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Kiss the bin man's wrinkle, you handstand Anthony's.

Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast.

Can you hear that noise?

That's the sound of rain.

As you know,

I moved into a new office, a new office where I record this podcast, and I moved in here a couple of months ago.

And I did this because

my previous office, it was just getting too busy.

It was too busy in the corridors, there were people slamming doors, talking,

and I needed a quieter space.

So I moved to a different floor on the building.

And this floor, it's got less humans.

But what I didn't account for is I'm up at the very top, and the fucking roof is made out of tin.

So my podcast studio has a tin roof.

So when it rains, you can hear it.

Now, rain isn't the most unpleasant sound in the world.

There's a calming static to it.

I quite enjoy the sound of rain.

But because of the way that audio works I don't want to try and mask the sound of rain now what I mean by that is Normally when there's ambient background noise like rain or a fan what you do is you turn on what's called a gate

and what a gate does is it quietens down background noise But when you put on when you put a gate on when it comes to rainfall, you get a very strange effect.

I'll do it right now.

Now you can hear me talking.

There's no sound in between.

But when I do speak, when you hear my voice, you also hear the sound of the rain only when I speak, which sounds a little bit too percussive.

It's strange and it's not natural.

So I think we're better off

with this.

If we speak this way, then we're okay.

Who gives a fuck about the sound of rain?

It's a natural sound.

What you don't want are car alarms

or you don't want human voices.

Human voice.

There might be nothing I can do about that.

There's a man next door, and he might take a phone call.

And if that happens, I'm going to have to stop recording when that cunt is on the phone.

Actually, that's not fair to call him a cunt.

He's only doing his own job.

What I have to worry about is getting distracted getting distracted by the sound of rain because it is quite beautiful just to listen to it

you can't go wrong with the sound of rain patterning on a tin roof

so i'd ask please that

let's just say the rain is a podcast guest this week

the rain is joining us this week on the podcast

The rain might raise its voice, it might lower its voice, it it might get angry, that's what rain does.

Might have a little shout.

But we're going to acknowledge and welcome the rain rather than pretend it doesn't exist.

Also, unfortunately, so here here

here's the conundrum I'm in.

Also on my roof are some nesting seagulls.

They only started nesting about a week ago.

They make very strange noises.

So those seagulls they're on they're on the roof of my building they're right above my head and they're nesting

and

Right now they're quiet.

They're saying fuck all now because it's raining but as soon as it stops raining unfortunately the seagulls are gonna start chatting and they make queer noises

I've learned that over the past week that when When seagulls think that they're in the privacy of their nest and they don't know that humans are listening or what would why would they be worried about a human at the top of a fucking building?

When seagulls don't know they're being listened to, they've got a very different way of talking.

It sounds it sounds halfway between laughter and group sex.

So as well as the pitter patter of rain on this week's podcast, we may have to welcome some seagulls onto this podcast as a guest too.

And I'm okay with that also.

The rain is quieting down a bit there now, but

the reason I have to bring the rain on as a guest this week is

I know fucking rain.

I'm very.

When you live in Ireland you become very intimately familiar with rain.

And I know this type of rain.

This isn't we're not gonna get showers here.

There's a man having a little

I don't know what the fuck that was.

Cleared his throat, but it sounded like he came.

Oh, great.

There's some fucking sirens getting involved there.

Wonderful.

Okay.

So the rain's getting...

the rain's getting quiet.

It's gone down to a gentle patter.

And...

So the rain actually appears to be...

Yeah, the rain has gone very quiet now.

It's a gentle drizzle, so because of that, I'm going to put my gate

back on now,

and now we've got no background noise whatsoever, we just have my voice.

So if that gentleman in the office beside me wants to have another wanking cough, then he's welcome to do so.

And me and you won't hear it, it won't be part of this podcast.

But when the rain comes back and it's heavy, we're gonna have to listen to it again.

But like I said, it's gonna the rain this week is gonna be like a guest, a guest guest who's got some some opinions to offer and the sound of rain is a lot more interesting than some people's opinions to tell you the truth so the rain's gone down to it's barely perceivable now so I've got my my gate is back on so now you can't hear any background noises whatsoever the rain's gone to the toilet but it will be back it will be back very shortly

and the reason I know this and the reason I have to bring the rain on as a guest this week is because

if you live in Ireland, if you've lived here a long time, you get to know an awful lot about rain, about its patterns, about its behavior, and you can predict it.

And this current rain that we're experiencing right now,

it's what I call summer retribution rain.

I've mentioned it many times before.

It's a bit early for it.

You don't usually get it in April.

I'd associate this more with June and particularly July.

July and most of August.

But in Ireland, if you get a hot, dry spell for, we'll say 10 days, good weather, good, fucking, the sun is out, it's dry.

We've had that in Ireland for the past two weeks.

The weather has been fucking fantastic.

And the thing is,

when that happens in Ireland, you know that nature is going to get its revenge.

We have a revenge-based weather pattern.

Our weather pattern is based on retribution.

What goes up must come down.

And this retribution rain, it doesn't let off.

There's a tiny little lull right now, but it's coming back.

It's coming back.

And it's going to be like this, I would say, for the next, for the next five days, it's just going to rain.

It's going to rain day and night.

And all you're going to get are different tones of that rain.

So I know there's no point fighting it.

There's no point fighting this rain.

We're just going to have to bring it on to the podcast as a guest.

Ireland is a...

we're a temperate rainforest.

The forest bit is gone, but we're a temperate rainforest.

And what happens is, so we're an island in the Atlantic Ocean.

We've got these prevailing westerly winds coming from the west of the Atlantic, okay?

When it's when there's a hot spell, when there's a hot dry spell here in Ireland,

the ground dries out.

When the ground dries out from the sun, there's less moisture in the fucking ground.

So now the ground heats up.

The ground heats up a lot quicker because there's no moisture in it.

So this is, let's just say day five, day five or six into steady hot dry weather in Ireland.

The ground is dry and hot and this acts.

acts like a radiator like a heat plate so not the ground is heating the air, but as the ground heats the air after about a week that hot air rises up and then it meets those prevailing westerly winds in from the Atlantic.

The word prevailing there is very important.

You hear that on the weather all the time.

If you're looking at the fucking weather forecast they talk about prevailing winds.

Prevailing means they prevail, they're dominant.

The one thing you can be certain about, you can be fucking sure about this, Ireland is an island in the Atlantic.

And

wet winds from the west prevail.

They're always there.

So when we get a fucking hot spell, you've got this hot plate on the ground, this dry air rises up and it meets the prevailing westerly winds that are full of water and are colder.

And that weather system puts us in our place.

It puts us in our place.

It reminds us who is boss.

The prevailing westerly wind says,

I'm here all the time.

I'm number one.

I'm the Atlantic wind, I am.

You're a fucking island in a gigantic sea called the Atlantic and I'm the prevailing wind.

I'm going nowhere.

I'm here all the time.

So when the dry hot wind comes up, it puts us in our place.

It says, oh, what's the crack, Ireland?

Do you think you're Spanish, do you?

Think you're fucking Spanish?

With your hot, dry weather.

