transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Attitudes to the Irish language are rapidly changing in Ireland in the 21st century. It's becoming more popular than I can ever remember, with more and more people trying to learn the language. But this all begs the question, what happened to Irish to begin with? Four centuries ago, the vast majority of people on the island spoke it on a daily basis, but within 200 years, it was rapidly declining. Now you'll often read single line explanations for this. The Great Hunger, the Education System, Emigration, and sometimes even the Catholic Church are blamed. This episode charts the history of the Irish language from the early 17th century when it was spoken across all levels of society from the castles of the Gaelic aristocracy to the peasants in the field. It takes the story from that point forward through the impact of colonisation, plantation, the development of an education system in the 1830s, the blow that was the great hunger in the 1840s, and then emigration. Painting a picture of how and why the language spoken across the island of Ireland had largely shifted from Irish to English by the late 19th century. Hello and welcome to the Irish History Podcast. My name is Finn DuWer. And to chart the history of the Irish language, I am joined by Dr. Nicholas Wolf. Nicholas is a historian and librarian at New York University, where he is the co-head of NYU Libraries, Data Services Department and Associate Director of Research and Publishing Initiatives at Glucksman Ireland House. His 2014 book, An Irish-Speaking Island, is a social and cultural history of Ireland's Irish language community in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's a multi-award winning book and I can't recommend it enough if you want to dive deeper into this story that we're going to talk about today. I have it linked below. I also have Nicholas's full bio and links in the show notes as well. Now this episode is only going to be one of three that looks at the history of the Irish language over the coming months. I'm also planning an episode that revisits the Mam Trasla murders, a brutal event that happened in 1882 where the Irish language would actually play a very important role in the trials. And then an episode on the revival and history of the Irish language in more recent times. This episode is really only going to cover up to the 19th century. Now at the end of today's show I also have a very interesting listener feedback on last week's episode on funeral traditions so stick around for that it comes at the end of this interview. Sound on the episode is by Kate Dunlea. The reasons why Ireland is largely an English-speaking country today is pretty complex. I think a good way to understand or get a sense of the history we are going to try and explore today is to imagine the Irish language as a wall being chipped away rather than one single dramatic event where people stopped speaking Irish and became English speakers. It didn't happen like that at all. Indeed, we are going to be exploring how Ireland became a bilingual society where English and Irish were spoken and then we will move on to explore how English became the dominant language among the vast majority of people. Actually it's worth saying the term monoglot is mentioned a lot in the episode and that's basically a person who only speaks one language. But Nicholas and I started our conversation back in the 17th century when Irish was the dominant language spoken by the vast majority of people. But this was also a time of extreme violence and colonisation of Ireland by England. This war and colonisation resulted in the destruction of the old Gaelic order where the Irish language was not only spoken right across society but also where you had an aristocracy who funded Irish language poetry and writing and the destruction of that old order was a major blow. Nicholas picks up the story by explaining the impact of the destruction of Gaelic society and that Gaelic aristocracy who supported and nurtured the Irish language, particularly in terms of poetry and writing.

Speaker 2:
[04:10] So undoubtedly, it's a tremendous blow, right? The striking down of this Gaelic elite, in part because it undermines the structures that had sustained some of the key cultural activity in the Irish language. Now we should always preface that by saying that there are today and there were then many societies that could sustain a bilingual world with no problem and have an elite speaking a language other than what the rest of the country speaks. That certainly has happened in European history, for example, and throughout the world. But it's clear that this was a big blow for that cultural production. And when I say that, what I'm talking about is the bardic poetry, it had been so prevalent and active in previous centuries, and had been sustained by the finances of that Gaelic elite, as well as the old English, right? So in addition to the old Gaelic lords, you had an old English-Irish-speaking elite as well, that had financed a lot of that work. So insofar as that cultural production helps sustain the language, and in a way it does, this is a big blow.

Speaker 1:
[05:17] And then the language obviously doesn't die out at all. We'll go on to talk about actually the biggest number of Irish speakers. We don't really see that till the 19th century. But Ireland certainly becomes a bilingual society in the 18th century. Could you give us a sense of what that looks like? How many, for example, do we have any understanding of how many monoglots of people just speaking Irish there are? Is Irish being spoken in certain cultural or social or economic contexts now that it hadn't been or has it died out in certain parts of society rather than society as a whole?

