Hello and welcome to The Blind Bye podcast. Let's begin this week's episode. By reading out a poem that was sent to us by Hollywood actor Pierce Brosnan. I dreamt I played. Assassin's Creed. And it was set in Leitrim, a leap from the Leitrim staple, a leap from the Leitrim staple. I kill my enemies one by one. I am the assassin. If you have ever hurt me or done me wrong, I will kill you. I leap from the Leitrim staple.

I leap from the Leitrim staple. So that was sent in by Pierce Brosnan. And it doesn't have a title, Pierce Brosnan, who's actually from Draga. You know, you wouldn't think Pierce Brosnan is Irish. You'd think he's one of these lads I'd describe as Midatlantic, you know, Midatlantic, whatever the fuck that means. You know, you hear about who'll be Midatlantic. Pierce Brosnan is Midatlantic. Daniel Day Lewis is Midatlantic. Kind of Gabriel Byrne, almost Gabriel Byrne, Gabriel Byrne is just there off the coast of the Iren Islands, but some of these actors are mid Atlantic.

Pierce Brosnan, your archetypal Midatlantic actor. It's like he's Irish. But there's there's something else there, and you don't know what it is because it's not American and it's not English, it's Midatlantic, but they're not in the middle of the Atlantic. There's not much there's just a lot of fucking ocean, so what does that mean? Pierce Brosnan from the middle of the ocean, the middle of the Atlantic, is that is that what that means? This week's episode is sponsored by Pierce Brosnan.

Remember when he was James Bond, remember when Pierce Brosnan was James Bond, should God help him, I suppose he had to adopt that mid-Atlantic accent. Like, if you like, a drama, a drama action is a very, very strange accent. Very odd accent, I couldn't even begin to do an impression of the the accent because it's just so different to Elimelech accent, Trada accent, it sounds like someone who was perpetually drinking a glass of water.

That's what it sounds like. It's like they're always drinking a glass of water and talking at the same time. That's what the drama accent is over a glass of water here that I keep so that my mouth doesn't get dry. Let's give it a go. I'm going to I'm going to try and talk with my mouth full of water and let's see if my my thesis is correct, that the drama, the accent sounds like somebody's drinking water. Ma'am, ma'am, we had a problem.

I don't very large part of Shote went, my God, spy, I'm Jabri, but I'm not not far off, not far off the actual Dryad acts.

And that's what that's how Pierce Brosnan should sound. Actually, I got in shit for this before Pierce Brosnan. He's he's from OK. He was born in Derrida, but he was raised in Navan. So I know the Navan Andrada accents are similar, but not the same. So there's a big fight that goes on between Dryads people and Navan people over who gets to own Pierce Brosnan, which nobody lets. Nobody fucking owns Pierce Brosnan because he's Midatlantic. He belongs to a school, a school of sperm whales.

Off the coast of Greenland. So that's nearly four minutes there of Pierce Brosnan content. And seeing as he's sponsoring this this week's episode, I think for four minutes of Pierce Brosnan, content is what he deserves. This is not sponsored by Pierce Brosnan. That was a fib if you're a brand new listener to this podcast. Go back and listen to some earlier episodes, especially if you've been directed to this podcast, because you want to hear some of my mental health episodes.

All right, and you were wondering why the fuck is this talking about Pierce Brosnan for four minutes? So go back and listen to some earlier episodes. As they always say to brand new listeners, familiarize yourself with the law of this podcast to regular listeners. The henpecked Declan's the perpetual. Jennifer, you're very welcome. You're very welcome. So what I'd like to do for this, what I'd like to do this week is. Two weeks ago, I did a podcast.

Which was. Very well received by. It was the podcast about chicken it roles where I spoke about chicken feed. It rolls the iconography of the history of them and what they mean to Irish culture. And I started off skeptically saying, fuck that, I'm not doing a chicken feed at all podcast. But I did it and I enjoyed it. And it got really good feedback and I like doing it. And I stepped out of my comfort zone.

And since then, I've had numerous requests from Yi to do similar podcasts as to just take the requests have been I like to check and feel a podcast, take something else from Irish culture, just a thing and speak about it and give us a hot take. And obviously, people have been requesting teenage discourse and links Africa. Those are two very popular subjects. I don't I don't have enough in both those to do an entire heartache. All right.

But another big request that I guss. The past two weeks, people asking me to talk about Guinness. OK. Which again, I was reluctant kinkiness, what can I say about Guinness, but then I got a job in the week I got contacted for. To contribute to an article. This journalist called Polly Doyle and Polly, he writes he writes really interesting articles about Irish mean culture. He's like the only mainstream journalist that documents Irish memes and mean culture, which I think is really, really important.

He often publishes in magazines like Vyse and Parly often gets on to me to contribute to articles about Irish meme culture. And last week he said to me, I'm doing an article about Guinness, about what what does what does Guinness mean today? And. I gave him, like I wrote, like in a paragraph. And as I was right in the paragraph, I was going, oh, fuck, I do have quite a lot of heartaches and opinions on Guinness, so I'm going to do a Guinness podcast.

This is not sponsored by Guinness in any way. I mean, it's one of those ones.

This isn't really about Guinness as a drink are a brand. I want to explore Guinness, the icon of Guinness, and not necessarily Guinness, the the the icon of the the glass of porter, the pint glass of port with the Chicken Filiatrault podcast. It wasn't about a chicken. Fill it raw. It's here's what excites me. I couldn't have done an hour long podcast about sausage rolls. Just couldn't have done sausage rolls are delicious. They're fantastic. You buy them in the same place that you buy a chicken fellate roll, but they have no cultural significance.

And by which I mean something that is is both a foodstuff. And when you bring it up with another human being, it's a conversation starter. If I say sausage roll and then that begins a conversation and carries with it loads of emotions and ideas, then it's not just a foodstuff, it's iconic and it's of cultural significance. It's a unit of culture. I don't think sausage rolls have that. Not like chicken. Filiatrault rolls do not make breakfast rolls.

Did they have a little bit of cultural significance? There's a little bit of meme quality to a sausage roll mainly. They're marketed very aggressively, and when you go to a deli counter in Ireland, in the petrol station, you're not allowed by one source drug. You're just not allowed. Can I have one sausage roll for 50? Are you sure you don't want four for a euro? No, I just have the one for 50 P there for for the euro for free.

OK, I'll have four for a fuckin euro. That's as far as I can take it with sausage rolls. They're they're the only kind of nonconsensual deli item at the petrol station you'll always walk out with for sausage rolls and you'll eat one and you give three to a crawl. And that's an Irish and Irish modern tradition. But I can't do 90 minutes on that. That's as far as it goes. Now, I could do a podcast on petrol station Krewe's because Aurochs and Ravens', because that is a.

That's an interesting phenomenon there, and it's something they should have touched on with the chicken feed it, you know, in my lifetime I have seen crows change in their appearance and behavior because Irish people have started trading petrol stations as restaurants. I've seen this happen and craws as well. You know, they have historical significance within Irish culture. You think of the Morrigan, which is an an ancient mythical Irish croal going back like 4000 years craws represent a kind of prophecy or war or fate within Irish culture.

And now they're just.

Now they just eat sausage rolls at petrol stations like we don't like, because Irelands are, as I explained in the Chicken Filiatrault episode, Ireland doesn't have a food culture, we don't have a historical food culture. So our closest thing to a food culture is eating this food out of petrol stations. You do tend to see a lot of crows, Rook's and Ravens, very, very well-fed birds hanging around petrol stations and walking around the forecourts like they own cars.