Are you wearing a vest?

You're wearing a vest, Ireland, do you?

Is that jarts?

Are you wearing jarts and a vest?

Who the fuck do you think you are?

You think you're an Italian is it?

You think you're from Italy or Spain or an American?

Is that what you think you are?

I'll fucking show you.

That's literally what happens.

The hot dry air comes up and the prevailing westerly wind puts us in our place and then it unleashes a torrent of rain.

All that cold wet fucking rain comes down

because the ground has to show off.

That's basically it.

The Irish ground has to show off.

Look at my suntan.

Look at me.

I'm so hot and dry.

Look at me.

It's like, would you shut the fuck up, ground?

Be quiet.

Shut the fuck up and don't be telling the sky.

Don't tell the sky.

If the Irish ground could just shut the fuck up and not tell the sky about how hot and dry it is, then we'd be fine.

But no, it has to boast every single time.

It goes to confession.

The hot, dry ground in Ireland after a heat wave confesses its sins to the sky and asks for penance.

I'm too dry.

I'm too dry.

It's too warm.

I don't deserve this.

Punish me.

Cleanse me with rain.

So that there, that's the literal science of Irish summer rain.

That's what that is.

So that's why I know this rain is going nowhere.

It's going to be back in about maybe 10 or 15 minutes, even though it's quiet right now.

Like I genuinely make the case that

one of the reasons the Catholic Church took such a strong hold in Ireland is because of our weather system.

Because we have because the environment...

the environment teaches us about revenge, punishment and penance.

Our weather system

has always said to us, don't enjoy yourself too much.

because if you do it too much, it's gonna rain.

Like we know it, we know it.

Anytime there's fucking sun, anytime there's hot, dry weather and sun in this country, a part of us is going, oh, for fuck's sake, it's gonna rain for ages.

Like, I prefer winter.

Winter, it's it's cold, but it's dry, you can predict it.

Fucking summer, I can't enjoy a hot summer's day because I'm thinking about

the rain, the inevitable rain that's gonna happen.

And Catholicism, the Pope died yesterday, there, fair played him.

Catholicism,

after he met J.D.

Vance, the devil, the fucking devil.

He looks like he tried to eat a packet of salt and vinegar potatoes with his eyes.

But Catholicism places heavy emphasis on shame, sexual shame in particular.

Now I've done podcasts on this.

It's you can put that one on Saint Augustine.

St.

Augustine in the third century, he was a bishop in the third century.

Saint Augustine devoted his life trying to prove whether or not people could get boners in the Garden of Eden and he's credited with introducing sexual shame to Catholicism but we really embraced this shame sin the punishment those aspects of Catholicism here in Ireland often it gets blamed on on colonialism you know 800 years of being overpowered and oppressed and eradicated by the British that we've become so accustomed to being oppressed that we then chose

the oppression of Catholicism and gave loads of power to the Catholic Church.

But I do think the weather plays a part.

Straight up, our weather tells us without fail,

if you enjoy something nice, such as sun, if you enjoy that, there will be a price to pay.

guaranteed a heavy price will be paid heavy rain guaranteed and I think we absorbed that.

We absorbed that into our outlook of how life should be.

So it's Kunti Retribution Rain.

That's what's happening, okay?

It's Kunti Retribution Rain this week.

It's not going to go away.

So we're going to have to invite it onto the podcast as a guest and live with it.

I didn't.

This fucking office is amazing.

I have a beautiful big window.

I didn't factor in the fucking tin roof.

There's a tin roof.

I didn't factor it in.

Also,

unfortunately, there's nesting seagulls.

There are nesting seagulls on my roof making gangbang noises.

And my heart goes out to those gulls because they don't belong on the roof of an office.

This isn't their natural habitat.

They're herring gulls.

And herring gulls are supposed to nest along rocks and cliffs.

But what's happening the past 15 years in particular because of biodiversity collapse like limerick is on the the river shannon we're on the river shannon and we're at the mouth of the river shannon so the shannon flows all the way from the north of ireland down here to limerick where it opens into the atlantic ocean so here in limerick city the river meets the sea You have this strange hybrid where some of the water is salty and some of the water is fresh fresh water.

There was fucking dolphins.

Last week there was a video of dolphins in Limerick City which we've never seen before.

And it probably means the food that those dolphins eat at sea, the fish, is gone.

So now they're in fucking Limerick City.

Dolphins in Limerick City looking for food but that's why there's herring gulls above me now on the roof of my office.

They're trying to survive.

They're trying to survive.

So those the gulls of Limerick City that live on office roofs, roofs, they've given up on fish.

They don't eat fish anymore because the fish don't exist.

So now they live in cities and they eat out of bins.

And urban seagulls, they're excellent at getting into bins.

I've watched I've watched seagulls rip open bins and take out food and fucking destroy the streets but get a good feed.

But now I'm not seeing it anymore and I'm I'm very concerned about the seagulls.

So what's happened in the past year is we have a scheme.

I think we can hear the seagulls now, can we?

No.

We have a scheme in Ireland called the Deposit Return Scheme, where if you buy a can of Fanta,

you pay a 15 cent tax on that can of Fanta.

Or if you buy like a 2 liter bottle, a 2 liter bottle of Fizzy Drink, you pay a 25 cent deposit.

But you can get this money back as cash if you bring these cans and bottles to a deposit

return scheme vending machine.

So now in all the shopping centers in Limerick, there's queues of people with bags and bags of bottles and cans, recycling them and then getting cash in return.

But some people can't be arsed.

Some people,

they buy a can of Pepsi and they go, fuck that.

I'm not, I don't want my 15 cents.

So they throw it in the bin.

That's 15 cents.

So what I've been seeing in Limerick City the past year in the city centre,

we've got we've got a crack cocaine problem, and we have a problem with opioids.

So, people who are experiencing addiction, they're going through all the public bins,

they're going through all the bins at the backs of restaurants, and they're searching for bottles and cans to take them to the deposit return scheme.

And there's fairly fucking decent money if you go through a giant bin.

But now, as a response to that,

all of the bins in Limerick City, they're now not dealing with seagulls anymore or foxes.

They're dealing with human beings.

Clever human beings.

So now all the bins are very, very heavily padlocked to keep out human beings.

And the seagulls are fucked.

How are seagulls supposed to eat now when every single bin is padlocked?

Seagulls that are already living on the top of office buildings because because they're just given up on cliffs.

They don't belong here.

These seagulls don't belong in Limerick City.

They belong on the coast, but now they're inland.

And when I really started to notice this was...

So I'm gigging in Limerick tonight.

I'm doing a live podcast in Limerick tonight in the University Concert Hall.

Which that's something I never thought was possible.

It's my biggest ever Limerick gig.

I think it's like 1200 people.

I never ever ever thought that was possible that I'd be be able to do a gig in Limerick City to that many people.

I'm very humbled for two reasons.

My da.

When my da retired from his job in Shannon Airport, when he was in retirement, he got a job with a security company.

He worked as a supervisor.

I have to say that because my ma will kill me.

My ma has internalized classism.

So if I say that my dad was a security guard, I have to say that he was a supervisor, or else my ma would get very, very upset.

