Rory O'Neill AKA Panti

I could tell that my mother was upset and, you know, miserable.

Just the whole thing was absolutely miserable.

And I might have only been 11, but I just thought...

fuck this shit am I allowed to curse on your podcast I was like fuck this shit this is just bullshit there was nothing holy about that there was nothing uplifting or anything and I was like oh my god I want to be a Buddhist you know and I really I mean it's too simplistic to look at one event but it absolutely solidified for me this is bullshit and I don't want anything to do with this

I think I was.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm one of these people who has a billion books of philosophy and I'm... No.

But I definitely had a mind of my own and I didn't like being told what to think about things.

And sometimes something like that seems so self-evident to me that these people don't have some special connection to a God that they've worked out and that all the Buddhists and the Muslims and whoever else have got it all wrong and that these ones in this damp field...

eating, you know, damp brown bread sandwiches, waiting for a man who didn't bother to turn up.

I like, there's no way that this is somehow special and divine more than the others.

Oh, you know, absolutely.

It was the first time that I saw, oh, my mother's not a god, in a way.

Because I could see that she was upset and miserable too, on the way back and that.

And we had to walk down these, like, borines, but now it was pitch dark.

And so it was difficult and miserable and...

And everyone was getting jostled and bumped into each other.

And then we were only trying to get as far as buses, which were going to take us into Clare Morris, where all the cars had been parked.

But because of all the throngs on the roads and the boring, they couldn't even get the buses out.

So we had to walk to Clare Morris.

And there was a number of, I don't remember, but a good number of miles in the dark.