You know, that's the interesting thing about these birds. Like, they're very, very because we eat. Fried food and like wedges and sausage rolls and jam bands and chicken feed, it rolls from petrol stations and a lot of people eat them in the in the petrol station. Forecourt in the car are beside the bins. We tend to just throw our food at the crows. That's the thing you do. Craws rocks and ravens, very large blackbirds, very intelligent animals.

I have a lot of time for crows. I have a lot of time for crows. There's a there's a compassion to them. There's an intelligence. I have a lot of respect and a lot of time for crows. But the ones that walk around the petrol stations have nearly they bicker. They do bicker a lot with each other.

And you can see a hierarchy among them when it comes to who gets the sausage roll. But they kind of because their sole source of food now is always Irish people eating deli food around bins and outside of cars. They've kind of stopped flying a bit. And yeah, they walk around the forecourt as if they themselves have got cars are as if they themselves are interested in petrol. And I often wonder, like. Like, sometimes I think. Like the first animal in space was a dog race, a dog, Kalika, and the Russians, the Russians, before they sent humans into space, they sent this dog a dog in a fucking space costume and they fucked it up into space to send it up into space in a rocket.

And I always think, like, what if what if they shot the dog into space race and humans hadn't been to the moon.

So humans don't know, like outer fucking aliens up there. We don't all we have I don't I don't even know if satellites have been up there yet. So they fuck the dog into space. What happens if an alien catches the spaceship and then the aliens are like, oh. This must be this must be one of the creatures that down in that planet Ark below. All right, let's go say hello and they open up the capsule. And it's a fucking dog in a space suit, and then they go, all right, OK.

He must have built this for me. He's not one for talking, is he? Jesus Christ. Fuck me. And he built this spaceship and he doesn't even have hands and are looking at the dog's paws wondering how the dog was able to build such a complicated electronics. And he's panting and licking, you know, so if the aliens found that dog, they just go, all right, here's the intelligent life. We can't fuck this.

But like, if aliens now we're like, concerned about us and concerned about our like our fossil fuel consumption, because if I was an alien, a really smart alien, I'd be like, damn them, planet Artman. They're using all the resources. You know, they're they're drinking up all that oil. We can see that the carbon is becoming a problem.

We need to warn these cons about fossil fuels so the aliens come down, they land in Ireland and they they go to petrol stations because they want to warn us about fossil fuels. And then all they see is a lot of fucking crows. Walking around. And more close than human eaten chicken, Federal's looking like they're driving cars, so the aliens are going to give the message to the crows, they're going to walk up to a crow and say, once the crack, Mr.

Crow, I see your hair in your petrol station. What all your friends. We just need to warn you, it's really important. You got to stop using this shit, the crawl, just cause Karkare and the aliens fuck off. And then. And then. And then the human. Walks out of the petrol station with his four sausage rolls and says that a cruel what'd I miss and the cruel does not give me three sausage rolls. So like, I couldn't do a full podcast on sausage rolls because that's about the time I am happy with that theory.

No, because that theory just popped into my head like. For economic pick, because sausage rolls in petrol stations are marketed so aggressively that nobody buys one. Instead, we buy for that. It's not human food, it's actually cruel food. And it is changing the behavior of clothes and cars and clothes to stop flying and to start behaving like an overweight travelling salesman from feathered. Just hanging around his Opel Astra, but I could do 90 minutes on a chicken Phillip Federal because it's not just a piece of food.

As I explained, it has all this cultural baggage. It has value as a main. The chicken fill role says something about our sense of identity and the pint of Guinness. Does the same thing. So what I'd like to interrogate for this week's episode, what I want to establish a thesis around a such is. What is the pint of Guinness in 2021? What does it say about us as Irish people? What does it say about Irish identity and what makes.

Guinness are just part installed in general, what makes this significant is which they can fill it roles. Like that they just Chicken Federal's just have. They have cultural significance in the past 10 years, and that's it, and they didn't exist before and. But Guinness has existed for a long time. So Guinness has always had cultural significance as an icon, not just something you drink, but something you hold in your hand. And it says something about you and your you're trying to communicate something about yourself with it.

And also, the pint of Guinness holds a cultural value that we would like to have a little piece of. You know, when when you have your pint of Guinness in your hand, it's not just a delicious drink. You're trying to say something about yourself, you're trying to be part of a community. It stops being a drink like the chicken federal. It stops being a sandwich, the pint of Guinness, it is both a drink and something else.

And I want to figure out what that something else is right now in 2021, and also kind of what that something else was to our parents and our grandparents. So Guinness pint of Guinness, like I mentioned, they've always been present in Irish culture. Right. Going back 250, 300 years. Recently, the current Guinness discourse and what has shifted the meaning of Guinness to the current generation of young people, I think is an Instagram page.

And this is why I'm getting so many questions as well. This is why people were saying to me blind, why can you do a heart attack on Guinness or why? Last week, I was asked to contribute to an article about the significant significance of Guinness. The reason that's happening is because of an Instagram page that was started about a year ago. And the Instagram page is called Shit London Guinness. It's got over 100000 followers. It started by an Irish lad living in London.

And all the Instagram pages is it's terrible. Pints of Guinness in pubs all around London. Guinness served in a Foster's Glass, Guinness served in a Heineken Glass. Guinness served in like one of those weird Italian beer glasses, terrible looking pints of Guinness. And it has tons of followers and it creates huge discussion amongst Irish people. And if you look at the comments, you know, you'd have a terrible pint of Guinness in a Heineken glass and it looks disgusting.

And then all the comments underneath there are very performative. And I don't mean performative in a negative way. I mean, people would comment under the terrible pint and say, oh, what a crime against humanity and their tag, their friends. And it's like a performed Irishness. It's fun. We're not offended that the Guinness is poured terribly. We're pretend offended. We're performing our offence as a way to have fun and to bond. So shit. London, Guinness and its sister page, Beautiful Pints, which is an Instagram page full of beautifully poured pints of Guinness shit.

London Guinness has now created a new discourse around pints of Guinness and a new kind of rallying for identity. So I want to get to the bottom of that, which I revisit at the end of the podcast. But before I do that, let's look at Guinness historically. Let's look at Guinness psychologically and the Irish psyche historically. That's what I am interested in. So I've got listeners from all around the world. I don't think I need to explain what a pint of Guinness is.

Simply, it is it's an alcoholic drink stout. Which is. A type of beer. Which is black in color with a white head and the taste is it has a complex taste. You know, it it has a taste when you taste it for the first time, you're going to go, Oh, what's that? And then you begin to love it.

Guinness has that I don't know what the name for that is, olives have its coffee, has its dark chocolate, has its. You know, if you tasted coffee for the first time, like if you'd never tasted coffee, if you didn't know what coffee was and I gave you an Americana, you'd go, oh, my God, what's this? Weird. Bitter? What the fuck? And you'd hate it, and then the next day you'd be thinking about it and you'd want to go back and sit again and go, I want to taste that horrible thing.

And by day three, you love coffee. Same with olives. Black olives in particular, it just has a complex, intriguing taste. And there's no middle ground with Guinness, you either love it or fucking hate it, but most people, most people acquire a taste until they really, really love it. And it's made in Ireland and it's an Irish drink and it's Irish stout and it's our national drink. And in the absence of a food culture, as explained in the previous episode, we do not have a food culture.

