In memory of Manchán Magan

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He's been a guest on this podcast more than anyone else.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Mancon was

very sick, very ill,

but I didn't expect him to die as soon as he did.

He died five days ago on the 2nd of October.

Mankom was a writer, broadcaster, documentary maker, environmentalist.

He was all of those things, but most importantly, he's completely and utterly irreplaceable.

irreplaceable and I don't say that lightly.

The work that Mankom was doing around the Irish language, how that then relates to our mythology, our stories and then connecting that with the environment, biodiversity in the context of climate collapse.

We've lost an incredibly unique brain, a really, really unique brain.

He could listen to a fucking fucking tree and he'd hear the story that the tree was telling him.

As mad as that sounds, that's what Mankong could do.

He was a beautiful, wonderful lunatic.

And we're in bad need of lunatics.

Compassionate, thoughtful, eccentric people

who...

Don't even think outside the box.

People who live in a spectrum of reality where boxes don't exist.

So there's not even any thinking outside the box.

Boxes don't exist.

Mankong was one of these people, incredibly unique.

And now he's gone.

And I'm very shocked by it because I didn't know it was going to be that quick.

When I spoke to him last year,

when he first told me he had cancer, he said,

they're saying maybe four or five years.

Then I heard from him maybe

around August, a couple of months back.

And he was speaking in a much more positive way.

Almost as if the cancer had retreated.

And then the last time I chatted to him was

maybe about two weeks ago, a week ago.

And that's when he told me that the doctor said he didn't have much long left.

No, I did not know it meant days.

I didn't know it meant fucking days.

But he said, yeah, the doctor said I don't have much much long left.

And that was the last chat I had with Mankon.

And I'm kicking myself.

I'm regretting it because

I didn't have an authentic chat with him.

I got.

I got frightened.

I got frightened by the fact that he told me that he was dying and then didn't know what to say.

And then I retreated into a humorless, solemn politeness.

And I regret that because that's...

That's not authentic.

Me and Man Con would have fucking crack.

What I regret is the reason Man Con was contacting me is the actor Gabriel Byrne was trying to get in contact with me through Man Con and then I went oh fuck because

I've written Gabriel Byrne into a into my fictional fucking universe over the course of nearly 20 years like ridiculous shit.

Like I had an idea where Gabriel Byrne was trying to shrink himself down to a subatomic level so that he can be intravenously injected into Daniel Day Lewis And then there was a music video with a two-foot Gabriel Byrne puppet.

And then I wrote a piece of short fiction in fucking 2019 called the skin method where Gabriel Byrne can visit earlier versions of himself by snorting bags of his own skin.

And I've done all that really fucking publicly and now he wants to contact me and I'm like oh shit.

A about what and B is he finally gonna is he finally gonna tell me what the fuck are you doing?

Why are you writing all this mad shit about me?

I wanted to say that to Mankon because he'd have laughed his arse off at the utterly ridiculous situation I found myself in but I didn't

I did I didn't say that to him at all instead I just gave some type of stock polite response of oh please send him on my details

and

I wasn't authentic with my friend.

I gave him this facade of politeness instead because I was scared and frightened about what he'd just told me.

And

I also didn't use the opportunity to tell Man Kon what he fucking meant to me.

Two weeks ago on the podcast when I said that Mankon was

seriously ill, then I said on this podcast, I spoke then about how important Mankon was and how much I respected him and what he meant to me.

But I was kind of half doing that in the hopes that he was listening instead of saying it to him directly.

And then there's that thing of not knowing, oh, that was the last time I ever spoke to my friend.

That was the last time I ever, ever spoke to him.

That was it.

And

I wasn't my authentic self in that moment.

I let fear and nervousness get the better of me.

And the other thing that bothers me about doing that is

I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of that.

And it feels very lonely and isolating.

If you've ever...

If you've ever, ever had someone, lost someone close to you, or if it's been tragic, like for me, I lost my dad when I was quite young.

Fairly suddenly, he got a sudden illness.

And

everybody knew this and everyone felt very sorry for me.

And when I'd be meeting my friends, people that I know, They're either avoiding me or

really scared and nervous when they chat to me because from their point of view they just don't they don't want to make me any more upset.

Uh-oh, his dad's gonna die soon.

Better not bring it up.

But instead what you get then is a nervous politeness, a sorry for your troubles type of strange politeness and people are only doing their best when they do that but it does feel very alienating and lonely, incredibly lonely.

And I have to assume that being seriously ill or terminally ill is the same.

It

inspires the same fear in other people where all you want is authentic friendship and contact from the people that you know.

This is what you're looking for.

But you can't get it because what you're going through is too scary for those people.

So they retreat into politeness.

And that's what I did.

That's what I did the last time I spoke to Mankon two weeks ago I gave him a veneer of solemn politeness and not authenticity and crack and I really regret that and what I'm going to take from the situation is mindfulness around that that

then because look life is suffering death and tragedy are unavoidable and I know that a person close to me

is gonna find themselves in an incredibly difficult situation and I have to accept responsibility for my feelings of fear and make sure that I'm authentic with that person and that I don't deploy a veneer of politeness and that I make real authentic human connection with the full spectrum of human emotions, tears and laughter included.

So I'm navigating grief this week and confronting

that I took for granted the last words that I had with a friend

and

it's frustrating too to see

geez it that the whole country's in mourning over mancon

the outpouring of love and respect and admiration from all corners of Irish society this is huge fucking news and it's frustrating because it's like

It would have been nice to have a bit of that when he was alive.

Mancon had respect.

People loved Man Con.

But nothing on the scale of what we've seen since he died.

And I would have loved for him to have seen that, for him to know, fuck me, you're a legend.

And now we all have the...

I think it's because he was so accessible.

He was prolific.

Man Con was always working.

He always either had a book out or he was making a documentary.

And because of that, because he was so accessible, I think we all took him for granted a bit.

And now that he's gone, it's that cliche of you don't know what you got till it's gone.

Now Man Con is gone and everyone is like, oh my god,

you can't replace him.

Who the fuck is gonna step into those shoes?

There's no one doing anything like Mankon was doing.

But I know by...

Man Com was like a honey bee.

He was a pollinator.

He had an infectious enthusiasm.

If you spoke to Mancon about mythology, about the meaning of Irish words, if you spoke to him about a tree, a field, you would leave the conversation

vibrating with enthusiasm and curiosity.

He didn't know the meaning of the word gatekeeping.

He had such wide range of knowledge and he was generous with all of it.

Incredibly generous and full of empathy.

When Mankong was chatting to you, it was never about how much he knew.

It was about how he could communicate the thing that he was passionate about in a way that the other person could grasp and understand so that he could share his love

of storytelling or mythology with somebody else.

pure and utter generosity and that's why i think he's that's why i'm using the honey bee analogy.

When it comes to grief, you see when someone's gone they're gone.

But they they can still ripple on through meaning.

We still have Mancon's words and his ideas.

And when someone dies, especially when it's his like Mankon was young, he was in his 50s.

That's young to be dying, you know.

I mean, Jesus, Mancom was a...

He was a great old man in the the making.

That's the thing.

He had all the makings of a wonderful old man.

We all thought he was going to be a queer, strange old man telling stories.

A proper Shanoke, you know.

But that didn't happen.

He just got incredibly unlucky.

Very, very unlucky.

But I hope people out there have been fertilized by his ideas and his way of looking at the Irish language and looking at mythology and looking at the landscape.

And that

people out there will carry it on.

Carry it on in an ecosystem, especially if you can speak the Irish language.

Like that's the thing, I was shit at school, so I don't have much fucking Irish language.

But if you properly understand the Irish language, if you're fluent, and you can use that then to find the true meaning of places, laws, the land, how it relates to biodiversity, if you can do that, continue on mankind's work, let it ripple and pollinate and fertilize.

Cause it's not about old mythology, it's not just about old stories.

If you keep the stories alive then you keep respect for the environment alive and we need that to survive as a species.

And what mankind showed me

he showed me that there's

every fucking tree and lake and well and mountain and valley has a name and it has a story.

And this story tells us how we as human beings must live sustainably with the ecosystem and this isn't just an Irish thing this is in indigenous cultures all around the world and Mankom was great for that like his thing was Ireland but he used to fuck off to

indigenous tribes in Canada New Zealand, in Australia, in America.

I mean the work that he used to do in trying to trace the the Irish language thousands and thousands of years to fucking India.

And the great thing about Mancon was his madness.

He wasn't an academic.

And I'm not shitting on academics.

Academics are are essential.

Like I wouldn't be able to read old mythology if it wasn't for the academics that are translating it.

But because Mancon wasn't an academic,

he wasn't tethered by anything.

So his imagination around the Irish language or the roots of of it or stories from mythology, his imagination could run fucking wild.

And I know that used to piss off some academics because sometimes maybe Man Con's wildness wasn't very accurate.

But his wildness and eccentricity, that's the honeybee.

That's the excited honeybee.

That's what inspired people and fertilized people with ideas.

So look for this week's podcast.

I couldn't do a podcast this week.

I knew whatever podcast I'd I'd do this week, it had to be about Mankon.

But I certainly couldn't go off doing any hot takes or anything like that.

So what I'd like to do in memory of Mankon this week is

I want to play the first ever interview I did with Mankon.

I've had Mankon on loads, like six times.

Like when I thought Man Con had

maybe a year left, what I wanted to do was to sit down with with him with a microphone and a camera for like five hours

and just me and him chat and record everything, everything about his life,

his viewpoints, to have this

record.

We didn't get to do it.

But the first ever chat that I had with him,

which was six years ago, that's the thing it was six years ago, it's the closest that I've come to that because he speaks about

his life.

I didn't.

I knew who Man Con was before my first chat with him.

But

this chat, this was the one where we became fucking friends.

This was the one where,

like, I'm fucking autistic, so I don't click with a lot of people.

I can count on one hand.

