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All right. Karad, around the cattle, you henpecked Declan's. Welcome to The Blind Bye podcast. Got some new listeners this week. Because I did I made an appearance on the Adam Boxton podcast. Adam is someone who I've admired for most of my life because I grew up watching him on TV in the Adam and Joel show, and I had the privilege this week of being a guest on the Adam Boxton podcast. So check it out if you haven't heard it.

Uh, we spoke about how our movements like situation ism and data can have influence on comedy. It was very enjoyable. If you're a new listener to the podcast, because you heard me on Adam Buxton's podcast. Welcome you delicious conse. Welcome. And what I always say to listeners is go back and listen to some earlier podcasts rather than going deep into this one. Start off with some earlier plane by podcast's and familiarize yourself with the law of this universe.

Rather than going concours deep into this, you know, for regular listeners, what's the crack, how you get on? I hope you've been having a charming lockdown and quarantine, that you're not being too hard on yourself. That you're embracing that the current chaos of the universe that you're embrace and that which you can't control and focusing on what you can control, what I do have we this week. Is some escapism OK, I've got some real podcast Hoague escapism for you to listen to this podcast this week and switch off from whatever the fuck is bothering you and lose yourself in the universe of the podcast Hoague.

All right. First, I'd like to read a little excerpt of something. When I was a young fella of about six or seven, the neighbors had a young cousin called Jake over to visit, he was sounding off and he had ties of the turtles, which I'd never seen in Ireland. One day I said to him, Are you going to the shop? You are. And Jake gets this pure borzi look across his lip like I was trying to pull the piss.

Why are you telling me to go to the shop? I'll go to the shop if I want to. He says, I was only asking I wasn't telling you to go to the shop, Jack, I said.

I had no idea what had gotten him upset. Now my dad was over by the gate listening in with a smirk. Later on, he says to me that thing earlier with the young Yank when he thought that you told him to go to the shop. Do you know why he couldn't understand you? My dad then explained to me a theory about the way Irish people speak English, a theory which was given to him by his dad. My granddad lived on a boring blue and west cork that was on the way to a creamery.

He was a member of Tom Barry's IRA Flying Club and would constantly watch and take note of whoever passed. Regular Irish people would traverse with their horses loaded with pockets of fresh milk and would come back with horses packed with butter in their saddlebags, and this was a brisk, fast paced road. No time to stop and chat because milk would go sour in the sun and Potter would soften and a heartless shoulders. It was for this reason that British soldiers would stop and harass anyone who walked the Borane to interrogate, to trial, to get Haas's pure greasy with sweaty yellow butter, a small injustice, a show of power and an opportunity to make a person emotional enough to lash out and say the wrong thing.

My granddad would notice that when an English soldier questioned the man on the way to the creamery, no answer would be right or wrong. Any answer meant a long ways, and your papers inspected regardless to standard rolls of human interaction, had broken down. And to give an answer, Australia will be met with violence. So the Irish people figured out an in between a yes and a no at the same time a quantum superposition of an answer, an answer that would cause the soldier to say stupid paddy gibberish and usher the person off before the border melted down the horse's shoulders.

And this here was my dad's theory as to why I asked the American, are you going to the shop? You are. It was an absurd postcolonial way of arranging a question that had its roots in years of interrogation from the English.

Now, I'm not saying that's the case. This is just a story that was passed down to me, but as an adult, I learned that there was a name for how we speak, how I arrange sentences, and for the words that I use I barnow English, a resistant way of speaking the English language, a language we never asked for. As an author and a musician, I often find myself writing words as if their music I search for melody and rhythm on the page.

Jazz and blues are African-American forms of music. Born out of the resistance of African songs to European instruments. Musical notes exist in the African scale that don't exist in the Western scale. These notes are in between the Western notes and these in between notes give jazz and blues and emotional complexity that the traditional Western scale cannot deliver. The playful, bold and fluid way that hyperreal English resists traditional English does the same thing, this improvised musicality to how we think and speak provides me with a deep literary confidence to explore the in between, especially when the writing process presents me with resistance.

So what that was there was. That's a forward. That I wrote for a book called A Dictionary of HyperReal English and I barnow English. Is the English that we as Irish people speak, we speak our own version of Irish and that little story there. That's what my dad used to say to me. My dad used to say we speak Irish in a confusing way because of 800 years of interrogation. And it's just my dad's version of his. Based on what his dad told him, it's a folklore tale, I suppose.

But the Dictionary of Urbano English. It's Gail Books, who are the book company that published my first two collections of short stories. This Dictionary of Ivano English was made by Dr. Terrence Patrick Dolan, and he was a professor of English and he compiled this massive dictionary of high Bano English words, words that are English but uniquely Irish.

And it was out of print, writes I. I ended up seeing it online about a year ago, two years ago, and going, fuck me, I want to copy this book. And I couldn't find it online. And I went to jail books and I said, Devinn, have a copy of it because he published it years ago and they're like, we don't even have a copy of it. So I said to him, you need to fucking republish this book, this dictionary of hyperreal English words that has you need to rerelease it.

You need to get this fucking book because it's a shame for it to be able to print rereleased the fucking book. And I write the foreword for it. And I tell everyone on my podcast about this wonderful dictionary, the only one in existence that has got thousands and thousands of of high bano English words, words like quiere are, which I explained a few weeks back, are words that I grew up using, like Gauld calling someone a goal or a goal.

Sometimes the word girl was a name for a fanny and Gauld, like, you're like, what the fuck does Gauld mean, geode? And we just thought it was a limerick. It comes from the Irish word God to mean Zhongxun are all the words. I would have grown up saying I'd call the guards a shade. Ah, a woman was called the Pure and these words, then they come from Shelta, which is the language of indigenous Irish travellers.

So they spoke. The Dictionary of Habanera English, it's not my book, but it has my name on the front of it because I wrote the foreword for it. The book is by Terrence Patrick Dolan. It's in shops at the moment. Go out and check it out. Also, I don't profit from sales of the book. I took a small fee for doing the forward to it, but mainly this is me just doing the right thing, putting my name to the book so that it gets reprinted and it doesn't get lost because that would be a fucking shame, you know.

And because I don't know, it just broke my heart to think that a resource like this is out of print. You know, you don't want to lose like Piperno. It's the way that we speak English. It's our way of speaking English. It's it's a post-colonial way of speaking English. You know, it's the rose that grows from concrete. The Irish language was was taken away from us by the British and we were forced to speak English. And it's like.

You can force us all you want, but we're going to find our own way to speak English, that's Irish and that's what I barnow Englishes and. Finding out what words mean, you know, what what what does the word mean and why does it mean that? Why does it mean the thing it means is called etymology? Right. And my guest this week has just released a book which is about the etymology is such of the Irish language of Gwalia.

And my guest is called Mankind. Magon and Mencken wrote a book. Thirty two words for failed and what it is, is like. It's a meditation on the Irish language. It's a meditation on certain Irish words, I mean. It literally it comes from the Irish language has got Partito words for failed and Mencken's book is an etymological meditation on this. And it's the book says the richness of a language closely tied to the natural landscape offered our ancestors a more magical way of seeing the world.

Before we cast all the words aside, let us consider the sublime beauty and profound oddness of the ancient tongue that has been spoken on this island for almost 3000 years. So I had the opportunity to speak with Monken. And I recorded it, I'm getting really good at recording long distance chats and making them sound like we're sitting in a kitchen together and achieve in that podcast hug, I'm really looking forward to showing you this fucking interview, because Mahnken isn't just someone who's interested in the etymology of the Irish language.

He's also a travel writer. He's someone who has been all around the world and is is a very thoughtful, compassionate person and an incredible storyteller, an incredible storyteller. And he's got amazing things to say about his own life, but also. If you're into Irish mythology, mankind has got some incredibly interesting theories about Irish mythology based on his understanding of the Irish language, and he's got some theories about the roots of the fuckin Irish language that are going to blow your head off.

So without further ado, here is my chat with Mencken. So I suppose we'll crack into, um. I want to I want to kind start on on a an autobiographical level, right, what we're here to talk about your new book. Right. Which is tarty 32 awards for Field.

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

It was like you you delved into the most beautiful areas. So, you know, the way a you know, when you're calling someone's name, there's like a are father. But Duncan is my name are Mannerheim, but then end up in Donegal. It becomes a one hiner a wanking which is you didn't you didn't quite go that far. But it was a lovely, lovely, accidental Irish beginning to. And one of your fasts, one of your first books, right, were you the travel books?

I want to I want to I want to speak about your travel books, fast rates.

Like what's the journey? What do you hope? Do you set yourself right? I'm fucking off to America for six months and I'm just going to write about what I did have. Like, what are you looking for there? Do you fear that you come away with not.

No.

So what happened was like I was one of these kids who would have, like, heard voices in my head when I was young, like I was this idyllic, literally, like like as in mental illness or not a mental illness, but nice voices.