We have a drink culture. The pint of Guinness is the closest thing that we really have to a fuckin food culture. You know, if French people have got their cheese, Spanish people have got their cured meats. You know, we've got our fuckin Guinness, we have our Guinness, that's ours, it's our tradition. We have strong opinions about this. It's it's truly ours, it's our identity, and not only is it is it part of our identity, it's it's our identity internationally.

You think of St. Patrick's Day, what comes to mind? Green hats to know what the fuck that's about. Leprechauns. We don't give a fuck about leprechauns. All right. This is all American shit. Pints of Guinness. That's the shit that we're still doing. So when you think of Patty's Day, pints of Guinness, everyone around the world knows the Irish bar. Go to the Irish bar, have a pint of Guinness, come to Dublin, drink again.

It's in Temple Bar. It's there's many factors to the pint of Guinness, so let's what I'm trying to understand something I always use the alien metaphor like a dead Aaliyah. If aliens found the crows in the petrol station, what would they say? Well, if aliens if I'm trying to understand Guinness, which is difficult to understand because I'm so close to us, I've grown up with Guinness of Guinness is so ubiquitous to Irishness, you don't really give it any critical thought.

It's just there all the time. So you don't really give a critical thought. So when I want to give some critical thought, I think, what would an alien think? I think one thing I find interesting is if an alien arrived in Ireland in the 1910s, in the 1920s, in the eighteen hundreds.

And he saw all these Irish people drinking pints of Guinness, and if that alien was to say to themselves, what's the crack here? What Ireland? Wow, there's an awful lot of priests for me, the Catholic Church is is incredibly powerful here in this country.

And what do the people do? All right, OK, so they're they're very Catholic and they go to mass every Sunday. And then what does the man at Mass say are? The man at Mass says that wine is blood. So they involve themselves in some type of strange cannibal ritual where the priest man tells the Irish people to drink the blood of this other man. And there's this strange drinking and cannibalism thing going on. And then when you go to the pub, they seem to drink little glasses of priest.

So that's the first thing I would say if I was an alien and I didn't know anything, I'd say, isn't it strange that these Irish people who listen to all these priests who have Blackshirts white collars, that when these Irish people go to enjoy themselves away from the priests, they drink drinks that look exactly like priests? OK, I find that interesting, you might be thinking Jesus Christ blown by, you're overthinking it, but if I was an alien, I'd simply go, why is this historically deeply Catholic country that's run by priests?

Why is their idea of fun to drink a drink that looks exactly like a priest? A pint of Guinness looks like a priest. OK, black shirt, white collar. That's what a pint of Guinness looks like, it looks like a priest and then the priest tells us to drink blood and eat Christ. So we already have a culture of very strange ritualistic cannibalism and now we're also drinking priests. So I find that interesting. What I also find really interesting is.

So the Guinness Company and Guinness, they started making Guinness in 1759. Now this is just me with some mad hot takes. I'm just doing some mad hot takes. If I was an alien, what would I be saying? What things do I find interesting? I just find it interesting that in 1759 in Ireland. At that time, there were the penal laws and what were the penal laws, the penal laws were for about 100 fucking years from the sixteen hundreds up until the seventeen nineties, there were these laws in Ireland that were specifically against Catholics, OK, the British ruled Ireland and the penal laws were very oppressive and.

A Catholic couldn't marry a Protestants, Catholics were forbidden from like public offices, so they couldn't have jobs that were important. Catholics were forbidden from access and education. Catholics were forbidden from holding a firearm. You couldn't have a gun to defend yourself. Catholics couldn't inherit land from Protestants, how a Catholic past land if a Catholic did Hadland, how they passed that onto their offspring was. I could go on and on. Systemic oppression. Into the law was written incredibly deeply oppressive laws against Irish Catholics, right from the sixteen hundreds up until the 17th 1990s.

And what it basically did is it disenfranchised the Irish Catholic population. It created a Catholic population that lived in some of the worst poverty that's in Europe at the time. It created a generation of Catholics, no access to education, no access to language forbidden from practice in their religion. And you didn't have people who couldn't read or write, people who weren't allowed to speak their native tongue. Extreme extreme oppression, which then laid the groundwork for the famine and.

I just find it interesting that now another another important thing about this is when you disenfranchise an entire population like that over the course of generations, right. And you deny people access to any type of upward mobility and create extreme poverty and deprivation, that also creates a culture in which addiction thrives. OK. Alcoholism and Ireland, that's not a myth. All right, we tried we have had serious problems with drinking going back hundreds of years, and it's no surprise that's why wouldn't you have a culture of abuse of alcohol when you have that much disenfranchisement in the population?

So I just find it interesting. The hot conspiracy theorist in me is like, you're in the pain laws. You have this dark, poor population. And then there are now drinking these drinks that look like priests, but who's making the drinks? Ah, this this brewery called Guinness, OK, and Guinness, which was founded in 1759 at the height of the penal laws, were a very, very Protestant company. Guinness was a straight up Protestant folk and company after Guinness, the founder of the company, was a Protestant unionist who descended from a Protestant fucking family.

He was a colonizer of Ireland. So. Also, the Guinness Guinness only employed Protestants, they did not employ Catholics, they were a very anti Catholic company right up until fucking in the 1930s, lads. All right. Up until 1939, right now, this is the Irish. The Brits are gone at this point. Up until 1939, if a Protestant Guinness worker wanted to marry a Catholic, he had to resign from the company. So like during the 1916 rising, when the Irish rebels were occupying the GPO to try and get independence, eg Guinness donated a lot of lawyers to the British army so they could turn them into makeshift tanks in in 1913.

Lord IVI, who I think was like a great grandson of Arthur Guinness, Lord IV was like again part of the Guinness family that controlled Guinness in 1913. He gave a hundred thousand pounds to the UVs in 1913.

In 1980, Guinness Guinness seriously considered completely rebranding as an English drink and disassociating itself from Irishness completely because Guinness felt that Irishness meant the IRA. So Guinness were like, we can't be looking like a drink for Paddy's in their mind. In 1980 to the Guinness Corporation, Irishness meant terrorism and they were like, let's get the fuck away from that and pretend now that we're in English drink. And that was a serious plan that they had. And they didn't go ahead with it.

They didn't go ahead with it, probably because of the strength of Patty's Day. These people did not like the plain people of Ireland. They did not they were they were supremacists. They were unionist supremacists who would have heavily identified as British. Guinness has always been anti Catholic, anti Irish independence. This drink that we think of as being the Paddy's drink, the people making it were not paddys. Anti Catholic Irishness is in the very fiber of the history of the Guinness Company.

And this is a company set up by a Protestant unionist at the height of the penal laws, actual systemic oppression designed to. Eradicates at the Irish Catholic population, let's be honest, so I just find that why am I saying it? I find it really interesting. It's really fucking interesting. I'm not trying to be all Wolke. I'm not trying to be Wolke and say our lads don't drink Guinness. It's the drink of the oppressor. I'm not saying that at all, 2021.

What I'm saying is that it is it is a fact that the Guinness company was unionist, explicitly anti Catholic, selling an intoxicating substance to a mostly Catholic population whose alcoholism was as a result of collective trauma. So that to me seems a little bit there's a cynicism there that's cynical and the drinks look like priests. That's cynical to me and very interesting. Am I saying don't drink Guinness? Absolutely not. Guinness is delicious. Drink away. And if if you're thinking, like, that's a bit too far blind.