The people who I can truly like I can I could speak to this person for hours exact same frequency adore speaking to him that's a very small amount of people that I can do that with because I'm autistic Mancon was one of those people

in in his

the past year or so he started referring to himself as Nora spicy

so I don't think Mancon was diagnosed with neurodivergence but

he's Nora spicy as he referred to himself and he was a loner deeply passionate about ideas.

I'd imagine Mancon was NeuroDivergent in some way.

And often I find, and other NeuroDivergent people will find this, when I click with a person,

when I can chat with a person and there's no fucking small talk and all we're doing is speaking about ideas and we're on the same frequency, often I find out later that that person is actually NeuroDivergent.

That's called it's called double empathy.

It's a theory that

autistic and neurodivergent people, autistic people mainly, don't necessarily have a deficit in empathy or social understanding or communication.

But it's more of a reciprocal thing that

when autistic people and non-autistic people,

that communication can be difficult.

But when autistic or neurodivergent people speak to other autistic or neurodivergent people, conversation moves quite smoothly and that's a theory called double empathy and it's a view of neurodivergence and that's my lived experience.

Communicating with strangers for me is quite a lot of effort and it's tough going, it's difficult, very nervous when I'm doing it.

But sometimes I'll meet a person and that doesn't exist.

We're on the same frequency.

We can chat for hours.

It's amazing.

It's just exchange of ideas non-stop back and forth like a game of tennis.

Most of the people, and like I said, I can count that on maybe two hands, most of those people who I've had those conversations with have turned out to be neurodivergent.

They've found out same as me they got diagnosed as adults.

And so my lived experience there is that this double empathy thing is real.

I had that with Mankon.

We could just fucking chat for hours.

So that so I want to play the first chat that me and Man Con had for this week's episode.

I've improved the audio on it and

look I've got nearly I've got almost 500 podcasts over the course of eight years.

I don't like replaying old content but in this situation I'm making an exception because I want this episode to be about Mancon and Mancon's memory.

Before we do that I'm gonna have an ocarina pause because I don't want to interrupt the chat and also I'm contractually obligated.

to promote gigs.

Every podcast is unavoidable.

I don't have an ocarina, what I i do have is the the lid of a yogurt here lovely tin lid of a yogurt i learned something this week i was in my office eating this yogurt the other day and i was like starving and didn't have a fucking spoon so i'm like how am i going to eat this yogurt without a spoon can't use your fingers with yogurt it's not happening So the only implement I had to eat this yogurt was a hammer.

I had a claw hammer.

And I said, fuck it.

Let's try it.

A hammer is metal, like a spoon.

So I put the hammer into the yogurt.

Try and suck the yogurt off the end of the hammer.

Never again.

Awful.

Awful.

Very unpleasant and depressing.

And then I figured out, actually,

you can shape the lid of the yogurt so that it becomes a bit of a spoon.

So that's what I'll be doing from now on.

But here's the yogurt lid pause.

You're going to hear some fucking adverts for some shit, alright?

Crinkly.

Beautifully crinkly.

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Listen for free.

You listen for free.

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Very quickly, my gigs.

Last gig of 2025.

This month, Halloween night, 31st of October.

The Polka Festival in Mead.

Some Halloween fun.

Come along to that.

Then 2026.

The 23rd of January.

I'm in Waterford in the Theatre Royal.

On the 4th of February, I'm back in Vicar Street, up in Dublin, for a lovely Wednesday night gig there.

On the 12th of February, I'm up in Belfast in the Waterfront Theatre.

On the 15th of February, Galway, beautiful Galway, there in Leisureland.

And then fucking 28th of February, Killarney.

Let's do a bit of the iNeck.

I'm currently trying to sort out my website so that it has...

All the dates of my gigs on it.

I've been trying to build a fucking website for, I'd say nearly 25 years.

I've never had a successful website.

Ever.

Something has always gone wrong.

I'm almost there now after 25 fucking years.

Any more gigs?

Loads.

But I can't be arsed.

That's enough.

There's a tour of England, Scotland, and Wales there.

In October 26.

Ages away.

At feign.co.feign.co.uk forward slash the blind by podcast.

Alright.

Now,

I want to get into this this chat with

the very recently departed Man Con, Megan.

This conversation is from 2020.

It's the first time I spoke to Man Khan.

The reason I've chosen this particular conversation is

it's biographical.

All the other chats I had with Man Con, they're about ideas.

They're about

his

work.

This one is about his life.

One thing I want to point out, this chat is from 2020.

Before I found out that I was autistic and

I'm a little bit interrupty.

Autistic people struggle with interrupting other people.

I struggle with interrupting other people but since I learned that I am Autistic, I'm a lot more mindful in conversations.

to not interrupt the other person.

Before receiving a diagnosis, this wasn't hugely in my awareness.

So if you listen to this and you find yourself getting a bit pissed off with me interrupting, please don't mail me on Instagram about it.

This is a conversation from nearly six years ago and I'm working on the interrupting thing.

I'm aware of it and I try my best not to.

I'm better now than I was then.

But anyway, this chat, not only is it two people becoming friends, it's a chat about Mankon's life.

And when I listened to it during the week, week, it made me realize what we've lost.

The person that we've lost.

The wonderful person that's gone.

And

yes, we should feel sad, but I want this to inspire you to be pollinated by the honeybee and continue on Man Khan's ideas and work for biodiversity.

and meadows and caves and mountains and trees and rivers because

one thing I'm sure of, that's what he would have wanted.

I want to kind of start on

an autobiographical level, right?

Yeah, but you know, you just said that, you know, the way you said, I want to kind of start with, but the way you said it made it sound exactly like a Wanachoin, which is the evocative of my name, which was beautiful.

It was like you delved into the most beautiful artist.

So, you know, the way there's a, you know, when you're calling someone's name, there's like a Hamos or Afodrik.

But Mancon is my name or Monachon.

But then in Up and Donegal, it becomes a Wanachine or a Wanking, which is,

you didn't quite go that far, but there was a

lovely accidental Irish beginning to it.

One of your first books, right, were you the travel books.

I want to speak about your travel books first, right?

Like,

what's the journey?

What do you hope?

Do you say to yourself, right, I'm fucking off to America for six months and I'm just going to write about what I see do you do you have like what are you looking for there do you fear that you'll come away with nothing no so what happened was like I was one of these kids who would have like heard voices in my head when I was young like I was this idyllic what literally like like as in mental illness no not a mental illness but nice voices I mean you know someone could have called it a mental illness but it was never I mean I did go to psychiatrist but I think that was because I was just anxious no um I was like I had this herb garden so I didn't really fit in in the real world, but I just had these gorgeous, like, you know, reassuring voices and words and dreams that I could escape into.

And that works out really well, basically like one of those spiritual kids.

And that works really well until you become about 18 or 19.

And then, you know, suddenly the school tells you you're doing your leave insert and you're going to have to, you know, get a job.

You're going to have to get a mortgage and

do that.

And I realized that I couldn't do that.

There was no way in my life that um i could uh

you know knuckle down like that because so it was either these voices giving that that freedom that i had or otherwise it was depression and so at the age of about 17 or 18 would you did the voices mean that is that like a calling you felt the sense of a calling no no it didn't it was just

i was really happy i was deliriously happy and felt absolutely free

yeah so i just felt there was no stopping me i was like almost angelic do you know and then this is and you can believe like that in your own school.

You can get away with it.

Luckily, I didn't get bullied.

I was just ignored.

But then when you, when they tell you you have to go in the real world and, you know, do all these things, I thought I couldn't do that.

And then depression comes.

And you get that with a lot of these sort of you know, dream-minded kids.

So the constrictions of society basically did not work with your personality.

And the constrictions of society would bring on a sadness.

I didn't fit in, exactly.

And so I fled.

I knew that I'd end up in in St.

Pat's if I stayed in Dublin.

And that would have been fine had I done that.

But I realized that there was another way.

And so I was

because my family were Republican revolutionaries back long ago.

We used to learn.

Yeah, you've got a fucking serious lineage, man.

Your grand uncle is the O'Reilly.

My great-grand.

Yeah, that was my great-grandfather.

My great-granduncle is the O'Reilly.

And then...

Sheila Humphries is your grandmother.

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

Wow.

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

So we've been doing that since about 1890.

So luckily I was brought up in the, I mean, I left school in the 80s.

There was a recession.

But because I had German and French, I was able to just go off to Germany and work in a, in a hypermarket.

So I had money, money at the age of 18 or 19.

And I just went off.

And then I could see with this money that there was trucks leaving, crossing Africa, going across Africa over land, and it was going to cost three grand, no, 1,000 euros, 1,000 pounds for the year, for six, sorry, for seven months.

And I thought, this is it.

I will finally be free.

I'm going to understand that the bigger world is out there.

I'll escape the claustrophobia and the confines of this suburban Dublin world.

So that was the big idea.

And I just went off to Africa.

You know, I was so desperate.

It was this.

What was your first trip, like decent trip?

abroad?

Like you went to Germany, but what was your first decent trip abroad where it's an artistic experience as such?

You're going to not only travel, but experience and also journal

what's happening.

Yeah, so I was 19 years of age.

It was about two months after the German trip.

And I get on this truck,

this ex-army overland truck that's leaving London and driving the whole way to Kenya.

So it's going to go through France, France, and Spain.

It's going to go down through Morocco, through Algeria, to the center of the of the Sahara Desert.

How do you even find that?

How do you even

find that, man?

Yeah, there were these little ads at the back of the

British newspapers, The Guardian, of the Observer, and they said, like, three grand for seven months.

But I found a dirt cheap company that was doing it for one grand for the seven months.

And they just put 12 tents on board.

They put 20 people, they just bought the truck from the British Army for about seven grand,

put, I think, four-wheel-drive tires on it, put sand mats, and just sent it off across Africa.