I mean, you know, someone could have called it a mental illness, but it was never I mean, I did go to a psychiatrist, but I think that was because I was just anxious. No, I was like I had this herb garden. So I didn't really fit in in the real world. But I just had these gorgeous, like, you know, reassuring voices and words and dreams that I could escape into. And that works out really well, basically, like on those spiritual kids.

And that works really well until you become about 18 or 19. And then, you know, suddenly the school tells you you're doing your you're leaving search and you're going to have to, you know, get a job. You can have to get a mortgage and do that. And I realized that I couldn't do that. There was no way in my life that I could, you know, knuckle down like that because so is either these voices giving that that freedom that I had or otherwise it was depression.

And so at the age about 17 or you to the voice is mean.

Is that like a calling? You felt the sense of a calling?

No, no, it didn't. It was just I was really happy. I was deliriously happy and felt absolutely free. Yeah. I just felt there was no stopping me. I was like almost angelic, you know. And then this is and you can believe like that in your in school, you can get away with it. Luckily, I didn't get bullied. I was just ignored. But then when you when they tell you you have to go into the real world and, you know, do all these things, I thought I couldn't do that.

And then depression comes and you get a lot of these sort of, you know, dream minded kids.

So so the the constrictions of society basically did not work with your personality. And the constrictions of society would bring on a sadness.

I didn't fit in. Exactly. And so I fled. I knew that I'd end up in the same party if I stayed in Dublin, and that would have been fine had I done that. But I realized that there was another way. And so I was because my family were Republican revolutionaries. Back long ago, we used to learn that you've got a fucking serious lineage, man.

Your your grand uncle is the aurally my great. Great. Yeah, that was my great great uncle is the rally. And then Sheila Humphries is your grandmother.

So and then my grandfather was director of Arms Donald O'Donoghue for the IRA. Wow. So there was a rule and the rule in the House was you always learn French and German just so that you could import guns if you know. Yeah, yeah. So we've been doing that since about 1890. So luckily I was brought up in the I mean, I left school in the 80s was a recession, but because I had German and French, I was able to just go off to Germany and work in a hypermarket.

So I had money and money at the age of 18 or 19. And I just went off and then I could see with this money that there was trucks leave and cross in Africa going across Africa overland, and there was going to cost three grand. No. One thousand euros, one thousand pounds for the year for six sorry for seven months. And I thought, this is it. I will finally be free. I'm going to I can understand that the bigger world is out there.

I escaped the Costa phobia and the confines of this suburban Dublin world's. So I am so that was that was the big idea and I just went off to Africa, you know, I was so desperate it was this your first what was your first trip like?

Decent trip. Like you went to Germany, but what was your first decent trip abroad where it's an artistic experience as such, you're going to you're going to not only travel, but experience and also journalism at your what's happening? Yeah.

So I was 19 years of age. It was about two months after the German trip. And I get on this truck, this x this ex army overland truck that's leaving London and driving the whole way to Kenya. So it's going to go to France, France and Spain. It's going to go down through Morocco, through Algeria, to the center of the of the Sahara Desert.

How do you even find that? How do you how do you even find that Monkton?

Yeah, there are these ads at the back of the of the car of the British newspapers, of The Guardian and The Observer, and they said like three grand for seven months. But I found a dirt cheap company that was doing it for one grant for the seven months. And they just put 12 tents on board. They put 20 people. They just bought the truck from the British army for about seven grand, put, I think, four wheel drive tyres on to put sand mats and just sent it off across Africa.

And who else was on this with you? Who who are the type of people that want to do that?

That's a great question. They were not who I thought who I thought would be on it would be other freethinking, open minded people who want to explore the world, other people who as who are as dreamy and idealistic and ridiculous as me. But it turned out and they probably were on the trip across three grand, but because I was on this one grand trip, it wasn't them. It was basically the dropouts, the dregs. All of us were just people who didn't function in society and people who wanted to escape.

So there was one game. Yeah, there was one bloke. He had been in the British army three times in Northern Ireland. And there was a rule that if you ever went back to for time, he, you know, you were you'd be die. There was this superstition and he had done things like the first few days he'd be boasting to me. Yeah, you know, we used to do this thing. We he had a great idea when Bobby Sands was on hunger strike, he would drive his and he'd got a bit higher chip van and drive it up to the ventilation shaft and Bobby Sands a cell so that so that Bobby would be here would be smelling like fresh fish and chips.

Oh, my God. And that was how did that feel to you, man? Like your grandmother went on hunger strike?

Exactly. And I spent my night in the 1980s helping my granny. She was still in contact with each block and made prisoners during the 80s. So, you know, the Kames, these Rizla papers that were sent in and out of she when her eyesight got, you know, bad or they used to write tiny little notes on Rizla papers and like, hide them under fingernails or whatever you could.

Exactly. Exactly. Swallowed them or whatever. Yeah. But my granny would get these letters from the from the prisoners and then she'd have to write back. But her eyesight wasn't so great anymore, so she'd like to dictate the letter to me and I would then write it in miniscule handwriting on the on the, on the isn't a paper. One question there Minecart.

So if your granny is like so she's actively involved with communicating with the Provisional IRA and Provisional IRA prisoners. Did that mean that you were being watched. Ah. For you to like go to London and fuck off to Africa. Like surely MI5 would be keeping an eye on you.

I mean I was so innocent and young in 19, so my granny was living with us in the in the granny flat of our house and she's being watched. She's been watch out if you're. Yeah. That house was being watched and like not only watch, but I remember during the last coup de grace, amazing escape, you know, the Special Branch came to her door because she'd had in the past, she'd had prisoners that were on the run.

Eight block prisoners were on the run staying in the house. And we sat like my dad was this phoenixville quiet Gail Farmer from the well, you know, he was a doctor, but from a farming background. From Longford, absolutely. Redmond committed pacifist. But of course, he marries into this Republican family and this lovely house that he's bought, you know, in Dublin. He and he he pays for the granny flat. And now my granny has these, you know, these prisoners hiding out in it.

And that one time my dad was incredibly peaceful and, you know, just.

Did your dad know that these these men were prisoners?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. The only time I heard my dad roar was he went downstairs to check on my granny once said he'd tell he'd say the rosary with her every evening and Irish even he even learnt Irish just, you know, to because the Irish was so important to the family. And he goes down and he recognises who's that, who's hiding out in the cold hole. And he just screams, you know, not in my house. He says, so yeah.

He recognized the person from the news like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't good. Like, holy fuck. Yeah. It's like, you know, when you have a mother in law, you know, people say they have a problem. Mother in law.

Well, I mean, people have problems with modern laws. But if you're fucking if you're Martin McGuinness or something. Nicole Bunker. Yeah. Different story, man. Exactly. So bring it over to the rank. Yeah.

So I mean, I'm getting distracted in one way, but that meant that my relationship with the Irish language was complicated. But I might. Go back to that in a second, but one reason that I so I fled because I said I was this idealistic person, I go off to Africa, but there's a few reasons why I'm flee. And also because I realized this Irish language that I'd been given by my granny as this beautiful treasure and cultural sort of heirloom actually had an agenda, you know, that it was in some way a political weapon of war.

So this would be why I would have I would have gone off traveling. And I mean, Africa that Africa trip turned out terrible. Everyone, like I mentioned, the bloke who was the British army, but everyone was worse. There were people who had been embezzling people out who were running away from the tax were just the dregs. And our first day on our first day in Africa, we arrived in Morocco, in the little town of Shuan, having driven through France and Spain and some of the Bedouins come up to offer us.

We started we set up our tents, you know, the little old triangular army tents set to light a fire. Were there any hashish smugglers with you? That sounds like a hash smuggling type of thing.

There was no I to be fair, no, I was the only one who got involved with grass smuggling later. But there weren't you know, they were all better. They were all fine that terms. But there was on the first day, I mean, with this Bedouin came up to me and he came up to us on the officer's firewood. And the others are just super disgusted and suspicious. And they just call him or they start calling a raghead and said, get him away.

All he'll do his dirty old steal. And I realized I was stuck on this truck for seven months with these observations, racist, who didn't, you know, only had English and like 70 per cent those countries where where were French speaking countries. So it's a pretty it was a pretty dark trip. It turned out to be the best thing for me in my life that I had this Ottone life changing experience when we got to Zaire, to the Congo.

And anybody that, you know, Zaire is the heart of darkness. It is where Conrads where Karakurt Scott stock. If you're ever going to have Roger Casement. Exactly, exactly. If you're ever going to have a life changing experience, it'll be in the Congo. We arrive there and we had this woman who is driving us, Berlinda, an amazingly strong woman. I call her someone else in the book, but she all she wanted to do was keep us alive.

And she had done about 12 trips up into there, maybe, ah, seven between seven and 12 trips.

And yet what's the danger like here, Monken? Like, what's the level of going into the Congo in the back of a truck? It to me, I'd be like, that sounds a bit scary, man.

So all of our previous trips, someone had died. That's the level what what type of debt like I mean, through disease, through being killed or being kidnapped, maybe stupidity.