Boy, that sounds like a conspiracy theory. Look at what the British did in in China. In the eighteen hundreds, the British flooded China with opium specifically as a way to dominate and control. They did it. They did it in China. Look us look at the way that the US, the Reagan administration, in the Nixon administration, in the US, look at what they did to the African-American community in America. They at the same time that crack cocaine was flooding African-American communities.

They highly criminalized it so that they could lock up mainly black people for possessing small amounts of crack. And they also this was all happening at the same time that they were drawing funding from like education, health care, effectively destroying and disenfranchising the community and then creating the community conditions for addiction to be endemic. So it's not too far fetched.

Let's. You know, it's not too far fetched to paint laws, what a thing that's not conspiracy and penal laws deny people education, the right to vote, the right to own land, the right to have any hope. You're creating a situation whereby an addiction will be endemic. And now you have members of the Protestant ascendancy, very wealthy Protestant unionists selling people the drink that is feeding that addiction. So I don't think that's too far fetched to take it all.

And sometimes I get a lot of people saying to me blind, like, you're always blaming the Brits, why don't you shut up about this? This anti British have shut up about this. People need to move on. You're going to start things up. And what I say to people at that, all I'm doing is I'm taking a deep colonial view of history. We were colonized, so I'm working my way backwards to look at the actual colonization.

The penal laws was actual colonization.

And this fear, the fear of don't talk about our history, don't talk about the history because it's too uncomfortable and it makes the the British Empire look bad. And then Irish people would get really angry. We need to move on. That view is a colonial view. That means your soft minded. All right. This view of Irish people don't look at your history of oppression, because if you do, you will become uncontrollably angry and hateful towards the British.

That's a colonial view that denies US intelligence criticality agency. Who the fuck wants us to think that that's that's the old the old classic cartoon of the Irish as this aggressive dynamite monkey, it's basically saying don't pick up a book, don't read, don't read and pick up a book and learn about your history because it will unleash the animalistic anger within you. That's a colonial view. I don't take that view at all.

I am an intelligent, compassionate person and I'm capable of learning about and reading about my history and learning about the evils of the British Empire, while at the same time loving English people, Scottish people, Welsh people as my fellow human beings and not holding them responsible for the actions of their great, great, great grandparents. I'm an intelligent, compassionate person and I can do that and you should do it as well. And there's nothing wrong with looking at our history from a colonial perspective.

Have some confidence in yourself as an Irish person. Don't don't don't buy into the lie that were violent and stupid. So regarding Guinness, the beautiful pint that we all enjoy, if it's roots, if its roots are from this anti Catholic Protestant ascendancy unionist company, a car company who did not like Catholics even though they were selling us drink if. That's where it begins. Then how did how did that become our national drink? How is that synonymous with St.

Patrick's Day? How is that the most Irish thing possible?

Well, I'd like to talk about how psychologically we reclaimed it, we reclaimed the pint of Guinness. And made the pint of Guinness our own and. We made it, Oz, and we saw ourselves in the pint of Guinness and we made the pint of Guinness like Oz. So I'd like to explore a bit of that now after the ocarina pause, OK, because I got a little heartache about the Irish psyche and the pint of Guinness. So here's the ocarina, because you're going to hear an advert, I don't know what the advert will be for the advertiser algorithmically generated, so everyone gets a different advert.

I don't think Guinness advertise on my podcast. I don't I don't think that do. And here we go. Here comes the airplane and there goes the piece, you'll find expert advice on weening at my child hotel from the HSI.

So that was the Anchorena pause so that you didn't suddenly get startled by an advert because sometimes the adverts are very loud and the interfere with the podcast. So if I play the ocarina, you have a little warning. And support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the patriae on page.

I occasionally have the odd advert on the podcast, but only if, only if I'm cool with them, they have to play by my rules and I turned down quite a lot of sponsorships have gotten better for podcasts in Ireland, but I turned down quite a lot of sponsors because I don't want them on the podcast are. If if if an advertiser is like we're going to advertise on your podcast, but you must now change like this, this podcast. Talking about that, the history of fucking Guinness, talking about the negative history of Guinness, that's a lot of fuckin potential sponsors last right there, but fuck them, who gives a shit?

Because if you want to come and advertise in this podcast, you can play by the rules or not. It doesn't matter because this is a listener funded podcast. This podcast is funded by you, the listener, via the Patriot page, Patriot dot com forward slash the Blind by podcast. What does this do? It gives me full editorial control. To make a podcast about whatever I want, whatever tone I want, no one tells me what to do, complete freedom making podcasts for you.

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So I'm at the earliest stages of the very, very earliest stages after having taken a hiatus. So I'm only on Twitch once a week now on Thursday nights at half eight because I'm too busy writing. So if you want to see me live streaming on Twitch, come along and chat with me. Have it start that Thursday nights, twitch that TV forward, slash the plan by podcast. It's called Crack. So the beautiful, lovely creamy pint of Guinness, which I'm sure all of you are thinking about and can't wait until we're back in a pub until we can actually drink a pint of Guinness.

Where's my hot take? So here's one hot take historically regarding Guinness and Irishness. I view it the same way I do the English language. OK, so. My theory there, that's Guinness was created during the pain loss by a powerful Protestant unionist family and. It's sold massively in conditions which allowed for alcoholism. Like also during the panel. We were forced to speak English. You couldn't speak Gaelic, you couldn't speak your native tongue, this was criminalized, this was punishable.

So we started to speak English, a foreign language, a tool and an instrument of oppression, something that you're forced to speak, something that you're forced to speak to eradicate your culture and identity. But we spoke as. Then we made it our own, we made it the English language, our own, we made it into high bano English, you couldn't force it on us. You try and force English on us and we'll find our own way to speak it.

And then we would say, fuck you, we're going to create the greatest writers in the English language, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce Flynn O'Brien, the list goes on. And we reclaimed in the English language something that was forced on us and made it our own and. Empower ourselves with. And that's what the pint of Guinness is. I do initially view it as a tool of oppression, but we reclaim that, we reclaim that unmade in our own.

So the pint of Guinness that you hold in your hand and you drink and that brings us together and that we can rally around as as Irish identity. That's not the same pint of Guinness that was sold to people 200 years ago by a company that had had its customers. So how the Irish reclaimed Guinness is we brought into that drink, into that pint. The pint tells the story of our emigration, the pint of Guinness. So Irish. Irish people had to travel all over the world.

One thing that we've always had in our culture, for as long as Guinness has been around, we've had to emigrate, we've had to leave our country either forced and taken away or had to leave because of things like the penal laws, the famine, our just lack of work. We've had to go to Australia, we've had to go to the West Indies. We've had to go to America. And everywhere we went, Guinness followed for, you know, the shitty conditions that were created at home and in Ireland when we left, it created a demand for Guinness and a demand for Irish pubs.

And one of the things about Guinness that makes its unique. Two will say just a lagger or even wine or anything else, you know, why am I talking about what makes gannets so special? What's the iconography of it? But one big thing around it is Guinness and travelling. Guinness doesn't travel well, is what we like to say are the Guinness doesn't taste as good there as a taste here, Guinness is never allowed to just be a drink.

Guinness is something which is it's at its best in Ireland, and then depending on where it travels to, it tastes different. And our goal as Irish people, depending on what country we go to, is to find the place with the Guinness, the travelers, the best, the one that tastes like it does back home in Ireland. And I can't think of another drink like that. Even with fuckin wine, wine has all its vintages and it's grape and it's years.