And who else was on this with you who who who are the type of people that want to do that oh that's a great question they were not who i thought who i thought would be on it would be other free-thinking open-minded people who wanted to explore the world other people who was who were as dreamy and idealistic and ridiculous as me but uh it turned out and they probably were on the trip that costs three grand but because i was on this one grand trip it wasn't them it was basically the the dropouts the dregs all of us were just people who didn't function in society and people who wanted to escape.

So there was one.

Yeah, there was one bloke.

He had been in the British Army three times in Northern Ireland.

And there was a rule that if you ever went back the fourth time,

you'd die.

There was just superstition.

And he had done things like in the first few days, he'd be boasting to me, yeah, you know, we used to do this thing.

He had a great idea when Bobby Sands was on hunger strike, he would drive his, he'd get a, he'd hire a chipper van and drive it up to the ventilation shaft in Bobby Sands' cell so that, so that Bobby would be here it would be smelling like fresh fish and chips oh my god and that was how did that feel to you man like your grandmother went on hunger strike exactly and I spent my 90 the 1980s helping my granny she was still in contact with H Block and May's prisoners during the 80s so you know the the comms these Rizla papers that were sent in and out of she when her eyesight got you know bad oh they used to write tiny little notes on Rizla papers and like hide them under fingernails or wherever you could exit

exactly exactly swallow them or whatever yeah But my granny would get these letters from the from the prisoners and then she'd have to write back.

But her eyesight wasn't so great anymore.

So she'd like dictate the little letter to me and I would then write it in minuscule handwriting on the Rizna paper.

One question there, Mancon.

Well, so if your granny is like, so she's actively involved with communicating with the provisional IRA and provisional IRA prisoners.

Did that mean that you were being watched or for you to like go to London and fuck off to Africa?

Like surely mi5 would be keeping an eye on you uh i mean i was so innocent and young and 19.

so my granny was living with us in the in the granny flat of our house in done in dublin she's been watched surely she's been watched if you're yeah that house was being watched and like not only watched but i remember during the last the great maze escape you know the special branch came to her door because she'd had um in the past she'd had prisoners that were on the run, H-block prisoners that were on the run staying in the house.

And it was sad.

Like my dad was this fine gale quiet fine gale farmer from the well you know he was a doctor but from a farming background from longford absolutely redmondite uh committed pacifist but of course he marries into this republican family and this lovely house that he's bought you know in dublin he and he he pays for the granny flat and now my granny has these um you know these prisoners hiding out in it um and the one time my dad was incredibly peaceful and you know just a quiet did your dad know that these these men were prisoners yeah oh yeah the only time I heard my dad roar was he went downstairs to check on my granny once.

He'd say the rosary with her every evening in Irish.

Even he even learned Irish just, you know, to because the Irish was so important to the family.

And he goes down and he recognises who's hiding out in her coal hole.

And he just screams, you know, not in my house, he says.

So, yeah.

He recognized the person from the news.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It wasn't good.

Like, um, holy fuck.

Yeah.

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

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

Exactly.

So bringing over the wrong cake.

Yeah, so that, I mean, I'm getting distracted in one way, but that meant that my relationship with the Irish language was complicated.

But I might go back to that in a second.

But one reason that I so I fled because I said I was this idealistic person.

I go off to Africa.

But there's a few reasons why I'm fleeing.

Also, because I realized this Irish language that I'd been given by my granny as this beautiful treasure and cultural sort of

heirloom actually had an agenda, you know, that it was in some way a political weapon of war.

So, this would have been why I would have, I would have, you know, gone off traveling.

And I mean, Africa, that Africa trip turned out terrible.

Everyone, like I mentioned, the bloke who was the British Army, but everyone was worse.

There were people who had been embezzling, people else who were running away from the tax fights.

There were just the drugs.

And our first day, on our first day in Africa, we arrived in Morocco, in the little town of Chef Chouan, having driven through France and Spain.

And some of the Bedouins come up to offer us, we sorry, we set up our tents, you know, the little old triangular army tents, set a light of fire.

Were there any hash smugglers with you?

That sounds like a hash smuggling type of thing.

There was no.

To be fair, no, I was the only one who got involved with grass smuggling later, but there weren't none.

No, they were all better.

They were all fine in that terms.

But there was, on the first day, anyway, this Bedouin came up to me and he said, Came up to us all, and he offers us firewood.

And the others are just super disgusted and suspicious.

And they just call him a, they started calling him a raghead and said, Get him away, all he'll do, he's dirty, he'll steal.

And I realized I was stuck on this truck for seven months with these absolute racists

who didn't know who you know, only had English.

And like 70% of those countries were, were, um, were French-speaking countries.

So it was a pretty, it was a pretty dark trip.

Um, it turned out to be the best thing for me in my life.

I had this utterly life-changing experience when we got to zaire to the congo and anybody that you know

zaire is the heart of darkness it is where conrad where kurtz got stuck if you're ever gonna have roger casement man exactly exactly if you're ever gonna have a life-changing experience it'll be in the congo we arrived there and um we had this woman who was driving us belinda an amazingly strong woman i call her something else in the book um but uh she

all she wanted to do was keep us alive on every she had done about 12 trips up until there, maybe, or seven, between seven and twelve trips.

Yeah, what's the danger like here, man con?

Like, what's the level of

going into the Congo on the back of a truck?

To me, I'd be like, that sounds a bit scary, man.

So, on all of her previous trips, someone had died.

That's the level.

One person.

What type of death?

Like, I mean, through disease, through being killed, through being kidnapped?

Mainly stupidity.

You know, if the we are, as I said, the dregs of society.

We're not the ones who know about Africa.

We're not the ones who've read, who are careful.

We're just people who are totally uncommitted, unkempt.

So sometimes it was for some of the last one they were on.

He an old man just got a harsh dock in the middle of the Sahara and they had to bury him there.

The time before that, she had begged them not to go on, not to take out the inner tubes from the truck and start

riding the rapids on a river.

And one person smashed.

What type of request?

Don't take the tubes off the truck and go into the river.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, they did, and they smashed.

He smashed his head open.

He died.

So, Jesus.

So, or otherwise, it was just malaria or Bill Hartzy or some disease.

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

I mean, did you get your injections?

Uh, yes, I did actually.

I never had injections after that in all of my other trips, but I did for that because I think they insisted on it.

Um, and so when we arrive anyway in Zaire, in the in the Congo, she, she makes one, she has one other request for us that none of us will ever buy or take drugs.

Because, you know, every single military dictatorship there, all they're trying to do is get their hands on white people for some crime.

And it's just so easy for them to find drugs on you.

Why is that?

What's the incentive for them to capture a white person with drugs?

It's just, you know,

they have no money.

They want to get money.

And the best way of getting bribes out of people is to get someone with a crime.

And they actually have a crime.

And then they have to pay big amounts of bribes.

So we have a 19-year-old Irish lad here.

We're going to sentence him to death, and now all of a sudden, the UN is involved, or something.

Exactly, exactly.

Wow, I never thought of it that way, man.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Yeah, so exactly.

So, we arrive in Bumba in Zaire, and

you know, now known as the Congo.

And the first thing she's going to do is the only time she's going to leave us.

Every trip, what she does is she leaves us to take a boat in a village called Bumba to take one of the great river journeys of the world.

It goes from Kisingani or from Kinshasa to Kisingani and it's this huge floating market and just this one tug, an old German river rhine tug and these steel platforms and we slowly go down the way and there's no roads in this area.

So all of the local tribes people come out of the Amazon or sorry, of the equatorial jungle and they trade their crocodile skins and monkeys or whatever potions they have with you.

And she thought like this is a journey, it's an experience you cannot miss.

So she leaves us there that day.

And she leaves us just enough money and just enough, you know, malaria tablets and all to do us the five days that's going to we're going to be on the river before we reach in um in kissingani which was the old stanleyville from leopoldville to stanleyville and uh rubber plantation exactly exactly the darkest darkest shet of slavery um yeah and human trafficking and uh so that first day we all we all go we rent out two rooms in just this old shack and we all sleep on the floor of the two rooms like at this this stage, we've been three months in a tent.

So, so you know, sleeping on the floor of a room was luxury.

Um, and I went out, and just to my utter just ignorance and stupidity, someone offered me it was actually a plastic bag, like a spa or a super value bag of cannabis.

It was a pure shopping bag of cannabis.

I think it wash or weed, it was weed, it was weed, okay, very heavy crystal weed, like uh, but loads of bush with loads of abot, yeah, but loads of sticks and everything else to it.

But anyway, I brought this home back to the back to the

shack we were in.

And by this stage, a huge divide had entered the group.

Those who never wanted to talk to any African or engage were absolutely petrified, and the others wanted to do a bit.

And we, anyway, the ones who were willing to engage a bit, we smoked some of that.

But it turned out to be somehow laced with something.

It just made us all hallucinate a lot.

And we woke up the next day, we conked out, woke up the next day, and everything we owned was stolen from us.

Everything.

Oh, wow.

Now, any old Africa hand, anyone who understands Africa realizes immediately exactly what happened.

I didn't know this for weeks.

You're in a military dictatorship.

A military dictatorship, the military control everything.

They see every foreigner.

They see every person who comes in, particularly a foreigner.

They're the ones who give you the drugs.

Of course, they are.

The ones that are going to knock you out and then they're going to take all your money.

But I didn't know that.

So I innocently went down to the police station next day.

Oh, dear God.

There was no police station.

It turned out it was just a military encampment and they were just stoned to their eyeballs on things.

And this man, Hercules, I explained to him in French what's happened.

And he says, oh, you know, this is terrible.

It's a catastrophe.

Don't worry.

You will now see Zairean justice.

And he went down to the local sort of township and the ghetto.

And he picked, he just randomly picked three boys, dragged them back.

He got his Aryan soldiers to drag them back.

And he started beating them in front of me, beating them over the head with the butt of his rifle.

And again, I was this innocent kid.

I had no knowledge how to deal with this.

And eventually I begged him.

I said, I don't want that.

I just want to find their passports.

But when they got sort of so exhausted from beating, they sent us away again.

And we went back the next day and said, you know, have you found the things?

