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Basically, midges are flies with a recreational cocaine habit. They can smell fatty blood from as far away as Barnadearg, possibly Moylough, and usually swarm the peatlands of Ireland at this time of year. Heavy downpours of rain aside, midges are the number two excuse to emergency exit from bogside exercise. I’ve been keeping an eye out for them around my banks of turf and along the Cloonascragh approach road. Fortunately, none have popped on the radar or attempted to snort a line from my forearms yet, which, all things considered is a minor miracle. Because, midges view the bog the way twenty somethings in the early noughties looked upon a summer vacation to Ibiza—a euphoric melting pot of possibility. A hazy permission to engage in wild, frenetic dancing and chaotic exchange of horizontal vibrational energy. Sadly, though, these boglands are scarce of youthful blood and a far remove from the midge glory days of my youth.

Over the weekend, I developed some turf-footing rhythm and conceded to myself the bog experiment is my summer holidays. In layman’s terms, I was taking my time over the work and the weekend. Two lines in the morning and two in the evening along with two litres of Lemon ‘n Lime and an ice-cream to finish off the day’s endeavours—and devil a raving midge in sight.

My optimum turf stack has ten sods of turf. Under ten sods to the stack means the turf is wetter and breaking up in the hand and disturbing my peaceful groove. Above ten, means outbreaks of long, thin sods, almost bone-dry—rare occurrences, sadly. A blackbird landed on one of my stacks and stayed for a long minute. His orange beak and eyes scanning the stacks in the general vicinity. He seemed satisfied the natural order of the landscape wasn’t too inconvenienced by my labours to date. When I moved again he moved too and haughtily flew off to a neighbouring bank. I stood up to watch him take flight, hands on hips, and spotted a whitethorn in the far-off distance—spellbound by the blossoming beauty of it for a few seconds. I looked down again at the mounting stacks of my efforts and wondered how many fires they would light during the winter and what conversations they might spark. Or, perhaps, some sods would quietly flame and offer nights of silent contemplation and company. The thoughts pleased me and so I bent my back again and returned to work.

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On a break, and sitting in the driver’s seat of my car with the door open, a gentle voice drifted in, interrupting my cigarette. I half-heartedly began swiping away the beads of sweat dripping down my face and turned to face the words.

“Are Monaghan winning the match?“ the old man enquired.

The radio in my car was voiceless but out through the windscreen I could see four men in their early forties footing turf maybe seventy or seventy-five yards away. More talk than animated work seemed to be going on over there. The car door of one of their cars was wide open and the noise of a football match from the All-Ireland Football Qualifiers was blaring from the dashboard and out across the bog. I looked up at the voice asking the question, a man in his eighties with a walking stick, and rifled through my memory to see if I had an answer to his question recorded in there somewhere.

“I think Roscommon were two points up but that was half an hour ago“ I replied after a time.

Soon, the unmistakable roar of a score could be heard and a commentator’s voice bellowed out the up-to-date scoreline. Monaghan were now leading and a good scatter of points ahead of Roscommon with only a few minutes remaining in the game.

“Ah Monaghan, have it“ the man whispered knowingly and then quietly wandered off to his own car. Gingerly, he took up a seated position in the driver’s seat but made no move to drive away. He just sat and unobtrusively observed the bog population at play. Engaging in physicality that he no longer had access to or enough strength to participate in anymore. His fate sealed the same as Roscommon’s but unable to give up the bog-ghost—and wouldn’t right to the final whistle.

The turf is like this, I suppose. No Hi’s or goodbyes, really. People saunter onto the stage, utter their lines, and then go back to their own patches of sacred ground. Still sitting in the car, I returned my gaze to the neighbouring turf bank across the path from my own bank and the vista mildly aggravated my senses. A woman, in her sixties, steadily making her way through a mountain of turf, at least eighty yards of it. Her progress for a couple of days a little steadier and little faster than my own. The general shape and economy of her movement suggested a hardiness not acquired by an annual gym membership in Tuam.

Now, there is one big decision to be made about turf before commencement of the work each year.

To turn or not to turn, that is the question.

Turning turf adds an additional step to the process and increases the workload. Theoretically, at least. So, then, either turn and stack or skip the turning step and move straight to footing it. My goodly neighbour obviously made the decision to turn her sods first and was now gliding through the footing phase. This means every sod is handled twice, while this adds to the time it also adds to the care. It is properly the way to do it, in my opinion and I chose not to. Read into that what you will, I suppose. Given the moisture content of some of my lines of turf it seemed like hers was much the sounder logic. Every forty-five minutes or so, of bending, lifting and stacking sods she’d take a break in her car for twenty minutes and return again. And again. And again. I was mightily impressed. Similar to me, she showed up each day on her own and kept herself to herself.

The physicality of bog-labour means muscles not normally worked in modern life or by automated fitness regimes get thoroughly examined. On morning three, I woke early in the bed and tried to move. Only to discover my lower back was threatening to spasm and at least one arse cheek was vibrating. My upper hamstrings on both legs were taut and contemplating a snap, crackle and pop when I dipped a foot outside the boundary fence of the duvet. All told, a most pleasurable but long forgotten sort of pain and l bathed in the natural ecstasy of it for a minute or two. I suspected my competition across the gravel bog-road wasn’t suffering to the same degree.

Yet, conversely, the muscles of mind were completely massaged, relaxed and planning for two boiled eggs and heavily buttered brown bread for breakfast. Also, a simple decision was reached to continue driving the circuitous back-roads to the bog despite the addition of five miles to the trip and ten to the round-trip. It is no great revelation to say most of life is in the journey through it, but at some unknown point I’ve become insistent on regularly bumping into outbreaks of natural beauty to guide me along the way. I’ll fork out a little extra diesel money for the tuning fork of flowers, living hedgerows and the changing colors of season. For the foxes, birds, stray bullocks on the road, and for the young family of pheasants lined up on the grassy verge last week that I never before witnessed in all my years.

Sometimes the bog throws up more than turf from the womb of her belly. Worms frequently squiggle and stretch beneath the wet sod, startled at the sudden exposure to light. However, on plucking up one long piece of turf I uncovered a gemstone. A glistening white, bog-stained but remarkably smooth piece of quartz. Perfectly smelted by a few thousand years of simmering beneath the surface. I wondered about drilling a hole in it, inserting a shoelace, hanging it around my neck and advertising my services as the local midge hunter for next year.

Indeed, by the end of evening four the midges were still nowhere to be found and I promptly celebrated on the homeward journey by treating myself to a picture of some cow daisies hiding behind a gate that have been catching my attention on all four days but who I’ve been passing without pause to drink in. So I did, finally. After which, I felt inspired enough to rearrange and adapt the lyrics of an old, anti-war, Pete Seeger folk song—Where Have all Flowers Gone? and soon started humming the new tune for the remainder of the evening.

Where have all the midges gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the midges gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the midges gone?
Young blackbirds have tricked them, every one
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

The five extra miles seem to be a hallucination on the road back. I suppose, at the start of bog season you wish fifty yards of turf was thirty but towards the middle and end—the hand is itching and arse vibrating for a hundred more.

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The turf’s been cut for a few weeks now. Its looming shadow a creeping presence in the back of my mind for over a week. Like dark rolling clouds breezing in off an Atlantic sunset—a puffy gang that suddenly pitches a tent over Galway Bay to arm-wrestle the sun for a couple of weeks. The bog is all fine and dandy on the page but the work of it is another thing.

I drove down Tuesday evening to take a look at my snippet of bog and her harvest was ready for some moving. The plots were marked out neatly enough and most of the peatlands were untouched. Long sausage lines of brown as far as the eye could see. I found my plot handy enough and recorded the sight to memory. Fifty yards. Fifteen or sixteen rows of turf in long lines, ten sods to the row. Probably, three evenings work at a decent sweat.

Cue a little internal groaning.

I wonder are the Irish summer downpours a result of all the prayers offered up to heaven for two days of torrential rain to avoid the start of bog season. Anyway, I bent down and slapped together a couple of turf stacks to mark my territory like a sheep-dog pissing on the side of the road and promptly ran off to the nearest petrol station for some pedigree chum and a coffee. While I love the bog, remembering why always needs a little kickstarting.

Late last week, I travelled to Kerry to meet a woman of, shall we say, the Irish spiritual resistance and our conversations sparked some new angles on ideas already sloshing around in my head about all things turf. At one point she described me as a bog warrior with obvious and pronounced dark masculine traits and this immediately triggered the notion that the bog herself might be a dark feminine. Similar to my soul, I consider all bogs in Ireland to be feminine, or feminine dominant at the very least for some reason.

I returned to the turf on Wednesday and to a landscape filled with white cumulus clouds, wind and no little sunshine. So—Unanswered prayers and Himself insistent on a start. Like with any new exercise or training regime the mind battles the elements within for the first hour. But, gently, gently the sound of the breeze and the birds infiltrates the system and a man can start dreaming new, clean dreams a little while getting his hands dirty.

After two lines and two hours, a ten-year-old Citroen Berlingo van approached down the gravel road and halted directly across from where I was hunched. A man in his sixties got out and seemed to be already in conversation with me for a good sixty yards before stopping the van. He immediately set about investigating the state of my turf.

“ Ah it’s good turf “ he said. While bending down and turning a few sods over onto their backsides.

“ Few rows in the middle are still a bit stodgy “ I replied

“ Ah, it’s grand, it’s ready for turning “

We engaged in the usual bog banter for a few minutes and I soon discovered he knew my father.

“ Ah, sure didn’t he work in the council, I knew him well. He cuts a lot of turf “

We both looked across to where his banks of turf lay. Some of it stacked but plenty left to do. A Romanian family are stacking sods in this particular bog at three euro a yard and impressing the locals with their speed and work ethic. My old man may or may not have fallen under the spell of their charms this bog season. In proper bog-speak my new acquaintance got around to asking this question without asking this question.

“ I suppose, you’ll be giving him a hand when your piece-een is done? “

Not an inquisition, per se, just a general enquiry into the state of affairs on the paternal ancestral line stretching back three or four generations.

“Ah sure, you never know we might cut a deal “ I smiled.

He laughed and turned back to the van. I watched him drive away satisfied I’d revealed enough to chew the cud on but not enough to dine out on the family tree. I glanced around the bog-scape and noticed two or three other vans of a similar nature scattered around the place. The perfect vehicle from which to carry out three or four different enterprises. You rarely meet a bog man that has a strictly nine-to-five existence or incestuous relationship with the revenue commissioners.

At the end of day one I was pretty happy and even developed a hankering for cheese sandwiches and some fruit soda bread and duly obliged myself. However, the old Irish saying “Tús maith, leath an oibre” may not quite apply. The week has been intertwined with interfacing my mother’s hip with Galway University hospital and the Irish Health System.

