43 minutes of me walking around Limerick city and talking into a microphone about the history of a wall and how it's connected to 2pac ASMR

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Greetings.

Greetings, you sweltering Emmetts.

You steamy quevers.

Welcome to to the Blind Boy podcast.

You might notice things sound a little bit differently this week.

The reason is

there's no podcast this week.

There's actually no podcast this week because

what's happening is right now I'm in Spain.

I'm in Spain on holiday.

Well, not right now this second, right now this second, I'm in Limerick City.

But currently, as you're listening to this,

I'm in Cordoba in Spain, having a holiday.

For the first time in seven years, I want to literally take a week off.

I want to take a week off from the podcast.

And I don't want to put out no podcast at all.

So what I'm going to do this week, I'm just going to walk, I'm going to take a walk around Limerick City.

Is that a bit loud?

That's a car beeping.

I'm going to take a walk around Limerick City, completely freestyle, for 10,000 steps, and just see what happens.

Just see what happens rather than put out nothing.

And I'm got this won't be edited.

I'm going to try and put this out unedited.

And I'm just going to do one walk and then upload it.

And to me that that doesn't con that's not work.

Because usually a podcast takes me a couple of days to make.

But if I just walk around and talk, that's not really work for me.

So I am taking the week off.

So right now I'm looking out on the Shannon River.

The Shannon River in Limerick City.

And I'm looking towards

King John's Castle.

The river is fat.

It's the only way to describe it.

It's early morning so the tide is high.

So the river itself, the water is very chubby and fat.

And

I met a fisherman once in a bar.

I was shit faced, it was about five years ago, but I I met a fisherman in a bar.

When I say a fisherman, he claimed claimed to be

his family, he said his family went back about 300 years in Limerick salmon fishing.

And he said to me that the river that flows through Limerick City, that it's not a river at all, that it's the sea in a river costume.

And I was like, what the fuck do you mean it's the sea in a river costume?

You see, this river, the Shannon River, it opens out.

onto the fucking Atlantic.

It opens out onto the mouth.

So apparently, even though we call this a river, it behaves a bit more like the sea because just a bit a little bit up there you've got salt water so I don't know who that fisherman was I'd love to talk to him he seemed very knowledgeable about the river but here I am

the Shannon River in Limerick City and I'm looking at King John's castle what I'm looking at specifically is the island the Limerick island

Limerick,

which is where I'm from,

was founded in in the 800s.

I'm gonna walk a bit now.

Limerick was founded in the 800s by the Vikings.

Ireland didn't really have cities and towns.

That wasn't our thing.

Ireland was covered in rainforest, and we had little petty kingdoms, and we had little

forts,

but we didn't really have towns as such.

The closest thing we'd have had to towns is when Christianity came in about 500, and we had monasteries, but we didn't have towns.

So when the Vikings came and invaded in the 800s then they founded a couple of towns and one of these was Limerick.

So what I'm staring at right now was the island.

Limerick was at the mouth of the Atlantic.

So you had this small little island in the middle of the river.

And defensively it was perfect because it's an island.

So the Vikings said, right, let's set up a little town here and we can trade.

We can use our ships to go out to the Atlantic or we can go up the river altogether and go up as far as fucking Athlone if we want.

Because we all know the Vikings were handy with their ships.

That's what you're going to get this week, lads, because

I can't research.

I don't...

So I'm going to say things like the Vikings were handy with their ships.

And there might be some historical inaccuracies as well.

So then,

by about the year 1100, the Normans came over.

The Brits, but not really the Brits.

They were the Normans.

They were French lads who called themselves Brits.

And a fellow called King John, who was the King of England, he built the castle that's there in front of me.

And it's one of the best preserved Norman castles in the world.

King John was a cunt.

King John,

he was such a bollocks, they had to invent what's considered modern law.

They had to invent the thing called Magna Carta, which is...

I suppose it's the world's first legal constitution, but they had to invent that because King John was such a fucking prick.