And after the next day, they said, no.

The next day, they said they need money.

We had no cars.

We had no money to, they said they needed, you know, money even just to get diesel to put into the Jeep to look for the robbers.

We had no money, but we begged the other 10 people, you know,

the other half of the group who aged us to give us their money.

And anyway, we got into locked into this thing that we were, it was between about a week without, eventually our money ran out after about three days.

We give it all to them.

There was no signs of passport.

And this is, you cannot move anywhere without your passport.

You cannot go.

You know, by this time, it's been Nobel Area tablets.

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

There was no, nothing.

The only embassy was down in South Africa at the time.

But we thought, okay, we'll find another way out.

And are we talking the 80s here or the 90s?

We're talking 89 slash 90.

So the first, the Gulf War had just begun.

Okay.

Desert storm was going on.

And so what happened was that all of the countries, about a week before this happened, all of the Arabic countries around us, Algeria and others, Tunisia, had all closed their borders.

So no one was getting through.

So actually, normally there would be another NGO or charity group or an either Overland truck behind you, but there was none of those.

And then we also realized that there was no...

that

there was no diesel in the country.

Like this is the last days of Mabutu, the dictator Mabutu's regime.

The entire country was bankrupt.

So there was no money, there was no diesel, there was no way out.

We were the only truck to have come through, you know, a

foreigner truck to have come through in three months.

What emotions are going through your body at that point?

Well, the weirdest thing was we were, we only went there because Belinda had told us the river barge was coming the next morning and we were going to get on the river barge for the five days.

So next morning, when we realized we're robbed, the other 10 people go down to the river to get on the river barge.

But they realized the river barge wasn't there and the river barge wouldn't come and hadn't, it hadn't been there for two months because there was no diesel and it couldn't be there for another three months because the dry season had come early.

So Belinda had lied to us.

She had gone down to the port to check who was there and actually had abandoned us on purpose and fled with the truck.

So it was really, really dark.

So we couldn't even ask her for help.

There was no way of getting any help.

And did you, one little thing that's popping up for me too, is when you spoke earlier there about there a divide is a margin between you and the group.

And one thing that I find interesting is

when I hear about, we'll say these English people not wanting to speak with the locals being racist, did you find, um, did anything colonial come up in you?

Did you reflect on the fact that you don't come from a colonial culture and these people do come from a colonial culture?

And this is now being reflected in your actions, or were they just a shower of cunts?

No, no, I mean, I totally heard that.

Like the pride they had about getting to Uganda and Kenya and Tanzania, the places that have been colonized by the English, it was all about this idea that we are superior.

We are a colonial race.

You know, and I mean, I was called Paddy and sort of, you know, there was all those sort of jokes about me drinking and things were there.

It was just classic.

That mindset that is in, you know, a lot a large suede of England was very strong.

Like the moment you said the Congo to me, like the first thing that comes up to my head, it's Roger Casement.

And then I get this lovely feeling of Roger Casement was the one to highlight the crimes that happened here.

So, my association with a place like that, I get this lovely, wholesome feeling in my heart of

the Irish impact on the Congo is one of compassion and calling out injustice.

Absolutely, absolutely.

But we saw that at every single border we passed, we saw that because

the visas that the English people were having to pay were about two or three times as high as mine.

In fact, a lot of my visas were free and

they never twitched.

Because the African people are going hit this fella's Irish.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Wherever I went, I was just welcomed.

It was that lovely feeling you get.

Yeah.

That has led.

Another thing I'd love to ask you about, Mancon, is so one thing that I'm fascinated with, and I've a feeling you'd know a good bit about it.

Are you familiar with Bob Quinn's Atlantean theory and the relationship between Ireland and Africa historically.

I am indeed.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's very rich.

Fascinated with that, right?

Did your trip to Africa, did you learn, what do you think about that?

Can you explain for the listeners what the Atlantean theory of Irish origin is and reflect on it regarding your journeys to Africa?

Yeah, one good way of looking at it is even a lot of people know you know that the Irish word for a black person is far guram.

And, you know, there's a few different theories.

Blue man.

Exactly.

The blue man.

There's a few different theories.

Some people would say because, you know, dove, black is always connected with the devil and is always dark things.

And even a black horse would never have been called coppled dove, but it was called coppled down mostly.

But there's another theory for that.

And that is the Irish people would have known black people.

Like there was a, you know,

a Berber.

No, what is it?

Berber monkey.

Seven fort.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

They found that there's a skull of a monkey fucking 2,000 years old.

Exactly.

That's it.

Yeah.

Which, you know, most most likely either came from North Africa, could have been the one that came from Gibraltar, but it was from Africa.

And then even in a bog in Ophaly, there was

a Bible with papyrus papers, clad in papyrus papers.

So either that book was either brought from Egypt or at least the papyrus definitely came from Egypt.

So we know there was contact.

I mean, we just know that the routes were, you know, what Bob Quinn saw so easily was that there are these amazing trade routes.

It is very easy to go from the west of coast of Ireland, from the Iron Islands down along France and Spain, and then right around into the Mediterranean where you get to Egypt.

And even like in the Pharaoh's time, there was a canal that linked before the Suez Canal, you know, that links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.

There was the Pharaohs had systems of canals.

They didn't ever last very long because the sand would pile in again.

But there were ways of getting in ancient times to the Red Sea and to, you know, to get to the Far East.

So we know the Irish people were amazing sailors.

We know they were going up to the Pharaohs, going up to Greenland, maybe even going across to

North America.

And how long ago are we talking here?

Are we going back a thousand years, two thousand years?

Yeah.

So, I mean, let's say with that, with that Bible, we're going just 1,500 years.

As you said, with Nav and Fort, you're going down 2,000 years.

And after that, there's no sort of historical record, but we just know, well, the next link you're going is, so, you know, the likes of the passage graves, New Grange, you're going, you know, 4,500 BC.

What Bob Quinn showed so clearly, if you go to Tunisia and you go to Morocco, you're seeing those same standing stones, you know, these monoliths, you're seeing stone circles, you're seeing the remains of passage grave type buildings, and they are identical to the ones that are found in Ireland, in Cornwall, and in Britain.

Like, yes, it could just about be coincidence, but it's a weird coincidence.

It seems there was this common culture.

So the Bedouins too.

And Quinn's theory, Quinn goes straight.

Quinn just says that Irish people are essentially African people.

That we he says that we don't come from Europe, that we come from Africa via the sea.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, and like, so, you know, I just done a TV series on ancient DNA.

And, you know, what it's showing now is that the original settlers of Ireland were dark brown skinned, brown-haired, and blue-eyed.

Now, that mix doesn't exist in the world anymore, but it was an exist, it was a, it was a people that were found in sort of Egypt and in the far in the middle east so they we know for certain from dna evidence that the first people who came here were people basically from egypt and from and from the middle east you know who'd come out of

the atlantic route exactly exactly so bob quinn is finally because the thing with me and bob quinn whenever i would bring bob quinn up with historians he was kind of rubbished as a kind of a fanciful thinker yeah yeah it was and it was finally about four years ago michael viney did a great article where he he just said look this is the proof it has been shown by the latest sort of technology in in dna sequencing that he was right all along um wow yeah and what's interesting so those first people who as i said were blue-eyed what other connections is there mankan is it is it i've heard uh like

shano singing and similarities but shano singing and and almost uh islamic call to prayer from north africa and stuff yeah and again you know it's hard to definitely prove these things but just listen to the two listen to the shano sing and then as you said the call to prayer arabic sing it's these long cadences this this sort of rolling on a on a vowel and but there's words like the irish for confidence or trust is muneen and if you the arabic word is munna munna the the irish for knife is skiyan and if you go to any arabic country you'll they'll tell you it's either sikian or sikina or sikina but maybe most strong or gara gara is uh to cut you know in irish and gara is to cut in arabic khala in irish for port khala is the arabic for for port um But maybe the most strongest of all is the shamrock, the our ultimate symbol of Irishness, you know, shown on St.

Patrick's Day.

It's the shamrogue or the shamer.

But it happens to be the exact same word, in the Arabic word of shamrack.

And it's shamrak in pre-Islamic

Arabic culture.

In other words, in pagan Arabic culture, a shamrak was a particular tree-leafed plant, okay, a tree-leafed plant.

And each one of the petals of that leaf represented one of the pagan gods.

Like, are you going to say that's coincidence?

That it happens that pre-Arabic, pre-Islamic Arabic culture has this called shamrak, a leaf that represents the tree.

We know three was the key moment, key idea in pagan Irish or pagan, early Irish and Celtic belief.

And they happen to use the same word for it.

Like, that's uncanny.

That's phenomenal.

Yeah.

And it's nothing weird.

We know that we were, everybody, you know, that we were trading people, that people migrated constantly.

I think in so, you know, this book I've written, The 32 Words for Fields, I look at that, but the thing that blew me away most was the connections between Ireland and India.

Like, they are just so strong.

And again, why would you have these connections?

That baffles me.

Like, that's fucking baffling.

Yeah.

That's quite far apart.

And again, we just need to get out of our mindset.

We are so in the mindset of nationalism.

In fact, we're coming to the last, to the death grasps of nationalism now.

Previously, people were a migratory people who just moved and traveled depending on the circumstances.

And it looks like we're going back towards that.

So it makes absolutely sense that all cultures would have been interlinked.

But why particularly was India and Ireland?

Why are the connections so strong?

And it's really because, you know, we do, we know that we're sort of an Indo-European culture.

So our culture sort of came from the basically the middle of Europe or more towards the east of Europe and Europe in the Middle East, okay, that area.

Now, that culture, that sort of Celtic culture or Indo-European culture, which our language is based on, was pushed to the margins.

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

Wow.

But then that's...

So you think of it as something that's continually and consistently being pushed west.

Exactly.

Being pushed west and being pushed east.

So that same culture, all those same elements of it are still...

Yeah, they're still alive, which is why you will get like the Brehen War laws are like identical to a lot of the old Indian laws.