We have been complaining for generations about the Accident and Emergency departments of Irish hospitals and the inhumanity of corridors lined with trolleys of the sick. What is not mentioned is the numbers of staff taking up space on these same corridors. At one point I counted four beds in the corridor and about fifteen hospital workers. Nurses, doctors, ambulance service, physios, porters and the list goes on.

In the distance, lay a woman of a similar age to my mother. She was in a state of quiet wail with her left hand outstretched for someone’s attention. Her fingers were long and attractive with fingernails colored in the most beautiful shade of red. But, not even immaculately painted nails guarantee attention in our health system. Employees of the hospital zoomed by her bed, a mile a minute, ignoring her pleas for help. Maybe, one in every five paused briefly—fake-smiling promises of a return in a minute. But none returned in the minute that followed. Or the minute after that.

On exiting the system I passed a poem by Jane Hirshfield on the wall of the outer waiting room. I stopped to read it in full and considered afterwards that it was the most healing piece of furniture in the whole building. I took a picture of it on my phone but it was only after an evening in the bog I realised my full mistake. I should have gone back to read it to the lady with the heart painted fingernails and outstretched hand.

But, like all the others, I kept on walking.

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My mother has noticed my writing life involves more driving and peering up at the moon than writing. A secret I’d kept out of earshot of her faltering hearing aid until recently. The following conversation engagement has battled out over darkening skies for a week or so.

“Are you not writing anymore?“

“ Yes, I am “

“ What did you say? “

“ YES, I am “

“ I can’t hear you “

“ YES, I AM “

“ Now, there’s no need to be shouting at your poor old mother—I’m only asking a question “

Anyway, temporary peace and a reduction in the output of four letter words is restored thanks to a hearing aid appointment. However, the row raised a useful bubble in my mind to chew on. I never sit down to write. Most of the pen-pushing takes place in my head. The aim is to sit down and capture presence for a few hours and then perhaps write about it in my mind. So, a lot of attenuation happens in the car. A lot of attenuation flies out the window of the car too. Or some mountain, lake, forest or shoreline close to the car. Unfortunately, this literary conceit is not ideal for the mass production of sentences.

Especially at this time of year.

I can get lost in the gentle peace and pace of summer. The short, intense downpours of rain, the surprising Atlantic breezes gusting here and there, and the occasional blasts of heat from the yellow furnace in the sky—all massage a lazy tranquility across the landscape’s brow and my own. No one complains about the Irish summer except for the people. So, I think the word ‘weather’ should be banned from all public places and public houses in Ireland from now until at least mid-October. You know, the bores crying for just a ‘drop a rain’ after three days of sun cream and ice-cream. Or the weeping willows grieving over drooping meadows as if sixty consecutive days of sunshine a year would produce green fields and hedgerows and seasons of daffodils, tulips, cow parsley and cow daisies running seamlessly into one another.

The Irish summer is the Irish summer, just like a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. Each different but all uniquely the same. If you need a more scientific explanation on these matters I’m afraid I don’t have the psychiatric qualifications to hold space for the conversation.

I’ve been tracking the mini-seasons of flower and fauna on the verges of the road since the arrival of this year’s daffodils. So, I’m even more distracted than usual this summer and even slower getting around the place. For the past week or two, bunches of pretty cow daisies mooch around every turn in the road. Tall and dainty looking. Drawing the eye but calming the mind too. And ever so gently elbowing into the domain of the cow parsley. Softly edging them away from centre stage as May moves to early June.

This is the sweet-spot of Irish summer.

Each day stretching further into the night until midsummer in three weeks’ time. When a slow stop and gentle about turn commences. I always experience a little melancholy on the evening after midsummer night—the faint, worrying pulse that the days are once more abbreviating. Invisible at first but not for long.

During one of these rambles I stopped for diesel and stumbled across some dark magic from Lego-town. Dark magic words, to be precise. According to the “World Meteorological Organisation“ El Nino is going to hit us pretty hard here in the West of Ireland late in the summer. Now, not just here in North Galway and South Mayo but in all of the known world too obviously and a couple of unidentified galaxies as well. I’ve never heard of the World Meteorological Organization but, similar to the World Health Organisation, the WMO are full of the joys of life and drooling over impending calamities and disasters.

“WMO’s latest updates confirm that El Niño conditions are developing and are set to influence global temperature and rainfall patterns, increasing the risk of extreme weather over the coming months. Although some uncertainty remains about El Niño peak strength and timing, most forecast models suggest it will be at least moderate—and possibly strong”

Three years ago, I’d have dived straight down this rabbit-hole to unearth more information but nowadays I just note the new magical formula and vehicle, record to the memory bank, and move along with my life. Suffice to say, the World Meteorological Organisation, will be greedy for power, influence and control over our day-to-day lives and seek retail space in our mental, emotional and physical spheres.

Anyway, looking out the back kitchen window the summer seems well in itself and un-bothered about El Nino’s approach. The birds sing at such a happy pitch it suggests they intuitively believe that the World Meteorological Organisation is probably filled with bats. Bat-shit bonkers ones with no internal radaring system and scientists that can’t make it at the World Health Organisation. Or worse, scientists that did make it at the World Health Organisation. I suppose, when the birds stop singing the morning chorus I’ll start worrying more about climate and maybe read a scientific journal or a Fintan O’Toole article again.

In unrelated but kind of related news, I had the blessed good fortune to be in the Sligo and Leitrim region last weekend and happened upon a sign marked:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Needless to say, I couldn’t help myself and took a quick detour off the narrow back-road I was meditating on and onto an even narrower one and after a few kilometres there she was.

I’m an absolute sucker for a couple of W.B. Yeats’ poems and The Lake Isle of Innisfree is one of them. I still remember reading it for the first time in school and the way the second verse shifted something inside me. A hidden vibrational element I didn’t know existed. It occurs to me now the poem is set in summer or late summer.

The pretty island is tiny and overrun with trees and not quite the wild, peaceful beauty queen of my imagination. Though, as I stood near the shoreline of Lough Gill gazing out at it for a while, I found if not peace a little connection with the natural order of things. I guess, it is true what they say. You should never meet your heroines.

The next day, or the day after that, another petrol station refill brought my eyes back briefly to the drudgery of the political landscape via front-page headlines on the newsstand. I’m hoping to soon discover a filling station without one. At any rate, my mind was drawn to the front page of the Daily Mail. Now, if you closely examine the picture below you might notice the cover page is a big pharma infomercial. Four of the five articles referenced are celebrating not health but pharmaceutical products.

Pride of place is reserved for a revolutionary new mRNA vaccine that “ could “ work to reduce melanoma—the most aggressive and deadliest forms of skin cancer. Enough celebratory couched language is used so as to indemnify the products from ever needing to work while simultaneously doing enough to move a few billionaires into the trillionaire class. No doubt the WHO will roll in behind this one and sure once El Nino finishes up its business in August these new magicians at WMO might get behind it too. Because, after all, the overall sales package and messaging is this:

The Irish summer could kill you, or at the very least give you skin cancer.

So, have you inoculated yourself from the Irish summer yet?

Please do, as quickly as possible, at a pharmacy near you.

I guess, once you notice these aggravating patterns in the media there is no actual need to engage with the individual storylines really. The headlines may change but the fine print remains the same. Always.

Fear, more control and whatever delinquent desire you’re having yourself there Mister or Minister. All of it far removed from The Lake Isle of Innisfree. I think I might have a backroads summer and burn the passport. Because the birds are singing joyously, the hedgerows are packed with intrigue and the cow daisies are right on schedule. Every motorway exits onto a thousand backroads and silent ways around these times. That’s the bit the WMO or WHO don’t necessarily want everybody to understand. Fruitful places to tune in attention and recharge. There’s no need to shout or fix a hearing aid in places where the sounds vibrate through every living thing.

A world that wants us to hear everything but listen to nothing.

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The Irish Government are moving ahead with the controversial Occupied Territories bill. A piece of legislation targeting and banning the import of Israeli goods from lands occupied by the same. As previously written here this bill is the type of woke nonsense dreamt up to give Irish political and media elites something to gaslight the public about while allowing both sides to feel high and mighty about themselves on world affairs. This is a mask-slip moment, though. Even as their shiny, new drone-powered legal vehicle machine-guns condescension and faux-morality down on top of our heads from Twitter and TikTok.

Ireland does less than 250,000 euros worth of business with the occupied Palestinian territories in question. A nothing amount in relative terms. But, I must admit, this number doesn’t include the tens of billions in trade we conduct each year with Israel’s other illegally occupied settlement—the United States of America.

The revelation in the latest rendition of this bill is that it now excludes a ban on the provision of services from Palestinian occupied lands. So, a non-ban on Israel’s biggest export arenas—Tech and AI.

Interesting, wouldn’t you say.

“ Crucially, however, the proposed legislation will not apply to trade in services. Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that “fundamentally, it’s not implementable in terms of services. He added: “Secondly, our strong legal advice is in the negative also. And thirdly, it would perhaps potentially damage Ireland more than anyone else. In terms of potential impact on US multinationals based here and back in America. “

— Irish Times, Wednesday, May 27, 2026.

The third point above is the only material point. Additionally, I would note Taoiseach Martin didn’t refer to the economic effect this legislation might have on Irish multinationals or indeed anyone Irish.

The removal of the services element to the Occupied Territories bill is a bit like giving up sex for Lent except for orgies, threesomes and the missionary position. A worthless bill made more worthless. Sadly, Ireland itself is an occupied territory but unlike the Palestinians we have no idea just how many other countries or entities occupy us. Pieces of legislation like the one described here and the subsequent rollbacks shine a little light on who these occupying forces might be, though.

Rather than look at this issue in political terms or by naming countries, political leaders or individuals, let’s try something a little different and see where it leads. Instead, let’s consider the basic problem is a simple one and say:

Ireland’s economy and way of life is now almost totally funded by outrageous greed. The greed of outside agents whether they be US corporations or EU funding or a small cabal of other powerful interests.

In biblical or spiritual terms we might contemplate this word ‘greed’ as not just indicative of selfishness but as an intense desire to possess more. And then more and more again. A fierce, ferocious and dark energetic force that ever expands. So, in these terms, Ireland behaves not just as a tax haven for the rich, and a site for the creation of more riches for these same rich, but as a safe harbour for the expansion of these deviant desires. After forty years of this economic behaviour we are a nation at a point where economics has blackened our soul development. Where the island now acts as a magnetic force for attracting the darkest amongst the greedy few.

Why?

Because after four decades of the same policies only the darkest energy remains out there to reel in. Or worse, the established corrupt energetic force in the country only sustains and feeds itself via the importation of blacker and blacker pools of it.

