Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 244 - The Troubles Part 2

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Tom continues to take Joe through the history of the Troubles. In this episode we cover the famine, independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, partition, and more! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Listen to the Beneath The Skin Podcast: https://twitter.com/BeneathSkinPod Follow Tom on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gotitatguineys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad free and is totally supporter driven we use that money to pay our bills buy research materials that make this show possible and support charities like the red crescent the flint water fund and the halo trust consider joining the legion of the old crow

today and now back to the show hello and welcome to the lions led by donkeys podcast. I am not Joe. I'm Tom. And with me is Joe. Hello. It is still weird not doing the intro, but I'm working through it. Everybody's going to have to bear with me. As people have noted in the last couple episodes that I kind of sound like shit. It's because I've acquired a fun case of laryngitis. uh it's because i've acquired a a fun uh case of uh laryngitis um and the doctor's like well you should just try not to talk um or drink or smoke i'm like look i i literally live to do all those things so i'm just gonna have to wait wait for it to run its course you're doing like a self hatred speed run right now yeah i mean at least it doesn't hurt um like yesterday was really fucking bad um like i ordered food uh because i'm leaving for a week, so I don't want to buy groceries. They'll sit there and be bad. So I've been ordering food almost every day, which is fucking wasteful. I mean, at least it's affordable. It's not like ordering from Uber Eats or something where it's super expensive, but still, it's wasteful. But the guy couldn't find my apartment. So he called me on the phone

and I literally could not speak to him. So I had to text him how to find it because I could not speak on the phone. I think part of it is also winter in Yerevan is just awful. I mean, winter in Armenia isn't great in general in general but in yerevan it's so bad because it gets really foggy and cold and because there's so much fog and the the the environment like yerevan's effectively in a giant crater so like it's in a hole uh so like you have all of this fog it looks like fucking silent hill um and it also traps all the car exhaust and smog into the hole, uh, for the winter.

So like, if you don't smoke, congratulations, you do. Um, yeah, it's like as well. Just take it up.

Yeah. It's like, uh, like I made a joke yesterday. One of my friends was like, is this fog or smog? The answer to both of those questions is yes. Um, and it just like, it felt like i walked to the gym because i i pretty much walk everywhere here but i was walking to the gym this morning and like i was like out of breath but i got to

the gym because you're like it feels like you're breathing through a straw that has like paper jammed into it you know it's like the uh the reverse of high altitude training for like high performance athletes like you're just like walking to gym inhaling all this smoke and just imagine how well you can perform when you move to a country that like isn't filled with smog yeah i'm i'm uh prepping for the olympics in a country that has like health and environmental standards it's a what if the uh what if the olympics was in shanghai just like all those fumes yeah uh or like what it like let's do the world cup in mumbai like i mean it's probably not that far off considering they had it in fucking qatar of all places So, you know, I don't, but Qatar for, I mean,

I don't mean this as a, as a compliment because Qatar is evil. Uh, but like there, at least they probably have decent air quality. It's just really hot. I mean, how,

how high quality is the air if it's like breathing in fire? Yeah. Yeah. That's true. It's like, uh, when I, when I was in Kuwait,

I was only there for like a day getting a flight and it was just like walking on the surface of the sun if someone was blowing a hair dryer in your face and that hair dryer was full of sand so i was like fucking god this is horrible much like that a smash mouth smash hit walking on the sun yeah uh it also uh much like smash mouth uh kuwait is in uh shrek many many people don't know this wait what uh probably not they probably funded some weird thing with oil money or something the puss in boots movies are funded by kuwait the kuwaiti royal family is uh proud to present puss in boots i mean like but to be honest like don't most despots all have like weird fascinations with movies yeah i think uh like obviously i think the best recent example is uh osama bin laden's massive porn collection uh that is full of so

much fucked up shit the ca won't release what it was which is like one of my favorite stories of all times they will not say what kind of porn osama bin laden was jerking off to it's like why why is that a state secret what what was he doing also like to be fair considering how much anime he had on that hard drive as well i think it's hentai it's fucking hentai we could make some strong inferences what was on it i wonder if osama bin laden was a fan of neon genesis 7 gilead i mean i would love to hear his interpretation of what it means you know he's looking at shinji doing the leo point like he just like me for real you know i bet it's the weirdest of possible worlds like he's only into like slice of life comedy anime

just like him running around the compound with a slice of toast in his mouth you know he's a huge Naruto guy I mean like with the wing formation of an airplane that wasn't the airplane on 9-11 doing the Naruto run technically

I was just about to fucking say that oh god if we're going to talk about uh another great tragedy it's great segue uh since yeah we we had to get off our chuckles on the way down yeah because it only goes downhill from here so when we were last speaking king william was now firmly atop the throne in england and secured a protestant ruler well had secured a protestant rule for england scotland and ireland now over the next several hundred years there was a series of acts by which the union of scotland and england became great britain and then later in 1783 the Irish Appeals Acts or the Renunciation Act as it's also referred to by which no appeals of British laws in Ireland would be heard in British courts

and the Irish House of Lords by extension became less of a political and legislative body independent of the crown and more in line with the British Parliament than the House of Lords so essentially this solidified Ireland's connection to Britain. Now, it simply wasn't enough. By the 1790s, the Crown, frustrated by constant rebellions and uprisings in Ireland, sought to issue a final act

that would bind Ireland to Britain once and for all. As we discussed in the last episode, by this time access to institutional power was restricted to a small minority, the Anglo-Irish of the Protestant descendancy. Frustrated by the lack of reform among the Catholic majority, eventually led, along with other reasons, to a rebellion in 1798 involving the French invasion of Ireland and the seeking of complete independence from Great Britain. independence from great britain this rebellion was crushed with much bloodshed and the motion for union was motivated at least in part by the belief that the rebellion was exacerbated as much by brutally reactionary loyalists as united irishmen as by wait hold up the french invaded

ireland yeah there was french involvement in 1798 um several battles were fought actually in my home county of wexford and to this day 1798 is remembered as one of the last great pushes for independence before the 20th century so there is like over the course of the next probably 200 years there is a lot of european involvement in ireland mainly as to try and take a crap shot at great britain and sure of course so yeah just like that's why the french got involved like we don't care about the irish but we fucking hate the british yeah god wait until we get to the 1940s and we tell about who sent arms to the ira um you could take a guess i know i know in the 20s

i don't know much about the 40s i know the 20th century momar gaddafi was involved because he's always involved in everything in that era yeah he sold guns to street gangs in fucking chicago it's wild yeah the people's king he just was redistributing arms like the but the thing is that there's a weird connection between irish football and gaddafi so like there was like soccer teams that went and played in libya wasn't it wasn't one of his sons like a fake pro football player uh like gaddafi effectively bribed a syria uh side to like put him on the roster and he was fucking terrible i remember that i mean if you want like nepotism children i think that's the most mild form of it. Yeah, I mean, why not?