You know, if we are, as I said, the dregs of society, we're not the ones who know about Africa. We're not the ones who've read who are careful. We're just people who are totally on uncommented, unkempt. So sometimes it was for of us when they were on an album, just got a heart stuck in the middle of the Sahara and they had to bury them. Yeah. The time before that, she had begged them not to go on, not to take out the inner tubes from the truck and start, you know, riding the rapids on a river.

And one person smashed a request.

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

They and they did. And they smashed he smashed his head open. He died. So Jesus. Otherwise it was just malaria. Ah, bilharzia, some disease.

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

Yes, I did actually. I never had injections after that. I know that my other trips, but I did for that because they insisted on it. And so when we arrive anywhere in Zaire, in the Congo, she she makes one she has one other request for us that none of us will ever buy or take drugs because, you know, every single military dictatorship, they're all they're trying to do is get their hands on white people for some crime.

And it's so easy for them to find drugs on you. Why is that?

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

It's just, you know, they they have no money. They want to get money in. The best way of getting bribes out of people is, you know, to get someone to crime and they actually have a crime and then they have to pay bribes.

So we have a nineteen year old Irish lad here. We're going to sentence him to death. And now all of a sudden the UN is involved or something. Exactly. Exactly. Wow. I never thought of it that way. Man accents.

Yeah, so exactly. So we arrive in Bombay, in Zaire and you know, now known as the Congo. And the first thing she's going to do, it's the only time she's going to leave us. She's every trip. What she does is she leaves us to take a boat in a village called Bumba to take one of the great river journeys of the world. It goes from kissing Kisangani to in Kinshasa to Kisangani. And it's this huge floating market and just this one, Torgau, an old German riverine togue and these steel platforms.

And we slowly go down the way and there's no roads in this area. So all of the local tribes people come out of the Amazon are sorry of the of the equatorial jungle and they trade their crocodile skins and monkeys or whatever potions they have with you. And she's like, this is a journey as experience you cannot miss. So she leaves us there that day and she leaves us just enough money and just enough, you know, malaria tablets and all to do us.

The five days is gone. We're going to be on the river before we reach in in Kisangani, which was the old Stanleyville from Leopold Ville to Stanleyville and Rubber Plantation. Exactly. Exactly. The darkest, darkest. Yes. Of slavery. Yeah. And human trafficking.

And so that first day, we all we all we rented two rooms in just this old shack and we all sleep on the floor of the two rooms. Like at this stage we've been three months in a tent. So, so, you know, sleeping on the fourth floor of a room was luxury. And I went out and just to my altar, just ignorance and stupidity.

Someone offered me I was actually a plastic bag like a spa are a super value of cannabis. It was a pure shopping bag of cannabis. I think it was it hasher weed. It was weed. It was weed. OK, very heavy crystal weed like, but loads of bush weed loads, abbotabad, loads of sticks and everything else to it.

But anyway, I brought this home back to the back to the, to the, to the shack we were in. And by this stage a huge divide had entered the group. Those who never wanted to talk to any African or engage were absolutely petrified and the others want to do a bit. And we were the ones who are willing to engage a bit. We smoked some of that, but it turned out to be somehow laced with something. It just made us all hallucinate a lot.

And we woke up the next day. We contacted, woke up the next day and everything we owned was stolen from us. Everything. Oh, well, OK.

So now any old Africa hand, anyone who understands Africa realizes immediately exactly what happened. I didn't know this for four weeks. You're in a military dictatorship, a military dictatorship. The military control everything. They see every foreigner they see every person who comes in, a particularly a foreigner. They're the ones who give you the drugs. Of course, they are the ones that are going to knock you out and then they're going to take all your money. But I didn't know that.

So I innocently went down to a police station next day. Oh, dear God, there was no police station turned. I was just a military encampment and they were just stoned their eyeballs on things. And it's not how cool he I explained to him in French what's happened. And he says, oh, you know, this is terrible. It's a catastrophe. Don't worry. You will now see Zairian justice. And he went down to the local sort of township and the ghetto and he picked he just.

Randomly picked three boys, dragged them back, he got Azarian soldiers to drag them back, and they started beating them in front of me, beating them over the head with as the butt of his rifle. And again, I was this innocent kid. I had no knowledge how to deal with this. And eventually I begged him. I said, I don't want that. I just want to find our passports. But when they got so exhausted from beating, they sent us away again.

And we went back to Iraq the next day and said, you know, have you found the things? And after the next day they said no. The next day they said they need money. We have no cause. We have no money. They said they needed money even just to get diesel to put into the jeep to look for the robbers. We had no money, but we bag the other 10 people. You know, the other half the group raised us to give us their money.

And anyway, we got into lucked into this thing that we were about a week without. Eventually our money ran out. After three days, we gave it all to them. There was no sign. The passport, this is you cannot move anywhere without your passport. You cannot go. You know why this is, you know, malaria tablets.

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

There was no nothing else. The only embassy was down in South Africa at the time. We thought, OK, we'll find another way out. But we talk in the 80s. Here are the 90s. We're talking eighty nine point ninety. So the first the Gulf War had just begun. OK, Desert Storm is going on. And so what happened was that all of the countries about a week before this happened, all of the Arabic countries around us, Algeria and others, Tunisia had all closed their borders, so no one was getting through.

So actually, normally there would be another NGO or charity group are needed overland truck behind you. But there was none of those.

And then we also realized that there was no that there was no diesel in the country like this is the last days of Mobutu, the dictator Mobutu, his regime, the entire country was bankrupt. So there was no money, there was no diesel. There was no way out. We were the only truck to come through. You know, foreigner trucks have come through in three months.

What emotions are gone through your body at that point? Well, the weirdest thing was we were we only went there because Belinda had told us the river barge was coming the next morning and we were going to get on the river barge for the five days. So next morning, when we realized were robbed, the other ten people got down to the river to get on the river by barge. But they realized the river barge wasn't there and the river barge wouldn't come and hadn't it hadn't been there for two months because there was no diesel and it couldn't be there for another three months because the dry season had come early.

So Bolinder had lied to us. She had gone down to the port to check it was there and actually had abandoned us on purpose and fled with the truck. So it was really, really dark. So we couldn't even ask her for help. There was no way of of getting any help.

And did you want one little thing that's popped up for me, too, is when you spoke earlier. They're about there. A divide is a margin between you and the group. And one thing that I find interesting is when I hear about we said these English people not wanting to speak with the locals being racist. Did you find did anything colonial come up in you? Did you reflect on the fact that you don't come from a colonial culture and these people do come from a colonial culture and this is now being reflected in your actions?

Are they just a shower? Conse? No, no.

I mean, I totally heard that was like the pride they had about getting to Uganda and Kenya and Tanzania, the the places that have been colonized by the English. It was all about this idea that we are superior, we are a colonial race, you know, and I mean, I was called PADI and sort of, you know, all those sort of jokes about me drinking and and things where were there.

It was just classic, that mindset that is in, you know, a large swathe of England was was very strong because like the moment you said the Congo to me, like the first thing that comes up to my head, it's Roger Casement. And then I get this lovely feeling of Roger Casement was the one to highlight the crimes that happened here. So my association with with a place like that, I get this lovely, wholesome feeling in my heart of the Irish.

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

Absolutely. But we saw that at every single border we passed. We saw that because the the the visas that the English people were having to pay were about two or three times as high as mine. In fact, a lot of my visas are free and they never trade because that the African people are gone.

As far as Irish. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Well, wherever I went, I was just welcome to was it was that lovely feeling you got. Yeah. That Haslet.

Another thing I'd love to ask you about mankind is so one thing that I'm fascinated with and I've a feeling you know a good bit about us. Are you familiar with Bob Quin's Atlantean theory and the relationship between Ireland and Africa? Historically, I am indeed.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's very rich. Fascinated with that. Right. It did your trip to Africa, did you? What do you think about that? Can you explain for the listeners what the Atlantean theory of Irish origin is and reflect on it regarding your journeys to. Africa, yeah, one good way of looking at it is even a lot of people know, you know, that the Irish word for a black person is Fargodome. Yes.

You know, there's a few different here. Blumen. Exactly. The Blumen. There's a few different theories. Some people would say, because, you know, Dove Black is is always connected with the devil and is always dark things. And even a black horse would never have been called couple dobros called a couple down mostly. But there's another theory for that. And that is the the Irish people would have known black people like there was there was a you know, a bear.

No one is that I'm forever having fought.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I found that there's a skull of a monkey fucking two thousand years old. Exactly.

That's it. Yeah. Which, you know, most likely that came from North Africa. Could have been the one that came from Gibraltar, but it was from Africa. And then even in a bargain, actually there was a Bible with papyrus papers carved in papyrus papers. So either that book was either brought from Egypt or at least the papyrus definitely came from Egypt. So we know there was contact. I mean, we just know that the roots were you know, what Bob Quin's saw so easily was that there are these amazing trade routes.