He was just

he didn't abide by the posh rules.

He used to have like his barons killed and he was a bit of a despot.

So they had to bring in modern law to stop King John.

So that's his castle over there.

Now he was a Brit, he was a Norman.

I read an article there a couple of years ago by some English historian, rotten article, which claimed that

The reason King John was such a violent, horrible king was because he spent so much time in Ireland and he learned savagery from us.

And that was an article that was printed about three fucking years ago by some slimy English cunt.

So now I'm walking up a little bit here and

I'm looking at the Hunt Museum.

This is one of my favourite places in Limerick City.

It's a Georgian building.

Beautiful, beautiful building looking out onto the river.

And it's a museum.

It's a small little museum that we have here in Limerick City.

With...

I'm actually a member of the museum, so I can go in there as much as I want.

You know, if I want to look at

a piece of jewelry that was made in the 8th century, I might want to see that maybe three times a day.

I can just walk in and look at it whenever I want.

There's a bit of controversy about the Hunt Museum because

Nazi hunters

a few years ago apparently

I don't want to get sued now.

They were a lot of the art that's inside in this museum

might have been stolen by the Nazis.

So, like Nazi hunting organisations were knocking on the door here going, where'd you get your fucking art?

Did you buy it off Hitler?

Walking up a bit now from the Hunt Museum, I'm looking at

it's that St.

Mary's Cathedral.

Again, another wonderful cathedral built,

geez, it's 1200 years old, you know.

Absolutely fantastic.

If you want to look at some Protestant graves,

go up there.

I don't know much about that place.

I should know more.

I didn't want to put out no podcast.

Do you know what I mean?

I did want to take a week off.

I'm making this podcast seven fucking years.

So

As you can tell now, I'm approaching traffic.

I'm making this podcast seven years lads and I haven't taken a week off

and this is the closest to me taking a week off

just outside the hunt museum now

there's actually a pair of horses here a big pair of plastic horses

and they were built

they erect these horses as a result of a novelty song that I released in 2010 called Horse Outside and at the back of these horses I'm just beside

I'm beside the horse's arse now

it's a statue of a horse

and my hand print is actually on the back of it so sometimes I come here to the museum to put my hand on my hand print on this statue of a horse's arse that was erected because of a song called horse outside of course no one knows who I am

Currently, I just look like a divorced middle-aged man.

I've got my trusty outdoor jacket on.

And my pants aren't very divorced.

My pants are cargo pants.

And I suppose my shoes...

I'm a bit old for these shoes.

These are the type of shoes that a 25-year-old would wear.

But I'm divorced from the waist up.

If anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about there, what I mean is...

I just want to wear outdoor clothes all the time.

I want to wear outdoor clothes.

I don't give a fuck about fashion.

I want to be head-to-toe, Gore-Tex, outdoor clothes.

But if you do that, you look fucking divorced.

There's nothing wrong with being divorced.

You just don't want to look divorced.

So I'm after moving to a quieter part of the city, right?

Because all those cars were very annoying and loud.

I'm in an area called Watergate.

And what I adore about history is how place names can tell you the story of the land.

Like

as I mentioned, Limerick is a it's a medieval city an old medieval city, founded by the Vikings, then the Brits had a crack at it in 1100.

But a thousand years ago, Limerick was very, very important to the Brits.

Limerick got a town or a city charter ten years before London got a city charter.

So that's how important Limerick was.

But as Limerick expanded beyond that island I was just looking at,

it became separated into two areas.

known as Englishtown and Irishtown.

I'm talking 1200s here here now.

Englishtown was the area around the castle.

That's where all the English live.

That's where the richest people live.

Then the indigenous Irish and the Vikings, they're sent south to Irishtown.

And

as you can imagine, the Irish people, they're a little bit poorer than the ruling English.

And the name Watergate there...

These huge medieval walls were built all around Limerick because Limerick was so important economically, it became a fortress, an impenetrable fortress.