But I don't a source. I never I'd never hear someone saying, you know, being in a restaurant in Australia and saying, can I have some French wine drinking it? And then Senad, be better back in France. Now you don't. It's like the wine is from France and I assume it has travelled well. And even though I'm in Australia and I'm paying a shitload of money for it, I'm essentially drinking French fucking wine here and it's really good.

But with Guinness, it's like not a fucking whole body. What do you mean tasted it doesn't taste right, we're in Sydney and the skin is taste different and you sip it and you go, Yeah, it doesn't travel, Guinness doesn't travel well. And there's an element of truth to it. There is an element of truth to it. But we also grossly overexaggerated. We we as Irish people, grossly and performative overexaggerate Guinness and travelling and how well it travels and how well it does and travel.

And the best pint of Guinness there and the best pint of Guinness here. And like I said, to an extent, that is true. My favorite type of Guinness, because I don't really like Guinness for me. I'm not a huge Guinness drinker. I drink Guinness socially, if I'm meeting people, I'm having one or two pints than that pint would be a pint of Guinness, right. But if I'm at home having cans, I like Polish cans.

I'm not going to buy cans of Guinness. But if I need to drink Guinness at home for enjoyment, I drink Guinness, West Indies Porter. And what Guinness West Indies portrays is it's it's based on a recipe from the eighteen hundreds. There's Guinness, West Indies, Porter and Guinness for an extra export. Those are the two that I like. And basically what these Guinness is are is when the Irish were in the West Indies. And why would the Irish in the West Indies, because a bunch of Irish were sent over there as indentured servants.

I've spoken about this in other podcasts and they then became slave owners, of course, but there was a lot of Irish people in the West Indies. Guinness is huge in Jamaica and. When the Guinness was traveling from Ireland to the West Indies, it wouldn't travel well, it wouldn't. By the time the Guinness got to the West Indies, it wasn't right. So Guinness West Indies partner is they added extra hops and they added extra alcohol. So it's a very happy Guinness with a high percentage of alcohol.

It's got between six and eight percent alcohol. So that's the Guinness. I like the drink when I'm at home because it has more of a kick to it. I like it. But that exists because Guinness didn't travel to the West Indies back in the 18th century. Now I'm sure a travelers fine with modern technology. So that's an actual example of of Guinness not travelling well where they had to create a new recipe. So it would make the West Indies in the fucking eighteen hundreds on ships that took six months in wooden barrels.

But there's also the real the performative element of Guinness not traveling, I'll give you an example here in Limerick. Now, Lemrick is three hours from Dublin, so we have this mythology in Limerick where where we're a little bit jealous of Cark down in Karkh, which is the southernmost part of Ireland. Cark has its own stout cock, has got Beamish. So Beamish is stout, which is the same type of beer that Guinness is. And it's it's Cark exclusive.

The car has its own stout limerick, used to have its own stout. Now it does. Now it's got Treaty City Treaty City Brewery, which only opened in the past 10 years. But 150 years ago, Limerick used to have its own brewery that would make Limerick Stout, and that's what people in Limerick would drink. But then Guinness build a canal because here's the steak. Guinness couldn't travel on horseback from Dublin to Limerick by the time the Guinness went on wooden barrels on the back of a horse on cobblestones in the 18th century.

By the time it got to Limerick, it was shit. The head was gone. It was all the bubbles were gone. You couldn't drink it. So Guinness, the fucking corporation or the company, they built a network of canals around Ireland. I'm one of them led straight to Limerick. So now, 150 years ago, they could put the Guinness on a barge up in Dublin and it would make a really gentle journey all the way down to Limerick on a boat.

And when the Guinness got the limerick, it was lovely. But then what did that do? It shut down LYMErix brewery. So Limerick now no longer had its own Parta. But Cark was too far. No matter what you did, even when you got as far as Limerick with the Guinness, by the time it got dark, it was shit. So Car got to keep its brewery car had Beamish its own stout. And we in Limerick have this mythology where we're jealous of fucking Cark because they got to keep their stout and Guinness round our brewery.

So what I think we've done as Irish people with the pint of Guinness is that we've written into it the story of our own journey of travelling. OK, and what I mean by that is that it's to the immigrant, to the person who went to Australia, to the person who went to America, and this is going back 200 fuckin years. The pint of Guinness represents the Irish journey to get to that place.

You think of how the pint of Guinness is poured, you know, it's it goes straight into the fuckin glass and it's this Darma dark cloud, not unlike the waters that someone would have been looking at when they were on a ship travelling to America, are travelling to Australia. They looked down and they see these dark waters. And then in as the pint of Guinness starts rumbling in the glass and rising, you know, the white foam rises to the top.

And this reminds us of the waves, the white crests of the waves in the murky black dark waters. And then most importantly, what you have to do with the pint of Guinness, and this is what separates Parta are stout from other drinks and particular Guinness. You have to wait for your Guinness. You can't just drink it straight from the tap. You got to chill the fuck out and you have to wait. And while you're waiting and staring at your Guinness as it becomes the perfect pint, I think because I'm looking at a at a Guinness settling is.

It's a visual beauty which is on par with looking into a fire. It's so intricate in how the bubbles rise and how the colors go from brown to cream to black. It's a beautiful thing to watch and you can't not watch it, just like the way you can't not watch a fire burning. I think this this point class, when you do that to the human mind, it creates a contemplative space watching your pint of Guinness settle and rise immediately. It's a contemplative space.

You get a little moment of flow. Seeing these complex patterns you naturally reflect while staring at the pint of Guinness. What's also fascinating about Guinness is that it's the language, the language around it. You must wait for a pint of Guinness for it to settle. Like, liquid doesn't I don't associate liquid with settling. I never look at a glass of water and say a glass of water needs to settle or even a pint of lager and say a pint of lager needs to settle.

Settling. Settling is the opposite of travelling. The language of travel has now been brought into this pint of Guinness. People settle.

Liquid doesn't settle, sediment settles, mud settles, people settle, liquid doesn't settle. So why do we have a fuckin drink, which is, you know, drank by immigrants and immigrants far away from Ireland with this drink?

That settles what the Irish psyche has done is we've we have.

We've projected in the narrative of our own journey of immigration onto these little black drinks, that's what we've done. And when you're over in London or you're in Australia or New York and you're missing home and you you have this little drink and the Irish people around, you have a toast and the drink settles. And yet finished the narrative by taking a sop. You've completed a little journey, a little story that makes the Irish person feel as if I've made the journey, I've made the journey, I've done the big trip.

I'm here now. I'm settling. I'm settling. And the obsession with this Guinness not travelling well, which is hyperbole. It's an exaggeration. The exaggerated performance of NA, you get the best Guinness there, you get the best. It's not the same as it was back in fucking Limerick. It's not the same as it was back in Mayo. You're just you're imbibing the the the immigrant narrative journey into your drink. That's what it is. You're imbibing a narrative into it, a narrative that doesn't really exist.

Certainly not nowadays. Like, OK, I've been in America, the Guinness taste slightly different in America, not because it doesn't travel, because it's made differently in America, in Australia. Australian Guinness has a slight taste of strawberry to it.

Very strange, but the Guinness in England, it's the same shit that's made in Dublin. You're not going to taste the difference. And anyone who says they're tasting the difference, you know, it's it's performative. They're pretending now can be poured badly and then it tastes different.

And it's tied in as well with the Irish pub, like when I first started touring and doing gigs, going to Canada, going to Australia, going to England years ago, like a tradition within the Irish community, when you go to West to Sydney, when you go to Toronto, one of the first things you do is you search for the Irish pub and people say, why do you do that?