But anyway, the the building, the university concert hall, where I'm going to be gigging tonight, my dad was a nighttime security guard there for about ten years.

And every single night he'd just he'd walk up and down the big empty theatre, making sure everything was okay every single night

for about ten years.

And the next morning, I'd be a little child.

The next morning he'd tell me how he'd

he'd be the security guard in this building at night time, like the only person in this giant, empty, cavernous

theatre.

And then he'd freak himself he'd freak himself out convincing himself that he heard noises and that there were ghosts.

He'd have been in his late fifties at this point.

So he'd convince himself that there was ghosts in the theatre.

Well, he wouldn't say ghosts, he'd say poca.

And poka it's the Irish word for ghosts, but poka also means fairies, because we don't really have ghosts, we've got fairies.

And fairies in Ireland,

they're not little things with wings.

They're ghostly, terrifying, scary demons that are part of mythology and folklore.

He's got one job.

To be the only person in the building at night time.

He's convincing himself that there's ghosts.

And then come home the next day and tell his child.

Which wasn't great for my anxiety or my imagination.

But I remember how he came to this conclusion.

So if you're working as a night watchman in a giant empty university,

you can freak yourself out.

I can see how it's very easy to freak yourself out.

So one night, he was walking through the university concert hall, no one around, pitch dark, and as he's walking along the corridors,

He hears a giant thud on the ground beside him and he flashes his torch and it's a belt buckle.

So this belt buckle fell from a great height and nearly hit him on the head and landed beside him.

It thudded on the ground and he said if it had hit him on the head and that would have killed him.

It would have hit him on the head and then he'd have slowly bled to death and then someone wouldn't have found him until the next morning.

This is the story he told me.

This is what he was afraid of what would have happened.

And then I must have been like 10

and I'm going, oh my god, do you think someone threw the belt buckle?

Do you think there was someone above in the theater?

And they threw the belt buckle from a balcony.

And then he went, no, there was no one else in the building.

It was a polka.

It was a polka.

And I'm like,

I'm young enough to go, it was a university, like it's the university concert hall.

Like it could have been one of the several thousand students who were just staying late one night or they snuck into the building and maybe they thought it was funny to freak you out and drop a belt buckle and he was like, No, it was a poker.

And I'm like, why?

And he said,

'Cause polkas make it look like an accident.

Which I didn't fully understand and I I think

'cause my dad was mad.

Okay, now that's not fair, I'm also fucking mad, but my dad was eccentric.

So I think he thought that if the belt buckle had hit him on the head and he died

and they found his body in the concert hall the next day,

that people would have believed

that he killed himself by repeatedly hitting himself into the head with a belt buckle.

Imagine

a security guard dies

in the University Concert Hall because he beat himself to death with a belt buckle.

So that was his theory.

This was the fairies.

University concert hall is haunted.

It's haunted ground.

He goes, it must have been built over a white thorn tree or it must have been built over a fairy fort.

But the fairies are in this building and they tried to kill me with a belt buckle, and they wanted to frame it as a suicide.

It's always made me want to find out if the concert hall, if the university concert hall in Limerick was actually built on a fairy fort.

Those are the superstitions we have in Ireland.

That you don't go near fairy forts, and if you were to disturb a fairy fort and build on a fairy fort, then terrible, terrible bad luck will befall that site.

So I'm gigging there tonight.

I am gigging there tonight and I never thought that would be possible.

But my dad died.

My dad died.

He never got to see me do anything with my career.

My dad didn't really even get to see me be an adult.

I was in the first year of college when he died.

The one thing he said to one of my brothers before he died,

he said about me, even though I was young, he said, I'm not worried about him, he's going to be fine.

Which, as simple as those words are,

that meant the world to me for for a father to say about his son to my brother I'm not worried about him he's gonna be fine especially considering he was quite a an anxious warrior to hear those words that meant an awful lot to me that was a huge vote of confidence but yeah he had no my dad had no idea whatsoever that I would

go on to become an artist or a writer and I know it would mean it would have meant the fucking world to him the absolute world to him for me to be gigging in a venue where he was on duty every night as a security guard as a supervisor as a security guard as a supervisor where he was on duty every night patrolling that place for 10 fucking years I know it would have meant the world to him for me to be to be gigging in that space And the guest, the person I'm going to be speaking to at the live podcast is the Shanna Key Eddie Lenahan.

Who I've had on this podcast before.

Eddie is he's one of the few Shanna Keys in Ireland, which means a lore keeper.

And Eddie is an expert on fairies.

He's an expert on fairy trees, fairy forts, folklore, and fairies.

Eddie Lenahan is famous mainly for

in County Clare.

In the late 90s, they were building the M18 motorway.

This huge motorway with all this EU European money and Ireland is in the middle of the Celtic tiger.

And we're trying to be this modern progressive country and we're using our EU money to develop our roads.

The planned route of this motorway in Clare

meant knocking down a fairy tree.

It was a whitethorn tree called the Latoon Fairy Bush.

White thorn trees in Ireland, they have a lot of superstition around them.

Superstition are indigenous pagan beliefs.

But you don't fuck with white-thorn trees.

White thorn is seen as

like a magical tree.

And the roots of the white thorn, like I've done podcasts before about the Irish Otherworld, the other world where the fairies live, this separate spectrum of reality.

The roots of the white thorn are seen to reach into the other world so you don't fuck with white thorn because then you're fucking with the fairies, you're for fucking with forces that you don't understand.

White thorn is in bloom right now actually.

It's one of the first.

The Mayflower, sometimes they call it, but it's a raggedy, straggly, fucking, hardy-looking bush that always looks windswept.

You tend to see what like

I know that white thorn grows along Yarty's couch and it grows near the University Concert Hall.

But when you see white thorn on its own by itself in a field and it looks like it doesn't belong there, that tends to become a fairy tree.

Those are the ones that people are scared of.

Don't fuck with it.

Don't fuck with that.

White thorn is also planted beside pagan wells, beside holy wells, which we know were very important to our ancestors.

Whitethorn is often planted

where land meets water, holy wells, only gat cave which i've spoken about on previous podcasts which is the

the entrance to the other world in ros common where halloween starts i've been down that cave just as you enter that cave it's guarded by a whitethor bush whitethorn was also used in ireland to mark burial sites

during the famine during the famine particularly where children died

there was a fucking famine going on a a genocide.

People didn't have gravestones.

People were dying.

And sometimes white thorn was used to mark a mass grave.

So anyway in 1999

Ireland has been building this gigantic mortarway in Clare the M18.

90 million Euro, well it would have been pounds at the time in 1999.

A lot of fucking EU money comes in.

And then Eddie Lenahan,

the Shanokee, he goes to the government, to the council, to the people who are building the roads and says, you can't build that road there.

There's a very important fairy tree.

There's a fairy tree right there and that's where the monster fairies and the connacht fairies meet and you cannot fuck with that fairy tree.

Now Eddie Lenahan is a shanokee, which means that

Eddie would collect the stories of the old people, the old people of the land.

Eddie collects all of their stories orally and carries on this oral tradition of the Shanakee.