I mean, he's definitely not the first person to do that. He won't be the last. Yeah. So furthermore, Catholic emancipation was being discussed in Great Britain and fears that a newly enfranchised Catholic majority would drastically change the character of the Irish government and parliament. It also contributed to a desire from London to merge the parliaments. According to historian James Stafford, an Enlightenment critique of the Empire in Ireland laid the intellectual foundations for the Act of Union.

He wrote, The exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects under the terms of the papal laws from the benefits of property and political representation would further disenfranchise the catholics and you know these critiques were used to justify a parliamentary union between britain and ireland i feel like i feel like the the dispossession of the catholics was the whole point it doesn't happen on accident so well you know especially when they're a majority yeah yeah so in the 18 in 1800 the active union was passed uh through which the legal governmental and political links between the two countries were solidified it enshrined in constitutional law the union between great britain and ireland and includes some of the following articles which were will be immediately

relevant to anyone who is vaguely familiar with irish history so we're gonna i'm gonna read out some uh legal articles for you i'm just gonna i'm just gonna play this so uh by playing homies you're kind of inferring that england and ireland are now homies well that that's what they thought. And it's also, you know, shout out to Shox. I'm sure he'll be listening keenly for me, my reading of these legal articles. So, here we go. Articles 1 through 4 dealt

with political aspects of union. It created the United Parliament. In the House of Lords, the existing numbers of the Parliament of Great Britain were joined by as Lord Spiritual, four bishops of the Church of Ireland, rotating among the diocese in each session as Lords Temporal, 28 representative peers elected for life by the Peerage of Ireland. The House of Commons was to include the pre-union representation of

Great Britain and 100 members from Ireland. Article 5 united and established the Church of England and the Church of Ireland into one Protestant Episcopal Church to be called the United Church of England and Ireland. This is going to become relevant. But also confirmed the independence of the Church of Scotland. Article 6 created a customs union

with the exception that customs duties on certain British and Irish goods passing between the two countries would remain for 10 years, a consequence of having trade depressed by the ongoing war with revolutionary France. Our boy Napoleon is sticking his head in again. Hell yeah. We stand a

short king. Short emperor, whatever. Exactly. And before anybody gets mad at me, I know he was normal sized, okay? Leave you alone. Yeah, how many cubits was he that's the that's the only measurement that uh that i trust at this stage he was precisely one napoleon in length we're gonna measure stuff in napoleons um article 7 stated that ireland would have to

contribute two sevenths towards the expenditure of the united kingdom the figure was the ratio of british to irish foreign trade this is going to become very relevant in like two minutes article 8 formalized the legal and judicial aspects of the union so joe do you have any questions about how this can go wrong it sounds uh like all of it's gonna go wrong uh first of all lord temporal that's some warhammer 40k shit um that sounds like someone who works for the fucking inquisition secondly it this i mean this is kind of the point of course this strips ireland of any kind of self-determination and self-rule very obviously they don't even have their own fucking church anymore yep ding ding ding ding you are right and over the course of the 19th

century british control over Ireland tightened, as in mainland Britain, the Industrial Revolution was underway, and the United Kingdom's new cities full of factories and workers needed food to eat and resources to burn. You can tell what's coming. Similar to the British colonial story all over the world, Ireland's resources were exported en masse to Britain, be it labour, raw materials or food, and then finished products were resold back to the colonies. During this time there was consistent political unrest in Ireland as there was an almost constant tension between the rule of Britain and landed aristocracy and the Irish parliament. Many

of the newly ascended Protestant class were sympathetic to the situation of the Catholic Irish and were dedicated to their emancipation from the penal laws and their subjugation so the year is 1940 have a guess what happens oh uh let me guess world war ii yes world war ii um in the 1840s a strain of the potato blight struck europe and decimated potato crops all across ireland i'm gonna try and say this the actual word uh pithothoria infestans arrived in ireland in and around 1845 and the situation at the time could not have been the more perfect storm to decimate the country i'm assuming they were brought in on like exports or something right if they've never been there before yeah so the the difference between this strain of potato blight to others is that it's it's parasitic more than

fungal so a lot of the research into it that has tried to explain where it came from it said that it arrived from ships from the u.s and the americas so oh wonderful it's it's great how that keeps happening i mean of course it didn't happen on purpose but it's much like the uh the spanish flu yeah uh it was pinpointed to happen i believe it started i believe kansas yeah yeah and then it was trucked on over to europe because of world war one and within the lungs of some fucking conscript some like 16 year old who's been dragged away on a ship is uh hacking up his lungs and he's like oh i hope that the fresh air in europe will help me yeah they open up this the troop transport door like oh no but dead bodies in here all right this is spain's fault uh i mean don't get me wrong. I'm fine blaming the Spanish for most things,

but not that one. Yeah, I don't think the Spaniards have done a whole lot good in history, but they gave us tapas. I'll give them that. Small plates restaurants are great in my books. Yeah, alright. Well, if your country exists

and it was once a great world power and the best you can offer us is small plates i got nothing to say to you man so at the time due to the penal laws forbidding irish catholics to own land most lived as subsistence farmers on small subdivided plots of land as a side note at the active union in 1800 would have had a direct effect on the impact of the potato famine as by the 1840s over 70 representatives of the irish parliament were landlords with large holdings of land rented out to poor irish farmers once again fuck landlords weird how that keeps happening it's like this constant through line in history of landlords being parasitic little fucks yeah it it's going it's

going to come up um their accommodation was meager and in 1845 24 of all irish tenants were on less than uh were on between 0.4 and 2 hectares which is one to five acres in size while 40 were on two to six hectare hectares five to 15 acres holings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family shortly before the famine the british government reported that poverty was so widespread that one third of all irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after their rent was paid so they created a like effectively um they they kind of did a pull pot here right like uh like they put them on land that was so incredibly small and probably just bad land as well um that they could only grow X amount of crops. Those crops were not enough to feed anybody. And on top of that, they create a giant monoculture,

which is all things you do not want to do. But also, and it's something I'm going to cover in a couple of minutes, that they weren't just growing potatoes. They were growing other stuff. It was just that they only had enough space to grow potatoes to feed themselves. Right, right. Like the main staple crop that they needed to survive was a monoculture. It's not a good sign. The family survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant workers in England and Scotland,

and following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings. In 1841, the census showed that Ireland had a population of just over 8 million, and in 1845, the Earl of Devon finished his report on the levels of privation in Ireland, and in his report he said, You ready for this, Joe? Oh, hit me. It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations

which the Irish labourer and his family habitually and silently endure. In many districts, their only food is the potato, their only beverage water, their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather, a bed or blanket is a rare luxury, and nearly in all their pig and manure heap constitute their only property. Good God. All right. I'm sure you're going to cover this. Maybe, I don't know. In case anybody's wondering, no, I have not seen the script.