You might say, the Occupied Territories bill is a recognition in some small way of this kind of darkness existing in the world but as it skates along through its initial stages in Dail Eireann—the blackness emerges to remind everyone involved their souls have already been sold. Bizarrely, the Irish government, and the Irish Development Authority as marketers in chief for the country, have hammered-posted signage across every corner of the land which reads something as follows:

“ Only the greediest welcome, visas and citizenship will be supplied “

In real terms, Ireland has become an energetic concentration and indoctrination camp. Here, you go to school in one, you go to university in one and then get a job and career in one. Later on, you might join one of the sanctioned political, sporting or media groups to pitch in and help promote the greedy merry-go-round from a high horse going round in circles.

But, our state institutions, finance houses, government departments, NGO sector and right on down to the local village community council, GAA pitch and town hall are all, eventually, thread-linked back to the same bottomless pit of avarice coursing through the work, leisure, public and civic bloodstream. Viewed through a vibrational or energetic lens something quite obvious emerges. No long term good outcomes can ever establish, sustain or prosper because the wholesome energetic life-force of the people servicing the greed is drained away over time, or worse still, corrupted entirely.

So, for example, we might say Ireland has a terrible health system despite the fact tens of billions of euros a year is spent on it and then question why. One way of answering the question is to say: Well, it is because the investment, year after year, is sourced from a dark pool of greed. Greed gets greedier and because it does, all solutions must service and unrisk the greed—first, second and last. What is left over isn’t much good and quite often toxically bad.

The occupied territories bill is a joke and, I suppose, the only sensible response to a joke is to laugh.

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The fire comes from the belly of the land. The ancient womb of old bogs and heathered banks heave with life and potential for new birth.

It is earth and it is fire and it is a flame like no other, surely.

A casual mountain pass leaks nameless waterfalls on to the road, onto the ditches and into rivulets of water and on into the valley below. A lough of ages opens its lips and drinks in their sweet kisses.

The flame of the earth and the fire dance a jig on the shoreline. The wet mist adds tenderness and a tear or two. The water deepens beauty as the yellow blaze turns away from the blossoming gorse bushes and inwards to orange.

A damp sod smokes and the wind catches wind of it. Dark swirls scent the sunset sky with spices. Spices of the earth and the fire and tear-drop memories of lagoons of long ago.

Truth arrives slow, a knotty fat sod resisting the hot of the fire and misty waters. Dense with peat and generations of darkening browns and blacks. After a while, though, it unexpectedly cracks in two and the smoke thins to a lighter fragrance.

Only patience coaxes out the deepest ambers and wise reds. Fatherly warmth now steps in to stroke the cheeks. Strong and encouraging the eyes into a deeper place of silence and peace. The flame is man and it is woman and the air is pricked with the pregnancy of the possible.

The breeze whistles a forgotten tune as the embers nestle into the mounting pile of white ash. There is life and death in every fire. Soon, the ash will be whisked away and scattered across land and lough. To begin again, someday.

But, for a moment the simple quartet of instruments move together like an orchestra.

There is everything man could need here. From his earth, from his fire, from his water, and from his air.

From his God.

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Today’s Interview on the Scholar Gypsies

Siofra O’Donovan is author of Malinski and several other published books. She is also a facilitator of creative writing workshops and a writing mentor for over twenty years. Siofra is a member of the Writers in Schools Poetry Ireland scheme and the Writers in Prisons Arts Council scheme and a member of the Teaching Council of Ireland.

Malinski– a novel of historical fiction about two brothers separated during the Nazi occupation of Poland who meet again after communism falls– returns in a new Audible edition at a moment when its themes feel strikingly contemporary.

The Whale Theatre in Greystones is hosting the launch of the audio edition of Malinski with a Live Performance on May 21st 2026 with Siofra and actor, Gerry Cannon followed by a conversation and Q&A facilitated by Andrea Splendori.

This year, Siofra is the writer-in-residence at the Dorlindon festival—running June to August at the Dorlindon Forest Sanctuary in Co. Wicklow—and is offering Creative Writing Workshops with a difference - mythical, meditative and expressive. Her workshops are not think tanks of criticism, but crucibles of creativity.

Links to Siofra O’Donovan’s work and Booking Details for Malinski.

BOOK HERE for MALINSKI Launch with 20% discount with Promo Code SIO26

https://whaletheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873663404

Siofra’s substack on Myth, Folklore and Peculiar Things:

https://siofra.substack.com/

Dorlindon Forest Sanctuary/ Writer in Residence/ Ancient Music Festival

https://www.dorlindon.com/en/activities/creative-writing-and-storytel

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Cow Parsley have thundered into summer and onto the roadside banks quite magnificently. Long columns of green and white flank both sides of the laneways now. Together, their heads turn in excited unison as the turbulence of passing traffic sweeps past them and up the road ahead. Dangerously inching their bobbing heads onto the beat up road like a motor rally crowd at the Isle of Maan TT of old. Trading safety for the potential joy of catching wind of Joey Dunlop rounding a dangerous bend; his elbow, knee and backside grazing the tarmac. For a split second caught together at eye level, in fleeting alignment, as he whizzes by.

The blossoming and ancient whitethorns look on approvingly from the safety of the green, fertile ditches, while their branches arch over the road in spots to gather a better view and provide an umbrella of protection to the unruly rascals growing high and handsome and nosey below.

The past couple of weeks have been spent like this investigating the boundary roads and by-ways encircling the old village. Scavenging for sight of forgotten flowers I once knew intimately. Also, following a hunch that new roads dissect while these old ways protect. Summer is in and grumbling about its annual weatherly imperfections is to miss the beauty that only a blemished stretch of evening can create afresh—year after year.

In generations gone by this is the time of summer when national school children would soon move up a class ahead of the summer holidays. From third to fourth, fourth to fifth and fifth to sixth class. Trying on new desks and books for size without much attendant pressure. Printing names on new copybooks and proudly filling in the blank of their new, upgraded class. Back then, a copy-book would be reserved for leaves and flowers. Gathering them and then placing them carefully between pages, before applying enough weight until plucked nature stuck to the pages without recourse to the ugliness and unnaturalness of glue.

A time for hunting down the flowers and leaves of local place and locking the valuable knowledge into memory for eternity. These final few weeks of early summer evenings dedicated to unearthing hitherto unknown species of both from the fields and bogs and ditches. Cow Parsley were the poor relation in the schoolyard flower transfer market as they were so plentiful and everywhere. No-one quite certain whether they might be more first cousin to a weed than blood relative to a primrose or a marigold.

The glory and vibrancy of them persists, though.

Imagination and reality still live side-by-side on the backroads of the old village. The fields are the fields still and the cattle indifferent to the noise of the passing tractors weighed down with bales of new silage. Here, the first cut of grass has come and gone and the fragrance scents the air while jogging old memories into new refreshing thoughts.

The big roads are slowed with mechanical traffic lights. Diggers and trucks and men line the sides of the road here. Hauling stone and gravel and laying down black tar and cement. Progress looks unhappy, impatient and disconnected from the rural backdrop. The angry red stop lights and digital signs countdown slowly to zero from one hundred and twenty or two hundred and forty. Allowing time to observe the scarred landscape and the absence of youthful cows parsley or wise whitethorns. New, smooth concrete and freshly painted white lines strip the old road of its imagination. Safer, perhaps, but worryingly unprotective of what has been too.

At the homeplace, the sun still sets between a small gap in the bushes beside the shed. The same way it has always done since I first began observing such things in nineteen eighty nine. Nineteen eighty nine was a year filled with the excited anticipation of a new decade’s approach. My first conscious appreciation of the wonder of a new decade and all the possibilities it might have in store.

There is change everywhere of course but an old steadiness and nature persists. The only worrying note is the crab-apple tree beyond the fence has shrunk in size. It once stood at least a hundred feet tall but now looks, more or less, like a prickly overgrown shrub. I suppose I’ll need to patrol the hidden roads awhile longer to get it back growing up to its proper size again.

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I was very sad to read, Irish writer, John Waters is stepping back from his weekly Substack diary due to illness and low reserves of energy. John has been at the coalface of many honest endeavours in resistance Ireland and has a long history that pre-dates his pandemic notoriety in mainstream Ireland. My first conversation with him was on the subject of writing and our shared passion for it. It is still one of my favorite memories of these past five years. In many regards he’s a pioneer, not least as the Irish pioneer of the written word on this platform—another occasion where he’s been the one to walk first where few dare to tread—and I pray his recovery is swift and his weekly return inevitable at the appropriate time. I know first-hand—from the podcast series we did—some of the attempts to censor and stifle his voice over recent years and yet most have ultimately failed. In Irish terms, the Streisand effect might more accurately be described as the Waters effect.

I’m glad John is taking some time out and I doubt anyone in Ireland has hurled the resources at their disposal at the problems of this nation more than he has done. He’s thrown everything including the kitchen sink at them. There was a particular section in his announcement that troubled me, maybe frightened me a little, because I could relate on a personal level even though I very much doubt it is what he is experiencing but it brought me back to some horrors of my own from last year.

One symptom is that my energy levels, already in single digits, have utterly collapsed. This has happened gradually over the past month — since just before Easter — and at first seemed to be just standard exhaustion. In the past week, however, it has become clear that something more sinister may be in train, as I have been encountering difficulties with the most fundamental functions: walking, eating, drinking, lifting, even typing for more than short periods. Click Here for Full John Waters Piece

For the last couple of months I’ve begun to feel properly alive again but during the second half of 2025 my energy levels completely jumped off a cliff at various points. My moods and vitality levels swung viciously. As much as you try to keep these feelings internal they occasionally erupt externally. I didn’t know what way was up and just when I thought I did—I fell flat on my face again. At some point, though, quietly, quietly—I stepped back from almost everyone in my writing life and real life too. John, included. It was utterly selfish, not entirely a conscious decision, and had some very real world ramifications. However, I had unconsciously walked close to an edge that left me bereft of choices and in real danger.

I was failing an internal NCT test and one of the few tangible clues this was the case was the breakdown of my actual motor vehicle. A situation leaving me without a car for a stretch of months. A blessing in disguise.

Now, the normal course of medical advice for what I was feeling and sometimes writing down in print might be to bandy about a word like depression. Except it wasn’t depression. Because I’ve had encounters with the black-dog during my life and it felt nothing like those episodes. No, what occurred felt energetic and quite often seemed like energetic attacks that primarily involved me knifing myself in the back and depleting my own vital statistics. The conduit for these stealth offences was my mind. My solution was not exactly scientific or even conscious in the beginning. I started a series of writing called The Green Mile and it kind of saved my energetic-life. Although it didn’t feel like it at the time or for several months afterwards. Looking back, the key thing was the writing felt pure. The impurity of what my mind was consuming, thinking about, producing and worrying about was destroying my energy. Worse, it was largely imaginary. Somehow, someway. The daily purity exercise of walking The Green Mile and experiencing natures magnetic field helped cleanse my mind—just enough—to escape my mind. And the emotional waves it was triggering.

