A cultural history of Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman Jokes

A deep dive hot take into anti irish jokes, kerryman jokes and Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman Jokes 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

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• 1:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Extend yourself towards the bendy hen you heaven sent, Brendons. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first ever episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. As you can hear, I'm recording this during a fucking biblical deluge of rain. The type of rain that you only see once a year, once every two years. All of the rain that we were supposed to get in July, it feels as

• 2:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  if it's all coming down now. I am a huge fan of the rain. I adore walking around in the rain while dressed appropriately. Umbrella, Gore-Tex jacket, Gore-Tex pants, waterproof boots. That type of garmentery prophylaxis is useless in this weather. The rain hits with such violence that the droplets will jump up and find their way into your boats. I often dress up as a condom and penetrate the ether of Limerick City so that it doesn't get me pregnant.

• 3:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's not how it works. That's not how that works at all.

• 3:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was trying to be poetic there and I forgot. I was trying to be poetic, and in doing so, I forgot about the, the basic mechanics of sexual reproduction there. And that's actually a poor metaphor. That's a very poor metaphor. Me dressing appropriately for the rain is not, it's nothing like a condom. Unless, unless there's like just one lunatic and the reason they wear a condom is exclusively to keep their penis dry, and that's the only reason they do it. Which, I haven't heard that since primary school, since I was nine. Well, there was a joke in school, there was a joke, a schoolyard joke, which was, "Did

• 3:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  you hear about the carryman who had sex?" No, I didn't. He put the condom on backwards and he went. And I spent a good two years pretending I understood what that joke meant. In the days before internet memes, WhatsApp messages, before the internet, when oral culture was still, was still a huge part of the, the fabric of society, people told each other jokes. People memorized jokes and told them to each other. A joke like that, someone heard their dad saying it in a pub and then just repeated it because their dad's friends laughed, brought it to the schoolyard, and we kept repeating it, even

• 4:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  though we didn't really know what that meant. We received our sex education from priests, so they didn't tell us about condoms. When I was nine, like the, the last of the magdalene laundries still existed. Condoms could only be purchased in chemists. They weren't spoken about. They were... Probably the dirtiest word that you could say around an adult would be condom. It would bring about huge shame and embarrassment. Speaking about condoms made the adults angry. Condoms were things that you found underneath electrical pylons, on the ground, used. Children would gather around a used condom and stare at it for

• 5:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  days and touch it with a stick, or try and make a dog eat it. Cause when I was nine, touching condoms was how you got AIDS. I saw my first used condom. When I was about six, I found it on the ground, and I called my mother and showed her. And she went very silent and told me not to touch it because it was a dead ghost. And I believed her and asked her what a ghost, soul ghost of when it dies twice, and she told me to shut up. But I remembered the, the carryman putting the condom on backwards joke in my school leading to debates about putting condoms on backwards. And one fellow saying, "I, I

• 6:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  think what the joke means is if you put a condom on backwards, the sperm has nowhere to go, so it travels back down your willy and then your testicles explode." It happened to my dad's friend. His balls disappeared and now he just has this hole. He showed it to everybody at the pub, and now he has to wear a nappy all the time, cause all the piss just falls out around his legs. And we all know that that was utterly ridiculous, but there wasn't really anything you could do about it. Because the young lad who's claiming that this has happened is now taking this personally. My dad told me, "Of course it's true. You calling my father a liar?" His very sense of identity became entrenched

• 6:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  in defending this piece of information. I found him on Facebook a few years back, around the pandemic, and he'd joined a Facebook group that claimed that the coronavirus was caused by 5G signals. I was overwhelmed with a sense of comfort. He was still doing the same shit as a middle-aged man, structuring his sense of worth and self and identity around disinformation. It had nothing to do with 5G or exploding testicles. It was about the shame of being publicly wrong. And I wondered if his dad used to wind him up for crack and make fun of him. And that's where this, this sensitivity came from. But

• 7:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  that joke, "Did you hear about the carryman who put the condom on backwards?" You can't say it to a teacher, you can't say it to your parents. Will my balls explode if I put a condom on backwards? There's nothing you can do. No one has smartphones. You just had to sit with the anxiety of that piece of misinformation until you say it around the wrong person, an older lad, and they laugh into your face. And that culture, like if you look at the, the earliest episodes of South Park, South Park came out in 1997. The premise of a lot of early South Park episodes is a group of nine-year-olds being

• 8:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  exposed to some usually sexually explicit adult information that they don't understand, and then navigating that in the best way that nine-year-olds can. And that was the, the mechanics of a lot of early South Park humor. And it was relatable because that's how it was. That's how it fucking was on the schoolyard before the internet. And I, I still think that's healthier and safer than if that happened now, and the nine-year-olds just typed the question into Google, and now they're looking at videos of adults having sex. At the very least, there was boundaries of, of safety and propriety in place for

• 8:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  children, but also now, I reckon, I reckon a group of nine-year-olds could safely go to their teacher with that question. And the teacher is trained in giving an age-appropriate response, which is based around their safety. We did not have that. We had a priest. The teachers left the room and a priest came in and told us that if you have a wet dream, it means that you slept with the devil. But the original joke there, the carryman, that's what's called a, a carryman joke, which never sat very comfortably with me because...

• 9:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a type of post-colonial, internalised hatred that comes with the Kerry man joke. Kerry's an absolutely beautiful place in the south of Ireland in Munster. It's a county. The Kerry accent is incredibly lyrical. A bit like certain Welsh accents or the Birmingham accent. It's an accent that's inherently comical. So Ireland, the people of Ireland like to view the people of Kerry as being silly and stupid and backwards. I'll play you an example of a Kerry accent because I don't think a description can do it justice. I personally find this accent incredibly beautiful.