Why the word Ara,

the noble person, you know, or Ara, a minister in the government, is the same word as Arya, a noble

in Sanskrit.

Or why Brehav and Brahman are the same word, the same root.

They come from Brif, from mantras.

Or even idas, you know, idakhas or idhas, the learning.

That's the same word as the Vedas, the Indian Vedas, which is, you know, the Indian lore, the central lore.

And that Veda, again, even the word Dru, Druid, Dru comes from Dru, an oak, and then Vid, which is the Veda, the learning, the learning that is connected to the oak, which is the cell.

Like we are the same people.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

Now, one thing, when I hear the term Vedas, that's like one of the earliest religions that we know of.

And it's also one of these religions that quantum physicists and

people who are at the cutting edge of physics, who are trying to understand the nature of what reality is, and like things like reality being a simulation, they'll often say it has a lot of similarities to real early, early Vedic scriptures and their view of the universe.

Do you have you studied or looked at any, I don't know, ancient Irish religious, but like pre-Christian Irish religious views?

Are they similar to Vedic stuff?

Is there anything going on there?

So, as you said, like there, there are

Brahmins, very early type of Brahmins, chanting in parts of Karela and Tamil Nadu in the south of India,

in the forest there.

And the mantras they have, the chants they have, aren't words.

We don't understand them anymore.

They are pre-that.

They're almost what linguists say is they could be the sounds that were based on the first guttural sounds that humans made before they

developed linguistics.

Developed language.

Yeah.

Now, it's hard to find that same level of ancientness in in in Irish or or even in the sounds that made up Irish.

Like one of the things that I'm trying to get at in the book is that Irish, like, you know, we sort of know that the Celtic culture only arrived in Ireland.

That culture, that Indo-European culture that went to India, came to Ireland, it only came here probably about 500 BC.

So two and a half thousand years ago.

Here's a big question for you.

When people say the Irish are Celts, is that naive or incorrect?

No, it's correct.

So what we do know is that the people who built, so those first blue-eyed hunter-gatherer people, the blue-eyed, really dark-skinned people, they're not us.

They were hunter-gatherers who came here and they were wiped out.

Okay.

Then the next trial.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

Yeah.

We killed them.

Well, we might have killed them or probably temperature conditions killed them.

The next group of people were the people who built Newgrange and

the Nouth and Douth and Not Crew and all of these amazing places.

Obviously, incredibly sophisticated people who understood

astronomy.

They're not us.

They're not us either.

There's almost no DNA connection between us and them.

They died out too.

An incredibly complex community culture that, I mean, there's a trace element of them still in us, but not much.

That Neolithic culture, it only, you know, it's only, there's not very much of it in our DNA.

So who we are is we're the Bronze Age people, the people who came after that and brought, we were brought farming and we brought knowledge of bronze from, again, the Middle East, from North Africa area.

And then...

with them.

And then we were mixed.

We were joined by these Celts who arrived.

So because those people, the Bronze Age people would have come like four and a half, four thousand years ago,

four and a half, five thousand years ago.

Then the Brand, the us, the Celtic or Gaelic people came two and a half thousand years ago.

So we're a mix between those Bronze Age people and that new culture that came in.

But you know, as you say, this idea of the Vedic and the knowledge.

So in our language, it's hard to get a sense of the sounds that came.

But definitely there are words in Irish that make it clear that our mindset before modernity took over totally accepted that sort of quantum nature, that otherworldly sense of there being no

limitation to the physical reality.

Like there's a word in Irish called krither, and krither means a tiny particle or a spark of flame or a light or a tiniest portion of something, but it can also mean a subatomic particle and it can mean vulnerability, the vulnerability and the insubstantiality of solid objects.

So when we look at the world now in our rational objective mind, our pre- or post-Newtonian world, we think of everything as solid.

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

And quantum physics today will tell you that Solidity is an illusion.

Everything is made up of essentially waves, quantum waves.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

So, so, you know, create can be a swamp.

It can be the trembling of the land.

It can be an earthquake.

It can be the crumbling surface of cloud land when dry after rain.

It's basically accepting that idea of quantum, that the things can be solid and not solid at the same time.

Oh, the ambiguity.

Oh, it's beautiful.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Have you looked into the influence of, we say, psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and things like that.

on ancient Irish cultures?

Like, I've heard that if you look at the

art that's on the front of Newgrange, especially the the abstract art they were making the lozenges and the spirals that that was

the type of vision one would receive if they were to eat the type of mushrooms that grow out of cowshit around that area

yeah so and i heard billy moglyn discussing this with you and he he does it with such control you know because there's a degree There's a degree of uncertainty about all these things and yet all are potentials.

So what do we know?

Like we know, for example, that look at look at the look at the folklore.

You know, the main idea of Finn McCool getting the wisdom, the

salmon and the salmon and knowledge.

And how does he do that?

He goes to Kunna's well, or there's a few different water sources that he goes to.

He picks up the salmon, he burns himself, he sort of burns, he cooks the salmon and creates a blister, or he burns himself.

And that word for the blister is called bullagis, bubble of insight or bubble of knowledge.

And it's also used for the words of the hazelnuts that drop from this magic tree that is overcun as well.

And every when the bubble of knowledge are also called kno kritten, which is sort of a hazel of insight.

And it falls into the water and it makes the water magic.

And so when the salmon is in, it makes the salmon magic.

And so when Finnmikul gets it,

he either sucks.

And so it's a bubble of knowledge, a bullagus or a krilchrivement, a hazel of knowledge.

And then when he gets it, he gets another bubble of knowledge, the blister of knowledge, which again, bubble and blister is the same word.

It's all bullagus.

And that word bullock is also used for some particular type of mushrooms because, of course, those two were known to impart wisdom and to impart magic.

And when they say wisdom, immediately what I'm hearing is people who have psychedelic experiences, DMT, ayahuasca, and then they come back from it with a greater knowledge and understanding of self and reality, as is often reported.

Exactly.

So are you saying that, like, you, you, you reckon there's a way to interpret the story of the salmon of knowledge, where it's like Fionn McCool just did a load of mushrooms and met the elves in the machine it's it's a shamanic trip exactly and like why is the bridal why is it the salmon the salmon is a speckled animal yeah what else is it salmons don't eat acorns that's one thing i know the salmons for the two here's two things that that keep me awake at night about that story the salmon's name is finton which is a ridiculous name for a fish and then secondly he eats acorns Yeah, but you know, you do know what Finn means in Sanskrit and in early Irish.

It means the wise one.

It means white.

It means seeing through.

It means see through the darkness to the light.

You know, like Bowin, the Boen River.

You know, the Boen River, which is the white cow goddess.

The Boin River is a, the Boyne, you know, the river was so sacred that she was represented.

Well, the Bowin or the Boinda was the most sacred goddess in early

Irish culture.

And she was represented in physical form by the Boin River.

And so she is so luminous.

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

Exactly.

Exactly.

So luminous.

because billy who we were talking about there yeah he's got some stone in his garden or something but up in the stars using some ancient celtic archaeology or something there's

the milky way is the was the milky way referred to as a cow or something in ancient irish astronomy you have it you have it so so the boing river the boyne river is so nourishing so the boing god is a mother goddess um okay the boingda she's a mother goddess she nourishes her people with her milk now she is represented in physical form by the river the river of the Boyne, which nourishes its people with the water.

Okay.

And so powerful is she that at night she shines up into the night sky and becomes the Milky Way, Balach Nabo Fila,

the way of the white cow.

Exactly.

Now, so this, this is what I, this is what has me interested now.

So the ancient Irish are referring to this as cow as milk.

How in English are we looking up at the Milky Way and referring it to the way of milk, the fucking milk highway?

Isn't it lovely?

Isn't it lovely?

The way some trace of the knowledge gets kept, but then it sort of gets, you know, mushed up and confused.

And but just to finish that point, the final things I love about that is that if you ask people long ago about Nout and Doubt and Newgrange, the

prehistoric tombs along the Boyne, they will tell you that they thought that they were mirror image of planet constellations.

So not only is the Boyne River being reflected up in the night sky to create the Milky Way, but actually some of those star constellations are then shining, are then being mirrored back in the land in stone and circular form

into the ground.

And the final thing of that is Boinda, the mother goddess, the most powerful god, she's the exact same god as Govinda, as the Indian form of Krishna.

So Go is Go, Bo is a cow in Irish, as we know.

Go is a cow in Sanskrit.

Vinda is a finder, a looker, a seeker.

It is like the same culture, the same gods.

We are one.

And

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

I am not.

No, I have no expertise in anything.

So you're just a curious person, a curious person looking into this shit.

Like, do you ever take this stuff and try and like

go to academics?

Like, how these are essentially hunches that you have, and it's overwhelming.

Like, it's phenomenal.

As you said, it's like, how the fuck can this be a coincidence?

But how does it go from this wonderful coincidence into being something that's accepted or has research put behind it and something that then becomes truth?

What is that?

Truth is not above reason, but beyond it.

Like, so I, as I said, we started this with I was a disillusioned kid with an over-idealistic kid.

I went off traveling.

I went off to Africa.

I went off to South America and I went off eventually to India, moved into an old cow shed and like spent about eight months there going to parts of my brain that one shouldn't really have access to.

I sort of dropped out.

Tell us about that.

Tell us about being in a cow shed in India and visiting dirty parts of your brain.

I will.

Well, I'll finish what I was saying.

I will, though.

So, and I want to, I want it to make sense of my life.

You know, so after I came home from India, and I've explained that, I built my little strawberri house in West Mead.

And I just, the world didn't make sense.

I wanted it to make sense.

What I want from this book I've written is just people are lost, people are disillusioned and disconnected.

It just happens that our culture and our language and our old religions and beliefs can root us back into the world to make sense of who we are, of what we are in this chaot, chaotic, crazy world.

So I don't want to engage with academia.

Like I did a degree in UCD years ago in Irish.