Now, I have developed a rather quirky way of moving in the world but the longer I lean into it the more certain I am that it is correct for me. Not recommending for anyone else. It’s quite fucking nuts and intuitive based so I don’t advertise it too frequently. I came across something not so long ago that captures it best. The difference between the guidance of the over-active mind and intuition is this:

The overthinking mind speaks in anxious questions—often. Intuition speaks in short clear sentences—not so often.

So, maybe I’ll dive into it a little today by way of an old problem resurfacing repackaged and presenting as a current problem. And how I’m…eh, dealing with it.

Back in my free-wheeling days of monthly pay cheques and endless weekend nights, I had a friend who was a stock-broker. One night, I seem to remember him revealing one of the trade secrets of tracking the progress of the global economy—circa the year 2000. One of the most reliable indicators to map the short-term future fortunes of the western world was the sale of golf club bags. Now, it was either bags or a particular brand of golf clubs—’tis hard to recall precisely as the conversation took place over vodka and red-bull in the upstairs section of CopperfaceJacks niteclub.

What stuck in my mind, though, was how the sale of something so random could be a more accurate guide than a team of economic analysts poring over data, day-in and day-out. In a similar vein, more and more, I’m beginning to evaluate my spiritual health on the basis of how well my fourteen-year-old automobile is running. Over the last year, across two different cars, I’ve noticed a link that wouldn’t exactly stand up to the scrutiny of a team of forensic theologians. But a link seems to exist, nonetheless.

Recently, my car has been running well. So, I treated it to two new tyres. You know, trying to stay ahead of the spiritual curve. But, ever since I purchased the new tyres I’ve had nothing but car trouble. In fact, I’m sitting in my usual undisclosed, off-grid location near the Laois/Kildare border hoping to get these problems sorted over the next couple of days from the usual undisclosed, off-grid mechanic. Touch wood.

Long-time readers might remember my last car was named Brigid but probably don’t recall the sequence of events that led to her sad and sudden demise. Two days before she passed from this world into that great, big divine scrapyard in the sky I put two brand new tyres on her. I even went to the trouble of investing in some luxury items for the windscreen like a taxation disk. Yet still, a complete unravelling of the car and my life occurred that led to a winter of inner discontent and turbulence. A necessary discontent but quite the colossal pain in the hole and the soul. The torture was only slowly halted in its tracks by the process of healing that seemed to embody, bit by bit, as I set about compiling my first book. In short, spiritual carelessness led directly to car-less-ness and only through car-less-ness could the footsteps forward be found back to car possession and myself.

Let me save you the trouble.

Quite bonkers.

Nevertheless, these two new tyres and my current mechanical troubles are worrying me now in a spiritual manner. On both occasions, I thought I was doing the right and sensible thing and I was on one level, yet a car-death and car-trouble followed in both instances. But, I was ignoring the underlying signal—the bald tyres. A need to slow down and interpret some of the gifts and lessons I’ve inherited over the last few weeks. Also, I think the mechanical faults lie in a single engineering flaw.

I christened the new car with the wrong name.

Cue, bonkers again.

I kinda knew it wasn’t the right name at the time but thought I could make it work. It doesn’t work, though. And I’d prefer not lose another car or worse for the lesson. In addition, and sitting here in the middle of the night, Himself seems to have me earmarked for another book. The Green Mile opened up to Unvaxxed Soul which led to calmer waters. Again, a short series of writing I began at Easter feels similar—not a series of articles at all but rather a book. I can see that now.

So, hopefully you’ll be hearing a lot from Padraic and I from the road in the near future and in the meantime I need to slow-down and find some writing time for Black Sheep and get it dispatched before the end of the year or the end of the car.

Now, on the off-chance that I’m completely wrong about all of this—-The Green Mile 2 will be starting on Friday :-)

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Artificial Intelligence is tiresome to speak about nowadays. The every-where-ness of it feels like an inevitability cloak. A cloak promising invincibility but one weighing down on mankind with invisible stones sewn in along the hem-line. Sleep fell fitful last night and so I began thinking on this subject matter again.

Birthing a paragraph, a line of a song, a child, a picture from a box of crayons or even stacking turf in handsome lines along the bog bank are all acts of creation. In one form or another. It may seem odd to equate a child to four sentences in a digital book but there is a connection. An important one.

Is there anything truer, more creative, innocent or wonder-filling than the arrival of a new-born baby into your arms?

Can you remember the moment it happened?

My response was “Wow”

Then, holy fuck.

In olden days, this bundle of new wonder announced its imminent arrival by inviting his or her mother to suffer for her new joint creation. Rarely, do we congratulate new mothers or new parents by saying:

“Congratulations, on your new creation”

or to extend an olive branch to the seed planting Dad,

“ What a beautiful baby you created together “

Instead, we say they had a baby rather than created one. Yet, it is the most creative act imaginable. We often think of creativity in artistic form only—an artist, a poet, a lyricist, a writer, a musician. It is a mistake to do so and childbirth is a good reminder of one of the most important characteristics of powerful, inevitability-cloak-piercing types of creativity.

The ability to suffer.

Most often, the truest, most long-lasting creations and outputs boil down to the creator’s capacity to suffer for them.

Now, if we layer Artificial Intelligence into this bubble-stream we might say the following:

Artificial Intelligence thieves creative suffering through digital seduction. It is an invitation to not agonise. An offer to bypass anguish. A temptation to avoid soaking in uncertainty for too long. The seduction is alluring, though, as many can be and not without obvious plus points. But, in the end, not dissimilar to the distractive pleasure of a quick roll in the hay over the tedium of walking through shadowlands into something closer to hay-making. Artificial Intelligence knows not of truth or love—and you can even ask it the reasons why. Only of facts and patterns and probabilities and the introduction of creeping self-doubt. Truth is always a surprise of some sort, often messy and the best ones are the exception to every known rule. In my experience, at any rate.

The effect of all this lack of suffering is to minimise the transmutation of natural energy which occurs when the ugly caterpillar suffers just long enough to embody the beauty of the new butterfly. A new truth, a new creation.

A new world too.

If Artificial intelligence was able to fear, it would be the fear of us creating a new world without it. We just need to suffer a little for the creation. But, suffering requires energy. And what we’re dealing with is an energy vampire and not just one of the electrical variety.

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I see the branches pruned last year, or the year before that, sprouting hopeful new limbs. Their flowers blossom pink and white and face up to the sky. I consider if they’re strong enough to hold the weight of an apple this year. Or a harvest of them. My dreams say they will. The older barks and branches mingle with the new twigs. An apple-tree is both old and young at once and my arms and legs feel much the same.

In the light breeze, the sun shines some more. The shadows of growing grass fall over the white page, filling in the gaps where words are not required.

Is it so bad to lie in peace and gulp it in without guilt?

Soon, the farmers will call for a drop of rain. Forgetting rain can fall in swimming pools too. The belly of the bog squeezes long, damp rolls out onto the weathered, heathered banks. The bogs will be full and emptied this year, I suspect. When rain returns the turf will towel itself dry in the breeze, nonetheless. I imagine winter fires devouring these blackened sods like tasty plates of cocktail sausages.

I hide on old mountain paths and slow only for wild horses grazing on the margins of this world and the next. The odd fox darts across the road before the oncoming headlights make light of him.

Invisible birds sing loudly.

Everywhere.

Drunk on the stale porter of last week’s rain.

There isn’t much to do but breathe in the new air quietly. And exhale again into the moonlit nights. When the moon scribbles a word or two of serenity across cloudy gasps. The breeze coughs away old worries and a new dawn blossoms again. I could be twenty-two or twenty-three again.

Still dreaming of apple-pies.

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The Tuath Dé Danann is running a day and evening of music on Saturday May 23rd 2026 near Monasterevin on the Kildare/Laois border. We will have one or two conversations with people I’ve bumped into on my writing travels over the last year but the focus will be music, relaxation and community building and networking. The day is a celebration of a friend and musician who passed recently and who many of us met for the first time at the Tuatha Dé Danann in Fermoy in May 2023. As always with these events there will be an evening meal where we gather together and break bread.

Camping is available on site and there are couple of hotels very close by. There is no cost to attend but people will be asked to make a donation on the day to cover the costs of the food and camping that our hosts will be providing. I am planning to keep the numbers limited and costs low. So let me know as soon as possible if you plan to attend. I don’t plan to be advertising this event again publicly.

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I am an independent writer and publisher who survives via paid memberships and donations to my platform. As you are probably sick of hearing me rattle on about but they do occasionally work!

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Recently, I had the privilege of watching my friend die. Privilege seems an odd word to use. Yet, the only apt one. It captures a teaspoonful of the sacredness involved in bearing witness to a slow, steady expiration. He died well. His hopes for the future kept pumping out through his chest right to the end. Maybe that’s what people mean when they speak about bravery in these circumstances. A refusal to live without hope or to give up on the future. Even when the promise of an endless array of tomorrows dwindles down to a handful. I marvelled at his ability to live with dying while gently preparing his nearest and dearest, as best he could, for his exit to some other pool-hall in the sky. He was seventy-two but lived with divilment and energetic force of a man that consumed the seven and two and embodied them inverted.

I wasn’t going to write about him directly—at least not so soon—but sitting on a back pew in Knock Shrine earlier, and staring up at that big mosaic of the apparition of Mary, I remembered something. I wasn’t sure why I was sitting there to be frank and certain too that my friend was no lover of concreted catholicism.

Enough peace floated by, though, to remember something I noticed in his last weeks but in a different way. He was a little bit afraid he might be forgotten. It seemed a strange fear for such an electric presence. I suppose, in the immediate aftermath, some will recall him with a smile and others with the grin turned upside down. His faults were many—as all of ours are—but it isn’t the hints of the lights and darknesses of his life before I met him that I’ll remember. Rather his will to get to someplace better. Holy institutions had hurted him as a child and this made his climb harder and higher from the get-go. He’d his own way of tuning into God and I enjoyed learning and listening to his views. I’m not inclined to be hyper critical of those who’ve the divining rod already in their hands fishing for a holy well. No matter how it might look or how it might sound.