You have to settle yourself first. You have to set yourself first. Set yourself in the Irish pub. If you're in New York because you get overwhelmed, you'll get overwhelmed by the tall buildings. It's all to know. So go to the Irish pub for everything in there. Looks exactly like back home. The windows are blacked out. You might as well be in Talas. Settle yourself in the Irish pub, have a Guinness. The Guinness settles. Drink your own journey.

Drink a pint of the journey that you took with the dark, murky waters and the fucking waves rushing up and drink that journey and then you settle and that's what the Guinness is, that that's that's what it is we've reclaimed it by. That's our food culture. We've we've we've invited the narrative into a fucking drink. And then you get to hold it and you get to look around at the other Irish people and they're holding the same drink. And it's like wearing a badge on your fist, a drink, a beer fest badge.

But above all, the pint of Guinness is.

It's reliable, it's reliable, you rely upon it, you want you expect and want consistency with it. You never want to points to be different. Every point must be perfectly poured, taste the same. And that's your pint of Guinness. You're settled Guinness. That's fucking reliable amongst the pressures and chaos of life. And the best example of this within culture, of course, is the poem by Flanner O'Brien, who my favorite writer, Flynn O'Brien, wrote a poem called The Workmans Friend.

And this is a poem about a pint of Guinness, which is I think he wrote it in the 1950s. So he refers to the pint of Guinness in this poem as a pint of plain, because in Dublin vernacular, at that time, a pint of plain was just simply a pint as a point, a stout. But it's about Guinness. When things go wrong and will not come right, so you do the best you can when life looks black at the hour of night, a pint of plain is your only mind when money's tight and hard to get and your heart has also run when all you have is a heap of death, a pint, a plain is your only mind when health is bad and your heart feels strange and your face is pale.

And one when doctors say you need a change, a pint of plain is your only mind. When food is scarce and your ladder bear and your rashers grace your pain. When hunger grows as your meals are rare, a pint, a plain as your only man in times of trouble and lousy strife, you have still got a darling plan. You can still turn to a brighter life. A pint. The plain is your only man.

So that's Flanner O'Brien just saying a pint of plain is your only man and what that is, that means reliability, rock solid. No matter what the fuck happens, no matter what shit is going on, you can have a fuckin reliable pint of Guinness no matter where you are in the world. A nice pint of Guinness will go around you.

And I like that poem, but it annoys me because. I fucking adore flannel brain, and that is that's not his best work. That's that's not even funny. Not even amongst his good work, to tell you the truth, lads. But it's his best known work, and that bothers me. It's like when fucking David Bowie died and everyone started talking about his appearance in Labrinth and I just had to turn off the Internet and go, David Bowie is dead and you're talking about fucking Labrinth or he played an elf a.

It's like that it's it's it's his best known work, but fuck me going retard placement, so my my historical heartache on Guinness. It was a painless drink to oppress the Irish people. And then we reclaim this as something into which we could write the story of our own emigration and then drink that as a way of settling ourselves. So Guinness now Guinness in the age of Meems Guinness as it what does it mean to millennials will say and Generation Z and.

I was dropped I started off the podcast by saying that I was asked during the week to contribute to an article about Guinness and the person right in the article Parly, he drew it drew my attention towards a rubber band sketch from 2010 that I'd forgotten about, called the Rubber Bandits Guide to London. And there's just a little bit in the sketch for me and Mr. Chrom are in London in an Irish pub, and the kind of sketches were sitting down with two pints of Guinness in front of us.

And we're going, I'm scared to drink it. I'm scared to drink the Guinness Y in case it's different to the Guinness back home. And I'd forgotten that, and I was. When I wrote Das. I was actually taking the piss out of all the lads that wasn't something in 2010. That young lads would say to each other, I was taking the piss out of our lads, that's like something we were in an old Irish part of London.

And this Guinness not being the same back home thing was something that I heard from, like my dad. So I was taking the piss out of that then. And the comedy from it was the absurdity of two lads in their early 20s were genuinely worried that a Guinness in London is different to a Guinness back home. That was an antiquated idea, and that's why I thought it was funny in 2010, and I'd forgotten about that completely. And I found it amusing.

Now that this has returned as an acceptable position, this is now an acceptable position that once again, the Guinness is different back home than it is abroad. That was a that was a fucking dark weekend. If you look at that sketch is where the rubber band that's going to London, literally those two pints of Guinness in front of us were the first ever Guinness I had drank outside of Ireland. It was my first time in London. It was my first time in London.

And that was, you know, legally being able to drink as well. But yeah, that was a dark weekend. R.T. brought us over. And RTA cars are cheap, cheap fuckers and. They put me up and they put me up in a hotel room, or your man, Dennis Neilson, had murdered a lot of people and there was vomit behind my headboard and horrible, freaky fucking hotel. And then I looked it up afterwards and Dennis Neilson had murdered people there.

So that's what I remember, rather my first thinking as I remember staying in Dennis Nelson's hotel room, that the first of two occasions where I unwittingly stayed in a hotel room where a mass murder occurred, the second time being in 2013 where I stayed in Queen Street in a street in Sydney. Is it Sydney or Melbourne? I think it's Melbourne, Queen Street in Melbourne, where the Queen Street massacre occurred. My my hotel room and bed was on the floor of what the Queen Street massacre occurred and several murders happened while my bed was.

So that's twice unwittingly that's happened to me. Back to Dennis, why is this no definition of Guinness in 2021? What is what is a pint of Guinness mean to us today, what does it say about ourselves? What does it say about our identity? So it's it's changed slightly.

So far, firstly. I do not associate a pint of Guinness with getting drunk. OK? Our parents generation might have because when you went to the pub in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, you had a choice of three drinks from the taps and it was usually Guinness. Some type of lagger, and if you're lucky, Seida, and that was it, and in a good bar, they might have bottles. So people drank Guinness to get aurally paste.

But culturally today, a pint of Guinness doesn't mean getting really, really drunk. It just doesn't.

A pint of Guinness today means responsible socialism. That's semiotic, that's what it communicates, a pint of Guinness as people use it on Instagram. Think of it if you look at Instagram and your friends are out.

And they all have pint of Guinness and nice smiles on their faces and they're, you know, posing for a photograph on Instagram pre covid, it doesn't look like they're out for a mad one. It looks like we've gone to the pub for conversation as nice, responsible adults, and we're going to slowly drink our lovely, perfect settled pints of Guinness. We're going to slowly drink these and talk and maybe have three and no one's getting shitfaced. So the pint of Guinness doesn't connote drunkenness to Irish people in 2021 to Americans.

Yes, it does. They go I'm going to go to the temple bar and drink 90 Guinness and get pissed. That's not what Guinness is today in Ireland. Of course, people are still drinking it and get drunk, of course. But that's not what it communicates. I think what Guinness means today to millennials and I say millennial, millennial is basically anyone from the ages of 25 to 40. That's a millennial. You can kind of include a bit of GenZE in this, but they might be a bit young for it.

A pint of Guinness means I am an adult. That's what it communicates. I am a responsible adult and I'm having a Guinness now. I might have one or two and I'm going to sip it slowly with friends on a work night because I've got responsibilities in the morning. I'm an adult. That's what Guinness communicates today. Taking a photograph of a beautiful pint of Guinness and posting it on your Instagram is also a thing that we do. Everyone wants to get that perfect pint.