That's why I'm the guest. They're in union with England and Scotland, right? So they are subjects of the Royal Crown. Why is England not shipping them food? I think I know the answer because this is my field of study. I've never really studied the famine a whole bunch. And I know there's probably Irish listeners and stuff.

We know it's a genocide. We're calling it the name that is generally known as. We know that this was a genocide committed against the Irish people. But what was the reasoning for it? to irish people uh but what what was the reasoning for like because they couldn't just in you know in the press or whatever in the in the world news it's not like the english could just be like oh fuck them we're not sending them food like what was their rationale because there's always some kind of explanation so i'm going to get into it but there but there's two kind of reasonings. One is policy failure at first, and then second is essentially outright malice. I know a lot of people harp on about that book, How the Irish Became White.

Irish people, up until maybe the early 20th century were considered like a subclass by a lot of people in the UK that we were considered you know savages and needed to be cultured needed to be cultured in the British faith we were seen as fundamentally different from

you know Protestants in the UK and there was the religious aspect of it as well that cromwellian like righteous sort of fire of the protestant faith like that thing still kind of um existed but like huh so this is like a punishment from god for being catholic effectively yeah there there is that aspect of this is kind of like cosmic justice for our savagery, but it's also caused partially by the Enlightenment, one of the worst things to ever happen. So now as the British government had not the best history in responding to famines and crop collapses in Ireland alone, in Ireland alone, there had been a series of crop collapses over the previous century and a half,

and in each incident, there was only a moderate response, if any. You look at any kind of colonial power, the function of colonization is to extract resources and value from the colonized territories and then resell finished products. That's pretty much what Britain did did in ireland like if you look at forestry in ireland um only 10 of the original forest or maybe it's even less now actually um still exists in ireland because in order to build the british navy they chopped down

all our trees uh it's like yeah i mean there's you know obviously this doesn't happen with people that listen to our show. I would imagine we would have chased you out of there by now. But a lot of people will attempt to point at like, well, colonialism is bad, etc., etc. But they left administration. They built railroads in schools. They did that to better facilitate the extraction of resources. A very good example, again, with the British is India.

Like look at the Bengal famine. Like the infrastructure was built there, not for the betterment of people, but for the betterment of colonial extraction. Because you can extract more things if you have a more educated workforce and a bigger workforce, a workforce that can move around rapidly by rail and things like that like it's not about like benevolent colonialism it's not a concept that exists and it's funny because i don't have it in script but i'll talk about it in a little bit about there was like some very touching stories of solidarity from like people around the world in response to the famine in ireland like um that's right you can cut out the part about you googling and just make you sound smart yeah like there was this kind of ideological thing of you know let him starve and there

was some like really touching stories of like other groups around the world like particularly like the i think it's the choctaw nation in the u.s and yeah the head of the so the ottoman empire sent uh food as well you know it ironic there was yeah um but in the beginning there was a response to the famine corn was secretly ordered by prime minister sir robert peel to be shipped from the the US, but the relief effort would fall short as most Irish mills were unable to grind maize into usable flour. In response to this failure, Peel repealed the Corn Laws, which imposed high tariffs on cornmeal, causing the prices for bread to be high. Now, Peel's rule was very short-lived and on june

29th peel was ousted by lord russell and this replacement would spell disaster for ireland russell was a firm believer in laissez-faire politics and appointed charles trevelyan as head of the famine relief effort imagine a late okay well i don't we don't have to imagine this because it happened but like i met like think of a guy who's like ah i see millions of people are starving to death let's let the markets decide well that's literally it charles trevelyan who was in charge of the administration uh limited the government's food aid program because of his firm belief in laissez-faire politics in january 1847 the government abandoned this policy realizing that it had failed and turned

to a mixture of indoor and outdoor direct relief of course it failed the policy was doing nothing like fellas i have an idea we just sit here and we let the irish star fast forward like a year like guys i have some bad news doing nothing did not work uh that's that's like the same fucking thinking that like i have when i'm dodging work like oh no i've fallen behind why did i fall behind because i didn't do anything yeah um like the the former of indoor direct relief was workhouses through the irish poor laws so essentially if you were couldn't pay your rents you were homeless um vagrants it was illegal you got sent to workhouses where you were forced to work for food pretty much jesus christ i think i've heard some horror stories about the irish

workhouses yeah so essentially you were you were housed in cold stone rooms, fed meager meals, and all in exchange for basic subsistence. You would be tasked with processing stuff for export. You could be processing stuff like wool, grain, food. And it was just, you did it because you had to survive. The latter was soup kitchens for the outdoor direct relief. There's a joke in Ireland called taking the soup, where if you have a traditionally Protestant name,

so it goes that during the famine if you took the soup that was offered by these soup kitchens, you had to convert to Protestantism and change your name. Good God. So, say like my name is O'Mahony, so that's O apostrophe m-i-h-o-n-y my name in irish is omahuna and you would have to like drop the o from your name or like change

your name completely and you can see the direct effects of that in how certain surnames are spread across ireland because certain names might be more common in areas that might've had more popularity with soup kitchens and, you know. And your surname has nothing to do with your religion at all. Like that's, I mean, that, that, that is obviously just like targeted cultural destruction and like the elimination of a, of a cultural identity that like the fact that you have an O and your name does not make you Catholic. it's like my my mom grew up catholic she was a fucking irish well it does have some significance in

like irish catholicism because like protestants at that time were people who had either moved during the plantation of ireland or had descended directly from planters or were part of like you know irish aristocracy so they did have different names so sure but it's like it's a very obvious cultural identifier that they wanted they wanted to eliminate irish identity yeah like other than what they considered the good ones yeah so in june 1847 the poor law amendment act was passed which embodied the principle popular in britain that irish property much must support irish poverty the land of the proprietors in ireland were held in britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine however it was asserted that the british parliament since the act of union in 1800 was partly to blame