So when Eddie says this here is a very significant fairy tree, then he's basing that on the stories of the old people from the land.

And what happened?

They didn't build the moat, they didn't knock the fairy tree.

And what makes this so powerful is

this wasn't about a heritage site, a protected site.

There were no legal issues raised.

This wasn't a site of archaeological significance.

Experts weren't brought in.

Eddie Lenahan's, the Shanoke, Eddie Lenahan's story of that's the fairy tree, do not knock it to build the motorway.

The story was enough.

The superstition, the fear of the unknown, was enough for the government, for the developers to go, yeah fuck it, let's not knock the fairy tree, let's build around it.

The story enough,

that was powerful enough for a motorway, an EU motorway to get diverted.

People believed it.

If you divert a 90 million motorway around one tree because a man is saying that this tree is a meeting point for fairies, If you divert your motorway around that for that reason, even if you think it's bullshit, you believe it.

You believe it on some level.

Something greater than money and progress is at play now.

And the tree is still there today.

People were afraid of road debts.

Eddie said to the developers, if you knock a fairy tree, if you knock a fucking fairy tree and build a motorway, people will die on that stretch of road.

The fairies, the fairies will find a way.

They'll make it look like an accident.

but don't build a road on that fairy tree and it fucking worked and it's a very culturally important moment that

because

it's that bridge between old Ireland and New Ireland.

Old Ireland where we have that mix of Catholicism and then indigenous pagan folk belief that's thousands of years old and then New Ireland

which is the Celtic tiger and EU money and being part of the developed world.

But it it fills me with great pride.

It does fill me with great pride that

we didn't knock a fairy tree to build a motorway based on pure superstition alone.

It's quite decolonial.

And fairy trees and fairy forts in particular are decolonial because

I'll speak about fairy forts in a bit more detail in a few minutes, but some fairy forts are thousands of years old.

All fairy forts are hundreds of years old.

Our pagan wells and holy wells that are guarded by white-thorn trees.

Some of them are thousands of years old.

We were colonized by the British.

Even the British, who murdered us, eradicated language, culture, everything.

The British, even the fucking British, left our fairy forts alone.

and left our holy wells alone because we were so good at telling the stories.

Oh, I wouldn't wouldn't go near that fairy fort now.

You wouldn't know what would happen if you went near that fairy fort.

Terrible things could happen.

Even the colonizer left these things alone.

The colonizer was afraid.

I don't know what the fuck Paddy is talking about, but he's freaking me out.

Just leave it alone.

Don't cut down the tree.

Just leave it alone.

Cut down another one.

And what I love about the Latoon Fairy Bush in Clare and rerouting the motorway around it in 1999, it's the behavior of an uncolonized mind.

Capitalism, progress, roadways, infrastructure.

These things must stop because there's indigenous beliefs connected to the land, connected to a tree, connected to a fairy tree.

There are indigenous beliefs with superstition surrounding them.

And maybe these things are more important than a road.

Do I believe in fairy trees?

No, I don't.

But I do believe that indigenous folklore exists to keep us humans in line with systems of biodiversity.

And I'm very happy that a tree wasn't destroyed, an ecosystem wasn't destroyed for a motorway.

So Eddie Lenahan did that.

I had him on the podcast before and

I interviewed Eddie in Ennis and when I had Eddie on the podcast

that gig was what introduced COVID-19 to Ireland.

I don't know if you remember that at the time.

We can laugh at it now.

But

yeah, the first outbreak of COVID-19

happened at my gig in Ennis at the Glore Theatre in 2020 when I was interviewing Eddie Lenahan about superstition and bad luck.

And the insanity of COVID made me think, did I intrude too much?

Did I ask too many questions about the fairies?

And then they caused an outbreak of the first outbreak in Ireland of COVID at my gig.

Because I asked Eddie Eddie too many questions about the fairies.

The paranoia got the better of me.

Just like my da

thought that the fairies were gonna make him beat himself to death with a belt buckle.

But that's that's why Eddie Lenahan is my guest at the University Concert Hall, Limerick.

Because

Because my da was convinced that it was built on a fairy tree or a fairy fort and that there was some type of fairy magic that brought bad luck to the building.

And it's very plausible.

Like I said, just beside the University Concert Hall, you have Yarti's couch where the otters live.

And when you walk along that path,

there are whitethorn trees.

There's three, I think.

So it is possible that the University Concert Hall was built on a white thorn tree.

You know, I speak about planting native, you know, proper native Irish wildflower.

Making seed bombs and specifically planting native Irish wildflower in derelict properties.

Properties that are derelict vandalism for the rich in the middle of a housing crisis.

Plant some fucking white thorn, man.

Plant white thorn in your local derelict property.

Bring back some fairy magic.

But white thorn, it's an indigenous tree and

again it's it's

like I say,

with any of these, any stories about trees

that are indigenous to the land

that could be thousands of years old, there's always a reason.

It's always connected with biodiversity.

The role that white thorn has in the ecosystem

is

a protector.

Like,

so now is white thorn's time, okay?

White thorn blooms

in April and May.

White thorn is one of the f the f when we are going from winter into spring, one of the first native flowers that blooms is whitethorn.

It's the first bit of color.

Well, it's white, but it's the first

bit of life that you see even even before the trees start to go green.

The white thorn blooms come out.

And you know who that benefits?

The fucking queen bee.

bee the queen bee who is establishing her colony she needs to feed on the flowers of the white thorn the only fucking flower that's in bloom honey bees bumblebees solitary bees just remember one one queen creates a hive

so that queen she gets her food from the white thorn

Then she goes and creates her hive and that's where you get all the bees that will pollinate everything all summer.

And if you think of our ancestors, you know, they've chosen this one tree here.

This one, this one's connected to the other world.

The roots of this white thorn, that goes to the other world.

And I'm guessing

that's the tree of life.

If that's the first tree to flower, and the queens eat from that,

and then the queen has the hive which pollinates everything, then that's the most important fucking tree.

That's the earliest one.

Do not cut that down.

That's very important to biodiversity mess with those and there's crap failure another beautiful thing about the white thorn is

so it's covered in these white flowers but once a bee has visited those

like we're talking thousands of flowers on one bush once a bee has visited one of those flowers and successfully patternated it it eventually turns pink So the white thorn tree goes from white to pink when the bees have visited it and patternated it.

And the honey from white thorn was considered an absolute delicacy.

The white thorn grows in hedgerows too so little birds little birds have their nests inside there and they're protected by all the thorns.

So little birds nest inside the white thorn tree.

It's a mother tree.

It's a tree for the birds and the bees and it gives birth to the life of summer and that's its role in the ecosystem.

So am I a believer in superstitions about white thorn trees and that they belong to the fairies and bad luck will happen to you.

No,

I don't believe that stuff, but I consider it hugely important.

Very, very important.

And this is what I love about folklore.

This is what I love about mythology and ancient stories.

On the one hand, it's ridiculous.

That tree over there, that tree over there has roots that go into an alternate dimension.

where a supernatural race called the fairies live.

And if you mess with that tree, bad things will happen to you.

Ridiculous, harsh shit.