By a quirk of chance, I saw him an hour before he passed on. His brother was with him playing guitar and singing the songs they both shared and loved to play. I thought he had more time but I suppose we always do don’t we. Leonard Cohen’s “ Sisters of Mercy” was the tune his brother was singing when mo chara gently let go of his grip on this world. As we were chatting about the song on the phone the deep orange of sunset sliced through the back door and back kitchen of the homeplace at an outrageously acute angle. Divinely precise mathematics of story, song and sharing, I thought. Rightly or wrongly. There is material wealth and then heavenly abundance and I can’t imagine that the richest person on this planet could orchestrate such a peaceful serenade from this world to the next. His brother‘s love bathed him and I guess God helped with the rest.

Our last conversation was on the Saturday before the Monday of his death. He was weak but sitting up in the armchair. His words a tired mumble, incoherent in spots, but filled with an insistence to escape. Looking back, I can see he had one foot planted here and the other somewhere else. His eyes still alive and looked into my own for as long as I could hold them. He informed me of a couple of people who would pop into my life at some point in the future and my options for dealing with them. He gave me some advice about how to handle people and situations and myself better. Truth but without his usual, healthy dollops of poetic licence. He was close and we were at the business end of our final conversation which bore similarity in texture and fragrance to our first random encounter three years earlier. In so many ways the world has speeded up but in the particulars of this relationship time seems to have slowed to a walking pace. I asked had Himself been in touch much in the hospice and he said that he had but it was harder to hear him with all the drugs.

After awhile, a pretty care attendant delivered his dinner and then asked if he needed anything else before she left and for once he didn’t even have the strength to ask for her telephone number. I stayed an hour and should have stayed more but I’ll never forget the peace of it for the rest of my life. In a way, I thought the previous five or six weeks was about finding a way to help him on his way out the door. At the end, though, it was he pointing out doors I hadn’t seen and advice about how to open them, or save that, pick the locks. He was a man of many contradictions as I am, yet a guide and teacher too. He was different people to different people. As we all are, I suppose.

When the absurdities of living were all stripped away all that was left was his music. The instruments of his beginnings in this world and childhood abuse had been somehow tuned into weapons for his spiritual salvation. By himself and with the help of his brother too. When I arrived back to his bedroom on the Monday evening Leaba Padraic was empty. Sterile and clean and getting ready for its next arrival. I imagine he left without a second glance with his cheeky grin, chat up lines, yarns, books and guitars. Bruised by some, bruising to others. But more people cared when he exited than when he entered. He made progress here.

A pilgrim’s progress.

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The grassy verges on the country by-ways fill now with golden armies of dandelions. More infantry men than officer class. Yet, filled with their own fragrant healing and knowing. The unknowing war on the black tarmac ruffles them not a feather growing in flowing clumps between hedgerows. Too busy replacing the droopy heads of the daffodils hanging on as long as they can but who wilt away peacefully into full repose. The baton passed to the thick, lush and full arrival of the dandelions as a new season quietly steps onto both sides of the road ahead.

A tulip or two pops their head up too, here and there, in purples, and reds, in purples and whites, and purples again. Summer whispers its old yarns of promise through the air though the skies are troubled with clouds of seasonal uncertainty. Off the beaten track the eye is drawn to the fertile squelch in the ground and some unexpected waterfalls streaming down the side of a Maam Turk mountain. Occasionally the sun casts a ray or two over the contours of a self indulgent puddle, beating it back.

But, there is thunderous raw power and protection everywhere around. Stone, rock and wet, ancient bog. New grass swamps the old marks of the scythe with cocky new growth on the old wounds of turf long past. A circle of stones marks out Tobar Padraic. The water is cool and surprisingly holy. Blessing the brow and quenching the thirst of the lips deliciously.

He is there, and I am too.

Away from here, for a moment or two.

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Can’t

Can't is the worst word that's written or spoken;
Doing more harm here than slander and lies;
On it is many a strong spirit broken,
And with it many a good purpose dies.
It springs from the lips of the thoughtless each morning
And robs us of courage we need through the day:
It rings in our ears like a timely-sent warning
And laughs when we falter and fall by the way.

Can't is the father of feeble endeavor,
The parent of terror and half-hearted work;
It weakens the efforts of artisans clever,
And makes of the toiler an indolent shirk.
It poisons the soul of the man with a vision,
It stifles in infancy many a plan;
It greets honest toiling with open derision
And mocks at the hopes and the dreams of a man.

Can't is a word none should speak without blushing;
To utter it should be a symbol of shame;
Ambition and courage it daily is crushing;
It blights a man's purpose and shortens his aim.
Despise it with all of your hatred of error;
Refuse it the lodgment it seeks in your brain;
Arm against it as a creature of terror,
And all that you dream of you some day shall gain.


Can't is the word that is foe to ambition,
An enemy ambushed to shatter your will;
Its prey is forever the man with a mission
And bows but to courage and patience and skill.
Hate it, with hatred that's deep and undying,
For once it is welcomed 'twill break any man;
Whatever the goal you are seeking, keep trying
And answer this demon by saying:

"I can."

By Edgar Albert Guest

Republished from the book titled "Heap O' Livin"

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Thanks to old and new members alike. This is just a note to let everyone know the discount window for membership to The West’s Awake that’s been in place for the last while will be ending tomorrow. Please consider supporting my publication in whatever way you can through one of the membership or one-off options below.

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Sunday evening’s fuel package announcement contained the theatrics and faux-gravitas of the March 2020 lockdown moment. A big empty stage, three lecterns and three politicians facing mainstream camera lens attempting to bookend a week of protests.

By the end, it became increasingly apparent Independent Sean Canney is the de-facto leader of the Irish government and band-aiding it together. Well, for the next couple of weeks at any rate. Taoiseach Martin looked ashen-faced and beaten, Harris spoke with a few extra scoops of his painfully contrived earnestness, Canney made more ordinary, empathetic remarks while at the same time seeking to sit on both sides of the protest fence at once—an impossibility to pull-off for more than a day or two more.

Missing, though, was Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan. Architect of the Garda deployment of public order units at the weekend to Whitegate, Galway and O’Connell Street. O’Callaghan’s was a curious omission. For he and the new Garda Commissioner are the ones guaranteeing the €500 million in cheques Taoiseach Michael Martin, Harris and Canney were writing on RTE News.

For what good is the watered-down fuel deal if the safety of port facilities which O’Callaghan and Kelly somewhat miraculously lost on Wednesday and then somewhat miraculously found again by Sunday morning were to be taken once more?

Hmmm.

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I have extensively written about the effective relationship O’Callaghan and Kelly have developed in recent months since Kelly stepped into the Garda Commissioner’s role, replacing Drew Harris. My synopsis at the time, and one I still believe holds true, is that elements within Official Ireland realise—far too late—that Irish progressive-left social policies have over-stepped the mark hugely in this nation and these elements are now trying to take a half, or a quarter-step, back from the brink. From lockdowns to mass immigration and now to fuel. The developments of the last week have the fingerprints of both on them. Especially when you read media reports that Minister for Defence, Helen McEntee, and other cabinet members were booted out of the loop over the weekend.

But, first, let’s jump back to Thursday and a statement O’Callaghan gave to assembled reporters and Irish media.

I would ask people involved in the protest to cease their protest. The government has heard the point that they’ve made but it is now clearly the case that considerable damage is being to inflicted to Irish people and to the Irish economy and I’d ask them to stop their protests now.

When you look online at present You can see that many “ outside actors “ are seeking to manipulate these people for their own purposes. I see Tommy Robinson, in the UK, referring to and relying upon these protests to advance his own political measures.

—Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, April 9th, 2026.

O’Callaghan’s delivery above—recorded for cameras—was calm, steady but not particularly anger-ridden. A marked contrast to his own party leader and colleagues in government. Which is an oddity, considering his ministry was the one tasked with bringing the blockade of ports and motorways to a safe conclusion via the Garda Siochana.

O’Callaghan’s statement reference to former British Nationalist Party member, Tommy Robinson, is a tell but not in the fashion many in Irish resistance circles might think. A day after O’Callaghan’s address to reporters government negotiations were announced on Friday. Over the weekend these talks were conducted with stakeholder organisations like the IFA, Road Haulage Association and others as mentioned in my article on Friday. Now, it’s very conceivable that senior members of these stakeholder organisations were heavily involved in the conception and roll-out of the fuel protests with a private nod of approval from people, security forces, and politicians within our captured state. People in Official Ireland, in other words.

A fly in the ointment to a semi-inside job would if the protests expanded to incorporate other huge Irish issues like, say, mass immigration, state lockdown and vaccine policies during Covid, or a host of others. This would threaten to introduce chaos and affect the rogue elements within the state and their ability to remain in control of proceedings. These other issues are not ones these elements want to touch with a barge pole at the minute. Which is why, I believe, the only note of concern in O’Callaghan’s tone last Thursday was when he made reference to the non-existent problem of Tommy Robinson in Ireland.

Now, despite all of this, I think the fuel protests were a success. For the very simple reason it brought waves of young Irish men and women onto the streets for the first time. General public support for what occurred remained high through-out. In a sense, members of Official Ireland who spend ten hours a week in their cars driving to work joined forces with Unofficial Ireland and those diesel-covered jean wearers who spend over fifty hours a week working in their vehicles. Both sides of this equation were authentic and angry and possibly virgin to how the hidden hand works. But, all now possess first hand experience of how state, security forces and media collude with each other and manipulate message and agendas. Only bitter experience teaches this lesson so that it’s never forgotten, unfortunately. As I said earlier, what happens from here will be instructive. Will the protests peter out?

Last Saturday, at Galway city and port, an education was on offer for any who stuck around to absorb it in full. The early evening saw a carnival atmosphere as hundreds popped in and out of the port area to support the trucks, vans and tractors blockading Galway’s oil storage facilities along the docks. Fires, food, chainsaws cutting up pallets, and some singing were all part of the early evening proceedings. Newbie protesters interacted good humouredly with a smiling local Garda Siochana.

Protesters cutting wood and stoking fires, circa 8pm, Saturday evening in Galway.

The smiles were knowing ones, though. Three or four hours later, under the cover of darkness, the public order units descended on the area from out-of-town and dispatched hundreds of balaclava masked police to begin taking back the port facilities. Ushering in a different, authoritarian face of the state many reading this have seen and felt before. The barricades were pushed back four hundred metres, protestors efficiently ejected, approach roads cut off quickly, and by sunrise Galway Port began transitioning back to a quasi-normal state. Fuel traffic could flow once more to a degree. To repeat—the ease with which Irish ports were so easily blockaded in the first instance and then so handily taken back leads me to wonder about how much insider dealing was at play overall.

Quite a bit, I suspect.

Garda invasion, circa 2am, Sunday morning, Galway

So, to draw this piece to a conclusion we can say the following: The government and security forces have played their full hand with the roll-out of fuel concessions and the repossession of the ports. Stakeholder Ireland signed a deal agreeing to look after their own members while the average motorist received a paltry 10c-a-litre in fuel cuts.