And these massive walls, huge ones, were built all around Limerick.

So when you hear the name gate, gate, in any name in Limerick, it means that there was a gate there for the old walls.

But Watergate there, what does that tell you?

It's in Irish town.

It's called Watergate because it used to flood.

And just around the corner up there, you've got Flood Street.

So the land that the Irish were given in Limerick City, it was prone to flooding, it was mucky, it was rotten.

And then the British, the English, they got the better land.

Now I'm after walking up from

after walking up from fucking Watergate and I'm moving towards St.

John's Church and I'm on my way towards a place called John's Gate.

Close to here we've got

I'm just at the corner of a very, very famous chip shop in Limerick by the name of Donkey Ford's.

No one knows why it's called Donkey Fords.

It's called Ford's.

I'm just at the corner now.

I'm just at the corner of Donkey Fords.

I think these are the best chips in the country.

Anyone from Limerick will tell you that these are the best chips in the country.

This is famous if you're from Limerick.

I'm right outside Donkey Fords right now.

All it says is Ford's fish and chips.

That's it.

Nothing fancy.

There's only about about three things on the menu.

They cook their chips in beef fat

and they're unparalleled.

So if you are coming to Limerick City, hop into Donkey Ford's chip shop and get yourself chips and some battered sausages.

So right now I'm in an area called Johnsgate in Limerick City.

In the old Irish town part of the city.

And what I'm actually I'm in a housing estate.

I'm in a little housing estate.

But what I'm looking for

are remnants of the old Limerick medieval walls.

You see, because not a lot of the Limerick medieval walls,

these fortress walls, exist anymore.

There, I see them right there.

So I'm looking right now.

This is just a fucking housing estate.

Just a regular fucking housing estate in the middle of Limerick City.

But what you have is

there's

demolished, I wouldn't call them demolished, there's walls in front of me that are a thousand years old and they're about 30 feet high.

And these are,

that's a fine stretch of wall there.

Now, this is one of the best pieces of unbroken medieval wall that we have in this city.

And it's just here in a house, like people's back gardens are backing onto a defensive wall that's a thousand years old.

Let's get a look at it here.

Limestone incredibly thick.

So this is...

this wall is maybe eight foot thick

and maybe twenty-five foot tall

and just beside it is a sign that says Irishtown City Wall Park 1997 because that's when they tried to renovate it

and the stretch of medieval wall I know I'm doing a podcast about a wall.

I'm doing a podcast about a fucking wall in Limerick City.

But it's not just a fucking wall.

This is a very, very important wall.

All the walls of Limerick City are now demolished.

They were demolished in 1691

during a thing called the Siege of Limerick.

And

the Siege of Limerick is a very, very important

part of global fucking history global history so in 1691

There was a fight for the English throne, right?

There was a fight for the English throne.

You had King William William of Orange.

Yeah, that fella, the Battle of the Bine.

You had King William, William of Orange

and he was fighting a fella called James, James the Something, right?

So William of Orange was Protestant.

and James was Catholic.

And they had their big battle in the Battle of the Bine.

The Battle of the Bine is the thing that the Orange Men celebrate today.

They had the battle in the Battle of the Bine in 1690.

And then the Catholic forces that lost.

Here's what I'm gonna do.

Here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna connect this fucking medieval wall in Limerick City.

I'm gonna connect this Limerick City wall with Tupac, with Tupac Shakur.

And this is how I'm gonna do it.

There's the bell of St.

John's Cathedral there.

Hope it doesn't fuck shit up for me.

So it's 1690.

The Catholic forces, the Jacobites, they're after losing to the Protestant forces at the Battle of the Bine, the Bine River up there near the north, right?

So the Catholic forces flee and they say, fuck it, we got to go to Limerick.

Why do we got to go to Limerick?

Because Limerick is a fucking fortress.

Limerick is...

you cannot get into Limerick.