And then you ask science and science says that tree over there is a keystone species to the ecosystem of Ireland and the crops and food that you eat depend on that tree.

Depend on that tree over there.

It's very very important.

So don't cut that down.

That'll be a terrible idea.

Evidence-based science is saying the same thing that the folklore is saying just in a very different way.

But then we move on to fairy forts

and fairy forts are man-made structures.

And again,

a fairy fort is way more scary than a fairy tree.

Like, no one's going to cut down a fairy tree.

But some people won't even walk into a fairy fort.

A fairy fort takes the form of an ancient stone circle in a field.

And there's lots of them all over Ireland.

I visited a fairy fort this weekend.

And I visited it because because I'm going to be speaking to the Shanoke Eddie Lenahan.

Actually, this is a good story, so let me do an ocarina pause now before I continue with the story about the fairy fort that I visited.

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That was the the ocarina pause, the the bottle-blowing pause.

The rain hasn't come back.

I misjudged the rain.

There's no pit or patter.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast.

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please consider becoming a patron.

This podcast is my full-time job.

It's how I earn a living.

It's the only thing I do to earn a living.

It's how I rent out my office.

It's how I pay all my bills.

I adore making this podcast.

I absolutely love it.

I love making this podcast.

I adore that it's my job, but it's only possible because of listener funding.

That's why this podcast exists.

I'm not beholden to advertisers.

I can tell them to fuck off.

I can do a podcast about fairy forts, about fairy trees.

I can do a podcast about whatever the fuck I want.

I'm not worried about how many listeners I have.

I don't give a shit about that.

I want to speak about what I'm genuinely passionate about each week.

That is only possible because of listener funding.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it.

Okay?

And

if you can't afford that, don't worry about it.

You can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

So everybody gets the exact same podcast.

I get to earn a living right so that's patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast if you want to sign up and give me a couple of quid and also if you are signing up don't sign up on the the iPhone app because Apple will take 30% of whatever money that you give me so fuck that sign up on a browser and don't sign up as a free patron because you're just giving Patreon your data and this podcast doesn't receive any funding.

Okay.

I'm trying to avoid introducing a tiered payment.

I don't want to have it.

The only way I can get rid of the free option is if I have tiers of payment.

And I don't want that because I want someone to contribute whatever they like.

I want to keep it like that if I can.

And everyone gets the exact same podcast.

Regardless of whether you pay or not.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

Do I have some upcoming gigs?

I'm sure I do.

I think the only thing that there's tickets going for now is that fucking the tour of Scotland and England, right, that's happening in June.

Um,

starting from the first of June, I mean, I'm in

Bristol, is that June?

The 6th, is, yeah.

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, and Norwich.

It's a big tour in June.

It's mostly sold out.

But please come along along to those gigs.

They're going to be wonderful.

They're going to be really nice, intimate gigs.

I'm going to have cracking guests.

Speaking of this shit,

like I know over in England in particular,

you don't have the type of knowledge about your indigenous folklore that we have in Ireland.

I think a contributing factor to that was the Industrial Revolution.

So when English people moved from the countryside to the city, you lost this stuff.

But in any of the places I've listed out there,

if you know any decent local folklorists or historians who could tell me about English folklore, I would love to learn about that.

Like I know that Wales are pretty good for it.

I know that white thorn grows in England too.

and ye might have beliefs about white thorn but I'd love to learn this stuff because it's I'm very lucky in that it's easy to find out the Irish stuff, but I know fuck all about English folklore and I'd love to know more because let's be honest.

That's the interest in history.

The history of the regular people.

The beliefs and superstitions and the knowledge of the regular everyday people.

That's what interesting.

Not fucking

Prince Fogface, this, the King Fockface.

I don't give a fuck about that shit.

Stupid English royal shit.

Rich people making a bullshit about each other.

Oh, did you know that King Henry VIII actually wrote that song Greensleeves?

Did he?

Fuck the stupid bollocks.

Give a shit about that.

I want to learn about the stories of the regular people, the peasants.

That's what's interesting.

Right, what have we got after that?

I'm in Derry on the 19th of September.

Come along to that in the Derry Millennium Theatre.

And then I have a Vicar Street gig in Dublin on Tuesday the 23rd.

Why the fuck did I book a gig on a Tuesday there now?

Tuesday's when I usually finish the podcast.

Sure it's September, I'll figure something out.

And anyway, lovely little quiet midweek gigs.

Alright, back to the podcast.

I want to tell you about ring forts.

So I'm going to be gigging a university concert hall Limerick tonight, and I'm going to be speaking to the Shankey Eddie Lenahan tonight.

Because I'm doing that, I wanted to to visit a fairy fort in Limerick.

So I went to one called the Grange Stone Circle in Lochgar

in Limerick near Kilmallock which was about a 20 minute drive out from Limerick City and this is

this is a very powerful fucking fairy fort.

It's it's beautiful.

It's an ancient very large ancient stone circle perfect circle.

with all these old stones that were put there by somebody and sticking out of one of the stones is this gnarly old fucking white thorn fairy tree.

So I didn't again I didn't step into the fucking

I didn't step into the circle.

It's huge.

I didn't step into it.

Again superstition.

I say I don't believe this shit but I'm not stepping into the stone circle because it's not what you do.

Not one that's guarded by a fairy tree.

I was just thinking nah.

Why bother?

Just don't bother.

Don't need to.

And just respect the beliefs.

So I stayed outside the stone circle.

And this particular Grange stone circle in Loch Garr in Limerick, archaeologists have looked at it.

It's

it dates from 3000 BC.

It's 5,000 years old.

So this is 5,000 years old.

For 5,000 years, nobody fucked with that.

It's just...

some stones very very very old looking stones large boulders, clearly placed there deliberately in a perfect circle.

That's all it is.

And then one of those stones has got a...

it's been split open by a fairy tree.

And the fact that it's undisturbed, again, it tells us people were afraid of this.

This was considered powerful, superstitious, whatever the fuck.

Nobody fucked with this thing for 5,000 years.

Ordered in the pyramids.

And now here I am, beside it.

And what has me mentioning the seagulls this this week, who've been quiet, they haven't interrupted the podcast.

What has me mentioning the seagulls this week is

while I was there in awe of this stone circle in Loch Gar, a fucking seagull shows up

with

a seagull

who had a Dubai chocolate bar wrapper in his mouth,

which was bizarre and sad.

So number one,

seagulls have no business in Kilmalock

out by Loch Gar this is this is quite inland very very inland I know there's a big lake Loch Gar seagulls don't belong there so seagulls are flying that far inland to try and find food maybe they're going to the lake to get fish but seagulls don't belong this

inland

and it had a dubai a Dubai chocolate bar wrapper in its mouth which it left behind I went over and looked at it and saw it was a bit of a Dubai chocolate bar wrapper which I'm assuming it had taken out of a bin.

And the first thing I thought was

I wonder is some bad luck about to befall Dubai chocolate bars because

Dubai chocolate bars are mad.

I'm sure you're aware of them.

I've never seen anything like it.

It's a viral online trend.

that manufacturing can't keep up with.

