TG, uh TG Car, a brand new Irish language television station. So my brother hatches the plan that he's gonna direct the brand, the first ever travel uh uh uh channel in travel programme in Irish and I'm gonna present it. So he comes out. Fucking hell. And he's very serious and pragmatic.

• 1:30:14Speaker 05

  So he comes out in a full safari suit, as though he was a director of, you know, Born Free or something, with a load of heavy duty equipment. Actually, it was the very first addition of a Sony hate, uh Sony, no, was it HD? No, Sony digital camera, um, Digi, whatever, those little Digi tapes. And it was not HD, it was over Digi. And um one shipped digital camera and he convinced Sony that he was gonna make the first ever TV programme with it. He comes out, comes out to Delhi, then goes up to Almora, then finds his way to Papa's alley and asks in the local chai shop, where is Magan living in the, in the cow shed? And he finds me and like, I'm not in a good way. Like, I am being, you know, I've been drinking my piss for a long time now, I am far out in sort of glorious parts of my brain.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  And he, he's just disgusted, I'm wearing like dirty old t-shirts and sweaty, smelly sweatpants and he's just like, and my hair is a mess. And he says, Magan, we're making a TV programme, I have not wasted my time, I haven't come the whole way out here and got this gig from TG Car so that you can screw it up. So he drags me down to Almora, he washes me, he gets my hair cut, he buys me a new shirt and trousers and puts me in front of the camera, his little new digital Sony. And of course, I'm only too happy to be put in the camera because I have loads to tell people how we are all unified and how drinking piss will cleanse your insights and how everything is one and everything is gorgeous. And Ruwan watches this, my brother watches this and he turns off the camera and it's

• 1:31:38Speaker 05

  just, I can see the sadness, the, the, the, just the break and broken heartedness, he's put so much work into this. He's convinced TG Car, who have no idea who he is or who I am, that this is worth taking a punt on and I'm about to screw it up. And he, he screams at me, he roars at me and he says, for fuck's sake, Magan, I have not. Come this way, you better get your act together. So he turns on the camera again and I just spout my beautiful new age rubbish again. And so it goes on for weeks. He slowly, over those weeks, tells me what to say. He threatens me to what to say and I, I just have to say, we're in India now and it's lovely and we're starting our journey. And if you see that program, I might put a clip of it up on the internet.

• 1:32:16Speaker 04

  Do.

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  You see this kid who is just, God love him, he's just lost. He, you know, he could easily be an institution. His eyes have that far away look. He's just like so many, you know, young backpackers you see. Um, but luckily Ruwan, my brother, taught me to be pragmatic, that you cannot go that far out, that you need to find a way of communicating ideas. And ever since that, that was ninety six, every year since then, we made a television documentary for T G R. In China, in Africa, in South America, in Greenland, just all over the world. Um, and uh. Until eventually then Hector came along and Hector says like, let's make a program where you don't have this like idiot pontificating to camera the whole time. And he made a program that actually was, was a sort of funny and comedic.

• 1:33:00Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:00Speaker 05

  Um, and then, but then.

• 1:33:02Speaker 04

  One thing, one little question there, right? You started off by talking about when you were a kid and hearing voices and stuff, right? And I had on this podcast a psychiatrist called Dr. Pat Bracken. Who is a psychiatrist, but he's also very anti psychiatry.

• 1:33:17Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  And he is very interested in, we'll say, hearing voices, but looking at it from different cultures. He says that hearing voices in our Western medicalized culture is immediately seen as a bad thing. But there's other cultures around the world where hearing voices is not stigmatized. And in these cultures where, where hearing voices isn't stigmatized, the people, the voices that people hear are actually quite nice. But in societies like ours where it's medicalized and, and said that it's a bad thing or labeled as schizophrenia, the voices tend to be terrifying.

• 1:33:54Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  How do you feel about that? I mean, because you seem to, even to the point, he talks about there's now a movement where people don't like to be referred to as psychotic, they don't like to be referred to as having schizophrenia. They're simply part of a community that hear voices and this is how they live and this is their life. How do you feel about that? Is it ringing true with you?

• 1:34:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, because I sometimes talk about these experiences to people and they often think, okay, were you schizophrenic or were you?

