All Bola Boss Yukon's Welcome to The Blind Bye podcast. I want to I've got a a little hot take this week, a historical journey, heartache that I want to try and get into as soon as I can. Rather than dilly dallying at the start, if you hear any excessive noise on this podcast. Like a whirring sound. Are a breathing sound. That's that's the sound of my computer on its last legs. The computer that I use to record this podcast is full to the brim and is wheezing.

Because because they are I ordered a new I ordered a new computer lights in Fokin, December, Middleford Brenno and I ordered it from Germany CustomMade Audio Computer and it's been hell getting it here because of Brexit.

So. The computer parts of it arrived here, but then English customs lost an essential part of the computer because it was in several packages, they lost an essential part about two weeks ago. So that's gone. And then the company had to resend. So today I thought, I'm going to have my fucking new computer today because the last piece was supposed to arrive today. And then I get a text this morning from the courier saying the package has been seized by UK Customs and they won't release it unless I pay a Customs fee.

Which should not happen because I'm ordering the computer from Germany, which is an EU country, and I'm having it sent to Ireland, which is an EU country, but in the process of that, it must move through England as a land bridge. And England isn't in the EU because of Brexit. So they have no right to seize my computer and try and charge me a customs tax. So that's why if you hear a. If you hear excessive wheezing in the background of my computer, it's it's the Brits, I can blame the Brits for this one.

Let's Brexit means that there's a wheezing noise in the back of this week's fucking podcast, soap opera. I guess this is this the second podcast I've released this week. You spoiled boys and girls. And I released a bonus podcast yesterday.

Because it was it was a sponsored episode. So I released a bonus podcast about the 70s, like Japanese electronic group, Yellow Magic Orchestra. So if you like my music podcasts, go and listen to that podcast that I released yesterday called Yellow Magic Orchestra. If you're a brand new listener. Go back to the start, listen to some earlier episodes, this episode that I have here might be might be a bad start. And so, yeah, also last week's podcast, let's.

What I did a big, long ramble about, about will say online media versus television and radio. One thing I want to clear up, right, because I kind of so here's the crack. I referred to Irish TV, Irish radio and newspapers as mainstream media.

And I use this phrase quite a bit and on listening back. I shouldn't use the term mainstream media, I should have instead referred to it as traditional media. And I'll tell you why the phrase mainstream media has a toxic undertones, in particular in America and a little bit here, but mainly in America. People who are conspiracy theorists are people who are like avid Trump supporters. They'll use the phrase mainstream media. And when mainstream media is used like that, it's used quite disingenuously to discredit facts and truth, to tell it to be honest.

So when I was using the phrase mainstream media last week, that's obviously not the context. I was using it in the past, I should recall. That was traditional media and that's what I meant. That was the context and intent that I was using. And I wasn't like trying to discredit the integrity of. The news as such are discredit the integrity of professional journalists, know, what I'm saying is that traditional old school media, newspaper, TV, radio, these powerhouses that have money behind them that are traditional.

They're quite different to online media, so I sort of should have said traditional media, but I listen back and I said mainstream media so many times, like 70 times. I couldn't go back and edit it, so I'm just clear on that one up when you see that someone saying the phrase in the phrase mainstream media, often that person's a prick and is espousing the views and opinions of a prick. So into the topic of this week's podcast, it's definitely a hot take and it's definitely historical.

How I write this podcast each week. Sometimes, right? And it's it's becoming rarer and rarer, especially with the pandemic, because of the because it is pandemic and quarantine and not receiving much external stimulation into my brain and having the same four walls around me all the time, my creativity is down my mind. All my creativity isn't necessarily down because I work on it. My moments of inspiration are down. When you're a professional artist, moments of inspiration may happen throughout the day at any point.

I could just be washing the dishes are looking out the window and then a fully formed idea, we just arrive in my head like it was sent from the fucking heavens. And when that happens, fucking fantastic. And the scale you have to develop is right down the idea. And that used to happen quite a bit before the pandemic because I'm engaged in a lot of activities that feed my unconscious mind, such as speaking with human beings, going to the gym, experiencing the spontaneity and chaos of life, and then ideas come.

I'm not getting a lot of inspiration in the pandemic. So for my ideas, I got to work hard and I got to work and I got to research for the ideas to come. The do come. I just have to work. So how I kind of write this podcast is. I take I take note during the week of high arousal, moments will say. If I read an article or if I see something on YouTube or whatever, or if I'm listening to a podcast.

If I receive a piece of information and this piece of information causes me to pause or to contemplate or to have a strong emotion, then I immediately take note of that thing. I saved the article. I put it into a little into a little folder or whatever. And if an idea comes alongside is our little thread of thought, I write that down as well, because I know if I receive what I'd call a high arousal moment about a piece of information, that's my unconscious mind telling me.

There's a heartache here somewhere. Something about this thing you just heard is, is the idea is already in your unconscious mind. It's already there and you formed it in that moment. But the language of your brain will not allow you access to the idea yet. So what you have to do is pick this thing you found, then spend several days researching around it and the idea, the heartache when reveal itself to you. So last Friday. I just saw on on the news there was a ruling in the UK about the company, Uber and Uber are.

They're like that taxi company, you can't get Uber in Ireland, but the corporate headquarters of Uber is based in Limerick where I live. That's the European headquarters. You know what fucking Uber is? It's the taxi app. But anyone can be an Uber driver. You don't have to be a taxi driver and have Uber eats as well, which is like delivery. But the problem with companies like Oba is. They're Uber drivers, anyone, if you want to be an Uber driver, all you need is a car and the fucking app, and then you become an Uber driver and you get to earn money being an Uber driver, being a taxi person, essentially.