There are these chocolate bars and on the inside is this really gooey, sweet pistachio filling.

They look delicious.

I've tasted one.

It wasn't worth what I spent on it.

But two months ago they just went mad viral on TikTok.

And everyone wanted a Dubai chocolate bar, but you could not get your hands on them.

And in Limerick there was there was one shop and there was cue's around the corner.

For home made Dubai chocolate bars.

They were making chocolate in empty Chinese food containers and filling them with pistachio cream and charging people I think it was like 30 quid.

It was nearly the same price as drugs.

Demand for these chocolate bars was so great that people were selling homemade versions because you couldn't get the real thing.

And now two months on, the market is saturated.

You can buy Dubai chocolate bars in fucking Lydal.

There's one shop in Limerick and when you go in there, instead instead of cigarettes behind the counter, they have a full a full rack of different Dubai chocolate bars.

So we've gone past peak Dubai chocolate bar now.

They're no longer expensive and now they're like three for one.

There's so many Dubai chocolate bars that I went to an isolated 5,000-year-old fairy fort in Loch Garr and a fucking seagull lands and drops a Dubai chocolate bar wrapper in its mouth.

They're selling them in Kilmallock.

And I'll be honest, the first thing I thought, the first thing I fucking thought

when that seagull dropped the wrapper was, I wonder is some bad luck gonna befall Dubai chocolate now?

So I took out my phone and googled it for the crack and yeah, there's a world pistachio shortage.

Right now there is a world pistachio shortage

because Dubai chocolate bars have gone too popular.

And we do have that association in Ireland

people people have knocked fairy forts and built businesses on them the most famous one would be

do you know that car this is another little connection I made but this is just autism

do you know that car the DeLorean

that you'd know it from back to the future it was a 1980s sports car and the doors opened up like wings and specifically those doors were called gull wings.

Literally the doors on a DeLorean car are called gull wings.

And that's what had me connecting the seagull with the DeLorean.

But anyway the DeLorean sports car

they were built by a fellow called John DeLorean in the 80s who would have been a bit of a like an Elon Musk in his day.

An eccentric car maker.

John DeLorean used to he was a Yank.

He used to work for General Motors

and he publicly his plan in the late 70s was, I'm going to make this amazing, affordable, ethical sports car.

And it's going to look incredible.

It's going to look amazing.

And it's going to be a huge success.

And everyone's going to own one.

And that's, and this car is going to be the most futuristic car you've ever seen.

That's how it ended up in Back to the Future.

Look at the car in Back to the Future.

That's called a DeLorean.

It's one of these cars, right?

That's Simpsons episode.

There's an early Simpsons episode where Homer finds a long-last brother, and then Homer designs a car for his brother, and it's a huge flop that's based on the DeLorean.

The DeLorean car is one of the greatest flops ever, and

no one knew how it happened.

They were like, this was supposed to, of course, I want the DeLorean, an affordable sports car with incredible doors that open outwards.

Of course, I want one of them.

Give me one now.

And it's affordable.

Wow.

So what happened?

So So John DeLorean, the American, is like, okay, I want to build my factory.

I want to build my factory to make these futuristic cars.

But I want to make them affordable.

These need to be affordable.

How am I going to make these futuristic cars and also make them affordable?

So the British government approached John DeLorean and said, we're going to give you a hundred million.

We'll give you a hundred million pounds of free money.

Right?

If you build your DeLorean in Belfast.

Now Belfast in the north of Ireland, right?

This was like the late 70s, early 80s.

There was a war.

There was a war.

There was a sectarian war.

The IRA.

The period known as the Troubles.

Bombs, shootings, murders.

The British Army colonizing every single day.

The IRA, the UVF.

A war zone is...

It's not a...

War zones aren't great for economic prosperity so the British government were thinking fuck it maybe if we bring a giant international car company to West Belfast and just build this giant plant and provide tons of employment maybe that

will ease working class tensions and nobody will want to join the IRA because they've got a job in the DeLorean factory.

So John DeLorean says, great plan.

And I'll take that 100 million of free money from you, UK government, and this will allow me to build these affordable cars.

Did it go to plan?

No.

You can't build a car factory while there's a war going on in the middle of a war zone.

Only about 9,000 cars were made.

The DeLorean business fell apart.

It was seen as a spectacular, spectacular failure of this futuristic car that just never ever.

It was a terrible failure.

two years later John DeLorean

ended up in such debt that he got caught smuggling cocaine and in an FBI sting the FBI set him up he was so in debt that he ended up trying to finance cocaine smuggling and got caught he went from being a billionaire with a futuristic car that was going to change the world to smuggling coke and getting caught within about three fucking years.

Do you know what he also did?

He bulldozed, he personally bulldozed the fairy fort.

He personally bulldozed the fairy fort to build the DeLorean factory.

And everybody said to him, even the IRA, the fucking IRA went to him and said,

listen, we're the IRA.

No, no, no, it's nothing.

We don't want money.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Look, no, it's not about that either.

nothing to do with the Brits no no no

we don't even have guns we don't even have guns on us it's not about that

please don't bulldoze the fairy fort

we appreciate that you're building a factory fair play to you don't bulldoze the fairy fort please because very very bad things are going to happen to you if you bulldoze that fairy fort and John DeLorean the Yank He doesn't understand it.

He's not listening.

He's not listening to the community.

So

he bulldozes bulldozes an ancient fairy fort himself personally in a bulldozer.

And then two or three years later, his business is gone and he gets caught smuggling cocaine.

In Waterford, there's a pharmaceutical company called West Pharmaceutical.

They also, they bulldozed a fucking...

They bulldozed a fairy fort to build their plant.

And if Trump has his way, that place is going to get shut down.

But my point is, in Ireland, we take fairy forts very seriously.

And,

you know, that story there with DeLorean,

there's loads and loads of.

Look, he built.

I know the Brits are giving you 100 million quid, but don't build a car factory in Belfast at the height of the troubles, alright?

That's not going to work out for you.

But we will retroactively make that a boat.

No, no, it's not because of that.

He got bad luck from bulldozing a fairy fort.

So, like, I promise you, there's a fairy fort near you.

I guarantee you if you live in Ireland there is a fairy fort near you.

And an enjoyable thing to do is when you find the name of your local fairy fort, go to ducas.ae du C H A S which is the National Folklore Collection.

Type in the name of your local fairy fort and you'll find all the folklore and superstitions and stories that are attached to your local fairy fort.

Like the fairy fort in Loch Gar

where the seagull had the Dubai chocolate bar.

Like one story associated with that fort

and this story was written down in the 1920s.

I got it from from Ducas.ae.

One story is that

it says

it's locally known as Lias Moor because there's two other smaller forts in the opposite field.

They're circular in shape.

It's surrounded by an earthen mound and inside the mound is a circle of stones and the ground is level like a saucer.

It is thought that they were made by the fair bulgs and used by them as a place of worship.

So a fair bulg, fairies but

the fair bulg were in mythology

a race of people on the island of Ireland that were defeated by humans and and driven underground to the other world.

A kind of a and they became a begrudging demonic race.