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Speaker 05

  I just, I never identi-, I really don't think I had anything like that because I had just all, they were just such loving voices. But what you're saying, I like, is the fact that so many people have so much tension in them now and so much, you know, their voices are so full of paranoia and darkness, is it just a reflection on a society that doesn't make sense? Like, if you're living in a society that really looks like it's going to commit suicide, then I suppose it's natural that some people would have those darkest thoughts. So, let's say back to what you, the psychiatrist said.

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 05

  We know, yes, definitely other cultures accepted that, that there were, you could hear, you had access to other voices. But it just happens that so too did our culture, so too did the Irish language. You know, every single traditional story, folk story, it's about an encounter with the other world. And that other world, like, okay, this is something now. So, the she, you know, the she yoga, the she, the fairies. She means, she used to mean a fairy man, okay? You know, she ghee her gust of wind, that is actually the fairies. But the she was a fairy man and then it became the fairies where they lived and then it was the fairies themselves, the she or the she yoga. Now, the she is the same word as, as the root for shea han, for peace.

• 1:35:38Speaker 05

  In fact, in Scots Gaelic, S I T H is she, fairy, and S I T H is peace, the same word, okay? Now, the old way of spelling she, fairy, was sidde, S I D H E. Now, Siddha, that Irish word, the old British fairy, is the same word as Siddha in Sanskrit, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, and in Zoroastrianism. Basically, Siddha is an enlightened being, okay? So you suddenly realise, these fairies actually are enlightened beings. It's the same word, there's no linguistic, you know, uncertainty about this. She is the same word as Siddha, an enlightened being, who, you know, a being who would have stepped out of, this is a human being, who would have taken a step back from the small-mindedness

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  of of reality and realised that there was a bigger dream and a bigger vision and connected themselves to something grander. So let's say these fairies, and where do the fairies live? They live underground, beside humans, but they live nearby and they are obsessed with us, they're constantly looking at what humans are doing and laughing at us and telling us, what do they tell us to do? They tell us to celebrate more, to feast more, to play, to dance, to party. So, and they, and whenever we tell them, whenever we go to them with our small-scale concerns, as all of the stories do, you know, you go when you're in time of worry or time of heartache, and they laugh at you, and they laugh at your obsession with time. So what do we know about the Siddha, these enlightened beings, the fairies? They, they, they do not accept time, which now we realise is not true.

• 1:37:06Speaker 05

  They want us to have a bigger vision and not to be so locked up in our small-mindedness. So actually, our culture, from the very beginnings, from every single folk story you were told in school, is only trying to tell you one thing, you can root yourself to nature and you can root yourself to a world that is beyond the physical, to a world that is nourishing, where there is advice and guidance there. Even, even like a word like Pukoke. Pukoke is a, a, a blindfold, okay? It also can mean a goat muzzle and it can mean a tin shield for putting over a thieving cow's eyes. But also, but the main meaning sort of for, for Pukoke is, I don't have that quite right,

• 1:37:51Speaker 05

  Pukoke, it is almost Pukoke, I'll tell you in a second, is, it's, it's an otherworldly being that can, that can appear invisible in this world, an otherworldly being that can, Pukin, sorry, Pukin is the word. You still use it in English, you know, put a Pukin, a blindfold over someone. So it's an otherworldly being that can appear invisible in this world. So we knew, our ancestors, even our grannies knew that there were people who could jump from critter or from counter, which is this region or this place to alter, the other world. And that there was amazing reassurance we got from that. And I would just, all of our problems could be solved if we, if we expanded our awareness to realise that bigger picture.

• 1:38:33Speaker 05

  We would no longer have the anxiety and we might have answers to a deeper connection to nature, to, as you said, that belief that we are one with the Nettle. It is there to heal us and we are there, you know, to be part of it.

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  Do you, one thing I found really interesting there is when you were speaking about people speaking about interactions with the fairies and the fairies laughing at them. Like, literally, when I go on to the internet and I listen to people recount their Iowaska or DMT trips, a lot of people report visiting somewhere where time doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist, and they meet these beings that they can't describe. They're, they're crystal beings and they basically laugh at them and they have fun with them. Like, do you, the similarities between modern day Iowaska DMT trips and what you've just described with ancient Irish fairies, do you see a correlation there?