• 10:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's bard-like, it's jazz music and a wonderful use of Iburne English. You're not going to understand any of this, but this man is speaking English and he's... It's from Instagram, it's a video of a man in his car speaking about his dog Tommy.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Here we are to see it on the roadside by Barley Court Beach, myself and Tommy. What does a misty, damp type of evening? And we're after a walk down the way earlier, this is the second walk today locally. We got a walk in before the rain, it was nineteen degrees. Thank everyone for the concern about Tommy and the chicken bones. And you know, I have my mind made up there now that I won't give him no more chicken. Raw chicken, like some must say like raw chicken is fine for him, but you know, I want to... We'll read now the comments there now that the bones could still like even though they wouldn't be cooked. I think that they could, that they could still be bad for him, that I'll... Sometime I'm going to ask him later something.

• 11:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a Kerry man by the name of Liam Wilcox, who just records videos of himself in his car with his little Jack Russell Tommy over his shoulders. And he's talking there about, you know, thanking everybody on Instagram for being concerned about Tommy because Tommy's having difficulty eating chicken bones, whether it's raw chicken or cooked chicken. That to me, that's jazz music. That is Ireland's jazz music. That's the prose of Irish literature and that's a pure rural Kerry accent. With all due respect, it's also fucking hilarious, okay? It's a very, very funny accent. So we have the Kerry man joke.

• 12:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you make a Kerry man laugh on a Monday? Tell him a joke on a Friday? How do you confuse the Kerry man? Put two shovels against a wall and tell him to take his pick? Did you hear about the Kerry man who tried to blow up a bus? He burnt his lips on the exhaust. They're all really funny one-liners and they're pretty harmless. But my issue with them is a lot of them started off as anti-Irish jokes. It was a huge thing in England during the 1970s when Irish people in England or Scotland or Wales

• 12:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  were immigrating there, legitimately marginalised and facing institutional discrimination. Anti-Irish jokes didn't help any of that. It was completely normal to call Irish people thick as fuck, big thick fucking patties. Backwards muck savages. I actually resent that last one because it comes from the joke, "Did you hear about the Irishman who tried to blow up a bus? He burnt his lips on the exhaust." Who the fuck are ye to tell us we can't blow up buses? We're fucking brilliant at blowing up buses. We invented how to blow up buses, you English cunts.

• 13:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm only joking, I'm only joking, but seriously like, that one does offend me a little bit. Not as an Irish person, but as a writer. The shovel one, for fuck's sake. Irish people built England. Irish people were working on the construction sites. Why the fuck would they not know what a pick is? Um, what do you call an Irishman under a wheelbarrow? A mechanic. Fair enough. Now, now you're making sense. If we're in Sheffield or Coventry in the 1950s, big industrial wealthy cities and you're trying to make fun of an Irish immigrant who comes from a very poor rural background where they may not have seen a car, now that joke works. Now we're making sense with your racism.

• 14:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Paddy has never seen a car. He thinks a wheelbarrow is a car. Fair enough, you have me there, but don't like, "Did you hear about the Irishman who blew up a bus?" Yeah, I did. It devastated the financial centre of London and now Margaret Thatcher wants to negotiate. But anti-Irish, racist anti-Irish jokes were completely normalised. You had comedians, 1970s English comedians like Frank Carson, Jim Davidson, uh, fucking Mike Reid who used to be EastEnders, Bernard Manning, who'd have a comedy routine based around one-liners and a huge part of that comedy routine was anti-Irish jokes.

• 14:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then anti-Pakistani jokes, anti-West Indian jokes. And then you'd have the, they were the famous comedians. And then you had thousands of copycat comedians with this one-liner racist humour. And the stinger is, is that a lot of this humour would take place in what was called working men's clubs in England. Working men's clubs were very important. So they weren't, they weren't just like pubs. Working men's clubs started to pop up mid to late industrial revolution, 1860s onwards. Now, when I say they weren't pubs, they emerged as a response to pubs.

• 15:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you have this large industrial working class, England, Scotland and Wales, north of Ireland too. I'd be surprised if there wasn't one or two in maybe Limerick or Dublin, but I'm going to stick with England. So with the industrial revolution, you've got steelworkers, miners, all of these separate industries emerging and a new industrial working class, urban industrial working class whose grandparents might have been peasants in a field. And when the men were finished working in the steel mill or working in the coal mine, they'd all just, they'd go to the pub because they'd have money in their pockets and they'd go to the pub and get shitfaced.

• 16:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Spend all their money in the pub to a private pub landlord. You gotta realise that the industrial revolution and the modern industrial city, I'm talking 1750s onwards, introduced things like widespread alcoholism, the widespread trauma of addiction that comes with industrially produced gin. Look up the paintings and drawings of William Hogarth from the 1700s. A drawing of his like Gin Lane, he used to draw, I suppose you'd call him satirical cartoons maybe, but it was more of a, like a social realism and he would portray working class people living in industrial slums,

• 16:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  suffering from the poverty of gin addiction. So the temperance movement started to emerge during the Victorian era to move the urban industrial working classes away from destructive alcohol consumption. So from that comes the working men's clubs from the 1850s. Where can all the miners and their families gather to let off steam after work in a space which isn't exclusively focused on getting shitfaced? So the working men's club, it was a cooperative, they were cooperatives. So they weren't necessarily run for profit, not like the pub landlord

• 17:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  who's extracting everyone's wages for drink. The working men's club, a co-op, not run for profit, member-owned, self-governing. A social institution with cheap pints, cheap pints because it's not being run for profit and all the profits go back into the club. But also a space for the families of, we say the miners or the steelworkers, mutual aid, healthcare, education, political association. Like a working men's club in like Coventry.