Speaker 2:
[05:50] So it's very difficult to come to exact numbers for the pre-19th century. You do have certain surveys that were undertaken and that were a bit anecdotal in the early 19th century that gets you at least a little closer in time. Some of those were statistical surveys undertaken by the Royal Dublin Society. You have some parochial surveys conducted by the Anglican clergy, but you don't have that systematic evidence. We have to go by anecdotal. But what we would see there is a strongly bilingual society emerging in the 18th century. We know this in part because of the decline of monoglot Irish speakers. That is in evidence once you get to the firm evidence, which is the first census in 1851 to include a question on language. It has some inaccuracies, but one of the things it does show is that outside of a handful of baronies, about a couple dozen that still have strong levels of Irish monolingualism in 1851. Of course, you project back saying, okay, elderly folks in 1851, what was the story when they were young? That shows that geographically speaking at least, there is not a lot of concentration of Irish monoglots coming into the 19th century. Bilingualism is certainly happening. But on the other hand, what's astounding is that there's also a sign that there's not a lot of English monoglots. There are definitely a strong class of them. It's very prevalent among elites, but it's probably not until the last part of the 18th century, or even the first part of the 19th century, that speaking English as a monoglot becomes the majority situation in Ireland. It's quite close to the 19th century, if not the early first years of that, that happens. Yes, it's a strongly bilingual society, especially once you move outside of the elites. And even along certain aspects of the gentry, or in the professional classes, we definitely have evidence of Irish speaking bilingually among those classes. So it's an interesting situation. This is the period that in my mind is like the potential is there for a fully bilingual country at that point, had that been sustained as the situation going down the line.

Speaker 1:
[08:09] And just to get a sense of where Irish is being spoken, if not who, because I think you've presented a picture where there's a lot of different groups in society. But what I'm wondering is, like in the corridors of power in Dublin Castle, the most extreme example, was the Irish language being spoken, I suppose, in an administrative context, or had it ceased being a language of that and it's more a language of everyday life?

Speaker 2:
[08:33] Not in the highest reaches. I mean, not only that, I would say that authorities would be quite suspicious of Irish. It still has this connotation with rebellion coming out of the 17th century. In their minds, it's associated often with the Catholic masses, right? Even though that's not the case fully, it certainly has this reputation. But once you move outside, I think, Dublin and you move outside the cities, we do have evidence that if not landlords, at least their agents need to know Irish in order to just function with their tenetary. Obviously, there's a power differential there. You know, those that could speak English fluently, in addition to Irish, would have an advantage in interacting with those authorities. But we do have evidence that it was spoken and was used just in part to get through, right? That you needed to facilitate those interactions and make them happen.

Speaker 1:
[09:27] Just while we're on that idea of, I suppose, attitudes of elites and things like that, there's a common conception you read online all the time is that Irish was actually banned in the 18th century. It's often rolled in to the penal laws. But can you give listeners a sense of the attitude of the authorities on the legalistic level towards the language? Is there any laws that relate to the language at all? Or is it just kind of a cultural suspicion or a social suspicion?

Speaker 2:
[09:51] Yes, you do see this stated, but it's not the case that it's addressed in the penal laws, right? The penal laws are first and foremost about undermining Catholic wealth and therefore both their political power since those two go hand in hand in the 18th century. It's about undermining education, particularly of the clergy, right? Because the authorities see this as a means to hopefully curtail training of priests and try to undermine that story in the long term. Now, you could say that this is obviously not to the advantage of Irish-speaking classes that are often Catholic and are going to be undermined themselves either culturally or socially or economically by these laws. So it doesn't do them any favor, but you don't see a direct address of the language in these laws. Keep in mind also that in the 18th century, whether you're talking about nation-building or colonialism, right, or imperial powers, there is not in the same way that there will be in the 19th century and 20th century, this firm sense that to be a nation is to speak exclusively a specific language. There's a little bit more openness to kind of a multilingual imperial realm, shall we say, or there's not this sense of a kind of a racial connection to what languages you speak in that earlier period. Now, again, that's not to say that they're not concerned with language, that they don't see some advantage to having a single language spoken. And they don't, it's not to say that they don't regard Irish with suspicion, the authorities that are Anglicised or English speaking, but it's just not the top priority for them in a way that will be in later centuries.

