Philip Boucher-Hayes
speaker
466 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Sep
Philip Boucher-Hayes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I was out on the island of Inishmore and there were 200 people around me lifting a stone.
And I saw the emotions that it gave them.
This might sound ridiculous to people, but I was standing there lifting a stone written about by Limo Flaherty, our great Irish essayist and writer.
And there was 200 people around me in a circle.
And everyone's singing in Irish as I'm lifting the stone.
Ó ró, sé da baith a bhaile, like, ó ró, you're welcome home.
And I'm lifting that stone and the cheering and the shouting.
And I lift it up to my chest like the man does in the story and I put it down again.
And everyone comes around me in a hug, about 50 people in a group hug, like a tribal hug, you know, all around me, put their hands in on top of me.
No one said, well done.
Everyone just said, thank you.
No one got a margul.
Thank you for bringing it back.
So if you can give people a reattachment to their culture through the simple act of raising a stone from the earth, you're not just raising a stone from the earth, you're raising a bit of culture from the earth again too.
It's ironic that we're sitting here in a UNESCO Geopark which is all about showing how culture does come from the earth, comes out of the geology of a place.
Stone lifting is really an expression of that, isn't it?
It's probably the most primal expression of that.
It is the earth.
It's the bones of the earth.
But that it was such a communal activity and brought so many people together on what sounds like a very, very regular basis.
Showing 201–220 of 466 · page 11 of 24
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