• 18:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Let's just say 1870. So bicycles, bicycles were a huge industry in Coventry during the Industrial Revolution. So you'd have your bicycle makers, working men's club. So now, all the workers who make bicycles, they're going to the working men's club. They're buying pints, cheap, money from the pints going back into the club. Club is reinvesting it. Now they're building snooker tables. Now there's a stage for entertainment. There's a piano. There's all this money coming in from pints, but it's not going into anyone's pocket. There's, there's no landlord here. So now we have all this surplus money. What do the workers need? Well, a lot of them live in, in slums and they don't have proper

• 19:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  toilets, showering facilities, neither do their families. Brilliant. Okay. Let's build a, a bunch of fucking showers, decent bathrooms that are plumbed. Now the workers have access to showers and cleanliness and so that their kids and their wives, ah, fuck this lad, this lad's after breaking his hand while he was making a bicycle and now he can't work. Okay. Let's use all this money to have mutual aid funds and sickness funds. Let's have, let's organise seaside trips for the children of the workers here. Fuck it. Shouldn't the, the bicycle making company that we all work for, shouldn't they be providing some of this shit? Well, let's form a union. Let's organise a union here in this working

• 19:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  men's club and have a bit of solidarity. Let's build a boardroom. Let's have a committee. Let's train working class men into how to chair meetings and keep accounts and debate, collective administration, organisation. This sounds amazing. How is this all possible? Cause no one's siphoning off the profits. This is a cooperative. No one, the workers own this. The money that the bicycle makers are earning is going back into their own bicycle working men's club for the good of all the workers and their families. And what you start to see emerge is a healthy community, joy and meaning that isn't centred

• 20:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  exclusively around just the men getting shitfaced and pissing their wages away to a pub landlord. It also creates the, the type of space and the type of community where, yeah, there's pints being drank and you're gonna have your alcoholics, of course, but it's not a gin shop. It's not a crack den. There's community, snooker, education, entertainment, fucking meetings, mutual aid, collective governance. The unit of alcohol, it's embedded in social participation, rather than alcohol being the, the sole purpose of the institution. That environment is, it's healthier because there's a lot of meaning present. But crucially, like the English working men's club becomes the foundation to the welfare state. Things like

• 21:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  free healthcare, free housing, free education, what you'd call the social net. You can trace the roots of that to these working men's clubs in England. And by the 50s, 60s, 70s, these working men's clubs became sites of entertainment. There was a stage and the money existed to hire entertainers, singers, comedians, bands. But what does this have to do with anti-Irish jokes or the carryman joke? The comedians I mentioned, your Mike Raids, your Bernard Mannings, whose entire set was based around these anti-Irish or anti-Pakistani or anti-black jokes. They were on the working men's circuit and all

• 21:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  their copycats were on the working men's circuit. The reason it's a stinger, as I said, is all those jokes served to do was to create racial division amongst a group of people who actually had a fuckload in common. You're all working in the same mine, in the same steam, steel mill, the same factory. I would argue possibly 40% or to 50% of the workforce are Irish immigrants. You have the Windrush generation over from the Caribbean. So you've got people from Barbados, Jamaica, working in the fucking factories. Your fellow workers are from Pakistan. So you have this beautiful space cooperatively owned by the

• 22:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  workers, a site of union organisations, solidarity, collective bargaining against the fucking factory owners. And now Paddy doesn't feel safe showing up because he's gonna get called the Paddy and the entertainer, entertainer on stage. All he's doing is telling jokes about how Paddy is thick. And earlier on in the day, yourself and Paddy were working together equal in the fucking mines. In some clubs, Irish people just weren't allowed in. Black people definitely weren't allowed in because there was a working men's club in Doncaster in 1968 and there was a Jamaican, a miner by the name of Iver Brown, who was explicitly barred from his working men's club because they didn't allow black people in. So where'd you go if you're not allowed in? So if you're, if you're listening to

• 23:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  this from England and your grandparents are from Jamaica or Barbados, Trinidad, Mansourat or South Africa, then you'll know the word shebeen. If you're listening to this and your people were Irish, you'll know the word shebeen too. Shebeen is, is an Irish word. It's from about the 1700s. In Ireland, it used to mean a little illegal hut where you could purchase and drink poojean, poojean being our, our moonshine. So the Irish and Jamaicans in London, Birmingham, Sheffield, wherever the fuck, we had our shebeens. Where the Irish worker in the steel mill and the Jamaican worker in the steel mill go to a

• 23:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  little makeshift pub where they'd drink Guinness, because Guinness is a big thing in Jamaica too. And you probably had a lot of carrymen and a lot of Jamaican fellas going, why do our accents sound the same? Now I'm talking 1940s and 50s for that, but not just shebeens. Irish pubs. If you've ever wondered, why, why the fuck are there so many Irish pubs in England? What's that about? Why didn't you integrate? You're all working in the coal mine. You're all working in the steel mill or making tools in Birmingham. Why aren't you going to the working men's club with all, with all the lads that you work with? Because Bernard Mannings up on stage calling me a thick cunt. So Irish pubs come from

• 24:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  that and Irish centres. Like my first ever live podcast that I did in England would have been London 2018. In the London Irish Centre, very strange gig. I learned a few things about doing live podcasts from that gig. In Camden, I think it is. And that was set up in 1955 as a social institution for Irish immigrants. It was doing the job that the working men's clubs were doing for white English working class people, but this was for Irish people, new immigrants. So these alternative spaces emerge amongst workers

• 25:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  because of, because of racism that's present in the working men's clubs. Where are the working men's clubs now? But 70% of them have disappeared because Margaret Thatcher brought in neoliberalism in the 80s and shut down national industries, shut down the coal mines, shut down the factories, gave the workers who owned their council houses the right to buy. Those houses now entered the private market, but new council houses weren't built. Working class communities become eviscerated. They lose their community centres. They lose their working men's clubs. And now these areas are incredibly poor. You see things like men's sheds emerging in that space. You see Nigel Farage and the

• 26:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Reform Party and Brexit voters emerging from that space. All those jokes did is they divided a community that should have been together as one. They all have one thing in common. Whether you're Caribbean Irish or white working class, you're all working class. You're all working in the same factory. You all need solidarity for collective bargaining to keep the unions strong. Who did those jokes benefit in the end? The capitalist class, the billionaires, the private interests enabled by Thatcher that dismantled and took over British industry. The racism fractured potential working class solidarity by encouraging

• 26:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  the workers to identify against the Irish black immigrant workers who shared the same material interests. It made unified resistance a lot more difficult. And when neoliberalism tore apart the fucking unions, dismantled the communities, the police on horseback, cracking the skulls of striking miners, covered head to toe in soot. Those police didn't give a fuck who you are. Whether you're Irish or English or Caribbean, you're just peasants, standing in the way of the, the class solidarity, the ultra wealthy. But those jokes, I learned that they were called chicken in a basket humour.