so essentially landlords in ireland were left to help hold the book they were told like okay these people are starving you have to feed them this is your property so this is gonna go great yeah so at this point we can't even get a landlord to fix fucking heating or air conditioning you're like pipes leaking but yeah let's have these landlords uh fix a famine yeah so this was illustrated in a london newspaper in february 1847 there it says there was no law it could pass at their request and no abuse it would not defend for them and in march the times reported that britain had permitted in ireland a mass poverty disaffection and degradation without a parallel in the world it allowed proprietors to suck the very blood of that wretched race jesus christ yeah so now there is something

that is not very talked about when it comes to the famine, and that is Ireland was producing more than sufficient enough food to feed its people. But the vast majority of it was being exported to mainland Britain and to its stations in other colonies. So, yeah, yeah, of course. It's just like what they did with the Bengal famine. Yeah. Now, was this being produced by like normal irish farmers or was it yeah so you you would have to pay a certain amount of your crop to the landlord and then that landlord would then sell it to exporters to sell to britain now there for people who argue that you know obviously

you're a genocide researcher so there is some complexity in it and like obviously there are some like there are technical things that have to be fulfilled for to be considered so and one of the things is that there was a for people who had larger holdings of land there was quite a few who were actively selling um the majority of their crops to britain for export but the influence of that on the effect of the famine overall i think is maybe a little bit overstated by some researchers but the majority of people agree that the famine was an act of genocide and by the end of the famine the irish population that was once eight million people was halved either through disease or emigration and jesus christ and it is only in the past i think a couple of years that it is so nearly 200 years later that has finally gotten back to what it was yeah like we we talked about this a

little bit during our king philips war series uh this like concept of uh population destruction cycles uh generally they're known as shatter zones um where like a population can be absolutely devastated but if they're left alone afterwards like they'll eventually um i mean using the term left alone is kind of simplistic but like it's not a continuous campaign of destruction the numbers will come back um like that's why until there was a sustained settler colonialism in north america native americans went through cycles of massive population destruction and then rebirth because they had time to bounce back. Or like the Black Death in Europe. Sometimes that's something people will argue, like why the famine wasn't

considered an act of genocide. It's like, well, then why did they stop? Well, I don't know if you know this, but a genocide doesn't have to be successful for it to still be a genocide because outside of a few very isolated cases mostly from ancient history uh no genocide has been successful so it's like you can't use that as a bellwether of so like well there's still irish people so it's whatever who cares yeah and the famine as it's referred to in irish is called uncourtortham Mhór, which is the Great Hunger. And it had so many consequences on the Irish people. For one, it concentrated the Irish language in the West. So the Irish language has slowly, slowly been disappearing over the past 150 years,

slowly been disappearing over the past like 150 years mainly because you know English became the language of business of work of if you wanted to get a job and survive you had to learn English but also the collapse of the school system and everything

was also very dominated by English right and the collapse of culture as well like the majority of people who could afford to leave Ireland left or stayed, that could afford to survive. But that meant that a lot of people who would have created art and literature in Ireland had moved abroad to predominantly the UK or America. And it caused a kind of cultural collapse, which is then addressed in the early 20th century but it had a

massive effect on Irish politics because as you can as you will see over the next kind of 70 years a lot of the popular support for Irish emancipation and Irish culture was coming from abroad so it was irish people who had set up you know in the us in continental europe in the uk were then sending up setting up like gaelic leagues so for other irish artists or irish culture could survive abroad um and the future t-shock of ireland amon de valera is one of those people whose family moved during the famine and then came back during the easter rising which you've covered in that series also fuck amon de valera it's all i'm gonna say it's something it's something kind of similar i think it's probably similar for all diasporas whatever you want to call them um that the

diasporan communities become much more intense about those kind of things which i'm sure you and shocks talk about in 33rd county uh but and there's there's jokes here that like armenians from la are the most armenian people possible because they because they make it their entire personality and then you hate them yeah but like um it and it's something that we will talk about quite a lot in the next episode of the series because it comes into play quite a lot. But yeah, so with Ireland decimated after the famine, this led to renewed attempts at some sort of independence from Britain after witnessing the three. It's treatment of the Irish people over the next 70 years. the attempts to establish a free irish state with would grow ever more successful until 1922 when the anglo-irish treaty was signed creating two states on the island of ireland well what

one legal state uh well you know two state solutions don't really work um no but it's funny that i'm flying to the uk tomorrow and and talking about this now yeah you're gonna have so many great talking points to talk because like people in general in the uk just do not know anything about irish history they don't even know they know very little about northern ireland as well um which i feel like that's probably on purpose though yeah oh it's 100 on purpose um we will, it's 100% on purpose. We will talk about that in episode three. There's a reason why most Americans couldn't tell you anything about Guam or Puerto Rico.

Other than like, yeah, those are places that exist. They got great cars filled with the biggest speakers you've ever seen in your life. You just hear someone going, I at like 3 in the morning you know so the first was the Irish Free State which later became the Republic of Ireland and then there was the Northern Irish State which comprised of

the six counties of Antrim, Tyrone Armagh, Fermanagh, County Down and Derry which remained part of the United Kingdom the formation of Northern Ireland came as a solution to the Home Rule crisis, which Home Rule meant Ireland could remain part of the United Kingdom, but would have some level of parliamentary independence, so kind of like an autonomous state.

Northern Ireland would be governed from Belfast and by extension Westminster, and the Republic would be governed from Dublin. From the get-go, there were problems on both sides of the border. In the Republic there was immediately a civil war between those who accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who took a staunch Republican view and did not want

to accept the secession of six counties from the Irish Free State. In the North the political temperature was not much better as the North began to establish itself as a political entity and an extension of the United Kingdom. It became very apparent who was in power

in the new state. The border of Northern Ireland was drawn in order to ensure an unassailable Protestant majority in political and civil life. Most Protestants were Unionist slash Loyalists. Most Catholics were Nationalists and Republicans who were nationalists and republicans who were in favor of an independent ireland there was a state of self-imposed segregation between

the two communities with protestant unionists and irish republicans existing in a state of informal self-imposed segregation with irish catholics experiencing discrimination in housing employment and education so i just so i'm sure that won't cause problems shortly yes i just want to take a second because i'm sure there are some irish americans who are listening and republican means a very very different thing in ireland and so does nationalist so i feel like we i also had to say this during the the easter rising episode because i was calling people republicans i was talking to an audience of americans mostly uh mostly americans like it's not that don't worry about it yeah so the republican means the the right of ireland to