The next few days will tell us if Jim O’Callaghan and the Garda Commissioner have played their cards correctly. Have they moved—just enough—in the direction of the protest crowd to quell an uprising. Crucially, though, what actually happens next is largely out of their control. However, I can guarantee one thing: the Irish ports will not be so easily taken by protestors for a second time. There will be no smiling assassins patrolling the sun and showers in Garda uniforms for a Round 2.

My experience of the last week was meeting lots of very authentic, hard-working and angry Irish people, ones I haven’t seen before on the various protest fronts. Grounded, earthy, and good-humoured. An Ireland I recognised but haven’t seen for quite awhile. The fuel protest was the first rodeo for many and ultimately government and the public order unit forces used this naivety to their advantage in Whitegate, O’Connell Street, Foynes, and Galway.

The fuel protests brought real Ireland to the streets but it remains to be seen if this novice protester will now get back in their cars satisfied with the 10c bribe the government are offering.

Interesting times.

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The scene from the N17 plaza and twenty-four hour filling station in Tuam last night resembled a crime scene. Reams of yellow and black plastic tape fluttered in the wind and circled around the station’s ten or twelve pumps. The eerie vista more akin to a place marked out as a murder site awaiting forensic examination than a refuelling station. The message was clear, if a little haunting too: No fuel available to night-time traffic in a town of ten thousand people. Or, to anyone cruising around looking to lob a few litres of patriotism into a Volkswagen Passat from an unprotected green diesel pump. The night was cold and damp and a few cars edged around the forecourt at 1am in search of fuel.

Another station down, I thought.

At last count the number of petrol stations running on empty stands at one hundred with the rest set to close by the end of the weekend. Yesterday, a quick tour of Limerick, rural Tipperary and the port at Foynes revealed both sides of the fuel equation. In Foynes, quietly determined groups of fuel protestors blocked the road to the port. Men populated from the unsexy industries and sectors of Ireland that rarely hit the headlines, but who ultimately keep the nation watered, fed, fuelled and royally dressed in our globally sourced finery. All were calm and not for the turning. Certain of the necessity of their cause, good-humoured and operating in general co-operation with the local Garda Siochana monitoring the situation. The infrastructure of the protest was solid and not likely to be easily broken by an invasion of army or public order units.

Elsewhere, as day moved towards evening, the forecourt queues lengthened everywhere but significantly the overall mood of the waiting crowds was supportive towards the protests. A fuel protest that began on Tuesday with a rag-taggle of tractors, buses and trucks dispatched to various arterial points on the Irish road network and to Irish ports threatens now, four days later, to grind the economy to a halt. Early in the week, most were only idly curious about this band of mechanical brothers, mildly interested to observe how the state and political authorities would stonewall their concerns and reverse them back to their farms, truck yards, and private bus depots in failure.

Now, though, everyone is invested and fully locked on to the developments and outcome of the fuel protests cause.

No mean feat.

Fatally, the response of out-of-touch elite ministers and media was one of immediate derision. A derision thinly veiled and barely concealed behind camera smiles filled with teeth promising menace and threat to all who dared to defy them. Again, early in the week, they pontificated with confident swagger and sinister snigger while the media lapped it up and pumped out stories about missed hospital appointments and people dying. Their general gait indicating a belief that the silent majority would side with Official Ireland and remain silent—as they always do.

“The protests at the moment are wrong. To prevent mobility, to prevent people from accessing livelihoods, medical appointments, disrupting day-to-day activities in the manner that has happened, is wrong and is a wrong form of protest. “There’s no justification whatsoever for blockading fuel depots.” Micheal Martin, Taoiseach speaking to reporters early in the week.

Yet, by Friday, as petrol station after petrol station ran out of oily juice, nobody’s sniggering now. Steely determination and defiance has forced this government to the negotiating table. A potentially disingenuous negotiating table but a counter top with a smattering of chairs and voices nonetheless.

Official Negotiations

Talks began today ( Friday ) in government buildings between government, represented by Ministers Darragh O’ Brien, Martin Hedyon, Sean Canney and Timmy Dooley and the Irish Road Haulage Association (IRHA), the Irish Farmers Association (IFA), the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) and other recognised groups. Crucially, many representatives of the front-line fuel protestors have been left on the side-lines and outside the official negotiations. Fuel protest leaders like Kildare farmer, John Dallon, who mainstream media were happy to platform but who negotiators refused to allow sit down at the table.

The government tactics seem crystal clear. Negotiate with official bodies they largely informally control but who are not at all centrally involved in organising the fuel protests. Then, come to a watered-down deal—some might say bribe—with these groups. In the hope this will ramp up pressure on protestors and essentially isolate them from public support and organisations many of them are probably members of.

Late Friday, Garda Commissioner, Justin Kelly, ordered every Garda in the country to report for duty for the next three days to police the ongoing fuel protests and blockades. The order is described as an “exceptional event” within An Garda Síochána, and one which has rarely if ever been used before. It’s a decision likely to create tension and flash-points over the weekend.

The Friday showdown at government buildings achieves another goal for Official Ireland. It’s best to have Ireland’s 3 million workers mull over these negotiations over the weekend. When the buried cost these protests and barren petrol stations are having on the nation’s leisure activities springs to obviousness, as opposed to chewing the cud on the same problem while backed up in traffic during the working week. When thoughts may wander to exactly how much the government are over-charging them in hidden fuel taxation for the honour of labouring away in Ireland Inc. Anger might bubble to the surface and explode into their consciousness in such circumstances.

However, support is beginning to expand for the fuel protestors from some helpful and related industries too. Head of the Irish South and West Fish Producers Association, speaking on behalf of a huge segment of the Irish fishing industry relayed the following statement on the fuel protests to this substack earlier this afternoon.

“ Irish South and West Fish Producers Association are concerned by the recent announcement by our government that they will escalate their reaction to the fuel protests by introducing a version of martial law. We believe that people should be entitled to protest regardless of the inconvenience that gives to the public.

And the reason for this is that our businesses are not viable and we will have to cease, and our members from the smallest to the largest have invested decades of their life and huge sums of money to get into the industry and keep re-investing. They were asked during Covid to set aside their fears to make sure food was supplied to Europe.

Yet, we see the comments where we need the exorbitant taxes foisted on fuel to pay for retro-fitting of houses around the country-side. I know heat and warmth and shelter is important but also is food and without a viable industry we will have no food “

So the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Divide and conquer is order of the day for the government. Hold the line the clarion call for the protesters.

What Should Happen Next?

In essence, a nation watches as a twist to the old Emperor Has No Clothes tale plays out—Irish style. The Taoiseach’s toxic and condescending language have no diesel in the tank to take him anywhere. It’ll be interesting to see what develops from here as from this perch—at seven o’clock on Friday evening—the fuel protestors have a full-choke strangle hold on Official Ireland and everyone knows it. Whether anyone admits this publicly or just concedes it privately atop a plush chamber-pot in a Leinster house wash-room is a moot point. Advantage protesters rules still.

Those involved in competitive sports instinctively understand that the follow on chess move from a choke-hold is a precisely aimed kick to the balls. The weekend will decide the momentum and it is vital, even with doubts pertaining to some of the groups and people central to the apparent success of these protests, that the silent majority dig in their heels and offer support. Support means inconvenience, fuel shortages and listening to a whole pile of howling from global Ireland on our digital devices.

If this steadfastness occurs then, day by day, it will be the politicians slowly isolated and stripped of already miniscule support. Currently, media narratives demonising the actions of the fuel protestors are not working as the majority lean into the shortages and away from the lies of an incompetent government. A motley crew pandering first and always to the needs of a gargantuan non-Irish multinational class and lapping up instruction from stakeholders who reside in Brussels and Washington and not the worker bees standing outside Whitegate, Foynes or Dublin Port.

On February 28th a far-away war of choice began thousands of miles away from these shores threatening the global supply of oil and gas. Prices shot up and our political class focused abroad rather than at home. Pontificating on matters they have no control over and admonishing people who have little regard for their words or opinions. Even as crisis and anger promises to swallow them whole at home they blather their confident foolishness on matters abroad.

“ Yesterday I spoke with Lebanon’s FM Youssef Raggi I am appalled by Israel’s brutal attacks across Lebanon, with over 200 dead. These attacks are unacceptable and must stop. A ceasefire must be upheld by all parties and extended to Lebanon. “

Minister for Defence, Helen McEntee TD on X. April 10th 2026.

Two reports and a potential solution

In 2024, the Central Statistics Office, produced a report that showed for those aged 25-64 years in Ireland, more than half (56%) had attained a third level education or higher. This was and is seen as progress and evidence of Irish success. A modern education system tuned to the appetites of western civilisation and global economics.

However, down in Foynes port yesterday, twenty miles west of Limerick city, a different type of Irish appeared. But one plucked from the same age profile as the CSO report. They were making their presence felt in no uncertain terms. Almost exclusively men and all huddled in groups blockading the road leading to the port. These are the important foot soldiers keeping the academic architecture and careers of the global Irish economy running smoothly. As GDP graphs have zoomed vertically over the last fifteen years these men’s worth to the nation has been simultaneously devalued.

All told, about fifty to eighty of them and their heavy duty vehicles and machinery let PHD Ireland know exactly how powerful, intelligent and valuable they are to our nation. Guys who put the seeds in the ground, cattle on the fields, food in the trucks and pluck fish from the seas. All the while, delivering goods, people and services to the retail units, hospitals, schools and plush supermarkets.

Official Ireland kinda hates this vital, virile and valuable Unofficial Ireland still exists. The reason for this is simple. They perform a function Official Ireland can’t live without. They get rich from exploiting it, though.

Unfortunately, masters educated Ireland who know the price of everything and the value of nothing have met a group educated by land, sea, road and the callouses on their hands. Mostly dungaree-ed and un-degreed. Who know the value everything, not least themselves and where their place in the real Irish food-chain actually stands.

One solution to the fuel protest is simple enough and easy to implement. Suspend all excise duty on all fuel for a trial period of three months. This kind of idea brings roars of psychotic insanity from the mouths of Micheal Martin and Simon Harris. But, if we hone in on diesel which is the main issue facing the protest groups we can say the following: At present, the price of a litre of diesel is averaging around 2.20/litre at the pumps. A breakdown of that price reveals the following:

Excise duty ≈ €0.53 per litre

VAT on the excise portion = €0.53 × 23% is an additional €0.12

So per litre, the State takes €0.65 in total tied to excise and VAT.