• 27:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the comedy industry, about 15 years ago, when I was, I was a professional comedian 15 years ago, I used to do Edinburgh Festival and all that shit. And I'd speak to older English comedians and they'd use the term, oh, that joke was a bit chicken in a basket. And I'd ask them, what the fuck does that mean? Who was it? Alexi Sale, absolutely lovely fella, an English comedian. Actually, he'd, he probably wouldn't even be like being called English, he'd identify more as Liverpool. A lot of Liverpool people who see themselves as completely separate, they're just Liverpool. He's an old school communist and he would have been quite literally in the 1980s, part of like a, a younger wave of comedian.

• 28:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, created a new type of stand-up comedy that was opposed to the working men's club one-liner tradition. I'd pints with him a couple of times when I was in London or in Edinburgh. Very kind to me when I was in my twenties and figuring out the entertainment industry. And he was the one who told me about this chicken in a basket humour, that all the working men's clubs, they used to have these comedian circuits. And those shitty one-liners were called chicken in a basket humour. Cause chicken and chips in a basket was the food that was being served in the seventies at these working men's clubs. And I'd never heard, I'd never actually heard anti-Irish jokes until I went to, to London in the early 2010s.

• 28:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'd be going to different comedy clubs and every so often, a shitty comedian would get up and make a couple of tongue-in-cheek anti-Irish jokes. And I was shocked by it. And I think I told Alexi Sale about it afterwards and he went, oh, that's chicken in a basket. That's what that is. And explained what that meant. But I knew those jokes, not as anti-Irish jokes, I knew them as Kerryman jokes. So I knew the same jokes and had heard them in the schoolyard, but they were about Kerrymen back home in Ireland. So we'd taken those same jokes against us and then applied them to people from Kerry.

• 29:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  I found a brilliant academic folklore article. I was trying to get to the roots of the Kerryman joke. This article written by Leah Lowthorpe, she did deep research and found that the Kerryman jokes, they didn't exist before 1973. The jokes emerged, the Kerryman jokes emerged in the London Irish community in 1973. Now, the correlation that I see that wasn't made in this paper is, and it has to be connected. 1973 is also the same year that the provisional IRA began their mainland campaign in England.

• 30:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you now go from Paddy being a thick fuck to Paddy being a legitimately dangerous fuck. The IRA never, ever targeted a working men's club. But if you're in Birmingham or Sheffield, 1972, 73, you're a steelworker working in a mine and one of your sons is a squaddy. I can see why these people would be afraid that their club might become a target. Anti-Irish racism would have exploded around 1972, when that IRA campaign began. And you gotta remember, you're dealing with a couple of hundred thousand Irish people, 99.9% in no way affiliated with the provisional IRA, not carrying out attacks, not even being

• 31:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  in support of the attacks, just trying to exist as Irish people in England. And I, I just find it so interesting that the Kerryman joke emerges in that year and that the vast majority of the Kerryman jokes that I've heard, they're just anti-Irish jokes, but it's a Kerryman instead of an Irishman. And at the core of the Kerryman joke, it's, it's an urban Irish thing, it's an anti-culture thing.

• 31:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think it was a way for the Irish immigrant to try and let their English neighbour know that they're quote unquote civilized. We're not the thick ones, that's the Kerry people, they're the rural ones, they're the muck savages, they're the ones you're talking about, the people from Kerry, not us. And by 1976, there was a book released in Ireland, which is apparently the, the best-selling paperback book in Ireland of all time, which is the book of Kerryman jokes, released in 1976. Most of the jokes in that book, it's English chicken in a basket anti-Irish jokes, except now it's about Kerry people. Now, in the London Irish context, I can see why a frightened, ashamed and embarrassed

• 32:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  community tried to distance themselves from Irish stereotypes by picking the scapegoat of the Kerry person. But why did it then take off so massively in Ireland? In the mid 1970s. Cause 1973 was the year that we joined the EEC, the European Economic Community, which became the EU.

• 32:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Both of my parents were born into what would be considered a third world country, very rural, very poor. My dad was born in rural West Cork. He wouldn't have had electricity when he was a child. His toilet was bushes, bringing pigs into the house in winter for warmth. Because we were colonised for so long, Ireland was a country of extraction. The north of Ireland, Belfast, which the Brits held Anta, the six counties, that was your industry. There's your Harland and Wolf, your shipbuilding. But outside of Dublin, maybe Limerick, Cork City. Rural Ireland was colonised by England and was not designed for the Irish people.

• 33:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was about agricultural extraction. Forests cleared and just swathes of fucking pastureland that the English used for dairy, meat, butter, to be exported to their slave colonies in the Caribbean. So when the south of Ireland, the 26 counties of Ireland, achieved independence from Britain and we were no longer part of the fucking empire, we had nothing. We'd lost half our population during the famine. So after independence, we just, we take back this, a country shaped by fucking colonialism that's just geared towards extraction. No industrial base, no skilled working class, we had a peasant class, none of the infrastructure

• 34:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  for an economically independent 20th century country. And then you have Dublin, still an absolute shit compared to an equivalent city of its size over in England and Scotland. So in 1973, when we joined the European Economic Community, you have countries like France or Britain or West Germany going, fuck, Ireland is in shit. We're just after letting them join the, the EU effectively and Ireland is in a state of poverty. So the EEC had to throw billions at us for rapid modernisation. So we had roads built, telephones, rural electrification, water and sewage, all of the infrastructure that we didn't have.