It is very easy to go from the west coast of Ireland, from the Iron Islands, down along France and Spain, and then right around into the Mediterranean, where you get to Egypt. And even like in the pharaoh's time, there was a canal that linked before the Suez Canal, you know, that links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. There was the pharaohs had systems of canals. They didn't last very long because the sand would would pile in again.

But there were there were ways of getting in ancient times to the Red Sea and to, you know, to get to the Far East. So we know the Irish people were amazing sailors. We know they were going up to the pharaohs, going up to Greenland, maybe even going across to to to to to North America. And how long ago we talk.

And here we going back. A thousand years. Two thousand years.

Yeah. So I mean, let's say with that, with that Bible we go in just one thousand five hundred years, as you said, with Love and Portugal and then two thousand years and after that there's no sort of historical record, but we just know, well the next thing you're going is so you know the likes of the passage Graves' Newgrange, you know, 4500 B.C. Bob Quinn showed. So clearly, if you go to Tunisia and you go to Morocco, you're seeing those states, same standing stones.

You know these monoliths, you're seeing stone circles, you're seeing the remains of passage, grave type buildings. And they are identical to the ones that are found in Ireland, in Cornwall and in Britain. Like, yes, it could just about be coincidence, but it's a weird coincidence. It seems there was this common culture.

So the Bedouins, too, and Queen's theory queen goes straight to queen, just says that, that Irish people are essentially African people, that we he says that we don't come from Europe, that we come from Africa via the sea. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and like so, you know, I just done a TV series on an ancient DNA. And, you know, what it's showing now is that the original settlers of Ireland were dark brown skinned, brown haired, blue eyed. Now that makes doesn't exist in the world anymore. But it was an existence. It was a it was a people that were found in sort of Egypt and in the far in the Middle East so that we know for certain from DNA evidence that the first people who came here were people basically from Egypt and from and from the Middle East, you know, who'd come out of the Atlantic route.

Exactly. Exactly. So Bob Quinn is finally because the thing with me and Bob Quinn, whenever I would bring Bob Quinn up with historians, he was kind of rubbished as a kind of a fanciful thinker. Yeah.

Yeah. And was finally about four years ago, Michael finally did a great article where he he just said, look, this is the proof. It has been shown by the latest sort of technology in DNA sequencing that he was right all along. Wow. Yeah. And so it's interesting to those first people who, as I said, were blue eyed water connections as there Mencken is. Is it I've heard like Shannon singing and similarities, but Shannon singing and almost Islamic call to prayer from North Africa and stuff.

Yeah.

And again, you know, it's hard to definitely prove these things, but just listen to the to listen to the Shanno sing. And then I just had the call to prayer in Arabic saying it's these long cadences, this they're sort of rolling on a on a vowel. And but these words like the Irish for confidence or trust is money. And if the Arabic word is Munna Munna, the Irish for knife is skill. And if you go to any Arabic country, you'll they'll tell you see the Scheana Sequela are Sakinah.

But maybe most O'Gara Ghara is to put, you know, in Irish and Ghara is to cause an Arabic culture and Irish to support. Hallah is the Arabic for for Porche. But maybe the most strongest of all is the Shamrock. They are ultimate symbol of Irishness, you know, shown on St Patrick's Day. It's the shamrock or the shomer, but it happens to be the exact same word in the Arabic word of shamrock. And it's Shamrock, MPRI, Islamic.

Arabic culture, not as in pagan Arabic culture, a shamrock was a particular tree leaf plant, a tree model, and each one of the petals of that leaf represented one of the pagan gods like, are you going to say that's coincidence? That happens? Sempre Arabic pre Islamic Arabic culture has this called shamrock a leaf that represents the tree. We know tree was the key moment key idea in pagan Irish or pagan early Irish and Celtic belief and they happen to use the same word for it.

Like that's on. That's phenomenal and it's not weird. We know that we were everybody, you know that we were trading people. The people migrated constantly. And I think it's so you know, this book I've written the 32 words for Field. I look it up. But the thing that blew me away most was the connections between Ireland and India, like they are just so strong. And again, why would you have these connection?

That baffles me. Like, that's fucking baffling. Yeah, that that's that's quite far apart.

And again, we just need to get out of our mindset. We are so in the mindset of nationalism. In fact, we're coming to the last to the death grasps of nationalism. Now, previously, people were migratory people who just moved and travel depending on the circumstances. And it looks like we're going back towards that. So it makes absolutely no sense that all cultures would have been interlinked. But why particularly was India and Ireland, why the connection is so strong?

And it's really because, you know, we do we know that we're sort of an Indo-European culture. So our culture sort of came from basically the middle of Europe or more towards the east of Europe and that Europe and the Middle East look at that area now, that culture, that sort of Celtic culture or Indo-European culture, which our language is based on, was pushed to the margins. OK, that's why the Irish language is still to be found only in the north of Scotland and, you know, the west of Ireland and then places like Plato, like Brittany and Galicia.

Wow.

But then that's what you think of it as something that continually and consistently being pushed west, being pushed west and being pushed east. So that same culture, all of the same elements that are slowly fuck, yeah. They're still alive, which is why you look at like the brand war laws are like identical to a lot of the the old Indian laws. Why the word aaargh! The noble person, you know, are a minister in government is the same word is idea and noble in the in Sanskrit or white bread.

And brown and Brahman are the same word, the same root because they come from bread, from mantra's or even either, you know, Iraqis are just learning. That's the same word as the Vedder's, the Indian Vedder's, which is, you know, the Indian law, the central law. And that Verda again, even the word Drew Drew it Drew comes from Drew on, OK. And then Vind, which is the the learning, the learning that is connected to the OK, which is the essentially like we are the same people.

Yeah. It's beautiful.

Now one thing, when I heard the term Veda's, that's like one of the earliest religions that we know of. And it's also one of these religions that quantum physicists and people who are at the cutting edge of physics, who are trying to understand the nature of what reality is and like things like reality being a simulation that often say it has a lot of similarities to real early, early Vedic scriptures and their view of the universe. Do you have you studied or looked at any, I don't know, ancient Irish religious, but like pre-Christian Irish religious views, are they similar to Vedic stuff?

Is there anything going on there?

So, as you said, like there, there are Brahmins, very early type of Brahmins chanting in parts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south of of Indian in the forest there. And the mantras they have, the chance they have aren't words. We don't understand them anymore. They are, Preetha. They're almost what linguists say is they could be the sounds that were based on the first guttural sounds the humans made before they developed linguistic developed language. Yeah, OK.

Now it's hard to find that same level of ancientness in in in ancient Irish art or even in the sounds of made up Irish. Like one of the things that I'm trying to get at in the book is that Irish like, you know, we sort of know that the Celtic culture only arrived in Ireland, a culture that Indo European culture that went to India came to, and it only came here probably about 500 B.C. So two and a half thousand years.

Here's a big question for you is when people said the Irish are Celts, is is that naive or incorrect?

No, it's correct. So what we do know is that the people who built so those first blue eyed hunter gatherer people, the blue eyed, really dark skinned people, they're not us. They were hunter gatherers who came here and they were wiped out. OK, then the next tribal folk, OK, yeah, we kill. Well, we might kill them or probably temperature, you know, conditions kill them. The next group of people where the people who built Newgrange and, you know, the north and south and the crew and all of these amazing places are obviously incredibly sophisticated people who understood as astronomy.

They're not us. They're not us either. There is no there's almost no DNA connection between us and them. They died out to an incredibly complex community culture that I mean, there's a trace elements of them still in us, but not much of an alien Neolithic culture. It only, you know, it is only it is not very much of it in our DNA. So who we are is we're the Bronze Age people, the people who came after that.

And because we were brought farming and we brought knowledge of bronze from, again, the Middle East, from North Africa area and then with them. And then we were mix. We were we were joined by these Celts who arrived. So because those people, the Bronze Age people would have come like four and a half thousand years ago and a four and a half, 5000 years ago, then the Bronto, the US, the Celtic or Gaelic people came two and a half thousand years ago.

So we're a mix between those Bronze Age people and that new culture that came in. But but, you know, as you say, this idea of the verdict and the knowledge, so in our language, it's hard to get a sense of the sounds that came. But definitely there are words in Irish that make it clear that our mind set before modernity took over totally accepted that sort of quantum nature, that otherworldly sense of there being no no limitation to the physical reality.

Like there's a word in ours called career and career means a tiny particle or are a spark of flame or a light or a tiny portion of something. But it can also mean a subatomic particle and a comin vulnerability, the vulnerability and the insubstantial of solid objects. So when we look at the world now in our rational, objective mind, our pre or post Newtonian world, we think of everything as solid. But of course, a world of people who believed in the other world, who believed encounter, which is this area, this region, this place, an alter, which is the other world.

And it was always only a thin veil between the two. For them, it was clear that things could look solid, but could also be utterly insubstantial.