But the problem is Obama doesn't recognize their drivers as employees. Instead, I think an Uber driver is technically like a self-employed contractor. And some Uber drivers are like, yeah, that works for me, that's fine, but it's the thing is, is that it's in a gray area with labor laws, labor laws, laws that were fought hard for. So Uber drivers don't have a guaranteed minimum wage. They don't have protection around the working time. They don't have holiday pay all this shit.

Right. They're not called workers. And if Uber don't call their work or workers, then those workers are not entitled to workers rights and work workers rights. That was a hard battle to get what we refer to as workers rights, so anyway, court in London ruled UBA must recognize their drivers as workers and the workers now must fall in line with the rights that they are entitled to as workers. And this is the ruling. And it's it's a victory.

It's a victory for workers rights. And it's a good thing.

But the high arousal emotion I had around that piece of information is.

I was pissed off at myself for being happy about it, and I was pissed off that it was in the news as a victory that we had to be happy about, because it's like I said, basic workers rights are things that were hard fought for. People died for these things. These things came about because of extreme exploitation of humans during the industrial revolution and basic workers rights, such as minimum wage protection around how many hours you can work, holiday pay, health insurance, all this shit had to be fought for.

So I was really angered by it's like, why the fuck in 2021 are we celebrating something that we shouldn't have to celebrate in the first place? Because I thought. This shit had been won already 150 years ago, but I guess not not with these big tech companies. So I was annoyed by that. And if you've seen my BBC series. Blind by undestroyed, I did a full episode on work and the gig economy, as it's called, and how new app based companies basically subvert and get around workers rights by redefining language and why that's a big problem in the 21st century.

And it's a tough one, too, because, you know, we're all stuck into the system of it. So we all use these apps. We use these apps, we use these we avail of the services of these companies that are subverting the rights of workers by their very their model. Their model supports these rights. And it's tough as well as a Lemrick person, because Limerick is a very poor city. Our city centre isn't particularly active, we say, and Uber having the European headquarters in Limerick City Centre.

Improves the quality of the city center. There's small restaurants and coffee shops and a bunch of shit that's open because Obama's headquarters are in Limerick. So it's a toughie, but it got me thinking about labor rights and unions and the history of these things and. It got me thinking of will say, the big companies and corporations 200 years ago who used to exploit workers and the ways that they used to do it. And another thing you reminded me of is.

A lot of companies 200 years ago used to do this. This model called the company town, like coal companies, used to do this in America. They would have the company town. And what they would do is they'd build a mine for coal or silver or whatever. Then they would build an entire town around the mine. And they would directly provide for the workers, so if you were a miner and you worked for a mining company in Pennsylvania, will say mining coal, you lived in a house that was provided by the company.

The company owned your house. You lived in a house that was given to you. By then, you add a lot of your food at work, which was provided for you and the company provided for the needs, the basic needs of the workers.

But it removed a lot of autonomy and freedom that the workers had, but it also massively exploited the workers because that's now a toxic relationship develops there. If you're a coal miner and the company you work for owns your fucking house, feeds you all your food, if you don't have that, you not only don't have a job, your family are completely homeless, then that relationship is that coercive and it's exploitative.

But thankfully, you know, America had a thing called the Cold War is like and shit like this used to happen in England, too. People rebelled. People died. People were shot. To achieve the basic rights so that things like that couldn't happen anymore, so that workers had health care, the right to unionize. The right to not work for an 18 hour days, the right to sick pay or holiday time and all these things that we take for granted, this was hard fought for, but a lot of these big tech corporations in particular.

They figured out a way to kind of return to an extent, to some of these exploitative models by changing the language and stuff, and it doesn't look that way. And I was thinking to myself, this company town shit doesn't exist anymore. And then I went online on a minute, like up in Dublin. Think there's a massive housing crisis at the moment in Ireland, a huge, huge housing crisis, or in Dublin in particular. Rent is some of the highest in the world, and people can't afford property, and it's destroying an entire generation of people, to be honest, especially if you live in any any Irish city, but Dublin in particular and.

One solution that the Irish government so here's the thing with Dublin, if you're not from Ireland, Dublin is a little bit like San Francisco, all the corporate all the headquarters of these tech corporations based themselves in Dublin because they can effectively launder money in Dublin, they can get away with paying less than one percent tax. In Facebook, Google, you name it, they're all here not paying tax and the Irish government, this is a beneficial relationship for the Irish government because it helps our GDP.

It provides employment. So the Irish government allow this to happen, but effectively. Dublin's a little bit like a company town when I mentioned there about we say in America in the eighteen hundreds where you had these coal towns where the mine, the company mine owns all the property and provides directly for the people. But as a result, you end up with an exploitative relationship where the quality of life is reduced for the workers. Dublin's a bit like that.

But they've they've changed the language, they've changed the parameters, so it's hard to see. So, like, yes, all the huge corporate headquarters in Dublin do provide employment, but those same corporate headquarters are a massive Raisen. That's rent is so high because they buy up all the they buy up all the property for the workers they stand contributes to a massive shortage in the rental market. You've got Airbnb now. I know that's after Chillun out now because of the pandemic Airbnb headquarters in Dublin, Airbnb, after making sure that Dublin and then the government respond by announcing this plan known as call living.

Called Living Spaces, so the Irish government's response to. And when I say young people. I'm talking fucking people up to the age of 40, let's, you know, call that young if you want. People from the ages of 20 to 40 have great difficulty living comfortably in Dublin, find them property, being able to afford rent. So the Irish government's response to this was we're going to introduce this thing called coal living spaces and waxhaw living spaces are is.

It's like if you're a young professional in Dublin and you work in a tech company, then you don't need an apartment. What we'll do is you get to have a bedroom with a toilet and then you and 30 other apartments will all share the same kitchen and the same living room. It'll be just like an episode of Friends. But really, it's not what that is, the tenement and tenements are a Victorian way of living that was considered unsanitary and unsafe.