CSO fuel clearance data on auto-diesel returns indicate approximately 280-290 million litres of diesel are cleared through the state per month. So, the cost of implementing a three month excise duty freeze on diesel would run to between 550-600 million euro. The pump price would reduce to about 1.55 - 1.60 for a three month period, a price that would allow for a little future padding if further price increases occur due to further escalation in the on-going conflict in the Middle East. The government don’t require a price cap but actually a price floor. A price below which they and taxpayer can agree introducing excise duty again.

A breakdown of total Irish fuel consumption by the CSO on an annual basis looks something like the following:

Diesel - 3.6 billion litres.

Petrol (unleaded) - 1.0 billion litres.

Marked Gas Oil (green diesel) 1.096 billion litres.

To implement a full three month excise duty exemption would cost in the region of 800 to 900 million euros. Maybe up to a billion in lost revenue. A fixed reduction in price doesn’t work due to oil price surges swamping any gains to the end consumer. At any rate, the higher the price, the higher the future taxes raised by the state which is counter-productive and also lacks transparency. Suspending the excise duty solves these problems. No doubt they’re are down-sides but extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures to protect the people the government are charged to represent.

In the meantime, government and interested parties could put some of the masters-degree and PHD level minds at their disposal to work designing a brand new taxation system for fuel that incorporates the geopolitical turbulence most likely to remain part of our future lives for the foreseeable future.

A simple solution similar to the one above helps the industries and businesses manning the protest lines, assists the consumer at the emptying petrol pumps and buys time for the government to come with a robust alternative. While these amounts are not small change by any means they are nowhere near the billions and billions in cost the Irish government are erroneously claiming on mainstream media anytime the subject is brought up.

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I wrote the following piece in early October 2024 ahead of the US Presidential election. It references dark forces championing Trump’s re-election. Those forces now seem fully in control of his presidency, while often masked as angels of light or some kind of force for good. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am republishing unchanged the piece. These times spawn a thousand new rabbit-holes and I discuss my own trip down the Trump rabbit-hole six or seven years ago. It’s a time for real people, real connections and real networks not digitally intoxicating narratives and AI generated fakery.

OCTOBER 2024.

Before we radar in on why darker forces, and previous enemies of the man, might well now desire a Donald Trump win in the 2024 US presidential election; we must first take a slight detour for some personal background. Nothing new for regular visitors to this piece of Substack real estate.

I suppose, to begin, let’s try the following suit of clothes on for size to see how it might fit:

Rabbit-holes are potentially both very beneficial and a highly destructive force.

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In fact, a rabbit-hole might more accurately be described as a swallow-hole, for that is exactly what sinking down one threatens to do - swallow your life whole. I’ve been down several during my time shuffling around this earth. None more so than the Trump rabbit hole. A development that began, rather idly and innocently, some-time in 2018, to discover why exactly the corporate media and political elites possessed such a visceral hatred for the man. For it most definitely seemed visceral. I stumbled into, rather than sprinted into, this particular rabbit-hole. Six or seven years ago, I was more positive than negative about the possibilities of someone like Donald Trump but mostly I was curious. Curious to see how a brash, loud, ego-laden business-man would run the biggest and most powerful economy on earth. And curiouser still, to discover why so many hated him with such instinctive gusto.

This rabbit-hole took me to some wild and wacky places. Supreme Court judge nominations, mass illegal immigration, Operation Warp speed, the seedier side of campaign financing on places like opensecrets.org, and election interference to name but a few. In summation, you might say, the whole experience brought me to Epstein Island and back. Darkness seemed everywhere.

My wanderings and ponderings came to a shuddering full-stop on January 6th 2021. My conclusion was the bad guys or darker forces had won the day in a most forceful manner with a breath-taking display of power. Politics, I concluded, was rotten to the core. On both sides. That was my feeling then and not much has swayed my thinking in the interim period. It was time to leave the Trump rabbit-hole, exhausted, and get on with life.

By the end, I was consuming five to six hours a day of US political and post-2020 election content. My own experience is that the benefits of rabbit-hole excavation only really manifest after you scrape your way back to the surface and breathe in some fresh air. Truths are unearthed, no doubt, sometimes explosive truths but the huge problem is that everything, and I mean almost everything, becomes visible only through the prism of your rabbit-hole. Not a great way to fashion a life or place from which to convince the world around you as to the widespread merits of your discoveries.

My conclusions, though, regarding the 2020 US Presidential election have not changed much from then to now: It was a stolen election, and in a sense, legally stolen through the proliferation of mail-in voting and vote harvesting ushered in under the guise of Covid panic through the relaxation of rigorous voting checks and balances in various individual states. The illusion of democracy died in early 2021, in my mind, and remains, more or less un-resurrected, ever since that fateful January day. Occasionally, a wave of optimism on this subject sweeps through me but rarely lives for more than a week or two.

As a result, today, I look at the 2024 US presidential election with different eyes. Most of the same characters, on both sides of the fence, are still in place which is useful. Political debate, while pretty basic in 2020, is now completely out-the-window and instead we are treated to a very bad series of X-Factor. The electorate, as it were, encouraged to vote for the candidate with the best viral-clip or the funniest memes.

Now, one interesting nugget I note in this election cycle is just how much easier President Trump is able to access all media. This has been especially true for the last couple of months. Very interesting, indeed. Last night, he appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, and it bears no repeating that Elon Musk has dedicated his company - Twitter/X - towards Trump’s re-election. But, in many ways, these two points and two characters are a smokescreen to what really is afoot, I think. Underneath, the mega-level of media reach accessible to Rogan and Musk, lies a cottage industry of influential “ independent “ political, comedic, and entertainment type podcasts. Almost all of them existed in 2020 but which have now grown up and matured over the last four years. These tech vehicles - combined - have huge reach and influence; Gript is an Irish example of one such entity.

President Trump has appeared on all of these second-tier platforms in recent weeks and months. Garnering hundreds of millions, if not billions of views. All of these various media businesses primarily exist on Youtube. Now, Trump’s access to these platforms and in-depth conversations on them, in 2020, was close to non-existent, and indeed, would’ve spelt almost instant de-platforming or vast shadow-banning for anyone silly enough to entertain the notion. This is instructive. Not of the media personalities operating on YouTube, but, of Google and Youtube. Google has taken a position on Trump, in my view, and the final decision is that they can live with Donald J. Trump being the next president of the United States. My guess, at this moment in time, is that he almost certainly will be the next President of the United States.

Why?

Interesting question and my answer is probably not one shared by many but here it is for what it’s worth: The illusion of democracy must prevail and the only person in the western hemisphere capable of delivering the illusion of democracy is Donald J. Trump. The darker forces, at this late stage, are in a bind and have possibly come round to the idea of a truce of sorts and a gamble too.

In exchange for the illusion of democracy they are betting Trump will be mostly controllable or distractible. The bad guys, in other words, will be free to pursue a majority of what they seek. Not all but enough.

Clues to this line of thinking are often to be found in the foot-notes and not on the page itself, I believe. Steve Bannon, the face of the America First movement, and Trump’s greatest ally, strategist and cheer-leader is currently serving time in prison. This is most probably a politically motivated short-term jailing but even that detail isn’t the main point. The bigger picture on this detail is very revelatory. Steve Bannon is scheduled to be released from prison next week, a week before the election. If we rewind the clock back four years there is ZERO chance Bannon would’ve been released from prison until after the voting had taken place on November 5th. He’s too big a risk and fly in the ointment.

Another inconvenient truth, and a consequential one, is a Trump loss, whether by means legitimate of illegimate, risks detonating unhealed wounds in the United States as a result of the stealing of the 2020 election. In addition, at this juncture, the US is losing badly an endless, unpopular war in Ukraine along with the madness erupting across Israel and the middle-east. The bad guys are in a delicate and vulnerable position. The darker forces and agendas corrupting the western world have no recent wins to point to and so very badly need the illusion of democracy to live, or risk complete chaos in the months ahead. The ultimate collapse and unravelling of what we know to be “the West” could materialise very quickly indeed.

Now, I utilise these words and terms “ bad guys “ and “ dark forces” as a placeholder. If you consume the external world in a strictly conscious, logical, literal and straight-forward sense you can probably offer forth a list of specific names, groups, companies, and countries in response to the use of the above terms. Personally, I’m more in a space of feeling now to say these forces are energetic. And while many of these people are fully conscious of where they stand and how dark and dangerous what they promote is, I would argue, for more, it is a subconscious trap and many might not be fully conscious of the devilishness of their actions. Herein lies the risk for the ordinary person.

At present, if we were to say the forces of good and evil in the world are both gathering steam - in terms of magnitude - for some type of face-off in the near future, I might, as an addendum say: the present moment then offers the greatest risk of getting sucked into the darker energies quite unbeknownst to oneself. As almost everything in the external world is not as it seems. At home and abroad. The US 2024 presidential election is a great example of this, I believe. So, endeavouring to ensure all within the inner world is as it seems is of paramount importance.

The good news, for me at least, is the next couple of months promises to be a wild ride. I can relatively enjoy the experience of observing the US 2024 election and shenanigans in the aftermath with the added benefits of some of the information garnered back in 2020 without embodying the diamond-tipped, toxic negativity rabbit-hole boring tends to engender in myself. At this stage, ten days out, I would say we are in the temporary eye of a global storm where both bad guys and good guys in this crazy world of ours need Trump to win the 2024 US presidential election.

The global macro - economic and political picture has worsened considerably for the United States through-out the Biden adminsitration which is hardly a surprise given a dementia-ridden pensioner and a hysterically laughing hyena are sitting a-top of it. This has allowed these darker forces - the ones actually deciding outcomes - to proceed with their competing agendas almost unhindered ( but with less and less cheer-leading, I might add). One of the end results of this on-going delinquent behaviour pattern is war as mentioned above. War, or the threat of war, abounds in almost everywhere corner of the globe, an almost unthinkable situation to envisage as recently as four years ago. In short, the bad guys at the heart of the West have received most of what they wanted in the first place. The production of copious amounts of fear, anger, death, negativity and chaos around the non-western world. While the FIAT money machines keep spitting out profits in their general direction. This can’t last, and this won’t last. Meanwhile, the streets of many western societies, Ireland’s chief amongst them, seem increasingly filled with a sedated or inoculated peoples. Oblivious to what should be staring them in the face but almost hypnotised or anaesthetised into acquiescence.

However, the increasing future threat, as I see it, is that the powerhouses driving the west - this undemocratic merge of : dangerous ideology—big media—big corporate— weak political have been getting pulverised by countries like Russia, China and the countries aligning around BRICS. Some leaders of these countries are by no means forces for good and freedom but most possess a recognisable common trait. They are tough guys. The Biden Administration, European Union and NATO are what we might call pretend tough guys.