Speaker 1:
[11:40] And then if we move then to the wider population, the people who are able to speak Irish, later in the 19th century, Irish does become associated with maybe limitations. Or obviously if you want to emigrate to an English-speaking country, it's not going to be as useful as a comprehensive understanding of English. But in the 18th century, is there a sense that Irish is a language that can hold you back? Or is it something that the wider population embrace rather than just a language they speak?

Speaker 2:
[12:07] We have to presume that they do see those advantages, that part of the story of the 17th century and 18th century is massive growth in towns, for example, and there is an advantage to being able to interact with those, in those realms in English and of course, not to the extent it would be in the 19th century, but the growth of state institutions. So, you know, that you're interacting with law courts, maybe for the first time before they might have been more informal, manner courts or estate courts. So there is an advantage there. But again, this is certainly a reason to learn English, but it need not necessarily be a requirement to lose Irish, right, to be able to interact with that. And again, a lot of those spheres, let's take a market, for example, let's say a market town that is founded, the market is founded within a town in the 18th century and it starts to grow. Those are sites where, yes, knowing English is an advantage. You want to know a language of your customer or your buyer, but it's also an advantage to know Irish because you can, you're not cutting off certain potential customers to interact with. And this is reflected in places like the later folklore that's collected even into the 19th century. They have all sorts of stories of those interactions and how they can go awry, or they can involve trickery, or just the richness of that interaction in a market setting. So those are examples of spheres that are ostensibly about the modern world or about interacting with a kind of beyond your local world, but which could often be characterized by that bilingualism or multi-language settings.

Speaker 1:
[13:51] And if we move then into the 19th century, this is also another time of major transformation in Irish society. We'll get to the great hunger, but even before that, you've touched on it. You get the emergence of the modern British state and obviously Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but you get institutions and we might talk about them in a minute. But also you get the establishment of the foundations of the modern education system and this is often attributed as being one of the drivers of the shift towards English in the wider population. Is that accurate that the foundation of the education system, as we understand it in the 1830s, does educate its generation in English and this presents major problems for the Irish language?

Speaker 2:
[14:37] Here I think the story is one, often as it is, which is yes, but, right? So yes, the national school system is aggressively seeking to teach English, right? That's, there's almost no conception among authorities in Dublin who are implementing this system that you'd be teaching anything other than how to read and write in English. However, when you look at the growth of the national school system, and keep in mind that there were schools prior to the national school, national schools that were also teaching English. So the notion of this firm break in 1830s is just, it's hard to see that. But keep in mind that with the national schools, the way the system worked, of course, was that you had to have local funds to help support the school, right? This was the way it worked. You got up the local funds, created, either paid for the schoolhouse, paid for the teacher's salary, and you had the national system coming by to make sure that the standards of teaching were strong. And this favored places like Lentster and Ulster, where you had more of that local wealth and interest in starting these schools, but also happened to be places where the language was already struggling, you know, outside of a few peripheral areas in those provinces. Furthermore, you always have to contend with local conditions, as well as the rate of attendance. So, for instance, as many folks would know, in the West, in Connaught, in any place that was in the Archdiocese of Tum, John McHale, the Archbishop, was actively antagonistic to the national schools, in part because of the language, but mostly because he wanted to have Catholic control over education and he wasn't willing to have this, you know, potentially Protestant state involved in that, as were many of the debates at the time about denominational education. And so the national schools were very slow in coming to Connaught, which is also a place with heavily Irish-speaking, so a delay there. The other thing is that you have definite cases of schools coming on and off roles throughout the 19th century. If you read through the educational records in Dublin, in the National Archives there, you find schools will last for about a decade, and then they'll fall off the roles because the local financing has collapsed, and then they'll come back on. So we're not talking about a sustained system of education, especially in the South and West for a number of decades. And then finally, attendance would be varied, right? The more rural and the more prone that your local population was to say, migration for work or these kind of things, the less likely they're going to be sustained attendance. And so, yes, this is a system that wants to anglicise. It wants to teach English. And it was understood as providing that by parents. But it isn't one that you can say is a juggernaut of influence on life.

