The Irish Government is in the pocket of Big Tech and Data Centres
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Insert your head in the bent hen's rectum, you sweltering emmets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, a steaming cueva, a ten-foot declan, You know the crack. As you can guess from the title of this week's episode, we are in the midst of a very unpleasant heatwave here in Ireland, which is going to last. It's been going for about six days and it's going to last for another 10 or 12, which is rare. We rarely get almost a fortnight of sustained dry, sunny weather. Irish weather is chaotic, unpredictable, irrational. Jacket in the morning because you're freezing.
T-shirt in the daytime because you're too hot. And then umbrella by 3pm because it's lashing rain. And then maybe hailstones in the evening just for the crack. With a bit of sun at the end. So much of our small talk and conversation is about the weather. Like I remember a couple of years ago I was doing... I was doing an ad campaign for a brand of Irish tomato ketchup. And they were launching barbecue sauces and the specific messaging of the campaign was how easy it was to take their barbecue sauces indoors if it happened to rain in the middle of the barbecue. Because that's how you have to have barbecues in Ireland. You have to prepare the barbecue in such a way that everything can be moved indoors in under 15 minutes if that's what needs to happen.
saw two weeks of sustained dry hot weather. We don't know what to do with it.
How does Irish weather and culture shape attitudes toward enjoyment and punishment?
And you can't enjoy it because our weather system is based on punishment. Like I have a larger theory that one of the reasons that Irish Catholicism which defined a huge part of our culture up until maybe 10 years ago and some of it still left. Irish Catholicism focused very heavily on sin, repentance, shame about sin, self-punishment, confession and a great sense of guilt about enjoying anything. That if you were to enjoy something then there must be some type of penance as a result of this. The trauma of 800 years of colonization plays its part. But even 500 years before any colonization, we were renowned for a version of Christianity that placed emphasis on asceticism. Fasting for days, sleeping on rocks, not sleeping for days, immersing in cold water, self-punishment,
The Irish ascetic monks of the 5th and 6th centuries and 7th centuries basically believed that any enjoyment of life was sin. And the only way to get into heaven was to live your life under the same miserable punishment that Christ went through when he was being brought to the cross. Like what examples could I give you? Saint Kevin. Saint Kevin of Glendalough. lived, we'll say the year 500. He was a monk. He was a hermit. Lived up in Glendalough in Wicklow. This area is known as the Garden of Ireland. If you were to go to Glendalough now, on a sunny day like this, you'd have a spiritual experience. Because it's, it's so beautiful. It's, it's like something out of a dream. It's how the Garden of Eden is described.
You're high up this winding mountain in Wicklow. The air would be thick with that beautiful smell of trees and flowers and a cooling wind, calming birdsong floating through the air and then you just reach this absolutely perfect crystal clear lake it's a glaciated lake so it was once a glacier so there's a perfect symmetry to everything and when you're on the banks of that shallow crystal mirror lake with the mountains either side The fact that it's a glacier really matters here. So you're talking 20,000 years ago, this lake or river freezes through the valley. It grows and expands. And then 10,000 years ago, that melts away. So then you're left with a landscape that feels unnaturally symmetrical, visually harmonious, as if it was deliberate, like someone created it.
That's the feeling you get when you go to Glendalough. It's so beautiful. I've been there. It's so beautiful. You have a spiritual moment. You pause. You think about what life is. You look at the abundant beauty and you'll naturally drift towards thinking about did somebody create this?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:46
2
How does Irish weather and culture shape attitudes toward enjoyment and punishment?
1:46–16:34
3
What is the story of St Kevin of Glendalough and why does it matter to Irish asceticism?
16:34–55:29
4
How did Irish monks preserve knowledge and accidentally invent whiskey?
55:29–59:14
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Blindboy Podcast
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