• 34:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  European money paid for that, but also because of colonisation, because of 800 years of colonisation, we'd missed the industrial revolution. So the infrastructure was being paid for to attract foreign investment. That's how we end up in the situation where we are now, where we have fucking no autonomy and we're a country where the biggest corporations in the world launder their money in Ireland and don't pay tax. I'm blaming the Brits on that one. That's a big reason for why so much of our economy is just going to join corporations and saying, here, come here, you won't have to pay tax, just come here, invest a little bit. All of that modernisation, all of that investment all over the news, made us feel collectively

• 35:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  very insecure about being a modern country. We were ashamed, we had huge shame about being Irish, shame about being rural, poor, backwards. We were ashamed about all of the things we were being accused of in those anti-Irish working men's club jokes. So then we took those same fucking jokes and used the Kerryman as a scapegoat. Why did the Kerryman put a ladder in the pub? Because the drinks were on the house. Why did the Kerryman put his radio in the fridge? He wanted cool music. Why did the Kerryman stare at the orange juice? Cause it said concentrate. Why did the Kerryman take his car door to the desert?

• 36:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he could roll the window down when it was hot. Did you hear about the Kerryman who had sex? He put the condom on backwards and he went. They became popular in the 1970s. We didn't have any immigrants to take the piss out of, so we picked the Kerry people. Why Kerry? Their accents are funny, so like Birmingham or like Wales, it's just an inherently funny accent. Same thing in Spain. In Spain, they take the piss out of people from Andalusia because apparently those southern Spanish people have got a ridiculous accent. But also in 1975, when it came to this EEC funding, Kerry was identified as a less favoured area, an area that needed more investment than anywhere else.

• 36:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause only a hundred years previously, it had been destroyed by the famine. It lost thousands of people. The European investment made us hyper-aware that we as a nation were seen as rural, backwards and poor by the rest of Europe, that we required massive charity. So to distance ourselves from that shame, we picked the Kerry people down at the bottom and said, no, not us, it's them. They're the ones you're thinking of, they're the backwards rural ones, not us up here in Dublin. It comes down to class and money. If you think of those white, English, working class people in the working men's clubs, making

• 37:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  the anti-Irish jokes, it's not just to shit on the Irish, it's to try and gain acceptance from the middle classes and the upper classes. Cause if they laugh at those jokes, then it must mean that the English working class are going to be accepted in the same way that when the-

• 37:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dark, poor Irish immigrants went to New York in the 1840s and were seen as the absolute bottom of society. It was the Irish people that were the first black and white minstrel performers. The Irish lived in the same New York slums as previously enslaved African Americans. The Irish learned how to speak like their African American neighbours, how to dance like them, how to sing like them, through a shared economic position. And then the Irish go up on stage in blackface as minstrels and start taking the piss out of African American people to a white, middle-class American audience in the hopes that ye might accept us because we're different from them. We're not like

• 38:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  them, we're more like ye. Now, a huge difference there is I don't think any Kerry people were marginalised. Also, if you're told a— if I went and told a Kerry man joke to a Kerry person, they're not going to be deeply offended and it won't exacerbate any pre-existing structural oppression that they experience, which they don't. But minstrel shows in America and anti-Irish jokes in the 1970s in London, different story. I think it's time now for an Ocarina Pause. That rain is still thundering outside, absolutely no let up. Varsely support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon

• 39:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you distraction, mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening to this podcast regularly and enjoying it, please consider supporting it directly because this is an independent podcast. And not only that, audio podcasts are disappearing. What we're calling a podcast these days isn't really a podcast, it's several short-form clips of two people talking that they're calling a podcast. Now, that's fine, I've nothing against it, but it's shifting everything

• 39:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  away from the long-form audio podcast. And the long-form audio podcast is more important than ever because it's one of the few things you can do with your fucking smartphone that will take you away from the doom scroll. There's no way that you're listening to this podcast and then also flicking through TikTok or Instagram reels. I want to continue this format that I've been doing for almost 10 years, this novel that I write and prepare and deliver each week. It's only possible because of direct listener support. This is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay rent out my office, pay my

• 40:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  bills, everything. Most importantly, it's how I have the time to write and research and deliver the best podcast that I can deliver each week. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. If you can't afford that, you don't have the money, no problem at all, continue listening for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. I have no exclusive content on my Patreon. The Patreon page is completely empty. I'd like to keep it that way. I'd like everybody to get the exact same experience, whether they pay or not. I think that's fair. I think it's a model that's based on kindness and

• 41:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  soundness. And also, if you've become a new patron, don't sign up to Patreon on the iPhone app because Apple take 30%. So if you're on an iPhone, sign up to Patreon on your browser on your phone, not via the Patreon app on the Apple Store because Apple take 30%. Also, this directly funding the podcast model, listener-funded model, means I'm not beholden to advertisers. Advertisers advertise on my terms. They have no influence whatsoever over the content in any way. Upcoming gigs. I believe I'm in Sligo. Oh, wait, no, I'm in England, Scotland and Wales first. October, right? My largest ever England,

• 42:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Scotland and Wales tour is this October, beginning on the 18th in Brighton at the Brighton Dome, then over to Wales, Cardiff, then I'm in Coventry on the 21st of October, Bristol, the Beacon Hall on the 22nd of October, Guildford there on the 24th, London is sold out, Glasgow is sold out, then on to Gateshead on the 29th, Nottingham then on the 1st of November. Please come along to those gigs and recommend some interesting local guests for me. Just give me a DM on Instagram at @blindbybowlclub. Back in Ireland then for November, gig up in Sligo on the 19th. I'd say that's nearly sold out, but you could

• 42:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  give it a go anyway. Someone told me it was sold out during the week that they couldn't get tickets, but give it a crack. I'm going to take, I'm going to take December off. I want to have December off and I won't be gigging in Ireland again until March 27th. I'll do an old Vickers Street. I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's available yet, not sure. My next Dublin-Vickers Street gig is going to be the 24th of March 2027. And then on to New Zealand and Australia. Perth and Brisbane are sold out. Sydney Opera House is ready to go. That leaves Melbourne. Melbourne's nearly ready to go as well. And then Auckland in New Zealand. I hope I didn't forget one there. You'll find all tickets

• 43:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  at theblindbypodcast.ie and the English tickets are fein.co.uk/blindby. Now, we'll do the Ocarina Pause. We'll have a little break and you will hear some adverts and then I'll be back after the adverts with some further hot takes.