And now in the course of an environment like these, these four living things, they were suggested two years ago in the corporate environment. Now, like you can't have safety within something like your living.

People shouldn't be forced to share a kitchen with 30 people. People shouldn't be forced for that is their only option. All right. And also to still be paying ridiculous rent in order to get that and. The Irish Independent then posted an article last year for one of the developers of these called Living Spaces. They were challenged and someone asked them, look, do you do you think it's OK? That's. Fokin, 20 adults are paying huge rent just to have a bed and a toilet.

Ah, just to have a bed in some situations and then that these 20 people should share the same kitchen or share the same bathroom or whatever, and the developer turned around without a hint of irony and said, well, a lot of these young professionals that are going to be living in all living spaces, they already work in Google and Facebook and their meals are provided for them. Their meals are provided for them, so they won't really need the kitchen, it won't matter, to be honest, they're just going to spend most of their time in the fucking office and just coming home to sleep a little bit.

And the thing is, they're probably right now, I explored this in a previous podcast. What's the fucking name of it? I think it's correct and penpals, but. I I basically compared the modern take office environment to the Tom Hanks film Big, I have an I have a hypothesis that the modern tech office environment, which contains like Facebook, Facebook and Google, these places up and down in the modern office environment, which has pool tables, ping pong tables, a fridge full of beer pizzas every Friday, all this stuff that tech companies do for their employees, which make the workplace really fun.

These things aren't the company doing a nice thing for the employees, what they're actually doing is they're fostering a relationship based on parent child dynamics. And this also ties in with the millennial condition whereby millennials had 10 years taken off. And because of the last recession, some millennials are a millennial as anyone from 25 to 40. Millennials are we're in it, we're in a stage of delayed adulthood, right? I'm a fucking millennial. I've got a plastic bag on my head.

Let's we're in a state of delayed adulthood, all right? And that's what our generation is. We like comic book films and we fetishize toys and objects and things like that. And it's grand. It's fun, it's grand. But we are in the delayed adulthood isn't the problem.

I love playing video games in my thirties and that being OK, I love that. I think that's healthy and good. The delayed adulthood isn't the problem. It's the economic conditions that created the delayed adulthood. It's you're not having any children until you're in your 30s, you're not on a house if you're lucky, until you're into your 30s, these things, that's the bad part, which has pushed our adulthood off by about 10 years because of the Great Recession of the 2010s.

And then with GenZE, I mean, I'm not fully sure the crack would with GenZE yet, but it's like all your 12 year, you're 12. Here's a good video of someone, an ISIS decapitating someone. How are you getting on now that you're 20? How's that going for you? That's the shit that GenZE kind of had to have to put up with. I mean, at least when I was fucking 12, the worst I'd ever see is is a an eighteens video from extraversion.

But tech officers exploit this by fostering a parent child relationship with their employees and basically gone, it's Friday, it's pizza Friday. You don't have to wear a suit. It's cold. All we've got a bouncy castle jump up and down in the bouncy castle like a good bye, daddy. Facebook's going to give you some porridge for breakfast. Yum, yum. Do you want your dinner? Daddy and Mammy Facebook is going to make you dinner. So when you work in a tech company, everything's provided for you.

Everything's really fun and cool and colorful. But I'll bet there's no unions or anything. It's at the expense of autonomy and rights to get what I'm saying. And it's a really, really friendly.

Joe Biden version of. The fucking coal mining town, the company town, it's the same shit, it's the same fucking shit. So Dublin is effectively a company town for big tax, big, big tech that's laundering its money here. And it's flat out evidenced by the developer of a coal living space, having the audacity to say the grown adults spending 800 euros a month to live in this coal living space. I know 20 of them are sharing a kitchen, but they won't use it because mommy and daddy Facebook gives them breakfast, lunch and dinner for free.

And the office in Facebook is so nice. It's so relaxing that you're just going to stay and work till 10:00 at night and they won't leave until they can get to go home. I've been in San Francisco. It's worse than San Francisco. If you're in fucking San Francisco, you don't even have to you don't even have to get a taxi to work. There's an entire. Fleet of private buses that take the workers directly to and from work like little kids, and then the workers are dressed like children from 1992 with their game boys.

And again, I'm not shitting on millennials fetishizing Toys R games. I do it. I love it. I think that's healthy. I'm not disparaging it. And I think it's a lot healthier than the performed, solemn adulthood of the 1980s. GOP we say, for instance, it's part of a system. It is part of a system that's exploitative. It's infantilizing it's an infantilizing relationship with the structures of power, with the people that are paying wages.

So as this week's podcast about that. Yes, kind of. And this is going to be a bit of a stretch, but it's a train of thought. And I'm going to lead through Detroit. And I'm I am interested in the fact that superheroes and comic books and superhero films and comic book films are the current cycliste. All right. And they have been for about 15 years. We live in a society where the one of the largest cultural outputs in cinema is the creation of superhero films made for and directed at grown adults.

That's a fact. That's an observation of a culture. And also the same adults who are being distracted by superheroes, we say, and the artifacts of childhood. The same adults are also seeing workers rights being peeled back, workers rights being degraded, rights which once existed, being taken away on the sly through a covert exploitation of our delayed adulthood, as I explained there earlier, with the workplace shit. So I have a heartache like a weirdly full circle in history.

I think I can demonstrate, OK, how? 16TH century Irish folklore created the modern superhero and not only created the modern superhero, but directly led to the collapse of company towns in the coal mines of 19th century Pennsylvania and the creation of the modern workers rights that are now being sneakily peeled back by tech corporations because we distracted by superheroes. No, it's it's it's an incredibly high tech. It's fucking Forest Gump bothering a stranger at a bus stop level of heartache.