exist as a republic similar you know think about napoleonic republics you know um and then nationalist is a it's about like irish national identity um not in the way of you know creating an ethno state but uh the creation of like a irish national identity and the maintenance of you know ireland as an independent state similar to how other formal former colonies have nationalism that is very different from i want to have a gun in the arby's um yeah yeah it's uh it's it's the the concept of nationalism in in colonized places is always complex to try to explain because you know generally uh my audience uh the audience of our show is you know western western living english speakers and a nationalist in your country is a bad fucking thing uh like you know an australian or a i assume canadian

nationalists are a thing there's gonna be one or two out there that's just that's just a quebec was yeah yeah the the worst people in france uh the we're sorry i gotta say that the worst people in canada uh i'm just kidding that there's probably worse people i don't know um but like it's it's so much different than running into your very common these days like american nationalists are like no we should uh you know melt the middle east and you know deport you despite the fact that you were born here because i don't like your political views and stuff like that like it i mean admittedly even uh where i live now is starting to get those guys um calling yourself an armenian nationalist a couple years ago wasn't necessarily a bad thing but now when they say it's like it's effectively armenian q anon people

yeah it's it's changing rapidly and and it's unfortunate that that is happening pretty much everywhere. Yeah, we have it in Ireland. We have, like, a weird national fascist party that's run by a guy who's 5'2", who got, like, beat up recently.

They were trying to have some, like, weekend retreat, and some Antifa super soldiers went up and kicked the shit out of them. It was all over the news. It was so funny. It's five foot two. That's like punching a child. I mean, just punching

straight down onto his head. Punching fascist children is okay. For its first 50 years, Northern Ireland had an unbroken series of Unionist party governments. So Unionism- Of course they did. It's purposely built that way, right?

Yeah, exactly. So Unionism is the cultural identity that Northern Ireland belongs as part of Great Britain. Almost every minister of these governments were members of the Protestant Orange Order. So I'm going to have to take a second to explain what the orange order is so the orange order is a protestant um i'm trying to be charitable here for a second uh i wouldn't bother so yeah they are a protestant supremacy group um that are honored they're still around they're still around today oh yeah they're they're it's still a big thing they are named after william of orange who we talked about last episode and they exist purely to essentially try and create a protestant ethno state in northern ireland whenever there is um a tragedy where someone is murdered you'll always see videos coming out of like an orange lodge

where they're like singing songs celebrating like the murder of an innocent civilian or a journalist or you know someone who's been caught in a crossfire between you know groups like the uvf and the ira um yeah they're horrible fuckers um i'm going to make no qualms about saying that. Another group of horrible fuckers, Northern Ireland's new police force, was the RUC, which is the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which succeeded the Royal Irish Constabulary. It too was a completely Protestant operation

and lacked operational independence responding to directions from government ministers. The RUC and the Reserve Ulster Special Constabulary, or as they will be known going forward as the B Specials, were a militarised police force due to the threat

that was organised due to the threat of the IRA. They had at their disposal the Special Powers Act, a sweeping piece of legislation which allowed arrests without warrant internment without trial unlimited search powers and bans on meetings and publications joe do you think this is going to go well so you have two different protestant armed groups uh they'll eventually i know they'll eventually turn into death squads um and

absolutely no freedom to do anything if you're not protestant so essentially like the b specials were like the armed unit of the ruc so like they were the armed unit of the police force and the orange order is kind of like it's a weirdly kind of masonic kind of group but that's kind of like the civilian branch the ruc or the police the b specials are the armed unit and they all kind of operate together like it's kind of you know cops within blue line shit would the orange order like were they like street fighting too um yeah they had they had marches it's kind of like it's hard to detangle like are they like irish proud boys like what's going on

here kind of yeah actually that that's a that's a good analogy they like they have like a lot of marches to like commemorate historical battles and which is going to become increasingly relevant going forward but yeah they like the ira at this time didn't really exist as it would come to be um after you know the war of independence and the civil war the ira kind of didn't really have anything to do other than a post partition where the orange order were already established both institutionally through their involvement with like government officials being elected elected officials and stuff like that. So they had some sort of state-backed legitimacy that was not necessarily implicitly stated, but existed nonetheless.

The Nationalist Party acted as the main political opposition in Northern Ireland, with successive Unionist governments putting in place informal discriminatory policies in order to freeze out any possibility of Irish Catholics gaining any significant political power. This extended to the extensive gerrymandering of electoral districts and the allocation of public housing. While some argued that some accusations were unfounded or exaggerated, there's enough cases to show a consistent and irrefutable pattern of deliberate discrimination against Catholics. So in 1949, the Ireland Act was ratified and it was the first legal guarantee that the region would remain part of the United Kingdom unless it had the express consent of the Northern Ireland Parliament at Stormont to leave so this is where you kind of have this majority rules thing come into effect that like people like ian paisley who i'm not necessarily going to talk about in this episode i'm going to talk about in the next episode is so terrified of that essentially catholics are going to outbreed

unionists and they're going to vote to rejoin ireland and but it's also it is a political mechanism that disenfranchises Irish Catholics from essentially voting to leave the UK and join the Republic. Because gerrymandered districts mean that only unionists will get elected and you need the express consent of Parliament. Whereas it's not, you know, not a popular vote in the similar way that the Scottish independence vote happened a couple of years ago. So this solidified the position of majority rules in Northern Ireland, with the majority of the population being at least Protestant, many being explicit Unionists, voting for Unionist politicians. During the period of 1956 to 1962, the IRA engaged in what would become known as the Border Campaign or Operation Harvest, as it was referred to internally by the IRA Army Council.

The aim of this campaign was to destabilize security within both the Republic and Northern Ireland through a series of guerrilla attacks to undermine the political backing for partition and overthrow what they saw as both sides of a partition government. Now, was the Irish Republic government pro-partition at this point? It was just kind of like, it was a political fact that that was the core agreement at the Anglo-Irish Treaty is that northern ireland remained part of britain it was a compromise that sparked the civil war pretty much uh okay uh i mean i know this is kind of off topic but like what does the government say about it now it's kind of a non-issue politically in terms of like government unless you are someone like shin fein which is the irish republican party

um it it's just an accepted fact you know northern ireland exists um and the only thing about you know a unified ireland is it has to be at the explicit consent of you know the entire population of uh northern ireland so it has to be majority rules, the majority of people want to leave the UK and join Ireland. It's a complex issue, and I think I could talk for hours about, well, what are the pros and cons of both? But I think at the end of the day,

it is down to the people of Northern Ireland to decide themselves what they want. The problem is that there is a political impetus to not give them that vote. today it is down to the people of northern ireland to decide themselves what they want the problem the problem is is that there is a political impetus to not give them that vote um and that's the that's the biggest disagreeing point that that's the biggest point that a lot of people can agree on is that the like the vote is essentially being blocked right so this campaign was in contradiction to the 1948 directive from the IRA General Army Convention under General Order No. 8 that was the de facto disarmament and was effectively the recognition of Northern Ireland as a sovereign region. General Order No. 8 prohibited any armed action whatsoever and under this new policy any IRA members that were called weapons would be ordered to dump or destroy them and not to take any defensive action.