• 43:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ocarina in the rain.

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• 48:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Shit, Ocarina.

• 48:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Another joke format that I'd like to interrogate is the

• 48:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman joke. And I want to point out too, while I'm speaking about this shit, I'm not being a buzzkill. I'm being curious.

• 49:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're just jokes. It's not that deep. They are just jokes. And you can laugh all you want, but it is that deep. They're hugely important pieces of folklore, and they survive and are shared and are popular because they reinforce underlying structures of power and hierarchies. The Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman joke, it's highly sneaky. It's a very, very sneaky and manipulative apparatus, which absorbs Scottish people into English colonization. An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman are about to be sentenced to death.

• 49:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're up against the wall, and there's a line of guns pointed at them. Just before the triggers are pulled, the Englishman shouts, "Earthquake." Everybody panics and the Englishman runs away. The Scotsman sees this, and the Scotsman goes, "Flood." Huge confusion. Everyone thinks there's a flood happening, and the Scotsman runs away. Now, the Englishman and the Scotsman have escaped. They're not going to get executed. But the Irishman is left. He has a think, and going to do the same thing. The Irishman shouts, "Fire!" And the triggers are pulled and he's dead.

• 50:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman find a magic slide. And whatever you shout when you're sliding down this slide is going to appear at the bottom. So the Englishman gets up onto the slide and shouts, "Gold." He slides down the slide and lands into a huge pit of gold coins. And the Scotsman sees this, and he slides down the slide and shouts, "Silver." He slides off and lands into a huge pile of silver. Now it's the Irishman's turn. As he's about to slide down, he slips and then shouts, "Ah shit!" and lands into a gigantic pile of shit. So that format there is the Englishman, Irishman, and Scotsman joke.

• 51:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was also a chicken in a basket joke. It was an oral culture joke. But if you look at it, what is it doing? It's manipulating the Scottish person.

• 51:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  The English person is the smart one, the level-headed clever one, the leader, the James Bond, the one who knows how to get out of these situations, who uses critical thinking and a cool head. The Englishman always wins. The Scotsman always wins too, but not by using critical thinking, or leadership, or autonomy, or thinking for himself. The Scotsman only wins when he obediently follows the Englishman. The Scotsman is being trained like an obedient dog. But the Irishman always loses. But the Scotsman, it's the English saying to the Scottish, "You're almost one of us. We're not sure about ye. We don't know the story with ye Scots.

• 52:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  We think you're one of us. You're definitely not. You're not as bad as Paddy, but you're kind of half Paddy though, aren't you? You're a bit half Paddy." "No, we're not. We're British." "I don't know about that. I mean, let's look at your history. I mean, we're Anglo-Saxon. We had Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. I mean, what did ye have up there in Scotland? Ye had the Picts. The fuck were they? Wild cunts, the Picts. Bit of Viking going on. Lot of Irish there though, isn't there? No, there's not. We're British. No, no. There was Dalryata there in the 9th century. Huge part of Scotland was actually an Irish kingdom. Why do ye speak Gaelic up there?" "No, we don't. We tried to get rid..." "You do. Yeah, ye speak Gaelic.

• 52:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ye speak bog savage Irish gibberish there on the, on the west coast. You've got, you have a Gael tucked."

• 53:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  "In fact, they're Scottish people, and you can speak to a muck savage Irish in your own fucking language, the same thing? What are ye exactly? Are ye sure you're like us? You're British? Are ye sure about that? Because we think you're fucking half Paddy. Prove it to us. Prove it to us. Prove it to us that you're not fucking half Paddy. How do we prove it to you? We want your approval. Just follow what we're doing. You just follow what we're doing, go along with the orders, and you're as good as English, all right?" "Okay, anything, but don't call us half Irish, please." I can't remove that structure of power and that dynamic from the Ulster plantations. Beginning in 1609,

• 53:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  the English Crown colonized the north of Ireland, engaged in scorched earth, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and replaced the Irish people with Scottish, Scottish colonizers. The orange men up there today in the north of Ireland, the ones doing those 12th of July bonfires, the loyalists, who call themselves British, who wave the British flags, who are not seen as fucking British by anyone in England at all. They're just seen as fucking Paddies. Those people are descended from Scottish planters. The Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman joke is actually a highly manipulative form of control and colonization, which plays upon a crisis of Scottish identity.

• 54:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because Scotland was the Picts. Then you had huge amounts of Viking and Norwegian settlement. You go up there around Arkeny, and the people of Arkeny in Scotland, they kind of identify as Norwegian. And then the west coast of Scotland, for I think around 300 years, was part of a Gaelic-speaking Irish kingdom. The Anglo-Saxons never went up there. The Normans did. That's where you get the Bruce families and the Stewart families. But I actually really fucking hate that particular joke format because it's so sneaky. It's really condescending. It's a form of nagging. It's paying the Scottish compliments that are actually backhanded insults.

• 55:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just follow us. You're not smart enough to think for yourself, to have leadership or autonomy or your own identity. You're not that smart, but you're smart enough to copy us, the English. You're smart enough, when we go down the slide and we say, "Gold", you're smart enough to look for silver. Now, silver's not good enough, but you're fucking smart enough. Not like that take cunt over there who went, goes into the shit. You're not like Demi, eh? And this, the exact same divide and conquer dynamic, the exact same one, is happening right now in Ireland with far-right influence campaigns. As is evidenced, okay? 77% of far-right messaging on Irish, on Irish social media

• 55:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  is coming from outside of Ireland. Some of them from America, some of it from Russia, loads of it from the UK. There's an emerging trend in the Irish far-right circles. Coming from the Tommy Robinson-aligned side, whatever the fuck that is, that Tommy Robinson side, where the Southern Irish far-right are marching with loyalists up in Belfast against Muslims. There's an organized campaign of far-right messaging, the Southern Irish, to identify a commonality with loyalists up north.