It's you post the pint of Guinness and it's like saying our work is finished. I'm relaxing, I'm chillin. I'm having this. Isn't it beautiful? Look at this lovely pint of Guinness. I'm going to appreciate this drink. I'm going to drink this slowly with friends over conversation. And this is going to be nice. I'm a responsible adult now. I mentioned at the start of the podcast, one thing that has signified this new meaning of Guinness for me is.

The Instagram page, Shetland and Guinness. OK. The people. So here's what here's what's interesting about the London Guinness Instagram page. It was started by a fella called Ian Wright, and Ian had recently moved to London. He's from Cork and started to notice shit pints of Guinness in various pubs in London. So, again, it's it's exercising that Irish immigrant thing. It's Guinness doesn't travel well to London, but it's not it's not the Guinness problem this time.

It's the cultural knowledge of how to correctly fetishize and pour the perfect pint that has not travelled well to London. And now you have all these buyers who think it's appropriate to serve Guinness in a Foster's less so by calling it a London pint. What you're doing basically is your stamp in your Irishness, your authenticity. So this page shitting on the Guinness, it's got 100000 likes most the Irish people. So if it has 100000 fucking likes in a year, that means it's really popular and it's it has its finger on the pulse of something cultural.

Now, what I find really interesting is Ian, who runs Shetland in Guinness. He used to run a main page, a very popular Irish meme page called Humans of the Sesh. Now Humans of the Sesh. Was an Irish main page that fetishized the sesh, right, and this was about 2015, 2016, and the lads who were creating this page, they would have been 19, 20 at the time when they made humans of the sesh and the audience would have been about that age to humans.

It has also created the phrase which became a meme, big, massive bag of cans with the lads. Now big massive of cans with the lads was something everybody would have said like five, six years ago. Big, massive bag of cans with the lads and the sash and humans of the sash. What that meant was people in their early 20s drink in a big, massive bag of cans at a festival or at a house party, drinking really cheap cans just to get drunk and fucked up.

And shit, London Guinness is now made by the same people, except there are about 26 27. So the fetishization of the perfect pint of Guinness, it's just like a step up from the. The person who engages in the sesh, the sesh is a mad explosion of drink and drugs and partying in a house party like when I said earlier, when I see a pint of Guinness on Instagram, I don't associate that with someone. Get drunk, what you associate with people getting drunk is photographs of cans in someone's house.

People don't really get drunk in the pub. A car should get drunk in the pub. But like, pints are really expensive. Pints are really, really expensive, so people tend to get blind, shitfaced, fucked up at house parties, at sessions, and then when you go to the pub, that's more. Drinking responsibly now people still get drunk, but gone mad is festivals and house parties, the pub is is losing its potency as a site of drunkenness in Irish culture, if that makes sense.

I'm not saying it's completely lost its potency. It's losing the potency it once had as a site of drunkenness. And the House party in the has taken over from that. But yeah, but I think the current fetishization fetishization of the perfect Guinness pint as it appears on Instagram, as is represented by the average person who likes the page Shetland and Guinness, it's a marker of adulthood. It's people who are now 26, 27, who five years ago.

We're having a big, massive bag of cans with the lads are engaging in the sesh now, these are people who have jobs. They might live in London, they might live in Canada. They have responsibilities. And now they're finding a responsible way to drink the pint of Guinness.

The pint of Guinness in 2021 has almost become the glass of wine. It's almost a glass of wine. You don't go mad on Guinness, you sip it slowly with friends, you appreciate its aesthetic beauty. To Schola Pint of Guinness is to waste a pint of Guinness. You have to truly enjoy it. It's narrative and I think that's a good thing. I think that's really healthy and it's a sign of it's confident. There's a there's a great confidence in that.

To to appreciate your point again, is is a confident act, it says I'm capable of restraint, I'm capable of appreciate anesthetics, I know who I am. And it's very far removed from the image of the pint of Guinness as it's represented in in Paddy's Day in St. Patrick's Day, which is more of an er an American view, which views pint of Guinness as getting utterly shitfaced, like even in America.

There's a type of Guinness that you can buy in America that you can only buy in America. I think it's called Guinness Lager. Basically what it is, is that it's a weak American lager that's just black with a white head. So it's not an actual pint of Guinness. It's made by Guinness. But all it's far is for Yanks and Patty's Day who can't deal with the taste of Guinness. So they have to have this fake black beer that looks like Guinness just for the photographs and this this recent fetishization of Guinness, where it's been it's been it's it's been culturally raised as like I said, something that's analogous to I didn't say that right.

Analagous. That's a word out there. There you go. Now, I've just learned a word I can't say analagous, analagous. I've only ever written that down. I've never said it out loud and and analogous. In 2021, a pint of Guinness is an analogue of a glass of wine amongst Irish millennials. And I don't mean a glass of wine. When Irish people drink a glass of wine, we can't really drink a glass of wine because we go look at me.

I'm a responsible adult drinking a glass of wine, but I'm also classy. That's what Wayne means to us. We're not ready for wine yet, wine is fancy, classy and posh. OK, Guinness is not what I mean when I say that's a pint of Guinness is becoming an analogue to a glass of wine. I mean, the way a glass of wine is to a millennial in France or Spain. If a person in France or Spain or Italy has a glass of wine, they're not looking at a glass of wine gone, look at me, I'm sor posh and fancy with my wine.

They're going, no, here is some wine. It's part of my culture. It's not expensive. It's an adult drink to be sipped amongst friends and appreciate it. And that's what Guinness has become. It's our wine. It's not pretentious when an Irish person drinks a glass of wine in that way there's an element of pretension. It's I'm a responsible adult, but oh, aren't they also classy with my wine, with Guinness? It's quite simply here's a fork and pint of Guinness.

This is mine. It's my culture. This is my drink. And I'm sipping this with friends socially. And isn't it beautiful and it's very wholesome and it's very authentic. A couple of things have done this, in my opinion. The disappearance of nightclubs, the fact that, like I said, pubs are in in Irish culture, pubs are no longer becoming exclusive sites of drunkenness, sites of drunkenness, 10 more to be house parties. Instagram has played a large part and then the absolute explosion of this over the past year coronavirus.

You know, why is an Instagram page with just beautiful pint of Guinness becoming so popular in the past year because we can't fucking have them, we can't have them, we can't go to the pub and have the beautiful, perfect pint of Guinness because there are closed because we're in lockdown. And I remember in July when lockdown was lifted slightly and we could get a pint in a restaurant, everyone was talking about, oh my God, we've been in lockdown for three months.

I can't wait until my first pint. It became an unwritten, unwritten rule in Ireland that if you're going to post your first pint, it must be Guinness. People were getting shamed for post and pints of Heineken, pints of Perrone, people were getting shamed. The fuck you post this for? This is your first pint in three months that you're allowed. Have you were only allowed to post a pint of Guinness? So the Guinness has become over fetishized because we can't really have it.

The other thing with Guinness, too, you can try your best. What a can at home. Guinness from a fucking tap in a pub is a different experience from Guinness in a can, even if there's a widget. So it's now over fetishized because we can't fucking have it. It's that simple. Unless you've got a tap in your gaff, you're not getting that perfect.

Pint of Guinness was Guinness. What was Guinness seen as like a responsible mark or heard of I am a responsible adult with their shit together and I'm not going to go mad. It was it was it this way 10 years ago, Norfolk and wasn't. I'm I'm going to tell you why not. Because I'm going to tell you I'm going to end this on the tale of Arthur's Day. Actors de. After they was fucking mad actors, there was a very short lived annual event from 2009 to 2013 and I fucking remember it, OK, Arthur's Day was it started in 2009 as the 258 anniversary of the Guinness Company.