So quantum physics today will tell you that solidity is an illusion. Everything is made up of essentially waves. Quantum waves. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. So so, you know, there can be a swamp. It can be the trembling of the land. It can be an earthquake. It can be the crumbling surface of Cloudland when dry after rain. It's basically accepting the idea of quantum that the things can be solid and not solid at the same time, or the ambiguity is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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So one thing that I've heard before is have you looked into the influence of with a psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and things like that on ancient Irish cultures? Like I've heard that if you look at the the art that's on the front of Newgrange, especially the the abstract art they were making, the lozenges and the spirals, that that was the type of vision one would receive if they were to eat the type of mushrooms that grow out of cautious around that area.

Yeah.

So and I heard Billy Modlin discussing this with you. And yeah, he does it with such control, you know, because there's a degree does a degree of uncertainty about all these things and yet all are potentials. So what do we know? Like we know, for example, that look at the look at the folklore, you know, the main idea of Film-Maker getting that wisdom that some in and out of some knowledge. And how does he do that?

He goes to common as well, or there's a few different water sources and he goes to he picks up the he burns himself. He sort of burns me. He cooks the salmon and creates a blister or he burns himself. And that word for the blister is called Bulloch is bubble of inside or bubble of knowledge. And it's also used for the words of the hazelnuts that dropped from this magic tree that is overcounting as well. And when the bubble of knowledge are also it's called Kohno Action, which is sort of Heysel of insight, and it falls into the water and it makes them water magic.

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

And so when finical gatsas he he either sook's. And so it's a bubble of knowledge. A bullock is on a shipment of knowledge and then when he gets it, he gets another bubble of knowledge, the blister of knowledge, which again bubble and bliss just the same word. It's all bogus. And that word Bulik is also used for some particular type of mushrooms because of course those two were known to impart wisdom and to impart magic.

And when they say wisdom immediately, what I'm hearing is people who have psychedelic experiences, DMT, ayahuasca, and then they come back from it with a greater knowledge and understanding of self and reality, as is often reported. So are you saying that like you, you reckon there's a way to interpret the story of the salmon knowledge, what it's like? McCoole just did a lot of mushrooms and met the elves in the machine.

It's a shamanic trip. Exactly. And likewise. Berdahl, why is it the salmon? The salmon is a special downhome. Yeah, what else is salmon? Don't eat. That's one thing I know the salmon, the two. Here's two things that that keep me awake at night about that story. The salmon's name is Fenton, which is a ridiculous name for a fish. And then secondly, he eats acorns.

Yeah, but, you know, you do not want Fynn means in Sanskrit and in early Irish, it means the wise one, it means wise, it means seeing through, it means seeing through the darkness to the light, you know, like bow in the bowing river, you know, the Boyne River, which is the white cow goddess, the poison river is the bottom of the river, was so sacred that she was represented with a bow in the bow.

India was the most sacred goddess in early Irish culture, and she was represented in physical form by the Boyne River. And so she is so low.

That's not the same cow. It's up in the stars, is it? Exactly. Exactly. So low. Because Billy, who we were talking about there.

Yeah, he's got some stone in his garden or something, but up in the stars using some ancient folk and Celtic archaeology or something, there's the Milky Way is what the Milky Way referred to as a cow or something in ancient Irish astronomy.

You have it. You have it. So so the Boyne River, the Moon River is so nourishing. So at the point God is a mother goddess of the Balwinder, she's a mother goddess. She nourishes her people with her milk. Now she is representing physical form of the river, the river, the Boyne, which nourishes its people with the water. OK, and so powerful, Ishai, that a night she shines up into the night sky and becomes the Milky Way.

Nepal feigner go the way of the white cow. Exactly.

Now so this is what I this what has me interested now. So the the ancient Irish are referring to this as cow as milk. How in English are we looking up at the Milky Way and referring it to the way of milk, the fucking Milky Way.

Isn't it lovely. Isn't it lovely the way some trace of the knowledge gets capped, but then it sort of gets, you know, mushed up and confused. But just to finish that point, the final things I love about that is that if you ask people long ago about an out and out a newgrange, that the prehistoric tombs along along the boyin, they will tell you that they thought that they were a mirror image of planet constellations. So not only is the Boyne River being reflected up in the night sky to create the Milky Way, but actually some of those star constellations are then shine are then being mirrored back in the land, in stone and circular form and into the ground.

And the final thing of that is Bolinder, the mother goddess, the most powerful God. She's the exact same God as Govinda as the Indian form of Krishna. So go shit. Go is a cow in Irish as we know go is a cow in Sanskrit. Vinda is a finder, a looker, a seeker. It is like the same culture, the same gods. We are one. And when you're when you're studying this stuff, are you coming at this from the position like you're not an academic, are you?

I am not. No, I have no expertise in anything.

So you're just a curious person, a curious person looking into this shit, like, do you ever take this stuff and try and, like, go to academics? Like, these are essentially hunches that you have. And it's overwhelming. Like, it's it's phenomenal, as you said. It's like, how the fuck can this be a coincidence? But how does it go from this wonderful coincidence into being something that's accepted or has research put behind it and something that with that then becomes truth?

What is that? Truth is not above reason, but beyond it. Like so I as I said, we started this when I was a disillusioned kid with, you know, an over idealistic kid. I went off traveling and went off to Africa, went off to South America, and I went off eventually to India, moved into an old cowshed and spent about eight months there, going to parts of my brain that we shouldn't really have access to. I sort of dropped out.

Tell us about that. Tell us about being in a cowshed in India and visiting dirty parts of your brain.

Well, I think I'll finish what I say and I will do one. So I want to I wanted to make sense of my life, you know? So after after I came home from India and explained that I built my little Straubel house in Westmeath and I just the world didn't make sense. I wanted to make sense. What I want from this book I've written is just people are lost, people are disillusioned and disconnected. It just happens that our culture and our language and our old religions and beliefs can put us back into the world to make sense of who we are, of what we are in this chaotic, chaotic, crazy world.

So I don't want to engage with academia like I did a degree in UCD years ago and, you know, Irish. And at the end, I remember the professor said to me, I see a great career career for you in academia. No one has done no one has looked at the Jehadi book, you know, in the genitive of Donegal Irish. And that's a world we don't need to cross into. Luckily, Billy Marklin can manage to do things.

He can do academia and he can do the work. The Wildside. But what I want is to bring these ideas. I close down Orishas don't make sense of the world. Mm hmm. Yeah, but what should I tell you about it?

Well, I'd love to know about India because they actually.

How did Africa end.

How did you like you were stuck in the Congo. Your passport is gone and now you're here on a podcast talking to me. So what happened that that you ended up things working out all right?

I got them. So I you know, that would that mean that five days or seven days in Zaire, we went without food. We went without water. That was the best time of my life. I suddenly realised I know now why I'm alive. I felt more vibrant, more alive. And I thought, I want to live a life which is does not have rules and limitations that based on my greatest aspirations. And that's partly because I was just, you know, a teenager with two big ideas, but maybe and also we were slowly working our way to the bank could have helped just to alleviate the pain, the hunger pains.

But in that Einziger I got, I ended up getting Bilharzia, which was no cure for. I had to drink the river water of the Congo. And he said, you can't wash it bilharzia this little snot slug or snail that goes into your into your body, into an orifice. And it slowly does you no harm for the first few years. But every year creates a little shell around itself and it goes into your kidney. Ah yeah. And creates a shell around your kidney and eventually it turns your whole kidney into stone.

Basically it's like the what was that mythic. The Gargon from the from the outside it turns into stone and there was no cure for it at the time. But luckily I came back and my mom insisted I go to the tropical medical bureau and they they had a cure was invented about two months later. And so I was cured, so. Oh, wow. OK, so then I finished. I go back to finish my degree. I go back into two years in college and then I go off to Africa.

Ah, sorry, to South America. And I ended up running a hostel on the Ecuador on an organic farm in the Ecuador Peruvian border in a place that was famous for Sampedro for this masculine cactus. And the Israeli soldiers used to all come straight off after their three or four years conscription and come to my place to take this to San.

So were you running like a retreat where people could do Sampedro Cactus?

No, I was just I was just asked to look after the hostel and the farm. The farm was OK and it turned out that people happened to go there for Sampedro. Yeah, but I would always tell them not to take this unblinded. We wouldn't give them enough information about where it was got but they would go off into the woods, into the forest. But eventually people would have bad trips and I would be called upon to hike up into the Amazonian cloud forest and take them back from the tree.

They didn't stripped naked our son all their money away. And then I'd have to ring up the Israeli embassy and say, you know, one of your kids has gone missing. It's meant ever since I have huge sympathy for Israel just because those kids who become the worst aggressors of Palestinians I just saw, they were just they were mixed up teenagers, you know, who didn't know how to say no. And they were. Their lives were ruined for for the oppression and the brutality that they had inflicted on to be institutionalized into becoming killers, essentially on unthinking killers, uncaring.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, I finished, but I basically I was trying to search for something that made sense in my life in Africa. If I failed, I got distracted. In South America, I got distracted. And so eventually my sort ends up in India. What is the nature of a distraction for you?