And at the end, I remember the professor said to me, I see a great career for you in academia.

No one has done, no one has looked at the GH, you know, in the genitive of Donegal Irish.

And that's a world we don't need to cross into.

Luckily, Billy Moglyn can.

manage the two things.

He can do academia and he can do the walk the wild side.

What I want is to bring these these ideas out because they'll nourish us, they'll make sense of the world.

Yeah, but like, should I tell you about India?

I'd love to know about India, but like, because, like,

actually, how did Africa end?

How did you like you were stuck in the Congo, your passport is gone, and now you're here on a podcast talking to me.

So, what happened that you ended up things working out all right?

I got um, so I, you know, that would that mean that five days or seven days in Zaire.

We went without food, we went without water.

That was the best time of my life.

I suddenly realized I know now why I'm alive.

I felt more vibrant and more alive.

And I thought, I want to live a life which is, does not have rules or limitations, that based on my greatest aspirations.

And that's partly because I was just, you know, a teenager with two big ideas.

But maybe, and also we were slowly working our way through the bag of cannabis that could have helped just to alleviate the pain, the hunger pangs.

But in that, on Zaire, I got, I ended up getting Bilhartzia, which was no cure for.

I had to drink the river water of the Congo.

And it had what?

It bilharthia.

It's this little slug or snail that goes into your body, into an orifice, and it slowly does you no harm for the first few years.

But every year it creates a little shell around itself and it goes into your kidney normally or your, yeah, and it creates a shell around your kidney.

And eventually it turns your whole kidney into stone.

Basically, it's like the, what was that mythic creature, the gargan from the, uh, from the outside.

It turns you into stone.

And there was no cure for it at the time.

But luckily, I came back and my mum insisted I go to the Tropical Medical Bureau.

And they, they had a cure was invented about two months later.

And so I was cured.

So, oh, wow.

Okay.

So then I finished, I go back to finish my degree.

I go back and do two years in college.

And then I go off to Africa, sorry, to South America.

And I ended up running

a hostel on the Ecuador, on an organic farm on the Ecuador-Peruvian border in a place that was famous for San Pedro, for this mescaline cactus.

And the israeli soldiers used to all come straight off after their three or four years conscription and come to my place to take this this san pedro um so were you running like a retreat where people could do san pedro cactus no i was just i was just asked to look after the hostel and the farm the the farm workers okay and it turned out that people happened to go there for san pedro yeah but we'd always tell them not to take that on the land and we wouldn't give them information about where it was got but uh they would go off into the wood into the forest but eventually people would have bad trips and i would be called upon to hike up into the amazonian cloud forest and take them back from the tree they didn't strip naked or throwing all their money away and then i'd have to ring up the israeli embassy and say you know one of your kids has gone missing it's meant ever since i've had i have huge sympathy for israel just because those kids who become the worst aggressors of palestinians i just saw them they were just they were mixed up teenagers you know who didn't know how to say no and they were their lives were ruined for for the oppression and the brutality that they had inflicted on to be institutionalized into becoming killers essentially exactly on unthinking killers uncaring yeah yeah so anyway i i finished but i will basically i was trying to search for something that made sense of my life in africa if i failed i got distracted in south america i got distracted and so eventually my sort ends up in india what is the nature of a distraction for you i wanted i believed that there was god inside me I believed that there was this source of utter creativity and love and

you know assurance.

And so, you know, you just get caught up in conventional thinking or self-doubt or just distractions of, you know,

I think drugs is a distraction.

I think gossip is a distraction.

I think loads of things are a distraction.

I wanted to just get in touch with

my mind.

So, how were you for drink?

What was your relationship with drink like?

I know.

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

Okay, yeah.

And I never drug, I never took huge amounts of cannabis or, you know, despite those cannabis stories.

Um, yeah, and after before India, I ended up on a big organic cannabis farm looking after the children in Vancouver in British Columbia.

So the most just because cannabis, people who are who are thinking left field who are marginal liminal thinkers, tend to be in that world.

But I just wasn't, I wasn't particularly interested in the drugs.

So then I went off to India, to India, determined to find a cat at a cave in the Himalayas because I heard, you know, that's where the purest energy was.

And someone told me.

Hold on a second.

How do you

hear there's a cave in India with pure energy?

I'm off there.

Like, what do you mean?

Well, a titrope walker, a French Titrope Walker from the circus, I met in Colombia.

And he told me about

this.

That was after, anyway, I won't get into it.

You know, the Screamers in Ireland, the only primary cult, the primary.

No, I don't.

I'll tell you another time.

I spent time with them in South America.

But I was,

this man, this Titroper from France told me about this place called Papazale or Almora.

And he said, if you go there, make sure you have a return ticket because otherwise you will never leave.

He said, make sure.

And so I immediately went to India.

That's when I, you know, as soon as I got home from South America, earned another, maybe did six months in a supermarket in Germany to earn more money and went off there.

And

I, of course, I only took off with single ticket.

There was no way.

I did not want to leave if I found this bliss.

And I tried to find the cave and I couldn't find that cave or any cave.

Now you'd know internet.

This is this this pre-internet.

Yeah exactly.

This was 96.

So I suppose a few people had internet.

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

Yes.

And it's not, it wasn't so hard before the internet because of that backpacker system.

Like I could still, I could find anyone in any country in the world.

I know that.

But you just go, you pick up a copy of Lonely Planet, you go to those places they're in.

We're all talking about the same things.

It's a total third, it's a different university like prison is a university that backpacking circuit for new thinking and concepts like everything i i have no mortgage i live in a straw bale house i am utterly free all of that i learned backpacking people tell you the secrets of not you know i didn't want to get tied down to the system i learned how not to to traveling so all i needed to do was arrive in delhi talk to a few people in a hostel they'll put you on to someone else you'll find someone else um and i heard about someone who was i heard about an immortal yogi who was 180 years living in one cave.

I was going to visit him.

And you just, you hear about people.

So I go up to Almora.

And at the same time, though,

there was an Indian man.

It was a German man who knew India.

And he happened to tell me that there was a leper station up there.

And he wanted me to check on the leper station to see I was.

So in the end, I ended up, he gave me a job in the leper station as chief medical officer.

I had no knowledge of medicine.

So I ended up in Almora.

I was met a chief officer of a leper station.

And although, because I couldn't find the cave, I found a couch.

What are your responsibilities?

If you're the chief officer of a leper station, what are your responsibilities there?

I mean, are you given any resources?

I mean, leprosy is contagious as well, isn't it?

It is.

It's pretty contagious, but it's very easy to cure now, thanks to a tablet invented by an Irishman in Trinity College in the 50s called One Tablet.

It's now

multi-therapy remedies, three different types.

He invented one.

All you need to do is take those tablets for six weeks and you're cured.

The problem is no one wants to be cured.

In India, particularly, or in Africa, or in any other culture, in all of the holy books, leprosy is the disease that is mentioned most in the holy books.

So you are most likely to get alms and charity if you have leprosy.

So the lepers in India...

Oh my God.

So

is it a system of poverty that's so great that

if you become a leper, you might more likely get room and board or food?

You're sorted.

Your needs are sorted forever.

You'll always get alms if you're a leper.

And particularly particularly it's complicated because in India there's the karmic idea you have been given leprosy in this lifetime it is not up to you to um interfere with the gods destiny and cure that leprosy but of course the German man who told me about this leper station he had a rational Western mindset and he knew he could cure these people in six weeks so all I had to do was once every 10 days go down to Almora and oversee the

go down to Pepasali and watch the people take the tablets force it force them basically to take their tablets.

And I'd do that every 10 days.

Luckily, they were far cleverer than me.

They'd always either spit it out of their throat down.

No one ever got cured in my

whatever seven months there.

But

so I do that.

And meanwhile, because I couldn't find a cave, I found a cow shed.

So I would, so once every 10 days, I'd go down to leper station.

And otherwise, did the cave ever exist?

Oh, yeah, there's plenty.

So Gandhi went up and meditated in a cave in this area.

Like a lot of the great gurus went up to this area.

It's an area.

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

I wasn't quite sure.

People were telling me there was, I could, I knew of four different hermits and anchorites who were living in different caves above me in the area, but I could find no cave that was free that I could move into.

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

Yeah.

So I went up to a cairn up in Sligo.

Is it Nok Naray?

Yeah.

Well, Nochnarae is Queen Maeves Hill, Hill, but it's the one.

Is it Karen?

Oh, Gee, because yeah.

You know, it could be, it's not Carrow.

No, it's Carru...

Carrow Keel?

No.

Carrow Keel and the other.

And think of Carol Moore.

I can't think of the name of it.

It's right beside.

Carn Moore.

That makes sense now.

Right beside Nok Naray.

Yeah.

You can see him.

And I didn't know much about Cairns.

And I was in Sligo on a gig and I was bored.

And I said, fuck it.

We'll go up there.

And I didn't know what to expect.

And I've got Tinnidus now, but it was before I had Tinnidus.

And I walked into the cairn and I experienced a silence that I'd never known, like this freaky silence.

And I asked someone there, and they said, yeah, that they say that they used to meditate in there, that the stones are arranged so that you experience this extreme silence so that you can be alone in your meditation.

Is that why these caves, is that what was special about these caves?

Was an auditory thing.

That too.

So, you know, and science is now showing that if we put

the right resonance into our head, and those they say that Loch Crew and the other caves in Ireland are tuned to that resonance, that actually you can track with an MRI machine that it changes the brain patterns of our brain and brings us to an awareness that sort of alpha waves, more alpha waves than beta or something, so that we have a grander awareness.

So that is definitely an element.

We can change our consciousness by vibrating in the right space.

And all these caves seem to have been created in such a way that it can do that.

But I think in the Himalayas, the reason why, like I genuinely did, I mean, I think I got enlightenment or any wisdom I now have, I got it in India.

And why does everyone get it in India?

Why did I get distracted?

And

yeah, did I forget my search in Africa, forget my search in South America, got it in India.