And basically like what it was Ireland tried to do Patty's Day to. We tried to have a second Patrick's Day because 2009 was the height of the fuckin recession, the country was fucked. Everyone had emigrated. The only people left who were young or students that was is so Ireland decided we need to have another St. Patrick's Day in September because this might bring some tourists and people will drink and good God, we need money in the economy. So Guinness invented this fictional day called Arthur's Day, which was an absolute fucking disaster.

I think it was like at six o'clock, everyone had to raise their pint of Guinness at six o'clock to Arthur and said to Arthur, the fuckin Protestant unionist who hated Catholics, everyone had to raise their glass to Arthur. Right. But really what it was, is now, I remember have been fucking great because. It was around the time Hasso site. We had a we had a huge fucking hit and all these hits on YouTube and our our career as the rubber bands went really big at a time when the recession was fucking terrible and all the young people were gone.

So we couldn't get any gigs. There was no one had money to go to gigs at all. So even though our songs were doing well, we weren't doing fucking gigs and art and money because there was no young people. So what happened is ATA's there was it actually meant you got fucking paid. So we I think we gigged every single day in some venue in Dublin and got paid really well to do it by Guinness because it's not ticket sales.

But it was carnage. It was basically a giant drinks promotion and tourists didn't bother coming over for this. Unfortunately, as well, when the fuck was it, man, it was at the end of September, which coincided with a lot of fresher's weeks with college, so the level of fucking debauchery and public drunkenness that actors they caused was unparalleled. There was no tourists around. It was just drunk students from the country in Dublin. Getting their first taste of being unspeakably drunk and Guinness became synonymous at that time because it was after that the Guinness was cheap, was an expensive and a lot of places were just trying it out for free.

So you had this never ending Fokin, Guinness, everyone was a rat arsed. And what I tell you what caused the end of the day, it was at the start of.

Like 2010, people sharing things on YouTube and sharing things on Facebook. And videos started to go viral of instead of Guinness wanting to see actors, this big celebration video started to go viral for the first time of unbelievable public drunkenness. And I know I tell you, the video that Fokin ended is because it went viral on YouTube and it went viral on Facebook around 2010, 2011. And I remember it well. It was just. Temple bar, about a thousand students jumping around singing, and it's the middle of the day, it's clearly like three o'clock in the day and everyone is so, so drunk.

And a circle emerges in the middle of Tampa bar and everyone screaming and roaring. And then into the Sakala. These two lads of about 19 or 20 start dancing in the middle of the circle while everyone's cheering around them. And there's bottles smashed on the ground, people are thrown glasses. There's chaos. The two lads are really happy, but they're in an ecstatic drunk trance. It's not healthy, whatever type. It's like it was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

I'm going to do a podcast on Hieronymus Bosch, but it was really was like a vision of hell in Temple Bar on Arthur's Day. And there's all these pints of Guinness flying around the place in plastic glasses, too, which is never a good look. And people throw gayness in the air because it's free. So these two lads, anyway, a circle emerges and they're dancing in the middle. Then they stripped down completely naked. So now you have these two fully naked young men drunk and one of them starts rolling around on the ground on broken glass.

And now there's blood all over his chest. But everyone is just screaming and raw and entranced in the sheer debauchery, this awful energy. So one that has blood coming down his fucking neck and chest, 40 naked. And then he grabs the other man, the other the other by as blood drips down his chest and he picks the other man up, picks his naked body up and holds him like a guitar as the people, the drunk people of Dublin cheer.

And then he starts playing his dick.

Like a guitar, he starts holding the other the other man like a guitar and playing his dick. As bloodstreams down his chest and then actors there was over. And that was it, it was just we can't do that again. This is going to hurt Guinness. This is going to hurt Guinness more than the fuckin IRA. And that video went viral and actors there ended 2013, Don, no more. This is not a play and that's what Guinness meant in 2011, that Guinness was fucked.

It was like, this is the drink that you drink to roll around on the cobbles of Dublin in the wet freeze and rain at two o'clock in the daytime, get naked, roll around in glass and play your friend's dick like a guitar. That's what Guinness means. So I just think it's fantastic in 2021 that it's gone full circle. To now mean and those lads, there are probably part, you know, those lads, God bless them, with the blood on their chests, Planeteers decks, they're probably 30 now.

And I'm sure they might even be listening to this podcast lady. I'm sure they're now on Instagram with their lovely, perfect pint of Guinness going, look at me, man. I'm a responsible adult with my perfect pint of Guinness. And I have a job and responsibilities and I'm certainly not going to slice my chest open and play someone's dick. So that's my hot take on Guinness. That's my take on Guinness, I hope you enjoyed that. I'm sure there was a lot of shit I wanted to talk about.

Was there, yeah, yeah, one redeeming thing, one redeeming 2010s thing for Guinness, and it kind of ties in as well with Chickenfeed, it rose to.

Barack Obama visited Ireland in. I think it was a 20, 2012 was about 2012, so Barack Obama visited Ireland. Now, as I mentioned last week when Barack Obama visited Ireland, the village of Moneygall, in enough to visit his is because he had Irish ancestors, his ancestral home.

We built a petrol station in his honor and with some fine fucking clothes there today and sausage rolls. We built a petrol station in his honor because that's what we do now in Ireland and. But also. Just a stone's throw from Barack Obama Plaza. Was it called Officemates, what was the name of the Pobby Winter? A stone's throw from Barack Obama Plaza, Barack Obama went to the little village of Moneygall, his ancestral home, and he went to the local pub, Ali Hazes, because they're still dining out on it.

They're still they have a caricature of Obama. Barack Obama went to this little Irish pub. And any time a foreign dignitary or a famous person comes to Ireland, they have to drink the pint of Guinness. Sometimes a famous person who's in an Irish pub is asked to go behind the counter of the bar and pull a pint of Guinness, which if you were a famous person listening, never do that because you're always going to get it wrong. Don't go behind the bar and publicly pull a pint of Guinness.

You're going to get it wrong and you'll be judged. So when a famous dignitary comes to Ireland, they have to drink a pint of Guinness no matter who the fuck it is. And we judge them. We judge them on how they drink it. Barack Obama fucking nailed it. Barack Obama, he was in the pub, is like, here's his ancestral home, he's given the pint of Guinness, right? And he just drinks it. He.

He really did a good job, it was it was good for his image, it was good for the image of Guinness. He's given the pint of Guinness perfectly poured. And then where he sepsis, he sips the Guinness like someone who's just done a hard day's work, who was really looking forward to it. He takes about an inch, a good inch, a proper gulp. This was someone who has drink. It was drank Guinness before. This is someone who appreciates it, who enjoys it.

But he was able to communicate.

I have worked for this pint. I have worked for the cause. The first super Guinness is always the big one. That's the first stop of the first point. That's the big soap. And then the rest is sipped. He went straight for it. He nailed it. And actually that was 2011. So Barack Obama's fantastic sipping.

And when he does it as well, the whole pub just goes away because he did such a brilliant job.

A sip in the pint. At that moment, it's like he's a party.

His great grandfather was from Moneygall. This man's a paddy. You're Irish. That was real proper Guinness Folk and drink and Fairplay to Barack. But all is all that good work was undone. By the lad who played his friend's dick like a fucking guitar with blood streaming down his chest. All right. God bless. I'll talk to you next week.