But that's why you're here. That's why you're here listening to this podcast. Let's not fool ourselves. So a common theme in this podcast all the time. And something I'm fascinated with is the Irish footprint. I write the cultural footprint of the Irish people. We are a small country that have had to emigrate all around the world for many, many years because of the oppression we faced, so the cultural footprint and the influence of the Irish order on the world is massive, absolutely massive.

And I love to trace these. I love to trace this cultural footprint for good and bad. And I do think it's a lot larger than we actually give it credit credit for. It is a lot larger. So let's take it to the seventeen hundreds in Ireland and the pain laws have been passed. OK, the penal laws, the. We're an incredibly oppressive set of laws that lasted more than a century, OK, Ireland had been colonized by Britain being colonized since the 11th hundreds, but really properly colonized from six, aggressively colonized from six hundred onwards.

There was a minority of what was called the Protestant ascendancy. These were rich English people trying to take over Ireland. And then you had a majority of Irish Catholics. The pain laws were brought in to persecute Irish Catholics. And then, like some Presbyterians, I think, as well, but mostly Irish Catholics. And it wasn't really a religion, a religious thing. It's it's much more of an ethnic thing. The laws were brought in to eradicate, kill and subjugate the native population.

That's what it was. All right. The Brits wanted us dead, simple as that. They wanted us dead and gone. What were the penal laws? They were a set of very aggressive laws. That meant if you were part of the Irish Catholic majority, you couldn't really own land, you couldn't have access to education. You weren't allowed to practise your religion. You couldn't hold public office, you couldn't have a weapon, a set of institutional racism with the intention of disenfranchising, disempowering and eventually eradicating an entire population culminate in one hundred and fifty years later in the Irish famine, which killed two million people and another two million left.

If an Irish Catholic was to violate one of the penal laws, then they were shipped away. They were shipped to Australia, they were shipped to the Caribbean. They were shipped to America. OK, so that's the scene. I'm saying basically is Ireland in the seventeen hundreds is a country of explicit and blatant systematic oppression and. An insanely downtrodden people, but interestingly, what one of the cultural artifacts that emerge from this period in the culture of the Irish Catholic majority was.

A love of folklore characters that were called like outlaws, like outlaw characters, but the interesting thing with these Irish folklore outlaw characters that people came to love during the Paintless was they share a huge amount of similarities with pop, with what we would call modern superheroes. So if you are part of the Irish Catholic majority in the seventeen hundreds, you could not go to school. You had no access to education. So what would happen is the Irish Catholics used to have to attend what was known as a hedge school and a school that they were called hedge schools because they said like it was a school in a hedge hidden away in a bush.

It was usually like farmhouses and shit. But we call them hedge schools. And it was where you went to get an illegal education. And often the teachers were priests. But it's where Irish people went to learn how to read, to learn how to write, to learn their native tongue of Irish, which was outlawed to fight the attempt to colonize our mind. You're not allowed to read. You're not allowed to write. You're not allowed to speak your own language.

You're being canonized. You're being eradicated. But people said, no, I'm a human being and I want to learn and I want to learn my own language and I want to learn my history. And I want to fuck and have a bit of meaning in my life. So kids went to schools secretly, covertly. Now, a lot of these kids learned how to read on a type of book which was known as a chapbook. And a chapbook was a really, really inexpensive pulp, like Pulp Fiction, like Pulp Literature.

It was a really, really cheap paper book. That you could purchase at FARE's for Fok Armony, and they were often counterfeit books as well, and some of them would be in the Irish tongue and some of them were in English. But if you went to a hedge school, chances are the books that you were reading and learning to read what these chap books which were like pirate books, like pirated books. But the thing with these chap books.

Because they were a form of pop literature. The stories in them were the stories of these Irish outlaws, these Irish folklore heroes, right? So all these kids were learning the stories of these outlaw heroes while they were in high school. Now, the thing with these Irish outlaw heroes that were in these stories, they would have been similar enough to we'd say Robin Hood, like these characters stole from the rich and they give to the poor. And there was biblical themes as well.

A lot of stuff from the Bible would have found its way into the narrative of these heroes. But what made them unique, too, is they were specifically they were fighting the fuckin English. You're in a school, right, in extreme poverty, in the penal laws. And the country is being run by this minority amount of English English cunts who are killing your fucking neighbors, bloodshed and murder. Your life means nothing. So you're in your secret school in a hedge.

And if anyone catches you, you're dead. You're sent off to Barbados, are off to Australia or to Virginia. So you better believe your heroes are fighting the fuckin English. They're outlaws who are fighting the English landlords every single day and taking their money and giving it to the poor people of Ireland. And also what these outlaws did is they instilled a sense of of kind of justice and morality. If you're living beyond the penal laws, there's no justice there.

There's no justice there, but these are deliberately constructed laws that exist to eradicate and disenfranchise, so there's no justice there.

What if you lived the life of the penal laws being the only law that you know, then there's no hope because you're born an Irish Catholic, you're never going to own land. You're never going to own a horse. You're never going to have a weapon. You can never become anything other than dirt on the ground today. So the outlaw hero instilled an alternative balance and alternative law, a new type of justice and a new type of morality so that you could live life with a sense of meaning or pride or dignity.

Because if you live life by just going to penalize, have me fucked, then you can't have any meaning. Daio or Hogan, who he's an academic who writes about the Irish outlaws of the seventeen hundreds. He said that English administration was of basically alien nature to the bulk of the people. And the inbuilt injustice of such an authoritative system accounts for the wide variety of social types who functioned as outlaws. It also accounts for the great quantity of Irish folklore, which heroism those acting in contravention of legal ordinances.

So from the penal laws, this new type of superhero emerges. In the fucking head schools on these shitty little chat chatterbox, these shitty little paper books that cost nothing. So let's look at some of the the commonalities that all of these outlaw heroes had in this fiction. Right. In this folklore. The first thing is. The outlaw, the outlaw is is there never an outlaw because they're bad? Something really horrible has happened to them in their life.