So this story, this folklore is saying that this particular

stone circle in Loch Gar was a place of worship for demon fairies.

And the story attached is: it says a man named Patrick Keene, who lived in Rahin, went one day to Limerick to buy a flute, and in those days he had to walk, so it was very late when he was passing by the fort.

It's thought that the fairies took him in and kept him there.

After five days, he found himself outside the fort, as if he'd slept there for some time.

He never told anybody anybody where he'd been or what befell him for the five days that he'd been missing.

But after he went missing, when he played the flute, which he wasn't very good at playing, after he went missing in this fairy fort, when he played the flute, it was the sweetest music that anyone ever heard.

And people said that he was taught by the fairies.

What's beautiful about that story is

it's so similar to UFO abduction stories.

Like that story there was written down in the 1920s and it's probably could be 100.

That story could be 200 years old, could be longer, could be several hundred years old.

But

it's so similar to UFO abduction stories.

People who get abducted by aliens, what happens?

Aliens come, these beings take them away and then they have a sense of missing time.

They don't know how long they've been away from.

But also what you get there is the Irish Other World.

I did a podcast about this a few podcasts back where I compared beliefs about the Irish Otherworld with quantum physics.

The Irish Other World,

it's not about linear time.

The Otherworld is an alternate reality where time does not exist.

It's not a concept.

And anyone who's able to visit the other world where the fairies live, they don't experience time.

Things operate differently there.

So this fellow who went into the fairy fort, the fairies abducted him.

He doesn't know how long he's been away, but when he arrived back in our world, it was five years.

And when he arrived back, he had the ability to play the flute magnificently.

So what's been implied there is

how long does it take to learn how to play the flute brilliantly?

Multiple years, I'd say.

So he went off to the world of the fairies when he entered this fairy fort, the one that the fucking the seagull brought to the boy chocolate to me.

This cunt went into the fairy fort and the fairies took him away for several years

and then they taught him how to play the flute brilliantly.

Now this belief system that also has parallels with African-American belief systems like now you know Irish and African-American people they mixed in America.

So

blues players, blues players in Mississippi, right?

1920s, 1910.

Robert Johnson is the best example.

Robert Johnson is one of the most important blues players of all time.

He was an an African-American fellow from Mississippi.

And they used to say about Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson was so good at playing guitar that one night he met the devil at the crossroads and the devil showed him how to play guitar like that in exchange for his soul.

That same story,

I'm reading that same story here

in local folklore in Limerick about a fucking stone circle.

A flute player went into this circle, the fairies took him away and then he could play the flute wonderfully.

But what's being implied, because the fairies are evil, is what did he exchange.

What terrible bad thing is going to happen to this man, this wonderful flute player?

What bad thing is going to happen?

Because nothing good ever happens anyone who walks into a fairy fort.

But I want to finish the podcast by speaking about

what fairy forts are

and why are we terrified of them.

Why is there so much superstition around these stone circles, these old stone circles that

can be untouched for thousands of years?

Why are people so afraid of them?

So

there's between 40,000 and 60,000

fairy forts or stone circles in Ireland.

That's loads.

That's a lot.

That's why I said to you, you've got a local fairy fort.

Just find it.

So what were they?

So a fairy fort usually is it's a circular mound in a field.

Most of the time it has ancient stones

and what they were was

like castles or forts.

People lived there

but most likely too cattle.

Cattle lived there.

So you go back several hundred years.

I'm talking pre-Christian, alright?

A thousand years, two thousand years, whatever you want.

There was people living in Ireland.

What did they live in?

They would have built

like

permanent wooden camps.

So they'd have built mounds and mounds of earth to defend and then a load of timber in this circular shape.

defensive and moats, right?

So think of this circle with mounds mounds of earth and then underneath the mounds of earth you have a depression in the ground.

So this is a defensive structure.

It's very difficult to get in there if you're attacking.

And then they'd have stuck a lot of wood and on the inside they would have had some houses inside there.

And this is where people lived.

Any place in Ireland that has rath in it or lease in it lis

it means that there was one of these ring forts they were called ring forts it meant that there was one of these ring forts where people lived.

If you want to see an example of what they would have looked like, go to a place called Craganone.

Craganone is, I think it's in Clare.

It's not Limerick, it's in Clare.

Craganone is a reconstruction of one of these ring forts and you can walk around it.

If a place in Ireland has Rath, Lias, Dune, Cair, Cashel, then all of those places had a ring fort.

Rath Mines, Lismore, Rath Farnum, Dunleary, Cashel.

These names, these names tell us this place once had a ring fort.

These circular mounds with timber where people lived but also cattle.

Now I'm going to simplify this.

So before Christianity, before 500,

we didn't have towns or cities in Ireland.

Very strange, but instead what we had were tons and tons of these ring forts.

And people

were pastoral.

Cattle was hugely, hugely important.

We cleared loads of forests.

And Ireland, before Christianity,

was a cattle-based economy.

We can see this from the records of how valuable cattle was.

Everything was...

All value was traded against cattle.

The most powerful person was the person who had the most cattle, the most cows.

One of our most famous stories, the Tyne Bo Kulna, write this epic piece of mythology.

It's about a cattle raid.

It's about a queen and a king fighting over who's the most powerful, who has the most cattle.

Whoever had the most cattle was the most powerful.

And people used to raid.

Cattle raiding was a huge thing.

People used to steal entire herds of cattle.

So all of these different ring forts were at war with each other, stealing each other's cattle.

So

holding cattle inside a ring fort, keeping your herds safe was very, very important.

You were protecting from raids.

Like I mentioned earlier, the Irish weather is revenge-based.

If you've got a sunny period, you're guaranteed the retribution of the rain.

That's what the weather tells us.

The weather.

The weather ingrains retribution and revenge into us as people if we live on this land.

Well some historians have said that

Ireland before Christianity was a particularly not Christianity but Ireland before monasteries and towns.

Ireland when it was just a lot of ring forts and people moving with cattle was

very revenge and retribution based because the entirety of society was based around stealing cattle.

This this family, the O'Neills, they steal fucking cattle from the O'Briens and then a war starts and then someone is kidnapped and then there's I'm gonna kidnap your sons for ransom and then you're gonna give me the cattle back I'm gonna steal that bull.

Consistent continual feuding and retribution based around cattle raids and violence and fighting.

and then needing to have thousands and thousands of these ring forts these secure ring forts that you keep your cattle inside.

Well, I read a beautiful paper, an academic paper by a historian called Patrick McCafferty this week with an incredible theory about Irish ring forts.

You see, these ring forts became the fairy forts.

These

like you're talking about beliefs about a place across hundreds of years, even thousands.

And the average person didn't have writing, they just had stories.

So what was once what was a ring fort a thousand years ago?

This place where humans or cattle lived that was a structure made of wood.

Once that becomes abandoned, the wood rots away, and all you're left with is this circle, this mound, this strange, unexplained mound that you don't know what it does or what it's for,

and maybe stones if stones were used.

So the ring forts, they become fairy forts.

The people of Ireland, hundreds of years pass, you can't remember what that thing was for, what it was called.

So people just go, I don't know what that fucking structure is.

I don't know who built it.