Some people say it's the rocks.

There is some type of electromagnetic frequency in the Himalayan, the rocks in the Himalayas.

And again, you can now calculate that using

high-tech sensors.

And it sort of facilitates the mind to open up different elements of it.

And that would have sounded hippy-dippy, but actually, scientists are now proving this in MRI labs.

You put different frequencies into the brain, and suddenly different parts of the brain are tuned up and open to things.

So, I think that's why the cave is-I mean, look, I'd be with it.

I'm someone who meditates, and

look, shit's happened to me during meditation.

Um, awareness is like I haven't, I'm not someone who does psychedelics, but I've had experiences with meditation that sound like when people describe ayahuasca.

Just

I'd be meditating and all of a sudden I awakened from it with this deep understanding of oneness.

I remember coming out of a meditation once and the first thing, as I opened my eyes, it was by a river.

I saw a nettle and I just felt extreme love for this nettle.

a real empathy and understanding that whatever the fuck me and the nettle were, it was the same.

You know what I mean?

Oh, beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

God.

And you know what I mean?

It's like I just sat down for 20 minutes and was with my own thoughts.

And now all of a sudden, a nettle feels like a family member.

And it was real.

Whoa, whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I believe.

And I know I'm just trying, is that the Irish language also has that idea just in a single word in many ways?

Like in the words like skim.

So skim means a tiny speck of flower but it also can mean a tiny piece of dust or any small particle and it can mean whitewash on a wall and it can mean a dust on a mantelpiece but skim has also these so you've got all these things basically a tiny particle again like creator it could be a sumatopic particle but also means um it means a fairy film that covers the land and it means um succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep.

So one word can bring you...

A fairy film.

Is it like I had Eddie Lenahan on?

He was speaking about like a goo that fairies leave in areas.

No, sorry, I'm with the wrong word.

I suppose

more a veil, more a sort of a go, you know, that haze in the early morning that you see.

Okay.

That makes you feel that the world is, you're seeing beyond.

It just seems, it seems that the edges are a bit mushy.

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

Exactly.

And that you can almost pass through the physical into another realm.

Exactly.

That's thing.

Yeah.

But the cave, yeah.

So, as you said, so my, I couldn't find a cave, so I found a cow shed.

So, what I would do instead is all day I'd walk in the Himalayas where they're in the rhododendron forest.

The rhododendron grow the size of trees over there, and I grow there.

And then I'd walk, I'd get back into my cow shed at night because there was a

man-eating mountain lion out at the time.

So, he had most of the mountain lions were high, high up in the Himalayas, but this one had come down a bit lower.

I mean, I was pretty high, I suppose.

Well, whatever would I be about 2,000 meters.

And so, he'd come down and he'd get a taste of human flesh.

So he had to be inside.

But during those walks in the daytime, I was like you with the meditation, I was able to access realms of my mind that I had never

done until, you know,

since I was like a six-year-old in my herb garden and haven't been able to since.

I was just going out to places, but I have a sort of strong mind.

I know I'm not going to get lost in them.

you know, I think a lot of people with my

sort of my

mind tendency towards mind would end up in mental institutions because you, because you go a bit too far.

I seemed to be able to go to those realms and then pull myself back.

So I was going very far out into places.

And, but, but the only time I said would I you mean places internally, yeah,

yeah, exactly.

Really just gorgeous places where every just thing, like you with the nettle, everything seemed utterly unice united.

And there was this sense of euphoria, this absolute love and white wash of white light and euphoria.

Were you meditating while doing these walks were you conscious of your breathing things like that no no in fact i've only started meditating during covid uh yeah wow yeah

you mad cunt you know but just because i had that access i suppose but my only problem once um oh i was doing this well i was following ayurvedic medicine well i was only one strand of it at the time which meant drinking my own urine copious amounts of my own urine

not anyone else's luckily but my own so when i went down to the the to almora to the leper station every 10 days to

check on the lepers, I'd also write a fax home to my mother.

I was sort of a dutiful son.

So my dad had just thought.

How are you getting on, man?

Drinking my own pace.

I'm scared of a mountain lion.

That was it.

Exactly.

But that was where, but no, I wanted to reassure her.

So I didn't say that.

Instead, I said, mum.

Has Granny got any more oil prisoners in the house?

No, I wanted to reassure her.

So I said, mum.

In Irish, actually, but I said, you know, everything is brilliant, mum.

Don't worry about me.

Everything is one.

I see that we are all unified.

Every leaf and every raindrop is one and there's light connecting all of the universe and all we are blissfully happy and there is gorgeousness and there is only unified connection.

So she believed that her sort of over-educated youngest son had gone around the twist, had gone mentally insane.

You know, some people would say I had.

I'm convinced I hadn't.

But she sent my brother on this mission of mercy to rescue me.

Now, my brother, my brother was a very serious, pragmatic man.

He was in the film industry.

And this was, he was working in the, this is 95, 96, the years that Far and Away were made.

He was locations manager on that and on Devil's Home with Brad Pitt and on all those big movies.

So my mum says, go over to India and rescue Moncon.

He's lost the plot.

So my brother was busy with all his things.

He didn't want to do that.

But the same time.

He really could see himself, you know, he was just locations manager in the big Hollywood movies.

He wanted to direct and he thought that he could direct a TV series.

And 1996 was the year that TG Car, Fianna File, announced they were going to set up TG, TG Carr, a brand new new Irish language television station.

So my brother hatches the plan that he's going to direct the brand, the first ever travel

channel in travel program in Irish, and I'm going to present it.

So he comes out

and he's very serious and programmatic.

So he comes out in a full safari suit, as though he was a director of, you know, Born Free or something, with a load of heavy-duty equipment.

Actually, it was the very first edition of a Sony hate uh Sony, no, was it HD?

No, Sony digital camera, um, Digi, whatever, those little Digi tapes.

And it was not HD, it was over a Digi.

And one ship digital camera.

And he convinced Sony that he was going to make the first ever TV program with it.

He comes out, comes out to Delhi, then goes up to Almora, then finds his way to Papazali and asks in the local shai shop, where is Monkon living in the cowshed.

And he finds me.

And like, I'm not in a good way.

Like, I am, you know, I've been drinking my piss for a long time now.

I am far out in sort of

glorious parts of my brain.

And he's just disgusted.

I'm wearing like dirty old t-shirts and sweaty, smelly sweatpants.

And he's just like, and my hair is a mess.

And he says, Markham, we're making a TV program.

I have not wasted my time.

I haven't come the whole way out here and got this gig from TG Car so that you can screw it up.

So he drags me down to Elmora.

He washes me.

He gets my hair cut.

He buys me a new shirt and trousers and puts me in front of the camera.

His little new digital Sony.

And of course, I'm only too happy to be put in the camera because I have loads to tell people how we are all unified and how drinking piss will cleanse your insights and how everything is one and everything is gorgeous and

ruan watches this my brother watches this and he turns off the camera and it's just i can see the sadness the the the the just the break and brokenheartedness he's put so much work into this he's convinced tg car who have no idea who he is or who i am that this is worth taking a punt on and i'm about to screw it up and he he screams at me he roars at me and he says for fuck's sake monk i have not come this way you better get your act together so he turns on the camera again and i just spout my beautiful new age rubbish again.

And so it goes on for weeks.

He slowly over those weeks tells me what to say.

He threatens me to what to say.

And I just have to say, we're in India now and it's lovely and we're starting our journey.

And if you see that program, I might put a clip of it up on the internet.

You see this kid who is just, God love him.

He's just lost.

He, you know, he could easily be an institution.

His eyes have that far away look.

He's just like so many, you know, young backpackers you see.

But luckily, Wuan, my brother, taught me to be pragmatic, that you cannot go that far out, that you need to find a way of communicating ideas.

And ever since then, that was 96.

Every year since then, we made a television documentary for TGR in China, in Africa, in South America, in Greenland, just all over the world.

And

until eventually then Hector came along and Hector says, like, let's make a program where you don't have this like idiot pontificating to camera the whole time.

And he made a program that actually was sort of funny and comedic.

And then, but then one thing, one little question there, because you started off by talking about when you were a kid and hearing voices and stuff, right?

And I had on this podcast a psychiatrist called Dr.

Pat Bracken, who is a psychiatrist, but he's also very anti-psychiatry.

And he

is very interested in,

we'll say, hearing voices, but looking at it from different cultures.

He says that hearing voices in our Western medicalized culture is immediately seen as a bad thing.

But there's other cultures around the world where hearing voices is not stigmatized.

And in these cultures where hearing voices isn't stigmatized,

the voices that people hear are actually quite nice.

But in societies like ours where it's medicalized and said that it's a bad thing or labeled as schizophrenia, the voices tend to be terrifying.

Wow.

How do you feel about that?

I mean, because you seem to, even to the point he talks about there's now a movement where people don't like to be referred to as psychotic.

They don't like to be referred to as having schizophrenia.

They're simply part of a community that hear voices and this is how they live and this is their life.

How do you feel about that?

Is it ringing true with you?

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

I just, I never identified, I really don't think I had anything like that because I had just all, they were were just such loving voices.

But what you're saying,

I like, is the fact that so many people have so much tension in them now and so much,

you know, their, their, their voices are so full of paranoia and darkness.

Is it just a reflection on a society that doesn't make sense?

Like if you're living in a society that really looks like it's going to commit suicide, then I suppose it's natural that some people would have those darkest thoughts.

So let's say back to what you, the psychiatrist, said.

Yeah.

We know, yes, definitely other cultures accepted that, that there were, you could hear, you had access to other voices.

But it just happens that so too did our culture.

So too did the Irish language.

You know, every single traditional story, folk story, it's about an encounter with the other world.

And that other world, like, okay.

this is something now so the she you know the shi yoga the she the fairies she means um she used to mean a fairy mound okay you know she guiha gust of wind that is actually the fairies but the she was a fairy mound and then it became the fairies where they they lived, and then it was the fairies themselves, the she or the shioga.