I want I believe that there was God inside me. I believe that there was this source of utter creativity and love and karma and, you know, assurance. And so, you know, you just got caught up in conventional thinking or self-doubt or just, you know, distractions of, you know, I thought I thought I think drugs is a distraction. I think gossip is a distraction and logistics and distraction. I wanted to just get in touch with my my mind.

So how were you for drink?

What was your relationship with drink like? I know. You know, I could I just luckily I can just drink two pints and I don't have a need to drink more, OK? And I never I never took huge amounts of cannabis or cannabis stories. Yeah, I have to. Before India ended up on a big organic cannabis farm, looking after the children in Vancouver, in British Columbia. So the was just because cannabis people who are who are thinking left field were marginal, liminal thinkers tend to be in that world.

But I just wasn't I wasn't particularly interested in drugs. So I went off to to India, to India, determined to find a at a cave in the Himalayas, because I heard, you know, that's where the purest energy was. And someone told me, hold on a second.

How did. How do you hear there's a cave in India with pure energy? I'm off there like, what do you mean a tightrope walker?

A French tightrope walker from the circus I met in Colombia and he told me about this. That was after it. Anyway, I won't get into it. You know, the screamers in Ireland, the only the only primary cult's primary. No, I don't know. I'll tell you, I spent time with them in South America, but I was this man, this social worker from France told me about this place called Papa Zali or Almereyda, and he said, if you go there, make sure you have a return ticket because otherwise you will never leave.

He said, make sure. And so I. I went to India. That's when I you know, as soon as I got home from South America, earned another maybe six months in a supermarket in Germany to earn more money and went off there. And I of course, I only took a single ticket. There was no way I did not want to leave. If I found this place and I tried to find the cave, I couldn't find a cave or any cave.

It is no, you know, Internet. This is this pre internet. Yeah, exactly. This was 96.

So I suppose a few people had Internet or you arrived in India, say, a French tightrope walker in South America that there's this cave and you had to rely upon the local people to know if the cave existed.

Yes. And it's not it wasn't so hard before the Internet because of that backpacker system. Like, I could still I could find anyone in any country in the world. I know that. But you just go you pick up a copy of Lonely Planet. You go to those places they're in. We're all talking about the same things. It's a total third. It's a different university. Like Prison is a university that backpacking circuit for new thinking and concepts like everything, I, I have no mortgage.

I live in a Straubel house. I am utterly free. All of that I learned backpacking people tell you the secrets of not you know, I didn't want to get tied down to the system. I learned how not to touch traveling. So all I need to do is arrive in Delhi, talk to a few people in a hostel. They'll put you onto someone else. You'll find someone else. And I heard about someone who was I heard about an immortal yogi who was a hundred and eighty years living in one cave.

I was going to visit him. And you just you hear about people. So I go up to Armorer.

And at the same time, though, I hope there was an Indian man, it was a German man who knew India. And he happened to tell me that there was a leper station up there and he wanted me to check on the Lepra station to see I was. So in the end, I ended it. He gave me a job in the Lepra station as chief medical officer. I had no knowledge of medicine. So I ended up in Damara.

I was medical officer of a of a leprosy station. And because I couldn't find the cave, I found a cultural responsibilities.

If you're the chief officer of a leper station, what are your responsibilities there? I mean, are you given any resources? I mean, leprosy is contagious as well, isn't it?

It is. It's pretty contagious, but it's very easy to cure. And thanks to a tablet invented by an Irishman Trinity College in the fifties called WANTO, there are multiple multiple therapy remedies, three different types. He invented one. All you need to do is eat is take those tablets for six weeks and you're cured. The problem is no one wants to be cured in India, particularly in Africa and any other culture. In all of the holy books.

Leprosy is the disease that is mentioned most in the holy books. So you are most likely get arms and charity if you have leprosy.

So the leprosy in India, my God, is it a system of poverty that's so great that if you become if you become a leper, you might more likely get room and board or food.

Your sources, your needs are sorted forever. You'll always get arms if you're a leper. So but I'm particularly complicated because in India there's the karmic idea. You have been given leprosy in this lifetime. It is not up to you to interfere with the God's destiny and cure that leprosy. But of course, the German man who told me about this leper station, he had a rational Western mindset and he knew he could cure these people in six weeks. So all I had to do was once every ten days go down to Ulmarra and oversee the Ersin proposal counterproposal and watched people take the tablets for Foreston basically to take their tablets.

And I do that every ten days. Luckily they were far cleverer than me that I was you to spit it out drawdown. No one ever got cured in my in my whatever for seven months there. But I so I do that. And meanwhile because I couldn't find a cave I found a cowshed. So I would say once every ten days ago at lapsation and otherwise. Did the cave ever exist. Oh yeah, there's plenty. So Gandhi went up and meditated in a cave in this area, like a lot of the great gurus went up to this area.

It's an area that this particular cave that the French tightrope walker told you about, was that a real cave or was it like many caves?

I wasn't quite sure people were time there was I could I knew of four different hermits and anchorites who are living in different caves above me in the area. But I could find no cave that was free that I could move into.

Now, here's another question I just want to ask you about caves and meditation. Yeah. So I went up to a can of beans, Slagle. Is it Nocona? Yeah, well, not Norway's queen, Mavis Hill, but it's the one is the current orgy because er you know, it's current. No it's karu karaoke. No karaoke.

And the other thing Claremore and think of the name of it, it's right behind more. That makes sense now. Right beside. Yeah. You can see it.

And I didn't know much about Karen's and I went, I was, I was in Sligo on a gig and I was bored and I said fuck it, we go up there and I didn't know what to expect and it was I've got tinnitus now but it was before I had tinnitus. And I walked into the Karen and I experienced the silence that I'd never known like this freaky silence. And I asked someone there and they said, yeah, that they said that they used to meditate in there, that the stones are arranged so that you experience this extreme silence so that you can be alone in your meditation.

Is that why these caves? Is that what was special about these caves was an auditory thing?

That too. So, you know, and science is now showing that if we put the right resonance into our head and those they say that like true in the other caves in Ireland are tuned to that resonance that actually you can track with an MRI machine, that it changes the brain patterns of our brain and brings us to an awareness that sort of alpha waves more alpha ways than bass or something so that we have a grander awareness. So that is definitely an element.

We can change our consciousness by vibrating in the right space. And all these caves seem to have been created in such a way that it can do that. But I think in the Himalayas, the reason why I like I genuinely did I mean, I think got enlightenment or any wisdom I now have. I got it in India. And why does everyone get in India? Why did I get distracted? And yeah. Did I forget my search in Africa, forget my search in South America.

Got in India. Some people say it's the rocks. There is some type of electromagnetic frequency in the Himalayan, the rocks in the Himalayas. And again, you can never calculate that using high tech sensors that and it sort of facilitates the mind to open up different elements of it. And that would have sounded hippy dippy. But actually, scientists are now proving this in MRI labs, you put different frequencies into the brain and suddenly different parts of the brain are tuned up and open to things.

So I think that's why the cave I mean, look, I'd be with it. I'm someone who meditates and. Look, it's happened, Miljan, meditation, awarenesses like I haven't I'm not someone who does psychedelics, but I've had experiences with meditation that sound like when people describe ayahuasca, I just I'd be meditating and all of a sudden I awaken from it with this deep understanding of oneness.

I remember coming out of a meditation once, and the first thing was I opened my eyes. It was by a river. I saw a nettle and I just felt extreme love for this nettle, a real empathy and understanding that whatever the fuck me in the world, it was the same.

You know what I mean?

Oh, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. God.

And you know what I mean? It's like I just sat down for 20 minutes and was with my own thoughts and now all of a sudden a nettle feels like a family member and it was real. Wow. Wow.

Yeah, yeah it is. And I believe I know that the Irish language also has that idea just in a single word, in many ways, like in the words like skim to skin means a tiny speck of flour, but it also can mean a tiny piece of dust or any small particle, and it can mean whitewash on a wall and it can mean dust on a mantelpiece. But skin has also these.

So you've got all these things, basically a tiny particle, again, like there could be some atomic particle, but also means it means a fairy film that covers the land and it means succumbing to the supernatural world to sleep.

So one word can bring you a fairy.

Phelim, is this like I had Eddie Lenihan and he was speaking about like a goo that fairies live in areas.

No. So of the wrong word, I suppose I felt no more of veil, more a sort of a God. You know, that that haze in the early morning that you see OK, that makes you feel that the world is you're seeing beyond it just seems it seems that the edges are a bit mushy.

The magical hour of the morning, the early morning when things feel magical and breathy and that you can almost pass through the physical into another realm. Exactly. I think that. Yeah, but the cave. Yeah. So as you said. So I couldn't find a cave, so I found a cowshed. So what I would do instead is all day I'd walk in the Himalayas where the in the rhododendron forest, the rajendran grow the size of trees over there and I grow that and then I walk, I get back into my cowshed at night because there was a man eating mountain lion out at the time.

