Irish people

Yet the people who go to Catholic Church are good people.

You know, the Irish people are really good pe- They're so nice that it's like [laughs] they just let everybody in.

"Come in.

Come in.

Yeah, sure, sure." Because they've got this argument, well, look at the 35 million Irish Americans, for example, that left Ireland.

But they don't realize that all of it's been controlled by the same puppeteers.

And I think what's happening is that all of these, this mass immigration in this country, the same as in the UK, but in the UK it started 40 years ago a- and it, and it was slower.

We've developed an industry that is stumbling from crisis to crisis.

How many droughts Irish agriculture has encountered just since 2018.

We've had emergencies at least two of those years where we've had to rush in fodder from France and Spain, uh, to supplement because, you know, that grass that we're so good at growing didn't grow.

Solar is ...

But I also just want to, to sort of, I think, give due kind of homage to your, the fact that, like, I think I, I think I've had you on some panel discussions, and I've always flagged this, and I wanna, I wanna say it again that, like, you were ...

So I think most people now would know you as, you know, f- doing, doing your stuff with Matt Cooper on, on The Last Word and so on, and that weekly slot that does so much to kind of bring these issues into the sort of mainstream media.

But for a long time before that, you were a kind of bit of a John the Baptist in The Irish Times, I think for a, with a weekly column talking about these issues long before they were really central to, to sort of, you know, the mainstream conversation.

Like, what got you interested in, in environmental issues?

And once he lamented that his old neighbors were gone and that all had forgotten him.

They used to draw a chair to the fire for him in every cabin and now they said, who is that old fellow there? The fret, Irish for doom, is over me, he repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven.

More than once also he said, waving his arm toward the mountain, only myself knows what happened under the thorny tree forty years ago.

And as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.

They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was like dribbled snow, he meant driven snow perhaps, and she had blushes in her cheeks.

She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now.

I talked to him about a poem in Irish Rafferty, a famous poet, made about her, and how it said, "There is a strong cellar in Ballylee." He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool where an otter hurried away under a gray boulder and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water at early morning "to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills." I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles further up the river and who remembers Rafferty and Mary Hynes.

She says, "I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will till I die." And that he was nearly blind and had no way of living but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the neighbors would gather to hear.

um have any association with anyone else he was just an independent investor with his his company elkstone innocently investing how would any of that benefit him how would that benefit him at all

none whatsoever because i meant to start his behavior made no sense because it meant that the people that invested the money with him were investing in an Irish company that was scaling.

And he crashed that company and actually tried to come in and buy the company through liquidation with the other shareholders.

And his behavior was crashing the company.

And on paper, everybody lost their money.

People were giving this guy money.

to help an Irish business and to make a return on investment.

But most of the people were trying to support Irish businesses, right? And even at the time that we had ended up in difficulty, he had already oversubscribed around.

We've got our Grainne Doherty.

The Hopeful Kind are finalists number two as part of Irish Music Month.

We're searching for the next local music hero.

We're gonna send, uh, one of our four finalists on to a national competition to represent us and the region.

If it suits you, maybe you work at home or in the home, you've got a smart TV or your Fire Stick, open up the YouTube app, type in Highland Radio Ireland, and you can watch your own, uh, program local to you.

We're across the Facebook platforms and on X as well.

Uh, the Irish Times this morning, Sinn Féin signs pact with Scottish and Welsh nationalists.

This is an interesting scenario we find ourselves in, and I mentioned it on the program yesterday ahead of this meeting.

That's right.

So I mean, the overall picture was that the entire Irish economy and lifestyle had now been found to be completely unsustainable.

You could not, as it was then practiced, feed eight, eight and a half million people, um, not without the potato.

I mean, we have this fanciful notion that we, in fact, had loads of food.

We did not.

We relied big time on this magic product that was coming out of the ground, producing trillions of calories, um, all on its own, you know, with, with, to be honest, fairly little labor.

Take that out of the equation, and you simply cannot feed the Irish population.

Now, as well as that, it had provided employment.

I mean, it is completely bonkers that people think like that we're old now at 35.

But, I mean, PJ, we're Irish, whether which, right? It's nothing to do with age.

All the Irish people love conversation either way.

Yes.

I mean, you're there, right? You're...

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we have our new Christmas speed dating event, which will be in the Bodega, that's the old town whiskey bar, form- formerly the Irish Market.

... yeah.

And then the Irish, too, were also, like, questionable.

For a long time, they were called white Negroes.

[laughs]Um, and they kind of-

[laughs]

...

the perception of whiteness and how people have added to it, like a, you know, a ball of wax, where like, "All right, we can mush the Irish on there." Uh-

Yeah

There is some sort of enthusiasm that encourages excesses or covers faults.

For instance, I for one have maintained from very early days the responsibility of the English for their atrocious treatment of the Irish.

But it would be quite unfair to the English to describe even the devilry of '98 and leave out altogether all mention of the war with Napoleon.

It would be unjust to suggest that the English mind was bent on nothing but the death of Emmet when it was more probably full of the glory of the death of Nelson.

Unfortunately, '98 was very far from being the last date of such dirty work, and only a few years ago our politicians started trying to rule by random, robbing and killing, while gently remonstrating with the Irish for their memory of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.

But however badly we may think of the Black and Tan business, it would be unjust to forget that most of us were not thinking of Black and Tan, but of khaki, and that khaki had just then a noble and national connotation covering many things.

To write of the war in Ireland and leave out the war against Prussia and the English sincerity about it would be unjust to the English.