So the Catholic forces, they flee the Battle of the Bine, 1690, they head down to Limerick and they go into Limerick and they begin to use the walls of Limerick to defend themselves.

Okay?

Then King William and his forces follow them down and what begins is called the siege of Limerick.

The Catholic forces are inside the wall and the Protestant forces are outside but they can't get in.

It doesn't matter how many cannons they fire, doesn't matter anything.

You cannot penetrate the walls that I'm staring at right now.

They're too big.

Then during the first siege enough cannon fire, enough

explosions happen that they managed to break the wall a bit.

So they start to dig a rampart and I'm looking at that rampart right now.

Behind this wall is like a grassy hill, a grassy hill.

Now this is someone's back garden.

This is somebody's back garden, right?

Imagine, you know, when you've got a back garden and your back garden is on a slope, a big slant.

There's someone living in that house and the choice of lawnmower that they buy in B and Q is determined by a battle that happened in 1690 because what they did was as the walls were about to fall they built a rampart they backed it up with a bunch of soil and rocks at the back so the wall wouldn't fall so the siege lasts for a while and the catholic forces win the protestants cannot get into limerick city

Then they have the second siege of Limerick a year later in 1691.

Now by that time the forces the Catholic forces inside Limerick City, people started to starve, people started to run out of resources.

And when the second siege of Limerick happens, now the civilians are involved, in particular the women of Limerick.

The women of Limerick stood on these fucking walls that I'm looking at now and they poured boiling oil and rocks down on the Protestants.

But the Protestants won, the Protestants got into Limerick.

Now the thing is with the siege of Limerick and why it's globally important and how I can link this to Tupac as I just said.

When the Protestant forces won effectively, okay, and they broke into Limerick City, they got past the city walls, the Catholic forces inside, of which there were thousands of soldiers, they surrendered, right?

So they surrendered.

And then they started to negotiate the terms of surrender to the Protestant forces of King William.

And those terms became what was known as the Treaty of Limerick.

That's why this is why Limerick is called the Treaty City.

Limerick was called the Treaty City because the Treaty of Limerick was signed here.

And the Treaty of Limerick guaranteed rights for Catholic people in Ireland.

So the Catholic soldiers said, okay, here's the deal.

We will leave the country.

We're going to leave completely.

Thousands of us, right?

All

these men who fought, the Protestants, we're going to get the fuck out.

We're going to go to Spain.

We're going to go to France, whatever you want, we'll leave.

But if we do that, you have to guarantee equality for the Catholic people behind.

So the Brits said, the Protestants said, okay, we'll do that.

And they signed the Treaty of Limerick.

And then thousands and thousands of soldiers left Ireland for France, left Ireland for Spain.

And did the Brits honour that treaty?

No, they did not.

They broke the Treaty of Limerick immediately and replaced it with the exact opposite.

They invented the penal laws.

And the penal laws were

a system of apartheid.

Where, first off,

it meant now that

so King William the Protestant king is now the Protestant king of England and Ireland right

and the penal laws came in into effect in Ireland and the penal laws were

Catholic people couldn't own land they couldn't vote they couldn't receive an education they couldn't practise their religion it was apartheid it was a way to subjugate an entire population and disenfranchise them of any power agency and rights so that they would experience generational poverty so that colonization could occur basically.

And that's what the penal laws were.

And the penal laws were, it was a spit in the face of the Treaty of Limerick.

So while the penal laws take effect, all these Catholic soldiers who'd fucked off over to Spain and over to France, they became known as the wild geese, okay?

And they were over in France and Spain going, those fucking dirty cunts, those dirty bastards back home.

I can't believe they ignored the treaty that we signed and they replaced it with the exact opposite.

What a shower of dirty cunts.

One of these wild geese was a fellow by the name of Patrick Hennessy, right?

So Patrick Hennessy had been a Catholic soldier in Ireland.

He fled after the Treaty of Limerick and he went to an area of France known as Cognac, the Cognac region of France.