So he had most of my lines were high up in the Himalayas, but this one had come down a bit lower. I mean, I was pretty high. I suppose I would have been about 2000 metres. So he'd come down and he'd get a taste of human flesh. So you had to be inside. But during those walks in the daytime, I was like you with the meditation. I was able to access realms of my mind that I had never, never done until, you know, since I was there like a six year old in my herb garden and haven't been able to since I was just going out to places.

But I have a sort of strong mind. I know I'm not going to get lost in them. You know, I think a lot of people with my sort of my my my mind tendency towards mind would end up in in mental institutions because you because you go a bit too far, I seem to be able to go to those around and then pull myself back. So I was going very far out into places and but the only time I said, would you mean places internally.

Yeah. Inner self. Yeah, exactly. Really just gorgeous place. And we just things like you with the nettle. Everything seemed utterly united, united. And there was this sense of euphoria, this absolute love and whitewash of white light and euphoria. Were you meditating while doing these walks? Were you conscious of your breathe and things like that? No, no.

In fact, I've only started meditating during Colvard. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, you're mad. I know, because I had that access, I suppose. But my only problem was once I was doing as well, I was following diabetic medicine and while I was only one strand of it at the time, which meant drinking my own urine, copious amounts of my own urine, not anyone else's luckily, but my own. So when I went down to the armorer to leper station every ten days to to, you know, to to check on the lepers, I'd also write a fax home to a mother.

I was sort of a dutiful son. So I, my dad had just died.

How are you getting on my drink? At my own pace. I'm scared of a mountain lion.

That was it. Exactly. But that was there. But no, I wanted to reassure. So I didn't say that.

Instead, I said, Mom, has granny got any more prisoners in the house? Now I want to reassure her.

So I said, Mom in Iris actually. But I said, you know, everything is brilliant, mom, don't worry about me. Everything is one. I see that we're all unified every leaf and every raindrop is one. And there is a there is light connecting all of the universe and all. We are blissfully happy and there is gorgeousness and there is only, you know, unified connection. So she believed that her sort of overeducated youngest son had gone round.

The twist had gone mentally insane. And, you know, some people would say I had. I'm convinced I hadn't. But she sent my brother on this mission of mercy to. Rescue me now, my brother, my brother was a very serious, pragmatic man. He was in the film industry and this was he was working in the this is 95, 96, the years that far and away were made. His locations manager on that and on devil's own with Brad, Brad Pitt and on all those big movies.

So my mom says, go over to India and rescue Mahnken. He's lost the plot. So my brother was busy with all the things. He didn't want to do that. But at the same time, he really could see himself. You know, he was just locations manager in the big Hollywood movies he wanted to direct and he thought that he could direct a TV series. And 1996 was the year to Fianna Fail announced they were going to set up T.G. Tijuca, a brand new Irish television station.

So my brother hutches, the plan that he's going to direct the brand, the first ever Travel Channel travel program in Irish, and I'm going to present it.

So he comes out of canal and he's very serious and he comes out in a full safari suit. So he was a director of, you know, born free or something with a load of heavy duty equipment. Actually, it was the very first edition of a Sony hate Sony knows HD, you know, Sony Digital Camera, Digital, whatever those little edgy tapes. And it was not HD was already edgy and one cheap digital camera.

And he convinced Sony that he was going to make the first ever TV program with it. He comes out, comes out to Delhi and goes up to Armorer, then finds his way to Papa Zali and asks in the local shop where his mom Mongkol live in India in the cowshed. And he finds me and like I'm not in a good way like I am, you know, I've been drinking my piss for a long time now. I am far right and sort of look glorious parts of my brain.

And he is just disgusted. I'm wearing like dirty old T-shirts and sweaty, smelly sweatpants and it's just like, oh, hair is a mess. And he says, Michael, we're making a TV program. I am not wasting my time. I haven't gone the whole way out here and got this gig from Tijuca so that you can screw it up. So he drags me down to Armorer, he washes me, he gets my haircut, he buys me a new shirt and trousers and puts me in front of the camera.

Is it a new digital cassoni? And of course, I'm only too happy to be put in the camera because I have loads to tell people how we are all unified and how drinking piss will clean your insides and everything is worn and everything is gorgeous and everyone watches this. My brother watches this and he turns off the camera and it's just I can see the sadness, the the the just the break and broken heartedness. He's put so much work into this.

He's convinced Hegar, who have no idea who he is or who I am, that this is worth taking a punt on and I'm about to screw it up. And he he screams I he roars at me and he says, For fuck's sake, Michael, I have not come this way. You better get your act together. So he turns on the camera again, and I just spanked my beautiful new age rubbish again. And so it goes on for weeks.

He slowly over those weeks, tells me what to say. He threatens me to what to say. And I just have to say, we're in India now and it's lovely and we're starting our journey. And if you see that programme, I might put a clip of it up on the Internet. You see this kid who is just God love him. He's just lost. He, you know, could easily be an institution. Is his eyes that are far away.

Look, he's just like so many, you know, young backpackers, you see. But luckily, Ruan, my brother taught me to be pragmatic, that you cannot go that far. Right. That you need to find a way of communicating ideas. And ever since there was ninety-six every year since that we made a television documentary for Tijuca in China, in Africa and South America and Greenland, just all over the world. And until eventually then Hector came along and Hector says, like, let's make a programme where you don't have this, like, idiot pontificating to camera the whole time.

And he made a programme that actually was was sort of funny and comedic. And then but then one thing one little question there.

You started off by talking about when you were a kid and hearing voices and stuff. Right. And I had on this podcast a psychiatrist called Dr Pat Bradken, who is a psychiatrist. But he's also very anti psychiatry and he is very interested in hearing voices. But looking at it from different cultures, he says that hearing voices in our Western medicalise culture is immediately seen as a bad thing. But there's other cultures around the world where hearing voices is not stigmatised.

And in these cultures, we're hearing voices isn't stigmatised. The people, the voices, the people here are actually quite nice. But in societies like ours where it's medicalised and said that it's a bad thing or labelled schizophrenia, the voices tend to be terrifying.

How do you feel about that? I mean, because you seem even to the point he talks about, there's now a movement where people don't like to be referred to as psychotic. They don't like to be referred to as having schizophrenia. They're simply part of a community that hear voices and this is how they live and this is their life. How do you feel about that? Is it ringing true with you?

Yeah. So because. I sometimes talk about these experiences to people and they often think, OK, were you schizophrenic, are you? Yeah, I just I never I don't I really don't think I do anything like that because I had just all they were just such loving voices. But what you're saying I like is the fact that so many people have so much tension in them now and so much, you know, their voices are so full of paranoia and darkness.

Is it just a reflection on a society that doesn't make sense? Like if you're living in a society that really looks like it's going to commit suicide, then I suppose it's natural that some people would have those darkest thoughts. So let's say back to what you're the psychiatrist said. Yes, we know. Yes, definitely. Other cultures accepted that, that there were you could hear you had access to other voices, but it just happens. That's so, too, did our culture.

So too did the Irish language. You know, every single traditional story, folk story, it's about an encounter with the other world and that other world, like, OK, this is something now so that she, you know, the shiogama, she the fairies, she means she used to be a fairy mound, OK, you know, she had a gust of wind that was actually the fairies, but she was a ferryman. And then it became the fairies where they lived.

And then it was the fairies themselves, the she or the Shogun. Now the she is the same word as as the root for Shihan for peace. In fact, in Scots Gaelic City is she fairy and the city is peace. The same word OK. And the old way of spelling she fairy was Center City. Now ceyda that Irish word. The old church is the same word as Ceyda in Sanskrit, in Hinduism, in Buddhism and in Zoroastrianism.

Basically Ceyda is an enlightened being. OK, so you suddenly realize these fairies actually are enlightened beings. It's the same word. There's no linguistic, you know, uncertainty about this. If she is the same word I said that an enlightened being who you know, a being who would have stepped out of this as a human being, who would have taken a step back from the small mindedness of of reality and realized that there was a bigger dream and a bigger vision and connected themselves something grander.

So let's say these fairies are where do the fairies live? They live underground beside humans, but they live nearby and they are obsessed with us. They're constantly looking at what humans are doing and laughing at us and telling us what do they tell us to do. They tell us to celebrate more, to feast more, to play, to dance, to party. So and whenever we tell them, whenever we go to them with our small scale concerns as all of the stories do, you know, you go when you're in a time of worry, our time of heartache.

And they laugh at you and they laugh at your obsession with time. So what do we know about the center, these enlightened beings, the fairies, they they they do not accept time, which now we realize is not true. They want us to have a bigger vision and not to be so locked up in our small mindedness. So actually our culture from the very beginning, from every single folk story you were told in school, is only tried to tell you one thing.

You can root yourself to nature and you can root yourself to a world that is beyond the physical, to a world that is nourishing, where there is advice and guidance there, even even like a word like Pukhov or Pukhov is a a blindfold, OK? It also can mean a goat muscle and it can mean a tin shield for putting over a thieving cows eyes. But all but the main meaning sort of for for petcoke is I don't have that quite right.