Speaker 1:
[17:38] And if we're building up a picture then of the language coming under pressure from several different forces in society from the late 18th century onwards, could I introduce then the development of institutions in Ireland, maybe the most famous that people would be familiar with is the workhouses from 1840 onwards. But you also get a network of prisons, asylums. People might be very familiar with the admission books to all these because when people turn up, they're asked their name, the address, but these are all written in English. And do these type of institutions again put pressure on the language because if people need to access these, do they need to use English? What I'm wondering is do they have any impact or do the administrators in these places facilitate Irish-speaking?

Speaker 2:
[18:24] They do certainly, we would presume they have some impact, right? That they are growing in the 19th century. You're right to identify all these aspects of the state that were not professionalized or not disdained prior to the 19th century. There would have been a perceived advantage to know in English in interacting with these. On the other hand, we know that Irish speakers would come into these circumstances and insist on speaking Irish. We know this because, again, the folklore has all sorts of stories about Irish speakers who trick or appear foolish in front of the doctor or there's some sort of dynamics going on there. This was embedded in society through the storytelling. Also, keep in mind that there is an impact on those institutions as well. They don't want to make provision for Irish speakers showing up and using those services, but they do. They have to pay for interpreters in order to make these things run. They try to do it on the cheap. They withdraw those interpreters as soon as they don't think there's a need, but they do have to provide them. We do have evidence of interpreters participating in a lot of these systems, certainly in workhouses and prisons. They're present in order to administer oaths on election day. They are there in the courtroom where they're often called on to ensure that evidence can be given by a witness.

Speaker 1:
[19:46] And if this brings us up to the eve of the famine in the early 1840s, I think some listeners will be surprised that this is estimated to be a time when you have the most Irish speakers on the island. Now that's not to say that these people can't speak English as well, but estimates of three to four million people are able to speak the language. Obviously the population has grown rapidly. Would it be fair to say though, even though it might be at its numerical height, it's already under severe pressure. I know the word decline can be somewhat controversial, but there are less and less people. Maybe there's already signs that in the later years, regardless of what happens during the Great Hunger, the language is going to struggle given the trajectory of Irish society at the time. Would that be a fair assessment?

Speaker 2:
[20:26] It is. You're always trying to keep an eye on two numbers when it comes to balances of languages in language contact or language shift situations. One is the overall numbers because you need density and you need large numbers in order to sustain a community that can speak to each other in that language. Then you're also looking at the proportion of the overall population. Yes, because of rising population in Ireland overall, we think it's on a trajectory to 10. Sometimes people say even more, 10 million or more on the eve of the famine, and it results in large numbers of Irish speakers. That first census to ask about language in 1851 showed a quarter of the population being Irish-speaking or either bilingually or monolingually. Now, we know that's an undercount. It was almost certainly closer to a third, but that's a problem when you had something like half of the population speaking Irish at the beginning of the 19th century. Now, one last thing I'll say on that is that also important is to the degree to which it's concentrated or that this is a regional story. And so, while a third of the population being Irish-speaking in 1851 doesn't look great, the fact that you have some areas where it's much higher than that, right, 80%, 70% is a good sign at the local level that it's still a going concern. And we see that in many areas right up to mid-century. I think it's after that you start to see some real serious problems.

Speaker 1:
[22:01] And sitting right in the middle of the 19th century in Ireland is the Great Hunger, which obviously impacts, I don't think you could find a single aspect of Irish life in the 19th century that is not impacted by this. Again, one of those popular conceptions or misconceptions you'll often read online is that the language goes into rapid decline after the Great Hunger. You've already spelled out that there's severe pressure coming on it from various different places. Could you explain to listeners the impact that the famine does have on the language and language-speaking communities?