Something was taken away from them. They were downtrodden and they're fighting back. So even though they an outlaw, they're outside a law that isn't moral. They have a new code. All right, so some great pain has fallen upon him at a young age and something was taken away from him by a big, dark, rolling power, and they're now outside the they're fighting back against that power. The other thing that the Irish outlaw character had was they were supernatural, but supernatural in a way that they it's like nature worked with them.

The animals and the rivers and the horses worked with this outlaw character. The Irish outlaw character had a communication and understanding and relationship with the land and the environment that the evil English landlord didn't. And this gave them supernatural powers which can, you know, which can be viewed as well as that can be viewed as you have to remember at that time with the English to. The English in the seventeen hundreds where you have to remember, Ireland was a temperate rainforest, Ireland was covered mostly in trees and this business you see today of no grasslands, that's not natural.

The English did that. And during the colonial period of the 70s, hundreds, they were clearing forests. The English were clearing forests, putting up pastureland, filling it for the cattle that they owned and then exporting all that. And this is what was contributing to the famine in Ireland. So there wasn't just the famine of the 40s. There was a famine at the end of the seventeen hundreds, too. So the English were contravening natural law in Ireland by destroying a change in our landscape.

Oliver Cromwell personally was responsible for the extinction of our wolves when there was any resistance against English troops. Irish, Irish kind of fighters used to use the woods, the woodlands and the thick brush for guerrilla warfare. So the English would just clear that land. So what you have there, too, is why wouldn't the Irish outlaw hero have this magical power that they can connect to the land of Ireland when you have an oppressive power, putting the penal laws in, clearing all the land, filling it full of pastureland and exporting all the animals.

The other thing that was common with all of the Irish outlaw heroes is they were chivalrous, they had respect, they were respectful to women. They were respectful to old people. They had a sense of morality. They had a sense of politeness, and there was a manners to them. They weren't rude. They were never violent for the sake of us. They also were very well dressed. They were well dressed. They looked nice. They looked after themselves.

They had a sense of dignity. And what you see there is it's like no matter what shape was thrown on the outlaw, they could still find happiness and meaning and they could still have the dignity.

To care about something as basic as their appearance and to have self-esteem, because, again, you've got a system of laws that are trying to take these things from you. What you also had with the outlaws is. They would whenever they stole money from the English in in their stories and then their tales, they always gave money back to the poor and also they never took more money than they needed. So if an outlaw robbed some English soldiers, they would only take the king's money, but they wouldn't take anything belonging to the soldier.

They would have the respect to let the soldier go and say, I'm just taking the king's money here. And then they distribute that the population. And the saddest thing with these outlaws that they have in common, they never won. They were always betrayed and they were always sacrificed. They never won. And. For me, that's probably the Catholicism, it's that's what it borrows from Christ. You know what I mean? Betrayal is is a very biblical thing.

Adam was betrayed by Eve in the garden. Christ was betrayed by Judas and then sacrificed betrayal is a team with all of these, somebody that they trust, the outlaw trusts a person, and then that person betrays them usually for money, and then the English kill them. And this always happens with the outlaws and Dior. Hagon says the heroes are victorious in individual episodes and toss head to preserve the morale and self-respect of the downtrodden folk. But they are, in the last analysis, the heroes of a conquered people, of a culture that's been pressed to the last lines of its defenses.

And it's no coincidence that their ethnographic present is the island of the penal laws. So the sad thing about it is that even though the Irish had these outlaw heroes, the penal laws were so fucked up and so oppressive.

That you still had that sacrifice, they still lost at the end, but the hope was still gone. So I'd give you an example of one of these outlaw heroes that would have been being read about in these chat books and would have been a hero to the Irish people in the 70s. Hundreds of radical Red O'Hanlan, now Red O'Hanlan, like he was a real person. So there was Red O'Hanlan, the real actual person, and then there was Red O'Hanlan, his legend and myth.

The real red O'Hanlan was a highwayman. He was a robber. He was a Tory. And this is this is the mad thing. In the seventeen hundreds, the word Tory meant outlaw are robber. It came from the Irish word tauro. It meant outlaw are robber. And when you hear in English politics today, the Conservative Party, the Tories that comes from that. Sometime around the six hundreds, I think. Outlaws and robbers in Ireland were so demonized by the English, because if you're an English person with a bit of money and you're trying to go along the road, some Irish jumps up from up from behind the back and says, give me all your money or I'll kill you.

And these were the Tories, the Tories. So the word Tory was a huge insult. And the Conservative Party in England today, I don't know how they ended up reclaiming it, but they're called Tories because 400 years ago, somebody called them Tories as an insult by basically saying you are the same as those scumbags in Ireland who fucking robbers.

And that's why Tories are called Tories today. But read O'Hanlan, the real red O'Hanlan was a Tory. He was a highwayman. He was a robber. But a fictionalized version of him got written about in these chat books that were being read in hedge schools and to the kids. He was a fucking hero to fictionalise read O'Hanlan.

Right. So he starts off his life, Red O'Hanlan was born to a wealthy like garlic chief and family. So the Gaelic aristocracy before the Brits came, he was born to one of these families.

But then the Brits, like, burned down all his family lands and took everything away and read O'Hanlan had nothing because the Brits took it all the way and killed his whole family. So then read O'Hanlan became this fucking amazing robber who do nothing but robbed the English soldiers and take all the money from the king and take it all and give it back to the poor people of Ireland. And he would dress immaculately and he was sound to your granny and women loved him and he was funny and charming and he could talk to craws and he could get up on the back of any horse.