• 56:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  People associated with the Shankill Butchers, they were death squads, death squads. English government colluded death squads in the north of Ireland in the seventies that killed random Catholic civilians. Loyalists who burn effigies of Catholics every 12th of July. There's a very deliberate and obvious far-right campaign coming from Tommy Robinson aligned that area that basically says, ye people are all the same, the Muslims are the problem. You're not like them, eh? And you know who's bringing all those Muslims in, don't you? Sinn Fein. The Irish Republicans, they're the ones that are bringing those Muslims in.

• 57:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it turns the, it identifies Muslims as the enemy and then turns a load of people from the south of Ireland against Irish Republicans who want the unification of Ireland. Very effective and messy division tactics. And what's the ultimate goal of that? Like, why? It's a long, a long ball Ash Rotherford campaign to create division in the event of a democratic reunification campaign. The Good Friday Agreement states that when the time, when the time is appropriate, when the time is agreed upon, the Ireland of Ireland can vote democratically to leave Britain.

• 58:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you can create a cultural seed where there's a load of people who believe in far-right messaging down south, if you can convince them that the loyalists up north are actually their kin, because the real problem is the Muslims, then that is exactly the type of disinformation campaign that would fuck up a unification referendum when it happens. It also turns, like I said, a bunch of southerners against Irish Republicans. And another part of the messaging is get Ireland out of the EU. Now, I said this a couple of weeks back, but who wants Ireland out of the EU? Billionaires, billionaires want Ireland out of the EU. The capitalist class. Why?

• 58:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because the EU has got lots of regulations. Things like forcing Apple to only use USB-C cables on all their iPhones, hugely expensive, tons and tons of regulations. Ireland's presence makes it very difficult for, makes it very difficult for billionaires or corporations to lobby the EU when it comes to regulation, because Ireland is unique, because we have a thing called the Crotty Doctrine from 1987. It was a court ruling that said that some parts of the EU treaty go against the Irish constitution. So Ireland stands out as unique.

• 59:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  When the EU wants to change its constitution, if the EU ever changes its constitution, the other member states, a government can sign off on that change. Ireland has to have a referendum, a public vote. So for the billionaire class, for corporations, Ireland is this tiny little island that's really inconvenient and has an inordinate amount of power, because we have to have a fucking public referendum every time the EU wants to change its constitution. So the easiest thing to do is get Ireland the fuck out of the EU. If you're wondering, why is 70% of far-right messaging in Ireland happening from outside of Ireland? Who's bothering their arse? Who's paying for that? That's really expensive.

• 1:00:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's being paid for by whoever would benefit from us being the fuck out of the EU. And if you want to see that messaging play out in real time, you see it on podcasts. You'd have a podcast and they're interviewing an ex, an ex-loyalist paramilitary, someone who shot and murdered Catholic civilians. Now, the vast majority of those loyalists, the ones that were active, were also absorbed into MI5 collusion, the British government, the British state. But you'll see podcasts coming out now and it's this loyalist who murdered a bunch of Catholics in the seventies and now they're doing a podcast and they're saying, you know, I really respected the IRA.

• 1:00:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even though they were my enemies, I really, really respected them, how tough they were. Those hunger strikers, even though they were my deathly enemy, me and all the other loyalists in the H block, you know, we didn't want to admit it, but we really respected how tough they were with that hunger strike. Did you fuck? Used to wave sandwiches out the windows of the prisons. I think now it's time to let bygones be bygones and we need, we need to look at the real problem now, the real colonization, which is this invasion by foreigners, in particular Muslims. I've seen two or three interviews exactly like that.

• 1:01:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ex parachute regiment, ex-British soldiers who did tours of duty in the north of Ireland. I've seen them on podcasts and it's the same messaging. You know, I, I was in Belfast in 1976 and it was really tough and we were fighting the IRA, but you know what? I really respected the IRA. Even though they were my enemy, I respected them because they were hard, they were good fighters. And I, they were my enemy, but I respected them as soldiers. Not like these Muslims, not like these terrorists. I mean, the IRA, they used to phone ahead, they used to ring up before they did a bomb. Not like these Muslims, not like these suicide bombers. You know, I really respected the IRA.

• 1:02:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  The mechanics of that, that's identical to Scotsman, Englishman and Irishman joke, fucking identical. It's nagging, it's the same mechanics. It's the ex-loyalist, it's the ex-British soldier going, I was at war and at one point I considered you terrorists, I considered you scum. But you know what? You're all right, Paddy. You're all right, because you're not like them. You're not like those savages over there. Prove to me that you're not like them. Do you want my approval? Yes, I do want your approval, Mr. Loyalist. I'm gonna go up to Belfast and wave an Irish flag beside your fucking Union Jack. This is what's happening. That's, that is an influence campaign, that's propaganda. I can't point out exactly who's behind it, but the same shit hap, is happening in America,

• 1:03:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  the exact same shit. Look at, and there's loads of mafia podcasts now, right? So the mafia don't really exist anymore, not like they used to. So you've got like literal, actual mafia, did 20 years in jail, murderers, they're now out of jail. They all have podcasts, every one of them. They're also all Trump supporters. And if you peel back the surface of those mafia podcasts, the messaging becomes, I was in the mafia, I shot people, I killed people, I was a criminal, but we had a code. I was an ordinary decent criminal.

• 1:03:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was a soldier. This was much closer to the military. We only shot other made men. We didn't shoot women, we didn't shoot children. We had a code, we had a rulebook, not like these scumbags now. Not like these crazy Islamic terrorists or these Mexicans, the Mexican mafia chopping people up, or those Crips in the Bloods fighting over colours. We, we had a code. We were ordinary decent criminals, not the depravity and savagery that you see today. All of them have that exact same fucking messaging and what it means is make America great again. Oh, wouldn't it be great if it was like Goodfellas or The Godfather? As if the mafia weren't absolute fucking scumbags.