It must be the fairies because no one knows, and it was there before I was born.

It must be the fairies.

Don't fuck with it.

But Patrick McCafferty goes further.

Geraldus of Wales, the fellow who wrote the original topographia Hibernica,

which I've done multiple podcasts on this.

If you're a perpetual Declan, you know what that is.

But Geraldus wrote about Ireland, he was a Welsh fella, in the 1100s.

And in the 1100s, he said that the place was littered with ring forts.

So Ireland was full of these ring forts, these circular structures.

But by the 1100s, the Irish had pretty much abandoned the ring forts.

So if we're to believe Geraldus of Wales in the 1100s,

he's saying that

something

happened that made Irish people go, we can't live in ring forts anymore.

Get the fuck away from them.

So there's a deadly bacteria called anthrax.

Anthrax,

you don't come across it much now.

Anthrax is

one of the scariest bacteria in the world because they reckon if terrorists use it in a bomb, it could kill millions of people.

Anthrax is deadly.

Absolutely fucking deadly.

Kill an entire village in a week.

And anthrax is, it's naturally occurring.

It occurs in animals, it occurs in cattle.

Cattle can become infected with anthrax and die.

And the humans who are in contact with this cattle, they will also die.

So Patrick McCafferty has a theory.

He looked at the Irish Annals.

So these ring forts, like I said, some of them are thousands of years old.

old, other ones are hundreds of years old, and they were definitely circular enclosures used for cattle.

So let's just say a thousand years ago,

there's an outbreak of anthrax in the cattle.

Completely plausible.

You can read the annals.

There's multiple plagues happen in Ireland.

People don't know the names for the diseases, but they list out the symptoms.

So let's just say one ring fort.

there's like 200 cattle inside there, and now they all get infected with fucking anthrax.

And all the people inside there get infected with anthrax.

That's everybody dead.

Every cow dead, every person dead.

No escaping it.

Anthrax is deadly.

So all of these people die in the ring fort.

And then their bodies rot in the ring fort.

And the wood rots away.

And hundreds of years pass

and everything's forgotten the bones are rotted away and now you're just left with a weird mound

just a strange circle of grass in the landscape or maybe some stones on it

so let's just say 300 400 years passed there's no writing

And the Irish people 300 years later are just curious about this stone circle.

Or maybe they want to take the stones.

They see that the stones are there and they're pre-cut and they want to take them.

Well, McCafferty's theory is that

the people who would have started digging at that spot, the anthrax bacteria, can actually stay in the soil.

So it's possible.

that some people in Ireland started digging up ancient stone circles and then they would cause an anthrax plague in their community and hundreds of people would die and then it's entirely possible that they planted a white thorn tree on that stone circle as a warning as a warning white thorn means danger don't fuck with this

so you have these ring forts cattle are being kept inside there anthrax is very common as a cattle disease and we know it can stay in the soil and you can wake it up hundreds of years later if you disturb the soil.

All it takes is

a handful of those instances in Ireland with ring forts.

And people don't know what, they don't know what jarm theory is, they don't know what illness is.

All they know is someone fucking dug up one of these ring forts, and the entire village died.

The cattle died, the people died, they all died.

What did they do?

They dug up the ring fort.

Then stay the fuck away from these ring forts.

That's fairy magic.

That's when you go at these ring forts, you're obviously fucking with the other world and the fairies will get you.

Plant a white thorn tree to warn people.

And Patrick McCafferty, his theory, his theory is that's

that's why that's why we're terrified of fairy forts and fairy trees.

We've just forgotten.

It's it's you're talking about superstition and oral tradition over thousands and thousands of years, warning us about the very legitimate fear of anthrax in the soil.

And it was an essay I read by him and he finishes it with,

no scientist, a scientist in Ireland hasn't tested ring forts or fairy forts for anthrax, but he wishes someone would.

I think it's a fucking brilliant theory.

I think it's a wonderful theory.

and what it ties back to too

and I've done a full podcast on this I just can't remember the name of it.

And I'm not rehashing all content, but I will bring

old content up if it supports the argument that I'm making now.

There's this thing called long-term nuclear warning messaging, and it's fascinating.

Nuclear waste is a thing.

When we make nuclear energy, we've got tons and tons of nuclear waste.

And nuclear waste is deadly, deadly poisonous.

It'll give you cancer, it'll kill you.

Radiation poisoning.

And nuclear waste,

it doesn't stop being deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.

So we have this really deadly substance that will kill people.

And there's nothing you can do with it.

So what we do do with nuclear waste is

scientists bury it.

deep into the earth.

They go to these caves and they bury nuclear waste deep, deep into the earth.

But even in 20,000 years,

if someone or something was to dig that up in 20,000 years,

it would be deadly.

It would still, it would kill a lot of people.

It's nuclear waste.

So the scientists have to imagine.

If we bury all this nuclear waste here, how do we tell someone that it's dangerous in 20,000 years?

20 civilizations might have collapsed.

We don't even know if humans would be on the earth.

Will it be aliens?

Will people speak English?

How do you tell someone 20,000 years in the future, do not dig here?

Something very dangerous is in the earth.

Please stay away.

Because humans are curious.

We love digging shit up.

So lots of the solutions they had was

they would use megalithic stones.

So where nuclear waste is buried, they would get large stones that are pointy and scary looking.

scary looking stones that stick out of the earth and they would hope that someone in 20,000 years would be freaked out by this and they'd say stay away to make a site of nuclear waste feel spooky or feel threatening in some way threatening and supernatural another theory was to create religions and songs and folk tales about nuclear waste that would be scary enough that it would last

thousands of years even if writing collapses.

So Patrick McCafferty, when he was...

He didn't bring this into his anthrax theory.

This is me adding to it.

But what if that's what the white-thorn tree is?

When it comes to these ancient stone circles, these fairy forts, there's always...

There's a white-thorn tree there.

That's the bit that freaks people out the most.

I don't know what this mound is, I don't know what this circle is, and why in the fuck is that gnarly scary looking tree right there in the middle?

Who put it there?

Why is it there?

I'm freaked out, I gotta stay away.

Maybe that's what the white thorn tree is.

600 years ago, a thousand years ago,

somebody dug this up and anthrax spread and caused the plague and killed hundreds of people.

So they planted the whitethorn tree as a warning, stay away, this means danger, this means forces that you don't understand.

And they probably genuinely believed that that was the fucking fairies.

If you dig into the side and everyone dies, and your belief is that the other world is underneath the earth, that's the fucking fairies.

That's what that is.

So that's all I have time for for this week's podcast.

I don't know am I gonna bring up the anthrax theory with Eddie Linehan

because he genuinely believes in the fairies and I don't want to burst his bubble.

But I love the anthrax fairy fourth theory.

I think it's it's fascinating.

Alright, rub a swan.

No, don't rub a fucking swan.

Feed an urban seagull.

Feed an urban seagull.

They're getting fucked over by this new bottle law, lads.

They're really getting fucked over.

So feed an urban seagull if you see one.

And don't cut down a white thorn tree.

And don't walk into the middle of a fairy circle.

God bless.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

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Coach, one more question.

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