And he used to. He used to. He used to hunt down priest hunters. And priest hunters were a real thing during the paintless they were agents of the Crown mercenaries who were given money to track down Catholic priests and kill them. And if you're in a hedge school and you are a kid, the priest is the person giving you education, giving you food. The priest is the one teaching you your native language. And this priest who's teaching you is in danger of being hunted down by men who are being paid to kill him in real life.

This was happening. So the fictionalized version of Red O'Hanlan used to hunt the priest hunters. He would find them and get vengeance and kill them. And then as well with Red O'Hanlan. He was born with a cross in his on his chest and he had a magical chart and his magical chart that he wore was impenetrable by bullets. So the English would fire bullets at Red O'Hanlan. They just bounce off his chest and then ran. O'Hanlan would take out his own gun and shoot all the English.

But the thing is, the only bullet that could penetrate Red or Hanlon's magic shot was the bullet from his own gun. And then finally, Red O'Hanlan died by gunshot wound and no one knows who did it. But you know that it was done with his own gun, which meant it was someone close to him, a friend that he trusted, a woman that he was riding, whatever. He died by his own gun, which means someone close got to do it and penetrate his magic shot.

And that was the story of Red O'Hanlan. And what I find fucking interesting there, just Superman. Superman was a rich kid on a planet Krypton and his fucking parents. Said, fuck this, Krypton is and sent him off down to earth. He's, you know what he want, the wonderful life he had is gone now. He's a nobody on earth. And he fights justice with his magical schadt. The bullets bounced up, bounce off, and he's chivalrous and he fights the right baddies and he gives back to the poor and helps people.

It's Superman. So these stories are. The template for what becomes the Marvel superhero in 17 hundred Ireland, then you had an outlaw hero by the name of Brennan and Brennan's schtick is Brennan, used to steal from landlords, steal the rent from landlords and give it back to the tenants. And some of these stories they like, they really stand off today as being really good stories, like there's a story about Brennan. So Brennan, again, who's a robber, an outlaw highwayman.

Brennan has gone along the road down in car. Right. And he meets a peddler who's selling goods. So the peddler is a merchant. And it's the thing is with this peddler, he's not like a rich, wealthy merchant. He's just a regular Irish Catholic worker. And the shit that he's selling doesn't belong to him. He's selling like his wealthy English landlords goods and then having to go back to him with the profits he makes from selling the landlord's goods.

So Branon anyway, stops him and takes out his gun and says, Give me all your fuckin money, give me a watch, give me everything. And then the peddler who's called the peddler bond peddler says to him, Look, Brennan, all right, I'm going to give you I'll give you everything. But here's the crack. Brenan, if if I go back to my fucking landlord and you take everything, the landlord's going to think that I just fucking sold that he's going to think that he's not going to believe me, basically.

And then Brennan goes, Yeah, fuck it, man. You're an Irish Catholic. You're the same as me. Of course, your landlord's not going to think that you actually stole this yourself and that you weren't robbed.

So the pedlar bond says to him, will you do something so that when I go back to the landlord, I can prove that I was robbed?

So Brennan says, yeah, forget Grant, throw your jacket onto the ground there. And I fire a lot of bullets at it. So the pedlar bond takes his jacket off, puts it on the ground, and then Brennan fires six shots into it. But then our Brenden's bullets are gone and the pedlar bond takes out his own gun and says, Now give me back everything, Brenan. And then Brennan is so impressed with how fucking clever the pedlar bond is, he says to him, Fuck it, man, I don't want to take anything.

You become my partner. You need to become my partner in crime, because that's the cleverest shit I've ever seen. And they do. And then the Pedlar Bond and Brennan become too high. Women outlaw superheroes who robbed the English on the streets. Fucking Batman and Robin fighting crime. So I told you how these outlaws how this ties in with workers rights and things like that when I'm going to get to that in a minute. But first, we'll have a little Macarena pass.

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That was the ocarina paws, which meant you had an advert in there, these podcasts supported by you, the listener, via the Patrie on page Patreon to come forward, slash the blind by podcast. So if you listen to this podcast and you're enjoying it and you're getting crack out of it and I'm making your pandemic a little easier, just consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. If you can afford it, I'm. It's a huge amount of work doing this, make this episode obvious that this three days fucking researched on this, I fucking love doing it.

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Subscribe to the podcast recommended to a friend, especially if you're outside of Ireland, if you're in like America or Australia, recommend in the podcast to a friend. This is of huge benefit to me and thank you to all the people who have done that. So back to the outlash in the seventeen hundreds at the height of the penal laws, you're in high school and you're learning about. These heroes read O'Hanlan, William Brennan, all these lads. And they're fucking rock stars, they're rock stars.

What else are you going to do? Seventeen hundreds in Ireland. These are fucking legends that the only thing that give you a sense of hope, that give you a sense of pride, these half real half imaginary characters that give you a sense of meaning and joy and purpose. Against the backdrop of a system that wants to eradicate you. So what starts to happen is the kids who are learning about. The outlaw heroes in school as they become adults.

They start to kind of try and replicate them, and it leads to the formation of an organization called the White Boys, The Boucle Bonnar and the thing they're a secret society and secret societies are a frequent element of the Irish story, and in particular, Irish rebellion. Like you have the white boys, the the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the IRA are secret societies. And like. Why wouldn't you, if you think back there with those penal laws, those the White Boys Secret Society, the simple act of going to school meant that you were in a secret society.

If you went to a fucking hej school to simply receive your education, to learn to read it was a secret society. The simple, the simple dignity of conducting your own education had to be done in secret as a secret society. So what was happening in Ireland by the mid 1980s was the conditions that would create the famine, the conditions that would create the famine, because you kind of go, how the fuck do you have a famine in a country like Ireland where you can grow things really easily?