It is almost too hot. I'll tell you in a second is it's an otherworldly being that can and that can appear invisible in this world and otherworldly being that can puking. So Pooky is the word you still use in English. You know, put a book in a blindfold over someone. So it's an otherworldly being that can appear invisible in this world. So we knew our ancestors, even our grannies knew that there were people who could jump from Korea are from Countercoup, which is this region and this place to alter the other world.

And that was amazing reassurance we got from that. And I would just all of our problems could be solved. If we if we expanded our awareness to realize the bigger picture, we would no longer have the anxiety and we might have answers to a deeper connection to nature, to, as you said, that belief that we are one with the natural. It is there to kill us. So we are there, you know, to be part of it.

Do you?

One thing I found really interesting there is when you were speaking about people speaking about interactions with the fairies and the fairies, laughing at them, like literally when I go on to the Internet and I listen to people recount their ayahuasca or DMT trips, a lot of people report visiting somewhere where time doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist, and they meet these beings that they can't describe their crystal beings and they basically laugh at them and they have fun with them. Like, dude, the similarities between modern day ayahuasca DMT trips and what you've just.

Described what ancient Irish fairies do you see a correlation there? Absolutely, yeah. And to get back to a point about that samen that we didn't make, what do we know about a salad? A salmon is speckled. What else is speckled? The fly agaric mushroom, the Amanita muscaria mushroom.

I was thinking spackled of ecstasy, but humans make them not the flag.

Garik, mushroom. And again, what do we know about that? I have a chapter in my book about the restorer. The Reischl was Colin's warp spasm. When he would get totally furious or angry, he would just have fire and flames shooting out of his top of his head, his eyeballs, his pupils would dilate to the extent that they were popping out so much that it said like a heron could be on, are trained, could write it off.

It's a perfect example of that masculine induced, you know, transcendental state, which which you don't get from magic mushrooms. You get from fire.

GAROZZO Those Vikings, the Vikings called. He used to take mushrooms. The Zakaryan. Yeah, the Berserkers. Exactly. Exactly. They used to take flyer Garik mushrooms. And it would make them incredibly angry as they went into battle and they went berserk.

Exactly. And the Sami people still do. But, you know, the way they stem the Somme, the fire mushroom needs needs to be taken with great care because it's poisonous, isn't it? Sometimes I have a podcast at the moment, actually. And when one of us I talked to Courtney, Courtney Taylor, a great expert in Wicklow, a mushroom collector who really actually demystifies the poisonous element of the of the fly agaric mushroom. And I also know that it's called on the back of Ireland.

But also I talked to Billy Maclean, who tells me about that last cave and those magical stones outside his land. And also in that one, I post myself into a cave, which is the Cave of Transformation Al Nagato in Roscommon. And I go down there for seven hours. Well, no, I don't do seven hours now, but about three hours to see what transformative. So I want to go towards the trail of the Cave of Transformation in in the time Bakula and all the old myths where someone would go down and they would enter the underworld or if I they get onto that or the berserker.

So the the fly agaric, you know, not only that, but the samme culture of northern Lapland still take the fly agaric and the reason so it can be slightly poisonous. It's not as poisonous as we think, but it relaxes the muscles. And so if it goes out, if it touches the heart, it'll relax the heart and you know, the heart. Like you don't want your heart to relax, you know, because that means it stops.

And so what the Vikings used to do and what the Sami people still do is they let the deer or the reindeer eat it first and then they drink the urine of the reindeer. And then the masculine element will pass through and it's pure steaks without the poison.

Yeah. Wow.

OK, but that's back on the fly agaric. It's a classic mushroom. You've seen it in every fairy story. You know, it's a red mushroom, white dots. And whenever you come across speckles in any of the old folklore folk stories and you will come across it everywhere, that's what it's ah, that's potentially what it's a reference to. It's a hint that to access this other world that we're talking about, the fairies are with our Whitfeld, Makhoul are the magic mushrooms are the haze of insight.

They are you can get to those through the fire agaric. Wow. So one last question, because I'm time conscious now, I know you need to fuck off the I need to ask you about your sustainable living. I need to ask you about the house that you live in and you live in a passive house, is that correct?

No, not really. So I didn't want a mortgage, so I came when I came back from Africa, South America and India, I had seen people there build their houses out of what was around them. So in Bolivia, they use reeds in Tibet, they use stone in Africa, they use modern India, they use or whatever. So I came back, I had my granny. The Republican revolution is Sheila Humphrey. She died and left me ten grand.

So in 1997, I came back to Ireland and had my 10 grand and looked for anywhere I could buy, find 10 acres. And luckily Westmeath welcomed me in and I looked around and saw what am I going to build my house out of? And there they were, growing barley, strong barley. So my must have 200 bales straw bales of good oaten bar of good barley straw and just use those as Lego blocks like as big Weetabix to build my house and put a metal roof on it.

And it did in the planning commission and I lived in for six years. I told the planners that this is what I'm building and then you can apply for planning for the for the next house. So the GAMAE in their wisdom, WME County Council and they're just kindness. They gave me permission for the Straubel House, so that first house cost me five or six grand. I lived in it for six years and then I built a second house for 26 grand.

It was meant to be able to Straube. And then I got scared and I put concrete block in the in this core of it and I put grass on the roof just because I didn't know how to tile, but I knew how to just wheelbarrow load of mud up onto the roof.

And then I put modern straw on the outside of the concrete because it looked very angular. And I built it in 2002 for 26 grand. And I've been living there ever since. I just in recent years I've wanted to I wanted to create my independence just because I don't have a great income in any way. You know, I do a little bit for the Irish Times. I write books. But those Godlove, those travel books I wrote about all those trips, you know, they don't sell much.

So I then I started grow my own vegetables on our first thing I did. I planted six acres of the 10 acres in Oakwood. I did that 20 years ago and garden was slow. But now massive oaks have these big, big oaks, twenty year old oaks. And then I've got pigs. I got Tamworth, the old native pig in and I got out, put the pigs in and then I now have hens and I've turkeys and I've got five beehives and a half.

So are you living off the land as such? Are you trying to you live in in a way where you don't need money for a lot of your needs?

Exactly, yeah. So I put my I put four point three kilowatts of of solar panels in so I'd have electricity most of the time. I first thing I did, you know, twenty three years ago when I moved here I was put up the polytunnels. So yeah. I mean clearly things like, you know, lentils and flour, I'm still buying in. I'd like to, I'd like to grow enough grain just for my own bread. But you're covered again.

I am growing so much more since Colvert because all of those things, they take up an enormous amount of time. Yeah. So none of them I would have been doing to that extent the scale I wanted to until this year. You preserve in vegetables and shit like that.

Are you canning things and stuff.

I am exactly. I'm doing that. And again, something I'd never done until this year was save my seed because it was so easy to save, you know, horrible to see flower seeds because it was so easy to just, you know, go online and order packages. Yeah. During covid, they were sold out, you know, and the great brown envelope seeds and cork and seed savers in Clare, they were all saying, we have no naft, save your own seed like the shops were actually telling you, don't come to us, do it yourself.

So that was a big learning experience for me this year. The power of being utterly independent means controlling your seeds as well as your irrigation, your electricity, your food source.

Yeah, so I leave you going, oh, man. Right. Thank you so much for that. That was an absolutely fantastic chatoor was so interesting. I'd love to have you on again man. I'd say we I mean you could talk about fucking anything for a long time.

I really appreciate. Thank you so much. And I genuinely I'm just so bowled over by the work you do. I thank you so much, man. It's like you see it. All right. I see you have a good bye bye.

Or that was absolutely lovely. What a wonderful conversation that I had there. What man can that feel fantastic for me? Because I'm fucking locked up a coronavirus. I'm not seeing a lot of people and I really enjoyed that. I'm going to be back next week with I've got a couple of heartaches on the part that's and I'm trying to decide which one I'm going to give you, but I'm going to have a heart attack next week. And I'm looking forward to recording next week's podcast.

Mind yourself, have some self compassion, have some compassion for other people. And like I said at the start of the podcast. Don't be stressing yourself out over things that are outside of your control. Focus on what is inside of your control. All right.

And you'll be Grand Hyatt. Our tree business, we know that your business sometimes needs to be run outside from home or on the road. Today, we are providing 5G in every county in Ireland. We also carry over two thirds of the entire country's mobile data on our 4G nationwide network. So if you're a business owner, farmer or a tradesperson, rest assured that we have you covered everywhere.

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This week's podcast is sponsored by Brave New World, which is a Sky, a regional drama based on the book of the same name by Aldous Huxley Brave New World. It's an adaptation which asks topical questions, and it draws parallels to the current world we live in. Oh, sounds spicy. A central theme of Brave New World is happiness or freedom. How much of our individuality, freedom of choice and privacy are we willing to sacrifice in exchange for always being happy?

Which sounds frighteningly familiar to my actual life and my relationship with my smartphone. But there you go. I write all episodes of Brave New World are available on Sky. Now check it out.