Patrick Hennessy was a wealthy Catholic, right?

This is when Catholics had a few quid before the fucking penal laws.

And his family were, there was whiskey makers in his family.

and when he got to the region of cognac in france

in about 1710 right

he's like what the fuck am i going to do with myself all right i'm going to start making drink

what if i tried to make whiskey out of wine so he starts making cognac hennessy hennessy fucking cognac you know hennessy cognac don't you have you ever seen hennessy

have you ever picked up a bottle of hennessy and thought this feels irish but it's not it's french well it is fucking Irish.

One of the wild geese who fled as a result of the Treaty of Limerick, he started fucking Hennessy.

He started making whiskey out of wine.

Cognac, his great-grandson, right?

So

Hennessy cognac starts to establish itself in France as the finest cognac around the place.

Patrick Hennessy's great-grandson, right,

in 1896, who's now the heir of the Hennessy Empire, he travels to fucking New York in 1896 and what he sees in New York in 1896 is he sees African American people being treated terribly.

So he starts a charity organization in 1896 in New York for African American workers.

And what this starts is

a relationship between

the Hennessy Cognac and African American people.

A kind of a solidarity, you'd call it.

Now,

I don't want to be talking up any corporation who performatively

has social justice as part of his branding, but this was very different at the turn of the century.

You have this great grandson of an Irishman who had to flee Ireland, the Irish revolutionary spirit, who's aware of the penal laws, now having solidarity with a community in America, African American people, who are being downtrodden.

You have to remember too,

in America, like especially up around New York, African American people started to have a few quid in their pocket.

They started to work.

They wanted to drink.

Whiskey brands, American whiskey brands like Jack Daniels and Jim Bean, they were all from fucking Tennessee and Mississippi and places like that.

They didn't want to advertise or to sell their whiskey to black people in 1909.

But Hennessy did.

And Hennessy also became the first corporate in 1910.

Hennessy became the first corporate sponsor of the NAACP which is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It was a human rights organization still around human rights organization for black people in America.

Then what happens is that African American soldiers they go over to France in World War II they start to see Hennessy there they remember Hennessy from back home

and you have this long-standing rel Hennessy in the 1950s as well they used to appoint African American people to their board of directors which in America, in the 1950s, that was exceptional.

So, the Hennessy Corporation, yes, they advertised to African-American people.

They didn't have a problem doing that.

A lot of brands would not advertise to African-American people.

Hennessy did.

And they also appointed African-American people, and they supported African-American civil rights organizations.

And

In the context of the 20th century, that wasn't performative.

It's not like now where corporations have their LGBTQ flag, or corporations claim to support social justice, where it's completely performative.

Hennessy appeared to actually lose customers over this.

They did this because they felt it was the right thing to do.

And there's a direct connection there

and this wall in Limerick that I'm fucking standing in front of.

And to bring it back to Tupac, Tupac's Ma was a Black Panther.

Tupac introduced Hennessy or Henney to hip-hop slang.

If you hit y

hear Hennessy all over rap songs, you can trace

Hennessy as a popular drink in rap songs to this fucking wall that I'm standing in front of.

A fucking shitty wall at the back of a housing estate in Limerick that I'm standing in front of.

And I think that's fantastic.

I love that.

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So listen, I'm trying to do an unrehearsed, unrehearsed fucking podcast here about

I know what this is about, history.

Subscribe to my Patreon, please.

Patreon.com forward slash divine by podcast.

I hope you're enjoying this podcast, lads, because, like I said, there's no podcast this week.

I'm just walking around and I'm rambling.

Something I've mentioned before, when you're dealing with any medieval city,

if you want to get to the real interest in history,

you go to the area beyond the city walls.

Beyond the city city walls is where it's the unconscious mind of a city.

It's where the dark things happen.

It's where the things happen that people don't want to see.

Or it's where warnings happen.