How the fuck does that happen? Well, what started to happen is. England essentially was using Ireland as it just wanted to extract our resources, forests were being cut down and what Ireland was being used for was industrial grazing for cattle as such. So what happened is the only people that owned land were the Protestant ascendency, our English people, absentee landlords, English people living in England with huge, huge amounts of land in Ireland, but them not living on it.

They're over in England and they just have like some fucking looking after the land in Ireland. But Ireland was used as a as a resource to exploit by a very small amount of incredibly wealthy people. So if you were a landlord and you had a huge amount of land, the tax system at the time incentivized it for you to use that land for cattle only. So what happened is landlords were just like, OK, then Attaran all my land into grazing for cattle.

And if I have anyone living on that land who might have a little house, a Catholic little house and a little bit of land where they're grown their own food, get evict them, kick them the fuck out of their house, burned our house down and make them homeless because I want to put some cows there, like take from them the tiny patch of dirt, what they can grow their spuds and just harvest cows, cows, cows, as far as the eye can see.

And if a Catholic steps onto that landing and be shot. So instead the white boys who were a secret society of Irish Catholic peasants who got together and they all they would they would go on raids at night time. They dress in white and they'd still horses. And what they would do is fight what they saw as injustices. And they deliberately modeled themselves on the outlaw heroes. That they worshipped as kids, they fought against the landlords, if someone was being evicted, the white boys would terrorize the landlord.

The white boys would if if if the Brits fucking put a lot of land out for pasture, the white boys would knock over all the fences and let the cattle run loose. They'd steal cattle. If there was debt collectors come and collect in debt from people who couldn't pay their debts, the white boys would send threatening letters. They became. The justice in an unjust system, they became the outlaw heroes as a collective, secret society. And frightened the living fuck out of the beneficiaries of the penal laws, the Protestant ascendancy, the small minority who are very powerful now had to be afraid in their beds because at any moment the white boys could come over the fucking mountain and stolen horses and burn down their house.

Now, if you're thinking, why would they call the white boys? Is that a racist thing? No, this is the seventeen hundreds and fucking Ireland this that the social construct of race did not exist in Ireland. In the seventeen hundreds. They were the boucle Bonnar because they wore white smocks, which was like farmer's clothing, white and they wore red white and they used, they used violence to fight for the peasants of Ireland against the injustice of the penal laws.

And it scared the living fuck out of the Brits, and then the Brits had to send over soldiers to become hunters of the white boys, but you couldn't hunt them because they were a secret society. It didn't know who was or who wasn't the white boy. So fast forward to the eighteen hundreds. The famine wasn't very kind to the white boys. You don't have time for secret societies and burning down the houses, the landlords, when there's literally no food in the country and two million people are dying.

So people who were lucky enough to emigrate to the United States and to get away from the terror of Ireland. A lot of them found themselves in mining communities in America. In particular, in places like Pennsylvania in the mid eighteen hundreds and you had this huge swathes of Irish people now living in Pennsylvania, mining and coal mines and the coal mining companies in America in the eighteen hundreds would set up these company towns. And the Irish lads there are mining.

And after a while they start to realize. Fucking hell, I thought things were going to be better here in America. This doesn't seem very nice at all. We're here in this company town and people are dying down the mine and they're making our children go down these mines as well. And this is a living fucking hell, and then they start to go, maybe we should all kind of. Get together and bring it up with the bus. Maybe we should say to the coal company that has a mine in here that owns this.

Company town that we don't like the conditions and maybe we won't work, but then when they do that, the company town and the mine that run everything have got private police called the coal and iron police and the coal and iron police have got private detectives that watch the miners all the time, called Pinkerton's from the Pinkerton agency. And if they try and speak up or organize, no one listens to them. There, some of them are beaten to death by the coal and iron police.

And they're watched at all times by detectives and then they start to go, fuck me, man, a lot of these Pinkerton's and these coal and iron police fuck lot of them are from the north of Ireland and they're Protestants and Orangeman. Shit, man, I thought we were actually after escaping this bullshit in Ireland, but now we're here in Pennsylvania living on what is effectively a coal plantation and the police and the private detectives are. The Protestant ascendency who enforce the penal laws back home, who fucking hate us because we're Irish Catholics, this is the exact same shit as it is back home, we've got nothin.

And if we if we complain, they'll either kilo's Ardella victors. This is like the penal laws, except it's in Pennsylvania. So the Irish workers in the coal fields of Pennsylvania. Are now in the position where they have to do that fuckin Irish thing again, where they form a secret society because they're being watched by Pinkerton detectives and the coal and iron police who are overrepresented with very anti Irish Orangeman, Protestant ascendency, people from back home who really, really don't like Catholics and enjoy oppressing them so directly inspired by the white boys from back home in Ireland.

The Irish miners in Pennsylvania farm a secret society called the Molly Maguires, who are basically the exact same thing as the white boys who followed the exact same code and ethics and ideas and virtues as the Irish outlaw superhero folklore character and the Molly Maguires begin to adopt the exact same tactics, the tactics that the white boys used back in Ireland against landlords.

Now they're using them against the owners of the company town that they work for. So they have this secret organization and they're sending really threatening letters to men are they're burning down houses in the night and they're organizing and they're letting the owners of the company town. No. This oppressive, these penal laws that you have and others that make you think you can shove our children, our minds are that we can work all day long, and if we complain, you'll kill us.

If you do this to us, we're going to fight back and you won't know which one of it which one of us it was because where the Molly Maguires and you don't know who we are and we're a secret society and your law is unjust, but we have a higher law and you now have to live in fear. And but then what started happening in the Pennsylvania mines is when the civil war in America broke out, some of the supervisors in the fucking mines, they used to like sell Irish miners to the union army for money so they would force Irish miners to go off and fight in the civil war and sell them for money.