Over the course of six years, from 1956 to 1962, attacks on RUC barracks and special targets were designated to, and I quote, break down the enemy's administration in the occupied area until he is forced to withdraw his forces. Our method of doing this is guerrilla warfare within the occupied area and propaganda directed at its inhabitants. In time, as we build up our forces, we hope to be in a position to liberate large areas and tie these in with other liberated areas.

That is areas where the enemy's writ no longer runs. So, you know, pretty bog standard liberatory paramilitary stuff these attacks were conducted all over the border on both sides with the exclusion of belfast due to ira leader paddy doyle the belfast operation commander being apprehended by the ruc prior to the campaign being undertaken the campaign was a disaster and gathered virtually no support from irish nationalists in northern ireland and only further alienated both unionist and protestant communities alike from the independence from britain why what was the the the reason like you think that the

nationalists would be in favor of it it's just that it targeted you know unjustified targets and at that time uh surely it's surely a topic that will not come up again regarding the ira yeah yeah we'll save we'll save this for the next episode so on the other side of the fence the unionists now uh one thing to this day that seems to be very confusing to a lot of people is that westminster does not care about northern ireland It fundamentally sees the North as merely an obligation. Yeah, like you talk to most people in the UK, they don't know anything about Northern Ireland

and they generally don't care. If you look at political policy to this day, politically, the government, both Labour and the Tories, just do not care about Northern Ireland. The Unionists enjoyed, largely enjoyed better opportunities

in their Catholic counterparts at the time, benefiting from structurally preferential treatment from Stormont and the Unionist majority in politics, which had held fast for about 50 years at this stage. But that being said, with traditional industry such as shipbuilding and Belfast and manufacturing on the precipice of decline the place of the working class union is protestant although

slightly better than catholics was precarious nonetheless over the 60s the two groups would come to clash politically civilly paramilitary and spiritually so as tensions grew into the early to mid 1960s, there was an emergence of unionist paramilitaries, namely the UVF and their offshoots, which were middle class and petty bourgeois unionist paramilitary groups comprised of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, officers who had served in the British Army and other similar professional class jobs that were reserved of educated protestants at the time where's the where's the where's the militia for like uh the the small business guy who owns like two car used car dealerships or something oh don't worry we're going to talk about that in the next episode the the working class uh unionist paramilitary funny enough women weren't allowed in the the UVF as well. It was purely the reserve of guys. That's not surprising. Yeah. So the group was founded by Gusty Spence, a former British

Army soldier who, with a coterie of like-minded loyalists, was fuelled by a fear that Protestantism was under threat from the growing Catholic community in the North, and to echo the sentiment of Home Rule is Rome Rule, Spence and a loose association threat from the growing Catholic community in the North and to echo the sentiment of home rule is Rome rule, Spence and a loose association of unions set up to form a group whose purpose was

to violently oppose nationalist and republican influence in the country and their counterparts, the IRA. Around the same time, IRA Chief of Staff Cahill Goulding tried to move the IRA away from militarism, which had failed during the previous border campaign and towards a grassroots left-wing politics aimed at organising and ultimately radicalising the Catholic community both north and south towards a Marxist-Republicanism.

That's what I like to hear. I don't think that worked. No, it didn't By the late 1960s in response to the deepening discrimination faced by the Irish Catholic community several groups were formed to campaign for equality in Northern Ireland

Inspired by the civil rights movement in America groups like the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Dairy Housing Action Community were formed and begun to hold marches and protests. These groups had strong ties to Irish nationalism and republicanism groups, and although their focus was on addressing the injustice, for many unionists, they were simply a front for republicanism and another IRA campaign wrapped up in a social justice cover.

So essentially, it's a Republicans being afraid that, you know, gay rights is gonna take away their guns. Yeah, of course, of course. Um, and it's important,

important to point out. I know we mentioned it earlier about the Irish diaspora. There was a lot of connections between the Irish movement, uh, civil rights movement in the North at the time and the American civil rights movement. Obviously a lot of Irish people had moved to the U S and had movement in the north at the time and the american civil rights movement obviously a lot of irish people had moved to the u.s and had family in the u.s at the time so you had like a lot of information coming from that movement to northern ireland and someone that we're going to

mention briefly in this episode and talk about a lot more uh going forward bernadette devlin was like heavily involved in that kind of cross-cultural knowledge uh passing through in the late 60s and 70s um now given the deeply politicized nature of marching and demonstrations in northern ireland protest marches were banned in dairy as they were seen as a bare-faced Republican stampeding on the front to the loyalist history of the city and on the 5th of October 1968 the protest groups organized a march and were met with violent resistance from loyalist groups and the

RUC who baton charged the protesters. So, something that I forgot to mention about the Orange Order is these boys love marching. They love marching. That marching that's what i thought like uh i like whenever i see something about like northern uh northern irish um like politics there's always there's always some dudes in very fancy clothing marching i guess it's those guys um yeah so like the like the function of orange order marching is essentially a supremacist

show of force um yeah of course it's meant meant to show that we're here there's a lot of us and we outnumber you that's pretty much it and then if if you show up the cops will take our side and beat you up man that sounds really sounds really familiar in America very recently. Yep. In January 1969, a march by the radical group People's Democracy from Belfast to Derry was attacked by loyalists at Burn Tollet, five miles outside of Derry. When the marchers, many of whom were injured, arrived in Derry on the 5th of January, rioting broke out between supporters in the RUC who seemed to have failed to protect the march. That night, RUC members broke into homes in the Catholic Bogside area and assaulted several residents. An inquiry by the Lord Cameron concluded that a number of policemen were guilty of misconduct which involved assault and battery, malicious damage to property and the use of provocative sectarian and political slogans so um i'm shocked this is

my shocked face that the cops were doing themselves a fascism yeah so um i can guess that one of the political slogan was tigues out which a tigue is a slur for a irish catholic in the north of ireland um if you see the bonfires on yeah the bonfires i was always curious about those i don't get those so that happens on uh july the 12th which is the anniversary of you know william winning uh the crown at the battle of the Boyne, which we talked about in the last episode. But quite often you'll see election posters, Irish