So I'm going to move beyond the city wall there where the city where the siege of fucking Limerick happened, Jansgate.

And I'm going to move up a little bit

to a street by the name of Clare Street.

It's just around the corner.

There's a lot of ivy right beside me and I hope a wasp doesn't come out.

So, I'm up in Clare Street

about 600 years ago, there was nothing here.

This, where I'm standing right now, was outside the city walls, and this was known as Moan the Muck.

And Mawn the Muck means bog of pigs.

So, where I'm standing right now, 600 years ago, it was nothing.

It was a bog.

Like, the river is only fucking

river's only two minutes away.

This was a bog where pigs lived.

And And then around 1500

it became known as a place called Farron Crowhee.

And Farron Crowhee,

I think it means like tall hill.

This was where people were executed.

This spot right here was a hill where people were executed outside the city walls.

But then after that,

what I'm trying to get at is

this exact spot here, Clare Street,

this has been a site of misery for a long time.

Okay?

Bit unfair on the pigs, alright?

It was a bog of pigs.

Not a very fun place to be.

But then it becomes a site of public execution.

So a lot of people outside the walls of the city were killed here, executed.

Then around the 700s, a school or sorry, the 1700s, a school is built here.

This school is a Lancastrian school.

Now

what's interesting about a Lancastrian school in the 1700s is it was the Lancastrian system of education.

Lancastrian education was

a way to educate the poor so that the poor could work in factories.

It came about around the Industrial Revolution.

I can't remember the cunt's name, but his second name was fucking Lancaster.

So, right here, they got rid of the execution spot and they built a school, and this was a Lancastrian school.

A school to educate

lots and lots of poor Limerick children to not not to not to inspire curiosity but to basically give exams that reward rote learning.

And a lot of the classroom system that we live with and suffer with today comes from the Lancastrian education system.

So right here I'm standing outside an old Lancastrian school.

But what happens after the Lancastrian school ends?

In 1888, the very building I'm staring at, they handed over to the Catholic Church, to the Good Shepherd, an order of fucking nuns.

And in 1888, this becomes a Magdalene Laundry.

I'm standing at the gates right now of the old Magdalene Laundry in Limerick City.

I cannot describe to you the pain, misery, hardship, torture and injustice that occurred inside these walls.

Not only can I not explain it, it's very difficult for me to even find any information about it because the dirty pricks in the fucking Catholic Church they like to hide it.

But this is a far it's a site of a former Magdalene Laundry founded in 1888 and it didn't close till 1996.

Which means that when I was a kid, when I was a child, when I was alive 1996 and I my ma would have driven me past this building, there were women inside that were held prisoner.

A Magdalen Laundry, a Magdalen institution, it was a home for quote-unquote fallen women.

Women who had had

children out of wedlock women who were simply deemed as young girls who were too attractive.

If a young girl was considered very attractive, they'd fuck her into a magdalene laundry so that she doesn't have premarital sex.

The children that were born were kept in here as a type of fucking orphanage.

When I try and find information about this particular place, I look up the blogs and the history stuff and then I go to the comments section.

And when you go to the fucking comments section, of anything about this laundry, all you see in the comments are women saying, I stayed here in the 1950s.

In the 1950s, I was in this fucking Magdalene Laundry, or I grew up here, and they all say there's women buried in the walls.

There's women hidden in the walls, there's women buried in the garden, there's babies buried in the garden.

There's a lot of darkness and secrets right here at this building I'm staring at.

I went to college in this building.

So, I'm just going to take you around the corner here.

This was, I don't know if I'm...

I don't know if am I doing this justice.

I'm going to do a Magdalene Laundry podcast at some point.

Maybe speak to an expert.

I don't know if I'm doing this justice.

This was a prison.

I'm going to call it a prison.

It wasn't called a prison at the time.

It was seen as a compassionate place for young girls who had kids out of wedlock.

No, this was a fucking prison.

It was a fascist-run prison where women were punished.