• 1:39:23Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yeah. And to get back to a point about that salmon that we didn't make, what do we know about a salmon? A salmon is speckled. What else is speckled? The fly agaric mushroom, the amanita muskara mushroom.

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  I was thinking speckled dove ecstasy, but humans make them.

• 1:39:38Speaker 05

  No, the fly agaric mushroom, and again, what do we know about that? I, I have a chapter in my book about the rheaster. The rheaster was Cú Chulainn's warp spasm. When he would get totally furious or angry, he would just have fire and flames shooting out of his, top of his head. His eyeballs, his pupils would dilate to the extent that they were popping out so much that it said, like a heron could bite it or a crane could bite it off. It's a perfect, a scamp, example of that mescaline induced, you know, transcendental state, which, which you don't get from magic mushrooms, you get from fly agaric.

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  Also those Vikings, the, what were those Vikings called who used to take mushrooms?

• 1:40:15Speaker 05

  The berserkers.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  Berians?

• 1:40:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, the berserkers, exactly. Exactly.

• 1:40:19Speaker 04

  They used to take fly agaric mushrooms and it would make them incredibly angry as they went into battle and they went berserk.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  Exactly, and the Sami people still do, but you know the way there's some, the fly agaric mushroom needs to be taken with great care.

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it's poisonous, isn't it?

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  Sometimes. I, I have a podcast at the moment, actually, and in one of it, I talked to Courtney, Courtney Taylor, a great, an expert in Wyclough, mushroom collector, who really actually demystifies the poisonous element of the fly agaric mushroom. And I also, in that, it's called the Almira of Ireland, but also I talked to Billy McLean, who tells me about that lost cave and those magical stones outside his land. And also in that one, I post myself into a cave, which is the Cave of Transformation, Aonagat in Roscommon. And I go down there for seven hours, well, no, I don't do seven hours, I do about three hours, to see what transformative. So the Aonagat was the cave of transformation in, in the time book Cool and all the old myths,

• 1:41:17Speaker 05

  where someone would go down and they would enter the other world. Or why did I get onto that? Oh, yeah, Berserker. So the fly agaric, you know, not only that, but the Sami culture of northern Lapland still take the fly agaric. And the reason, so it can be slightly poisonous, it's not as poisonous as we think, but it relaxes the muscles. And so if it goes out, if it touches the heart, it'll relax the heart. And, you know, the heart might, you don't want your heart, heart to relax, you know, because that means it stops. And so what the Vikings used to do and what the Sami people still do is they let the deer, the reindeer, eat it first, and then they drink the urine of the reindeer. And then the mescaline element will have passed through in its pure state without the poison. Yeah.

• 1:41:59Speaker 04

  Wow, okay.

• 1:42:01Speaker 05

  But that speckle, the fly agaric, it's a classic mushroom you've seen, it's in every fairy story, you know, it's a red mushroom with white dots. And whenever you come across speckled in any of the old folk stories, and you will come across it everywhere, that's what it's a ref, that's potentially what it's a reference to. It's a hint that to access this other world that we're talking about, the fairies are with Finn McCool, or the magic mushrooms, or the hazel of insight, they are, you can get to those through the fly agaric.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  Wow. Um. So one last question, because I'm time conscious now. I know you need to fuck off.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  Very good.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  Um. The, I need to ask you about your sustainable living. I need to ask you about the, the house that you live in. And you live in a passive house. Is that correct?

• 1:42:45Speaker 05

  No, not really. So I didn't want a mortgage. So I came, when I came back from Africa, South America and India, I had seen people there build their houses out of what was around them. So in Bolivia, they use reeds. In Tibet, they use stone. In Africa, they use mud. In India, they use straw, whatever. So I came back. I had my granny, the Republican revolutionary Sheila Humphrey, she died and left me 10 grand. So in 1997, uh, I came back to Ireland and had my 10 grand and looked for anywhere I could buy, find 10 acres. And luckily, Westmeath welcomed me in. And I looked around and thought, what am I going to build my house out of? And there they were growing barley straw, barley. So I bought myself 200, um, bales, straw bales of good oat and bar,

• 1:43:25Speaker 05

  of good, yeah, barley straw and just use those as Lego blocks, like as big wheel to bits to build my house and put a metal roof on it. And I didn't have planning permission. I lived in it for six years. I told the planners that this is what I'm building. And then you can, I'll apply for planning for the, for the next house. So they gave me, in their wisdom, Westmead County Council, in their just kindness, they gave me permission for the straw bale house. So that first house cost me five or six grand. I lived in it for six years. And then I built the second house for 26 grand. It was meant to be bales of straw, but in the end I, I got scared and I put concrete block in the, in this core of it. And I put grass on the roof, just because I didn't know how to tile, but I knew how to just wheelbarrow a load of mud up onto the roof. And then I put mud and straw on the outside of the concrete because it looked very angular.