• 1:04:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  They weren't ordinary decent criminals. They were vicious, psychopathic bullies in their own communities, horrible people. Yes, they did kill innocent people. They were horrible, psychopathic criminals and their code was bullshit. It only suited them when they wanted it to. And all the mafia ever did was turn against their own working class communities. They destroyed fucking unions, busted unions, corrupted unions, parasites to their, to their own working neighbours on behalf of the capitalist class. That's what the fuck the mafia were. And all of them who have podcasts, it's MAGA, MAGA, Trump, Trump. I hate the Mexicans, I hate the Muslims. They weren't like us, they didn't have a code. Make America great again.

• 1:05:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I, I would wager that a huge amount of them are on either the CIA or the FBI payroll. And it is a deliberate influence campaign, because they were all in the federal system. They were all in fucking prison. The mafia were in federal prison. The FBI, the CIA would have leaned on them, we'll reduce your sentence, or we have five murders here that we know about and we won't convict you on them. We'll make life easier for your family. We will, we will help you, all you gotta do is help us. What have we gotta do? When you come out of prison, you're gonna have a podcast, that's gonna be your new job, you're gonna be paid well. Just fucking make sure that your messaging is consistently MAGA, MAGA. The problem is the Mexicans, the problem is the Muslims, the mafia were brilliant and make, make America great again.

• 1:06:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then you've got your working class, American boomers, who remember when things were better. Things were better because there was unions and jobs. That was torn apart by the fucking mafia. These people remember, things were better about 30 or 40 years ago, houses weren't that expensive, a regular job meant that you could have a family. Trump and his cohorts, they need those working class boomers.

• 1:06:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  To not realise that what was taken away was a social net. They don't want them to realise that. They want them to think, no shit fell apart because of all the immigrants, because of all the fucking immigrants. You used to have standoff guys like John Gotti, ordinary decent criminals. Now look what you've got. Look at the depravity in your city streets. It's not because the social net was taken away or because everything was privatised. No, it's these immigrants and those mafia podcasters. That's the shit that they go on with. What does it do? It's propaganda that justifies the presence of ICE. It justifies surveillance, Palantir, it justifies flock cameras. It stops people seeing their Mexican neighbour, a fucking van, an unmarked van putting up with masked

• 1:07:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  men, stuffing their neighbour into a van and they disappear to a private for-profit prison in El Salvador. It stops the average human being who has compassion and empathy from going, hey, that looks like a civil rights violation. Instead, they go, not one of those Ecuadorian criminals that's supposed to happen. I heard it last week on a fucking, on a podcast from a fella who murdered 17 people in the 1980s. And I'd say it's the same with the, there's so many ex loyalists in the north of Ireland, ex paramilitaries who are active now in far-right circles and are active in agitation and coming

• 1:07:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  down south to Dublin or to Limerick or Cork and being welcomed into these far-right rallies, anti-immigration and anti-I-Pass centre rallies, being welcomed into these fucking communities. All of those loyalists were in prison. Collusion between MI5 and loyalists, be it Margaret Thatcher, was rampant. Are you telling me a lot of those loyalists aren't protected, aren't still in connection with British intelligence, aren't being payrolled by someone for these organised campaigns? So that's Scotsman, Englishman and Irishman jokes.

• 1:08:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's that, it's that, it's a type of a nagging. It's a backhanded compliment and then identifying someone else who's an enemy. And you, I've more power than you and you want to be like me and I need you to prove to me that you're not like that scum over there. And then those jokes, I can, this is the bit I can't understand. So I knew all of those Scotsman, Irishman, Englishman jokes in school, but we changed them in Ireland to Paddy Irishman, Paddy Scotsman and Paddy Englishman. I don't know why we did that. You see, the jokes were legitimately funny and some of them were clever and we loved telling them. And maybe here in this country, if we just made all of them Paddys, whether it's Paddy

• 1:09:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Englishman, Paddy Scotsman or Paddy Irishman, that's that little Hiberno-English intervention, that intervention of absurdity, where the joke can't be anti-Irish if all three of them are Paddys. That makes no sense, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Scotsman and Paddy Irishman. But see, now they're all Paddys, so you don't know who's the thick one. And that's what we had to do to tell those jokes. And sometimes some of the Paddy Englishman, Paddy Scotsman and Paddy Irishman jokes that I'd hear, we'd intervene with the farm. What I mean by that is, so Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman and Paddy Scotsman, they die and they go up to heaven and they find themselves at the gates before God.

• 1:09:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And God says to them, I'm going to give each of ye a wish before ye get into heaven. And the wish has to be something that you can do for your country. So you go first, Paddy Scotsman, what would you wish for? Paddy Scotsman says, well, there's loads of fishermen in Scotland, so I'd like the rivers, lakes and oceans all around Scotland to be full of fish forever and no one would ever go hungry. So God says, there you go, I've given infinite fish to Scotland. And then God turns to Paddy Englishman and says, Paddy Englishman, what would you do for England? And Paddy Englishman says, I want to build a big, huge, high wall all around England

• 1:10:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  to protect us so no one can attack us. All right, Paddy Englishman, says God, I'm going to build a giant wall all around England. Nothing's going to get in and nothing's going to get out. Then God turns to Paddy Irishman and says, Paddy Irishman, what would you like for Ireland? And Paddy Irishman says, well, God, now that England has that giant wall, can you fill it full of water so we don't have to deal with the cunts?

• 1:11:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's one of our ones. That's one of our, that's vernacular on the fucking schoolyard, Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Scotsman. That was our intervention in that. All right, that's all I have time for this week. In the meantime, rub a dog. Genial fleck to a trout. Take of the belly of a pine marten. Dog bless.

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

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• 1:12:49Speaker 06

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• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Laura Adams, host of Money Girl, where I help my listeners make empowered choices. Women are increasingly driving household financial decisions, yet many say they don't feel fully prepared for the choices ahead. When you're making choices for a future decades away, confidence matters. And confidence comes from knowing a promise will be kept. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped generations protect what matters today and prepare for tomorrow with life insurance and lifetime income solutions. Pacific Life keeps its promises, so you can keep yours.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help you create a more confident financial future. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.