Where women were punished for having sex.

That's what the fuck it was.

And this prison had a form of forced labor.

And the forced labour that happened inside this prison in the 20th century, up until 1996, the forced labor that happened in here was laundry.

Laundry fucking washing, right?

So they would wash people's clothes.

They would wash people's clothes.

If you wanted your clothes washed in Limerick, it got sent to this laundry.

And women who were kept prisoner had to were forced to wash this without any payment as a form of penance for their sins.

And just as I turned the corner here on Clare Street, and this is the amazing thing about history,

there's still a little laundry here.

There's still the remnants.

There's a small little dry cleaner's just at the side of the building.

A business that exists.

Because before that,

it was women being kept prisoner and they had to wash the clothes.

But one thing...

I understand I'm rambling a bit lads, but

I'm walking around the fucking street talking into a microphone and I don't have any research done and normally a podcast takes me three or four days to make that's you have to understand and

I'm pulling this one out of my hall

this site of misery this site of misery where I am right now

I went to college here

I went to art college here where I had some of the happiest years of my life I spent five years in this place as an art student when I was twenty.

This building of misery was the first place that anybody ever told me I was worth something.

I spent five years in here studying art, studying how to become an artist, studying how to research, developing and gaining the skills that make me a writer today and make me someone who makes this podcast.

And when I was this is still the art college, right?

It's still the art college now.

I used to,

when I was here 20 years ago I knew the caretaker and the caretaker used to let me go upstairs to the parts of the to the parts that were that were the remnants of the old Magdalene laundry the bits that were undeveloped that weren't the art college and I used to walk around the attic and I found a bathtub full of women's hair it was like the 1970s you could still see crimes that had been committed in this fucking building right here in Limerick City that used to be the place of execution 600 years ago.

And also what was said to me is that wh when this place was being built there's little tunnels, there's little tunnels all over this building.

And I'm staring right now at the the church, the church space of this old Magdalene Laundry.

The church space is now the gallery.

It's now the art gallery.

I was told that there's little tunnels all over this building.

And the reason these tunnels exist is that if if you look at the way the the the church is built, if you were to look at it from the sky, if you were a crow looking down, you'd see a crucifix, right?

So

the women who were kept prisoner in this laundry, they were on one side of the church,

one arm of the crucifix, but then their little children, their little children that were born here, that were born here and taken from them, they were on the other arm of the crucifix.

But they had built little, they're dirty rotten bastards in the Catholic Church, had built little tunnels in this building so that the children could go to Mass on a Sunday and their mothers would never see them even though they were only sitting fucking 20 feet away from them and that's deeply evil and

one positive end to this story is

this has been a site of misery for hundreds of years a site of absolute misery and then in 1996 it became the art college where I spent some of the happiest years of my life and it's the art college now and this

this place that was a site of torture and imprisonment for women specifically if you were to walk in there today

80% of the students are women 80% of the students are women and

sometimes I feel like art is healing the space you've got women inside there now and they're just they're creating art feminist art

the most radical shit you can think of that would make a Catholic priest's head explode if he fucking saw it and that's what's happening inside in that building now and That gives me a little feeling of justice.

Justice is the wrong word.

I just feel like

For a building to have so much misery inside it

for it now to be a place with no rules where you create where you make art where you make radical art where you challenge authority with ideas that's now what's happening inside that building and it's mostly it's mostly women that are doing it women who 50 years ago might have been thrown in there if they had a kid before they were fucking married and and something about that there's something spiritual about that and I don't mean any Catholic fucking religious bullshit

I mean a spirit of the land you know what I'm saying

I'm gonna conclude this week's podcast so I'm st I'm now walking up by an area called Sexton Street okay

and Sexton Street

it's the end of old medieval Limerick.

Old medieval Limerick.

And I'm going to connect.

I connected the

Johnsgate ancient walls of Limerick with Tupac.