• 1:44:08Speaker 05

  And I built that in 2002 for 26 grand and I've been living there ever since. Um. And just in recent years, I've wanted to, I've wanted to create my independence just because I don't have a great income in any way. You know, I do a little bit for the Irish Times, I write books, but those, God love it, those travel books I wrote about all those trips. You know, they don't sell much. Um. So I, then I started growing my own vegetables. Oh no, first I think I did, I planted six acres of the 10 acres in Oakwood. I did that 20 years ago and God, it was slow, but now massive oaks, I've did big, big oaks, 20 year old oaks. And then I got pigs, I got Tamworth, the old native pig in. And I got, they'll put the pigs in and then I now have hens and I have turkeys and I've whatever, five beehives and I have.

• 1:44:50Speaker 04

  So are you living off the land as such? Are you trying to, are you living in a way where, where? You don't need money for a lot of your needs.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah. So I put my, I put 4.3 kilowatts of, of solar panels in so I'd have electricity most of the time. I put, I, the first thing I did, you know, 23 years ago when I moved here was put up the polytunnel. Um, so yeah, I, I mean, clearly things like, you know, lentils and flour, I'm still buying in. Um, I'd like to, I'd like to grow enough, you know, grain just for my own, uh, bread. But during Covid again, I am growing so much more since Covid because all of those things, they take up an enormous amount of time. Um, so none of them I would have been doing to the extent, the scale I wanted to until this year.

• 1:45:31Speaker 04

  And you preserve in vegetables and shit like that? Are you counting things and, and, and stuff?

• 1:45:35Speaker 05

  I am, exactly. I'm doing that. And again, something I'd never done until this year was save my seed because it was so easy to save, you know, herbal seed, flower seeds, because it was so easy to just, you know, go online and order packages. But during Covid, they were sold out, you know, and the Grace Brown Envelope Seeds and Cork and Seed Savers in Clare, they were all saying, we have none left, save your own seed. Like the shops were actually telling you, don't come to us, do it yourself. So that was a big learning experience for me this year. The power of being utterly independent means controlling your seeds as well as your irrigation, your electricity, your food source. Yeah.

• 1:46:09Speaker 04

  So I'll leave you going now, Mancon, right? Thank you so much for that. That was absolutely fantastic chat. It was so interesting. Um, I'd love to have you on again, man. I'd say we, me and you could talk about fucking anything for a long time.

• 1:46:19Speaker 05

  I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And I genuinely, I'm, I'm just so bowled over by the work you do.

• 1:46:25Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you so much, man.

• 1:46:26Speaker 05

  Slav, see you now. Slav.

• 1:46:28Speaker 04

  All right. I'll see you, man. Have a good one. Bye bye.

• 1:46:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Poor old Mancon.

• 1:46:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that was, uh, Mancon Megan, the first chat that we had on this podcast. And he came back five times after that.

• 1:46:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  We had lots of mad chats and he won't be back. He won't be back on the podcast unfortunately because now we've lost him. Please engage with Man Con's work, his books, 32 Words for Field. Even a lovely documentary he made there, it's on the RTE player called Man Con's Europe by Train. A little travel show that he recorded two years ago, travelled all around Europe on a train. Keep his ideas alive, his work alive. Keep his books in need of reprinting. His body isn't here anymore, but his ideas can ripple. His ideas can ripple. Like the water on the pond and his ideas are like potting on the legs of a fucking bee.

• 1:47:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or shit from a bird's arse that grows into a tree. Carry on Man Con's ideas. That's what he would have wanted. Be a fearless fucking eccentric. That's what you get from that chat. He didn't give a shit. Curiosity came first and people's opinions about him came second. We can all be inspired by that. All right, I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and genuflect to a robin. Dog bless. Rest in peace, Man Con Megan.

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