To explain the above and end this piece I’ll use a boxing quotation. One used by the boxing coach Teddy Atlas, Mike Tyson’s teenage boxing trainer. Again, his is a controversial view on Tyson’s career and describes the flaws inherent in Tyson’s character as an explainer of his defeats as a fighter. Most boxing fans would think of Tyson as the supreme tough guy but Atlas took a very different view of him and used his fights with Evander Holyfield to crystalize his point.

“ To be the Viking, the Titan, the Samurai, to be the Warrior - to be those things, it has to be inside you. When the moment comes, you have to believe it. There are certain places you can't lie, That's why the Boxing ring is called the Chamber of Truth….

Great Fighters, when the fight comes to them find a way to overcome. Tyson found a way to disappear. Great fighters find a way to show up…..Tyson didn't bite Holyfield's ear because he was this savage or hungry animal. Stop the crap. He was looking for a way to get himself out - because he knew he wasn't that guy, he wasn't a Warrior - or a Samurai - and when you're not "That Guy" - Guess what you have a great talent for recognising……….when somebody else is "

The west can no longer be deemed a great fighter or great defender of freedom. Post pandemic they’ve done a passable imitation of one but that mask is slipping as a queue of Evander Holyfield’s around the world begin tapping them on the chin. Most of the non-western world have woken up to the fact the Western Emperor has very little clothing left. And these western forces aren’t beyond ripping our ears off as a last stand to saving themselves.

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It was late but I was out of cigarettes. So, I grabbed the car keys from the coffee-table and headed out the door for the 24 hour on the edge of town. It was a wet night and as I eased the car to a halt at the pumps I could see the damp outline of him to the left of the customer hatch. I got out and kept my eye on him but to avoid the rain began a half-jog to the same and only customer portal. The frenetic energy of him met me well before I arrived as he argued loudly with the shop assistant from a bench. I slowed to a halt and ordered my non-prescription medication interrupting their back and forth.

“ Hey, hey, hey can you bring me to Athlone, bring me to Athlone, please bring me to Athlone “

The voice was Eastern European and I knew dealing with it would be trouble. But, ignoring it might mean trouble too. The Indian attendant disappeared to retrieve my smokes and so the two of us were left briefly alone together. The station and fore-court held a vast concrete emptiness. Interaction was unavoidable.

“ Please, please, please, bring me to Athlone, bring me to Athlone, bring me to Athlone, I’ll fooking pay you “

I turned and he grinned, then he stood up. At full stretch he was over six feet tall and dressed in tracksuit bottoms, t-shirt and hat oblivious to the cold, menacing night. His only possessions were a plastic bag, an e-cigarette and can of Red Bull.

“ I’ll pay you one hundred and fifty, two hundred euro, bring me to Athlone, bring me to Athlone, I need to get out of Tuam “

I felt his chaos, trauma, anger, exuberance and heightened excitement muddled up together and was both wary and drawn to it. I suspected some narcotics were sloshing around in his bloodstream or maybe it was a Red Bull overdose. He opened his plastic bag and removed a fistful of cash from it and began waving it in my direction and repeated his plea for safe passage to Athlone. After about ten seconds silently drinking him in, I decided there was a greater than fifty percent chance he wouldn’t kill me stone-dead and I slowly nodded my head. It was after 1am, on a night in the middle of holy week, but my nod wasn’t an act of charity. I needed the money. Plain and simple.

Before I verbalised my agreement he started doing a little jig of ecstasy and moved towards my car, the only one in the entire fore-court. Before he passed me I put out my hand.

“Two hundred” I said

He paused, smiled to himself, and transferred the cash into the centre of my extended paw. Then, we started walking together towards my car.

“ Meester, meester… “ a voice called from behind, I swivelled around.

“ You forgot your cigarettes “

It was my turn to try a little wry smile on for size. It takes a lot for me to forget about a packet of cigarettes.

When I sat into the car after retrieving the fags the stranger already had the seat moved back and was engaged in a heated conversation with someone on his phone talking a mile a minute. I said nothing and eased the car out of the petrol station onto the road.

“ Costacurva in Tuam, I need you to collect me in Athlone “ he half-howled, half-laughed at the anonymous voice on his phone.

A mini debate broke out between the two about a location and it was eventually decided to meet in Ballinasloe not Athlone. The man on the other end would find a suitable landmark spot and call us with the location when he got there. I was unsure whether the output from this conversation between the two shortened or lengthened my life-expectancy but decided not to worry about it too much and lit a cigarette. He hung up and quickly began a voice note to a woman.

“ Thank you, Thank you, Thank you….Dad is a cunt, the biggest cunt, I had to leave. He told Costacurva to leave, kicked me out. Thanks for talking me down, thanks for talking me down. Costacurva will give you a very good seeing to when I get back…you know what I mean…Hahahaha”

When the voice note dropped Costacurva relaxed a little and tried to fasten his seat-belt which was bit like watching a bull calf attempt to wrestle a garter snake. He looked over at me and began pulling on his e-cigarette.

“ Costacurva a bad man, bad man. I was gonna rob a car before you came along “

He then proceeded to give me a run-down on his life: Nearly twenty years in Ireland, broken home, violent father, jobs here and there, a couple of children here and there, and ten years in prison. Both in Ireland and Eastern Europe.

“ Mountjoy, Clover Hill, Castlerea, and some sheet-hole in the Midlands”

He referred to himself in the third person a lot, an endearing quirk of absorbing the English language from places other than the Irish educational system, I suspected. Costacurva was in his late thirties, maybe forty at stretch, his language peppered with the Irishisms long-term Eastern Europeans living here develop. Fuck was Fook, he understood the international and Irish meanings of the word ‘crack’, and had some native dexterity in his use of the word cunt. At one point I asked him what he thought of Ireland and Irish people.

“ I love the Irish and culture here. Costacurva is stupid and the Irish are very simple. So, we get on good”

Soon though, I had a problem. The yellow fuel light was on and the red dial was dangerously low. I calculated I mightn’t make it to Ballinasloe and would need to stop at the 24 hour in Loughrea—if I had enough juice to get me there. Gently, I broke the news to Costacurva not sure how he’d react to the detour.

“ It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok. I can get out in Loughrea if you want. If you say to me get out in Loughrea, Costacurva get out. I believe in Karma “

“What do you mean?”

“ Costacurva a bad man but he believes in Karma. If I say I do something, I do it. If you ask me to get out, Costacurva get out”

I assured him I just needed some diesel. He told me a story about his apartment to elaborate on his Karma theme. A year earlier he moved into a place but signed no lease and promised the landlord he’d leave when asked. In early March the apartment owner duly asked him to leave with a week’s notice as he’d sold the apartment.

“ Costacurva just shook his hand and left on St Patrick’s day. Not happy but a deal is a deal “

“ What’s your work? “ he asked

For the first time in three years I was tempted to lie about this type of question.

“I’m a writer “

“What do you write?“

“Books” I replied. Satisfied the answer contained enough truth for the night that was in it. Then it occurred to me to ask him a question from left field.

“Did you get the Covid Vaccines?”

He started laughing at the enquiry in a manner that suggested Tommy Tiernan had just dropped a punch-line.

“ Costacurva no take that fooking sh-eet. Bad sh-eet”

He didn’t elaborate further on the subject and wasn’t passionate talking about it for more than sixty seconds. In the way a drug-dealer might recognise a bad batch of e-tabs and dump them down the toilet. Not because of a particular concern for anyone who might take one of them but rather understanding that selling them would be bad for business in the long-term.

After thirty minutes we arrived into another empty petrol station off the Galway-Dublin motorway near Loughrea and I jumped out to fill the tank with forty euros of diesel. With two hundred euros in the pocket it was the first time in a while I wasn’t staring intently at the price. Costacurva hopped out to get himself more red-bull and was dancing and shrieking his way across the forecourt towards the hatch. I looked around hoping no on-duty cops would arrive for their night-time coffee break and snooze.

When I finished up I started shuffling across towards the hatch to pay for the fuel and met Costacurva on the way back holding two cans of Red Bull. One for him and one for me. I advised him that the last time I drank Red Bull it had a double vodka in it. He shrugged his shoulders and moved past me towards the car.

“It’s ok, its ok, its ok, Costacurva’s pay for the diesel”

A mystery wrapped up in an enigma jammed into a can of Red Bull. I turned and followed him back to the car but made a quick diversion to the boot of the car. In it was my left over box of books from my book launch in February. I pulled out a copy, closed the boot and sat back into the car. I placed the copy into his lap and waited for his response. He picked it up and examined the cover.

“Is that you on the front?”

I nodded my head.

“How old are you?”

“ 50” I said. Shaving two years off, in case, you know, anyone in the car thought fifty two years olds wouldn’t be prepared to fight if it came down to it.

“Hmm. You look 44”

He stared at me, then back down to the book.

“I will read it. Costacurva promises he will read it even if it takes ten months. I read a lot of books in prison.

You wrote this from your heart didn’t you?”

I was inexplicably surprised and speechless. He had a way of boiling things down to the bare essence in a sentence. I wasn’t quite sure if this was a chemically induced superpower or not but suffice to say not many can distil so effortlessly.

“Costacurva is not as stupid as he makes out” I eventually smiled.

“Hahaha..and you’re not so simple. Are you sure you’re not an Irish Traveller?”

We got back on the road and the rain was bucketing down. I offered him my coat for the journeys ahead but he declined. His phone buzzed and it was our rendezvous man. He was in place at a car park in Ballinasloe that shall remain nameless. I advised Costacurva we were fifteen minutes away and he passed on the information.

“Are you sure you can trust this guy?” I asked

“Costacurva trusts nobody but he will do his job”

Whatever pyramid or pyramid scheme Costacurva was involved in the rendezvous man was lower down the food-chain. We didn’t speak much for the rest of the way and he began texting, pulling on his e-cig and polishing off the last of the Red-Bull. We arrived at the location and circled an empty car park. My anxiety briefly spiked but the phone buzzed again and his new chauffeur announced he’d moved to a different place across the road. We crossed the street and I pulled up about thirty yards away from eighty grand’s worth of automobile.

“ Thank you, thank you, thank you..” he said and opened the door to leave. A new adventure on the horizon. We shook hands and he was gone. Skipping across the distance between the two cars oblivious to the rain and the same ball of frenetic energy I met an hour previously. I sat and watched him greet the man in the new car and move excitedly across the front of the car towards the passenger seat.

An image struck me. The black sheep I met on the road in the Inagh Valley. Costacurva was another black sheep, I thought. Similar to the Connemara sheep, from the side-on angle I could see he was also one that was one flecked with streaks of white too.

Dirty but unbothered.

PART 1 BELOW.

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