flags on these bonfires being set on fire. I've seen Nazi flags. I've seen Confederate flags. I've seen all sorts of cursed shit on those bonfires. So one slogan that you might not know is K-A-T kat which means kill all togs ah lovely yeah so you can understand the type of people we're dealing with um it was after a this attack in

january that barricades which would soon become a constant fixture were erected around the bogside area and what's the names that they used for those? Like barriers for peace or some insane shit like that? No, the peace walls come later. Peace walls, the peace walls, that's right. Those will be in the next episode. Vigilante patrols began patrolling in order to

keep the RUC out and at this point the RUC were considered a greater danger to the Catholic communities due to their deep ties like the Orange Order, the DUP, and the violent strains of unionism

such as the growing UVF. Yeah, I mean, I imagine they would be much more threatening. They're the armed wing of the state and they're showing up and crushing your skull

for existing. Yep, yep. Now, this is a good time to talk about the murals too um this is when the now famous you are now entering free dairy mural is painted by john casey um firstly the name dairy in and of itself is contentious you've probably seen road signs london dairy uh for some people right yeah so the name change was thrust upon the city by King James, the sixth of Scotland,

who I was then, who had just been elected King James, the first of England and Ireland following the death of his cousin, Queen Elizabeth, the first in 1603, the astronomical. That is a long grudge over a name. I have to say as someone that lives in a country that loves long-term grudges over

names, I can respect the dedication to the anger. Yep. So the astronomical sum of £60,000 was raised by livery companies in the English capital, and the result was one of the ambitious projects of the Ulster Plantation. The most quintessential Protestant organization, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, was founded in 1814. They're going to become relevant soon. And the use of the abbreviated name suggests that it was normal and natural for the loyal Protestants to use the town's original name. And it was the Boundary Commission in 1925 which was set up to redraw the north-south border after partition also makes mention of the name Derry despite the commission's unionist majority. The first murals came around 1908 with unionists painting large murals of William of Orange on the gable end walls of houses in order

to strengthen the Protestant identity within an area catholic murals would come much later uh in the 1970s often the gable end wall is donated to the mural and the art is preserved on up until today and now features heavily in the tourism of the area not all murals are sectarian and some of them feature irish history and mythology so yeah so it got called londonderry um because for some guy it was a vanity project and for now that's still a problem right like is it is it still legally called londonderry um yeah so londonderry um is not the official name. It depends on the sign. It'll appear on some signs that will not appear on others. But in April 1969, the first casualty

of the clashes between protesters and the RUC occurred. Samuel Devaney and his team... Hasn't been a death up until now? That's kind of incredible. They don't have guns, Joe. Just a lot of people getting their teeth kicked in, I guess.

Yeah, pretty much. So Sam Devaney and his daughters were beaten by RUC officers in their home after a riot in the Bogside on the 19th. Devaney died from his injuries on the 17th of July and is considered by many the first victim of the Troubles. There was further rioting on the 12th of July. the troubles there was further writing on the 12th of july and like i said the 12th of july is a day where there is huge orange order marches in order to commemorate the battle of the boyne and the winning of william of orange solidifying the protestant majority blah blah blah those bonfires are fucking massive too yeah like they start how how do like drunken idiots not fall off those things and die? They fall over all the time. Like they,

they literally like, you'll see like footage of them falling over all the time. Like they start constructing those bonfires so early. Like they start like collecting all the wooden pallets and everything. And it's like, where do they even get all these wooden pallets? There has to be thousands of them. Like shot.

Like when you think about like deliveries to shops, like they all all these wooden pallets there has to be thousands of them like shot like when you think about like deliveries to shops like they all come on wooden pallets like how much construction stuff they they have to burn ireland northern ireland's yearly like pallet surplus every july yeah pretty pretty much and um so the further writing on the 12th came as a consequence of the orange Order parades and Derry citizens set up the Derry Citizens Defense Organization in order to defend the Bogside area from attack and intimidation. The group was Republican by nature, but many members were just residents or other left wing activists. And on the 12th of August, an Orange Order march was planned in commemoration of the Siege of Derry during the Williamite War. So, on the 12th of August, to commemorate the Siege of Derry,

the march was organised as a deliberate signal of supremacy during the bubbling tensions between the two communities. The march did not pass through the Bogside, but it passed Waterloo Place and William Street, where the initial fighting broke out. The union is throwing pennies at Catholics who were protesting the march.

And then the Catholics returned fire by throwing rocks and marbles at the passing march. There were no slingshots yet. Yeah, they were using slingshots to throw the marbles. Okay, that makes more sense. That shit would suck. Yeah. So the RUC were out in force to enforce some peace, quote unquote peace, were barraged with rocks and other missiles and moved against the growing crowd of Catholic rioters, encouraged Protestants to continue slingshotting stones at the Catholics. The police then tried to alleviate the pressure they were under by dismantling the barricade

and moving into the bog site on foot and in armored vehicles. This created a gap through which Protestants also surged, smashing the windows of Catholic homes. Almost like they did that on purpose. Yes, almost like they did it on purpose, Joe. The Nationalists began throwing petrol bombs,

this is a Molotov cocktail for anyone unfamiliar, and rocks from the top of the Rossville flats, stopping the RUC advance and injured 43 of the 59 officers who had made the initial push into the bog site. Just remember the name Rossville flats, it will become important in the next episode. There was a coordinated effort on the side of the Nationalist protesters with first aid stations set up and a coordinated positioning of barricades in order to stop the flow of people into the bogside. A radio transmitter, radio-free dairy broadcast messages

encouraging resistance and called on every able-bodied man in Ireland who believes in freedom to defend the bogside. Come down here and throw some fucking marbles at the cops. Yeah, fuck yeah. Many local people, whoever joined in rioting on their own initiative

and some impromptu leaders emerged. I don't need propaganda. I'm going to go fuck shit up on my own. I don't need to be encouraged to do this. But that's the thing is that a lot of people who joined these riots, they didn't do it because they wanted to smash up stuff they did genuinely were worried for their safety with

the ruc i mean how how couldn't you be i mean you had it's more than just these um paramilitary showing like the government is storing through and fucking your shit up you know yeah so it was at this time when people like emma mccannann and burnett devlin you know rose to prominence burnett devlin a was a community leader and became very very important in you know the civil rights movement or like burnett devlin for anyone who doesn't know is like so cool so smart and is so fucking badass there's a great anecdote which i'm going to talk about in a second but like she her and abe mccann they they have had their differences in the past but they are two like very interesting people who have spent their whole lives fighting for equality in northern ireland and around the