Speaker 2:
[22:34] Many listeners might be familiar from your reading lists back in the day. Sean DeFranc, The Great Silence comes out in the 1960s. In subsequent articles, he noted what he would call it an acceleration after the famine of shift. For a lot of historians, this was maybe a little suspect because they said, look how long this shift has been going on, right? The last time you have a true strength for the Irish language could be as early as the 16th century, right? Because prior to that, you actually have laws that are trying to keep out Irish in the pale and whatnot. It's actually under threat from the Irish language. So it's not in good health for many centuries. So why would we focus on this post-famine period? But I would say in recent years, as we look closer at some of the census numbers, there does seem to be something to this acceleration post-famine. If you look at both the Irish censuses as well as the American censuses, so in the US, questions were asked of those who were foreign-born, what language their mother tongue had been, starting in 1910. So again, as with the Irish censuses, you're often projecting backward. You're saying of those that survive in the later years, what was the story when they first arrive in the US? If you look at those Irish immigrants and you compare to the Irish counts, we probably would say that somewhere almost 40 percent of those that left Ireland in the post-famine period would have been Irish, have Irish as a mother tongue and would have some degree of bilingualism, if not fully bilingual. So a little bit higher actually than for the nation as a whole, and that's, well, it's obviously fueling this global diaspora of Irish speakers, many of them in the United States just because that's the chief destination in that period. But it's also bad news for Irish and Ireland because you can think of these cohorts that are just scooped out and brought abroad. They're going to England or they're going to Scotland or going to the United States or Australia or Canada. These are highly anglicized worlds and they're plopped down into the middle of that. Part of that anglicization is happening outside of Ireland and having the same effect which is to accelerate that post-feminine. I will say one more thing that adds to this evidence here. If you look at Welsh, so Welsh also suffers obviously from pressures for language shift. It also has migration of particularly rural Welsh-speaking areas into the cities. And we know that a lot of them end up in Cardiff in the 19th century where they form actual Welsh-speaking communities in the city. So it's not predetermined that if you move to a city, it's going to be end of the story for your local language. And yet if you look at sort of the age distribution of Welsh speakers in the 19th century and compare it to Irish, age is often correlated with the health of the language because if you only end up with fewer young people speaking it, that is a sign of weakness. If you look at the Welsh and Irish numbers side by side, the Irish numbers always look dreadful, right? It's aging rapidly. The average age of an Irish speaker in Ireland post-feminine. And that's another sign of that weakness, right? That they're not just missing, but the ones that are left are gone. And they go hand in hand, right? Young people left Ireland and young people were the ones you need to be Irish-speaking to sustain a language. So that Englishization takes place in Ireland too, but it's not in the cities, it's abroad.

Speaker 1:
[26:18] And just the other major shift, you could argue that it's happening in Irish society around the same time as the great hunger is obviously the emergence of the modern Catholic Church. It becomes kind of, it starts to become the institution that, you know, we recognize that dominates Irish society in the 20th century. And again, you will read online that the church had a relatively hostile attitude to the language. But can you explain, did the Catholic Church have an attitude towards the Irish language? Did it encourage us or did it encourage people to speak English?