Now I'm going to connect this area, Sexton Street, with Biggie Smalls for the crack.

I'll connect it with the notorious BIG

quite tenuously, but I'll connect the two.

So where I am right now, there's a corner right here, right in front of me.

And it has a type of red brick.

I used to stand here because it looked like New York.

Right now there's a there's a place called the Tarkman Grill.

The Tarkman Grill again another wonderful takeaway.

It's where all if you meet any fucking anyone here who's from Afghanistan or Syria this is where they eat really really fucking good kebabs in particular a type of food called a kabouli which is

It's like a lamb rice thing.

Tarkman Grill.

Fucking great food.

But at the corner here at the Tarkman Grill,

Sexton Street,

this really ends old medieval Limerick and what you get here now is what's called Newtown Perry.

This would have been built in the late 1700s.

Now this again is very very important on a global scale.

As mad as it sounds this is very important.

So when I was in the Hunt Museum there about 20 minutes ago

the Hunt Museum used to be the customs house.

So when

So first off as well after the siege of Limerick, Limerick becomes quite a Protestant fucking city.

Quite a lot of wealthy Protestants start to live in Limerick City from the siege of Limerick onwards.

And Limerick becomes a very wealthy town in terms of...

in terms of trade.

Limerick becomes a very wealthy town because a lot of ships were coming in.

And the Hunt Museum back there, that used to be the customs house.

So all the ships that would come into Limerick, they used to pay a bit of money into the customs house.

So there was a fine bit of money floating around the place by the 1700s and there was a fellow by the name of I think his name was Edward Perry right and he owned a lot of a lot of land south of the medieval part and he built

a modern city in the 1700s called the Newtown Perry that's where I am right now the Newtown Perry Georgian the Georgian part of the city but what makes this part of the city very very fucking unique

it was designed by a fellow called Christopher Coles.

Where I am right now, this is the first ever city, this is the first upper part of a city to be designed under a grid system, right?

Straight fucking grids.

Christopher Coles, who designed these grids in front of me, ten years later he fucked off to America and designed Manhattan.

So when you go to fucking Manhattan and you've got your 45th Street and your 46th Street and everything is designed in fucking

blocks and designed into grids.

That cunt did that in Limerick 10 years previously.

So that's how I can connect where I am right now, where I used to stand here without knowing this information.

I used to say to myself, wow, this looks like New York.

This is how I can connect this street to Biggie Smalls.

Because Biggie Smalls was from Brooklyn and Christopher Coles,

he would have designed the streets of Brooklyn ten years after he designed these streets this fucking new town Perry that I'm looking at right now

I hope this podcast didn't it's not a podcast

this is the ramblings of a fucking autistic man walking around Limerick that's what the fuck this is this isn't a podcast I just didn't want to put out nothing

I didn't want to put out no podcast I didn't do an ocarina pause for fuck's sake

Didn't advertise any fucking gigs.

Ah, bollocks.

Look, I have an Australian and New Zealand tour.

I think it's all a salt.

Vicker Street there on November the 19th.

That's the important one, will you?

Come along to that.

I'll get my head kicked in for not promoting gigs.

Come to Vicker Street in November.

I'm out of breath now for getting too excited.

I got too excited about that road.

There was a Belfast gig there in 2025 in the waterfront is that what it's fucking called

where the fuck am i galway leisureland

fuck's sake all right look i'm in right now i'm in spain i'm in fucking spain not thinking about making a podcast that's what the fuck i'm doing right now

and i want for the first time in seven years

i just want a week not a week off i just want a week where I don't have to be thinking about writing a big giant podcast.

I actually want to go to Spain and just do fuck all.

I just want to do fuck all.

I'll probably end up,

I'll do some amount of work, but I just want to go to Spain and

enjoy cocktails.

Okay, I'll catch you next week.

I hope this isn't a piece of shit.

I hope this podcast wasn't a piece of shit.

Alright, God bless.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day, Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

FacePlay responsibly must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

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