world the ruc i i'm gonna i'm gonna get to that there's a very very funny anecdote um the ruc were under prepared for the resistance they faced. Their riot shields were not sufficiently large enough to cover their bodies. What a fucking oversight. And their protective gear was not flame resistant and many officers were severely burned by

nationalist petrol bombs. Stretched thin with no chain of command. Orders for... Oh no no our uniforms are candles there was no order for relief and there was no extra officers to cover them so over the next three days lots of ruc officers had to stand uh at attention for three days just getting pelted with marbles and Molotov cocktails. Pretty much. Many have said that... Their fucking uniforms burning and melting to their skin and shit. Many

have said that this exhaustion would lead to officers actively seeking help from Unionist marchers and protesters in assaulting nationalist protester positions. They would already do that. They literally already did that. Don't look for an excuse. Yeah. So late in the evening the ruc began flooding the bog side with cs tear gas and many of the oh god that shit sucks

many of the protesters were forced to seek refuge from cs gas and doors and others using wraps and scarves to protect themselves from the gas so by august 13th the then irish t-shock which is equivalent of our prime minister jack Jack Lynch made a televised speech stating that the Irish government can no longer stand by and see the innocent people injured and perhaps worse he said he had asked the British government to see to it that

police attacks on the people of Derry should cease immediately. He also called for a United Nations dispatch to be sent to Derry and he mobilised the Irish Army units to be sent to the border to set up field hospitals in order to aid civilians injured in the fighting. It's about time. Yeah.

By the 14th of August, the rioting had reached a fever pitch and almost everyone from the bogside was now involved with the rioting. The RUC had also deployed the B Specials into Derry, a special armed police unit known for their use of unwarranted levels of violence and collusion with Unionists. This cannot go well. Yeah, it was always a matter of time before this fucking happened. So the B Specials are arriving. Sound like a fucking barbershop quartet band ass name.

Like the fuck? Oh, the Simpsons their names the B Sharps the B special is a wholly Protestant unit with literally no training crowd control shot two protesters and a fear spread throughout the bog site that a massacre was about to occur

yeah of course you don't send these guys there without a massacre being the point yeah and it's worth noting that the RUC didn't necessarily get this reputation out of nowhere. There was the troubles during the 20s in the North where they used, once again, excessive levels of violence. But in the afternoon of

the 14th, Northern Irish Prime Minister James Chichester Clark requested Harold Wilson, Prime Minister of Great Britain, to deploy British troops to Derry. And at 5pm, the 1st Battalion, Prince of Wales Regiment of Yorkshire arrived in Derry and relieved the RUC. They agreed to not enter the bogside and to stay outside the barricades. This was the first significant deployment of British soldiers on the island of Ireland in decades since partition, and was initially welcomed by residents of the Bogside as they saw the soldiers as a more impartial entity than the RUC or the B Specials. Yeah, I could see that. I could see it. They're not a Protestant death squad. So that, I mean, they do have that going for them. Yeah, and they hoped that the neutral force would de-escalate the growing tension in the city. Only a few people, like

Burden at Devlin, opposed the deployment, seeing their arrival as little more than further imperialist action and a more subtle escalation of Britain's chokehold on Northern Ireland. Also, yes. Yeah, like, it's definitely two things at once in this situation. Yeah. There's many

famous pictures of Derry residents welcoming the arrival of British soldiers, offering them cups of tea and biscuits as thank you for their protection. And as the tear gas began to drift off into the hazy August evening, a cam would briefly rebound off the walls of Derry. But this piece would quickly fade as the arrival of British soldiers would signal that a new reality was about to begin in northern ireland oh this is uh this is not gonna this is not going to de-escalate anything like uh it's it's interesting because like i could see where not the you know the catholics are coming from they're like well you know we don't like the british but they're

certainly better than the fucking b sharps over here uh who are just slinging guns everywhere but i could i mean the fact that this is just uh british flexing on what is very clearly a um uh a trigger point flashpoint whatever for uh something of a rally rallying for nationalism in Northern Ireland. Like, of course. Yeah. Like, Bernard, that's completely right. Yep. And it is right there where we will pick up on the next episode. Oh, man.

The next episode is going to be awful. Joe, I'm like three thirds or three quarters of the way done with the script. You do not know how miserable it's about to get. And I mean, that is saying something when there's so much bad, there's so many bad things that's happened in these three episodes that the famine got like 15 minutes

because we had to move on. Yeah, no, it's it is that thing where you know, the famine happened across five years. We talked about it for 15 minutes. In the next episode, I'm probably going to spend an hour talking about 10 minutes of actual time. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I know what you're talking about. Okay. Yeah, if you're listening at home, you know, you know. Like I said at the beginning, these three episodes are not going to be like a complete comprehensive covering of the troubles it is going to talk about you know set the scene if you want me to come back and talk about like the 80s and 90s bully joe and just of course just tweet at him there is no need to bully me that will happen but i think the the purpose of these episodes is that a lot of people know about the Troubles, but don't know why they happened. Right, they don't know why they started.

Yeah, and it's simple. You know, it is discrimination and supremacy. Who would have known, you know, a partition state would completely subjugate an entire group of people it's not like it's happening right now in multiple different countries yeah it couldn't be i mean i don't know they they say peace walls i'm convinced peace walls work peace walls work joe all right uh so thank you again for hosting part two uh this is the area where you get to plug your stuff um i host another history show called Beneath the Skin it's the history

of everything told through the history of tattooing and I do a show called 33rd County with Shox from the Zoo Crew where I talk more about Ireland to talk about the Irish experience and Shox talks about the Irish American experience we should have an episode coming up soon where Shox explains

Duncan to me so oh perfect keep an eye out for that i feel like that's an explanation that even i need because i don't understand the the massachusetts obsession with duncan donuts um but uh yeah everybody thank you so much for listening if you like what we do here consider supporting us on patreon you can get all sorts of stuff uh probably the most popular is our Discord, which is turning into a tight-knit, strange collection of very cool people. And you also could get this episode and every other normal episode early for a dollar. But if you don't have a dollar, that's fine. It's your money.

Do with it what you want. But you can leave us reviews. It's free. Helps a lot. So I've been told uh so go and leave a five-star review um and uh that would be much appreciated and uh tom thank you so much for taking over hosting duties for another week uh and uh until next time don't invade northern ireland i don't know how to end this