Now, the she is the same word as

the root for shiachon, for peace.

In fact, in Scots Gallic, s-i-th-h is she,

a fairy, and s-i-th-h is peace, the same word.

Okay, now the old way of spelling she, fairy, was siddha, s-i-t-h-e.

Now, siddha, that Irish word, the old word for fairy, is the same word as siddha in um Sanskrit, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, and in um Zoroastrianism.

Basically, Siddha is an enlightened being.

Okay, so you suddenly realize these fairies actually are enlightened beings.

It's the same word.

There's no linguistic

uncertainty about this.

She is the same word as Siddha, an enlightened being who, you know, a being who would have stepped out of, this is a human being who would have taken a step back from the small-mindedness of reality and realized that there was a bigger dream and a bigger vision and connected themselves to something grander.

So let's say these fairies, where do the fairies live?

They live underground beside humans, but they live nearby and they are obsessed with us.

They're constantly looking at what humans are doing and laughing at us and telling us, what do they tell us to do?

They tell us to celebrate more, to feast more, to play, to dance, to party.

So, and they, and whenever we tell them, whenever we go to them with our small-scale concerns, as all of the stories do, you know, you go when you're in time of worry or time of heartache, and they laugh at you, and they laugh at your obsession with time.

So, what do we know about the Siddha, these unenlightened beings, the fairies?

They do not accept time, which now we realize is not true.

They want us to have a bigger vision and not to be so locked up in our small-mindedness.

So, actually, our culture from the very beginnings, from every single folk story you were told in school, is only trying to tell you one thing.

You can root yourself to nature and you can root yourself to a world that is beyond the physical, to a world that is nourishing, where there is advice and guidance there.

even even like a word like um pukhog or pukog is a um uh a a blindfold okay it also can mean a goat muzzle and it can mean a tin shield for putting over a

thieving cow's eyes but also but the main meaning sort of for for pukhog is um i don't have that quite right pukhog it is bomos pukhog i'll tell you it in a second is it's it's an otherworldly being that can inv that can appear invisible in this world.

An otherworldly being that can be, a pukin, sorry, pukin is the word.

You still use it in English, you know, put a pukin, a blindfold over someone.

So it's an otherworldly being that can appear invisible in this world.

So we knew, our ancestors, even our grannies knew that there were people who could jump from kriter or from counter, which is this region or this place, to alter the other world, and that there was amazing reassurance to be got from that.

And I would just, all of our problems could be solved if

we expanded our awareness to realize that bigger picture We would no longer have the anxiety and we might have answers to a deeper connection to nature to as you said that belief that we are one with the nettle it is there to heal us and we are there, you know, to be part of it

Do you

one thing I found really interesting there is when you were speaking about people speaking about interactions with the fairies and the fairies laughing at them like

literally that when I go on to the internet and I listen to people recount their ayahuasca or DMT trips, a lot of people report visiting somewhere where time doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist, and they meet these beings that they can't describe.

They're crystal beings, and they basically laugh at them and they have fun with them.

Like, do you, the similarities between modern-day ayahuasca DMT trips and what you've just described with ancient Irish fairies, do you see a correlation there?

Absolutely, yeah.

And to get back to a point about that salmon that we didn't make, what do we know about a salmon?

A salmon is speckled.

What else is speckled?

The flyageric mushroom, the Amanita Muscara mushroom.

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

No, the flyageric mushroom.

And again, what do we know about that?

I have a chapter in my book about the Riostra.

The Riostra was Ku Holland's warp spasm when he would get totally furious or angry.

He would just have fire and flames shooting out of his top of his head.

His eyeballs, his pupils would dilate to the extent that they were popping out so much that it said like a heron could bite it or a crane could bite it off.

It's a perfect

example of that mesculine-induced, um,

you know, transcendental state, which you don't get from magic mushrooms, you get from flyer garic.

Also, those Vikings, the what were those Vikings called?

They used to take mushrooms, the berserker,

yeah, the berserkers, exactly, exactly.

They used to take flyargaric mushrooms and it would make them incredibly angry as they went into battle and they went berserk, exactly.

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

Because it's poisonous, isn't it?

Sometimes.

I have a podcast at the moment, actually.

And in one of it, I talked to

Courtney Taylor, a great expert in Wicklow, a mushroom collector, who really actually demystifises the poisonous element of

the flygaric mushroom.

And I also, in that pro, it's called the Almanac of Ireland, but also I talked to...

Billy Maclynn, who tells me about that Gloss Gave and those magical stones outside his land.

And also in that one, I post myself into a cave,

which is the cave of transformation, Aunagat in Ross Common.

And I go down there for seven hours.

Well, no, I don't do seven hours in the end.

I do about three hours to see what transformative.

So the Aunagat was the

cave of transformation in the Time Bukul and all the old myths, where someone would go down and they would enter the other world.

Or why did I get onto that?

Oh, yeah, Berserker.

So the

Flyagaric,

you know, not only that, but the Sami culture of northern Lapland still take the flyagaric.

And the reason, so it can be slightly poisonous.

It's not as poisonous as we think, but it relaxes the muscles.

And so if it goes out, if it touches the heart, it relaxes the heart.

And, you know, the heart might, you don't want your heart to relax, you know, because that means it stops.

And so what the Vikings used to do and what the Sami people still do is they let the deer.

or the reindeer eat it first and then they drink the urine of the reindeer and then the mescaline element will have passed through in its pure state without the poison yeah wow Okay.

But that speckled, the fly agaric, it's a classic mushroom you've seen.

It's in every fairy story.

You know, it's a red mushroom with white dots.

And whenever you come across speckled in any of the old

folk stories, and you will come across it everywhere, that's what it's a reference to.

That's potentially what it's a reference to.

It's a hint that to access this other world that we're talking about, the fairies

or with Finn McCool or the magic mushrooms or the Hazel of Insight, they are,

you can get to those through the Phyogaric.

wow

um so one last question because i'm time conscious now i know you need to fuck off

um

the i need to ask you about your sustainable living i need to ask you about the the house that you live in and you live in a passive house is that correct no not really so i didn't want a mortgage so i came when i came back from africa south america and india i had seen people there build their houses out of what was around them so in bolivia they use reeds in tibet they use stone in africa they use mud in india they use straw whatever So I came back.

I had my granny, the Republican revolutionist, Sheila Humphrey, she died and left me 10 grand.

So in 1997, I came back to Ireland and had my 10 grand and looked for anywhere I could buy, find 10 acres.

And luckily, Westmead welcomed me in.

And I looked around and saw, what am I going to build my house out of?

And there they were growing barley straw, barley.

So I bought myself 200.

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

And then I put mud and straw on the outside of the concrete because it looked very angular.

And I built that in 2002 for 26 grand.

And I've been living there ever since.

And just in recent years,

I've wanted to create my independence just because I don't have a great income in any way.

You know, I do a little bit for the Irish Times.

I write books, but those, God love it, those travel books I wrote about all those trips, you know, they don't sell much.

So then I started growing my own vegetables.

Oh no, first thing I did, I planted six acres of the 10 acres in oakwood i did that 20 years ago and god it was slow but now massive oaks i have these big big oaks 20 year old oaks and then i got pigs i got tamworth the old native pig in and uh i got though put the pigs in and then i now have hens and i have turkeys and i've whatever i have five beehives and i have so are you living off the land as such are you trying to are you living in a way where where you don't need money for a lot of your needs exactly yeah so i i put my i put 4.3 kilowatts of of solar panels in so i'd have electricity most of the time i put i first thing i did you know 23 years ago when i moved here was put up the poly tunnel um so yeah i i mean clearly things like you know lentils and flour i'm still buying in um i'd like to i'd like to grow enough you know grain just for my own uh bread but during covet again i am growing so much more since covert because all of those things they take up an enormous amount of time um yeah so none of them i would have been doing to the extent the scale i wanted to until this year.

And are you preserving vegetables and shit like that?

Are you canning things and stuff?

I am, exactly.

I'm doing that.

And again, something I'd never done until this year was save my seed because it was so easy, save, you know, herbal seed, flower seeds, because it was so easy to just, you know, go online and order packages.

But during COVID, they were sold out, you know.

The grace brown envelopes, seeds and cork and seed savers in Clare, they were all saying, we have none left.

Save your own seed.

Like the shops were actually telling you, don't come to us, do it yourself.

So, that was a big learning experience for me this year.

The power of being utterly independent means controlling your seeds as well as your irrigation, your electricity, your food source.

Yeah, so I'll leave you going now, man.

Con, right?

Thank you so much for that.

That was absolutely fantastic, chat.

It was so interesting.

Um, I'd love to have you on again, man.

I'd say we me and you could talk about fucking anything for a long time.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

And I genuinely, I'm just so bowled over by the work you do.

Oh, thank you so much, man.

Slog.

See you now.

Slog.

All right.

I'll see you, man.

Have a good one.

Bye-bye.

Poor old Man Con.

So that was Man Con Magon.

The first chat that we had on this podcast.

And

he came back five times after that.

We had lots of mad chats.

And he won't be back.

He won't be back on the podcast, unfortunately, because now we've lost him.

Please engage with Mankon's work, his books, 32 words for field.

Even a lovely documentary he made there, it's on the RTE player called Mankon's Europe by Train.

The little travel show that he recorded two years ago, traveled all around Europe on a train.

Keep his ideas alive, his work alive.

Keep his books in need of reprinting.

His body isn't here anymore.

But his ideas can ripple.

His ideas can ripple.

Like the water on the pond and his ideas are like pattern on the legs of a fucking bee or shit from a bird's arse that grows into a tree.

Carry on Mankon's ideas.

That's what he would have wanted.

Be a fearless fucking eccentric.

That's it you get from that chat.

He didn't give a shit.

Curiosity came first and people's opinions about him came second.

We can all be inspired by that.

Alright, I'll catch you next week.

In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and genulect to a robin.

God bless.

Rest in peace, mancon Magan.

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