And this led to supervisors and bosses of the mines getting murdered and killed and people not knowing who did it. And that's when the fucking the corporations that own the mining towns and the company towns really went against the Molly Maguires by aggressively hiring the Pinkerton Private Detective Agency. So this is the fucked up thing, the coal and iron police, who are the police of the mining town, because this is a town that's owned by a mining company. So it's like the penal laws.

The laws exist to benefit the town and the the people who have the money, but not not the people living there. So the coal and iron police are just oppressive as fuck consisting overwhelming amount of Orangeman from back in Ireland. And then you've got the Pinkerton Detective Agency who was founded by a a Scottish fella by the name of Allan Pinkerton and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where a private detective agency that operated all around America and specialized in infiltrating and Boston unions for large companies.

That's what the Pinkertons did. And they would break up strikes, they would intimidate workers. All this really bad shit. The Pinkertons hired a fella called James McPartland, who was he would have been a Protestant from Northern Ireland to infiltrate and take apart the Molly Maguires and basically accuse them of crimes, whether they did it or not, and identified about 20 men as being members of the Molly Maguires.

But the thing is to with the Molly Maguires, it wasn't like 100 years ago with the white boys where there's this peasant agrarian association dressing up in white, completely being inspired by these outlaw heroes. The Molly Maguires, by aviating 70s in the minds of Pennsylvania, started to become legitimate. And they were they were supporting and helping organizations like the Workingmen's Bellette Benevolent Association, which were a labor union and hourly labor union in the United States, and the Pinkertons were trying to take it apart.

The whole thing ended with the Pinkerton agency and this James McPartlan fella identified 20 men, very little proof, and they were all executed in the largest federal execution in US. History happened in 1877 in Pennsylvania prison where they executed 20 Irishmen. Who were members of this secret society, the Molly Maguires? But from that from that bloodshed, from the Molly Maguires standing up to the mining towns and saying this isn't good enough, you like you have to realize there was disasters in these mines where you'd have maybe 500 people dying, men, women and children, because the mine didn't put in proper ventilation.

It was real carnage, horrible, horrible working conditions with no rights. The Molly Maguires. I one of the cornerstones of modern workers rights in America and unions, not these things, unfortunately, now are disappearing. So at the start of the podcast, I said, what inspired this? And the little heartache I have? And the thing I find interesting is. You know, I've shown a credible lineage there going from seventeen hundreds outlaw folk heroes who were effectively super heroes, who inspired the white boys, who then inspired the Molly Maguires, who then led to modern unions from Irish superhero tales.

And then I said, now we have the disappearance of unions, workers rights. These things are being taken away amongst the backdrop of people in their late 20s and 30s in an economic delayed childhood, being distracted by superhero movies. The office environment of pool tables and free pizzas on Fridays. This only works on a generation who have had their adulthood delayed and who fetishized things from childhood. And if you think it's too hard to take. Last year, LED's, 2019, and this is a fact, you can look it up, Delta Airlines, right, ran an advert for their own employees and the advert has a big Xbox controller on it.

And Delta Airlines put this advert to their employees. Union dues cost around seven hundred dollars a year. But a brand new gaming system with the latest hits. Sounds like fun. Put your money towards that. Instead of paying dues to the union, that is an official Delta Airlines advert to their own employees. Seven hundred quid a year. Let's to be in a union. Fuck that. Get yourself an Xbox, you fucking idiot, you dumb child.

Get yourself an Xbox, you thirty five year old child, that's what that is, it's systematic and it's present. And Delta Airlines dropped the ball by being explicit. They're. They straight up said, you stupid fucking 35 year old pricks, what your ties fuck unions and get an Xbox, but that's what the tech companies are doing in a much, much nicer way with their bouncy castles and beanbag chairs. It's the same shit. What do you mean?

You want a union? We've got free pizza on Fridays. What do you what do you want a union for? I thought I was your friend. Why you Harton. Your dad. I'm your dad. I'm your ma. It's the same shit. And Dublin is the company town. If the developer of a core living space is able to say with confidence, it's OK for 20 adults to share a kitchen because they get Fed and Facebook and then the same corporate headquarters are creating the conditions, what the government need to present core living apartments as a solution.

That's a feedback loop. That's systematic toxicity. Doblin is a company town that is the infantilization, the corporate infantilization of an entire generation to strip back rights that were hard worked for and fought for and bloodshed given from its stripping back those rights by dangling fucking childish carrots in front of who they perceived to be children. So there's my boiling hot. Take that Zoroaster. That's a roaster that's like I said, that's your Forrest Gump. And all of this is a it's a little theory, it's a theory, it's something they've been thinking about and, you know, what am I going to do now?

Am I going to fucking boycott Facebook, boycott Google? Don't use Google anymore. Don't use Twitter. No. You know, because I need these things for my fucking life, we're in a system here. The problem is with the fucking system, you know, it'd be nice to have the perfect morality to for literally not I consume to have any impact whatsoever on human life and to be completely ethical. That's not happening. That's not happening in this in this fucking society.

Everything is dripping in blood. But that overruling that ruling that obese workers are now actual workers, I think that's fucking good. That's a good thing. I'm very happy to see that makes me feel a little bit better. But the corporate headquarters of Uber and Lemrick that at least now I go that corporate headquarters that is providing so much employment for people in Limerick and that corporate headquarters that is keeping that restaurant open in that pub open, at least now their drivers are considered workers.

You know, it's complex. It's a complex situation with many layers and nuance inside ness. And it's not black and white like on the Internet.

And as it's a heartache as well, it's it's me trying to fuckin entertain you for an hour and a bit to find the most interesting story I can give you. You are chatty next week. God bless. The bull, the story's the biggest personalities, the best accents enjoy series from across the pond with AMC. Plus looking for romance, a discovery of witches. Is your next obsession ready to raise the stakes? Check out what Entertainment Weekly calls one of the best new series, Gangs of London.

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