Speaker 2:
[26:49] I think the church is one of the hardest ones to peg in terms of what it's doing here. I understand the impetus to see it as a hostile force. Obviously it has no, you know, stated official language in Ireland that it wants to perpetuate. And it's a missed opportunity, as it is with the education system. The education system could have been rolled out with a favorable view of Irish and treated it as something to be taught in. Catholic Church as well, it's sort of indifferent, right? Now, on the other hand, the Catholic Church is a hugely international organization, encompasses languages everywhere. It's not likely to become an institution that comes out and favors a certain language over another. And especially in the 19th century, because it's coming out of a period of duress, right? It has been undermined for years, its wealth and its base in Ireland through the penal laws and plantation before that. And it's only really recovering in the late 18th century and into the 19th century. Churches are being built. And most importantly, because of population shifts and better supply of priests, it's able to impose its structure on everyday life for the first time in a long time in Ireland. This is what's often referred to as the devotional revolution. If you go deep into your historical studies there. So it's first and foremost, its goal is to make sure that Catholicism is not undermined and that it can fend off institutions of secularization and institutions, even worse, of Protestantism in Ireland. And it's not likely to be too kind about how it does that. It wants to go in and it wants to make sure that happens regardless of what language is being used. That said, we know the church in the form of local priests, local bishops, had to pay attention to this, right? You can't just show up into a parish and start speaking English and think that everybody is going to listen to you. And particularly not when you're in a time period where they're worried about people even doing basics, like coming to Mass. So you have in those local church records, you will see bishops, they would run things like a concursus, for example, which is where candidates, kind of local educated boys, would be vetted to see who they're going to send off to the seminary to be trained as priests. And they would record in some diocese who speaks Irish, you know, well enough to use it as a, with their flock, right? That's part of their assessment. Again, this is not universal. You would have certain dioceses where this would not even be considered. But there is an attention to pay to that. The other thing they do is they will be eager to catechize in Irish. Because nothing's, of course, you're not learning anything about your faith, if you can't understand the questions that are posed in the catechism to understand the basics of the faith. So again, that is something they feel has to happen whenever necessary in Irish. So you have Irish language catechisms, you have confirmations that are conducted so that they ask the questions in Irish. Because again, there's no point in just throwing people the tenets of their faith in a language they don't understand. That's not effective either.

Speaker 1:
[30:05] And then if we come into the late 19th century, earlier in the interview, you talked about how in the 18th century, there was a real opportunity that Irish society could have been a bilingual society. Can we identify a time after which it's very difficult to exist in Irish society without an understanding of English, or where English is becoming the language that you need to navigate Irish society? Like obviously there are Irish-speaking communities today. There has been all through the 20th century. But is there a moment where we can say that it's not possible for Ireland to be a bilingual society, that the future of the language is heading in a different direction?

Speaker 2:
[30:42] Well, what I would say is that there's an indication of a change that's really taken hold in the second part of the 19th century. And what you see is a fall off of the use of interpreters. It's kind of like a death spiral, right? Authorities can say, oh, there's insufficient numbers of Irish speakers showing up because there's a shift, and everybody seems to know English well enough, even if it's bilingually, that we don't need to provide these interpreters. So that just reinforces it. Next person who comes along, they feel like they have to know English because the interpreter is not being provided. So by all possible measurement, the Irish reaches its nadir in terms of its vitality in the 1850s to 1900. If you're an Irish speaker in that age, you're really suffering. This is not a good time for you to be able to express yourself in public settings or to interact with authorities in the ways that you need to. There are some bright spots underneath the scene going on there. Even though its print culture is incredibly weak at that time period, there is the first appearance of Irish language in newspapers, not only in Ireland but also in the United States. It's the first stirrings of a newspaper print culture in Irish that will take hold in the 20th century. Eventually, you're going to get revival movement. In the, you could say 1870s, fairly weak but still present, 1880s and most especially in the 1890s. That movement is going to look around and say, look, yes, we understand the language is in a weakened state, but if you are an Irish speaker, you should be able to interact with society with your language and have that be accommodated in some way. And they seized this, the revivalist in the early 20th century. They said, look, you should have your mail addressed in Irish and that should be okay. You should have, if you're in an elementary school, access to bilingual education, if that's the predominant situation in your local area. So you get the founding of primary education through bilingual provisions, not extensively, but certainly in areas where it's demanded. And that's part of that, what makes it so revolutionary, that revival movement from the 1890s onward is that they start to recognize that as more of a right and less of just a indifferent accommodation that might be the case in the earlier part of the 19th century. So some bright, bright spots, but it is certainly in terms of numbers, in terms of access to the key parts of society in, in bad shape in the second half of the 19th century.

Speaker 1:
[33:20] I want to thank Nicholas for his time. I've linked to Nicholas's socials, his website and a project he's working on at the moment in the show notes below. I also have links to his book, An Irish-Speaking Island there as well. As I said at the top of the show, that's a really good deep dive into everything we've talked about today. Now before we finish, I do want to return to last week's episode on the Banshee and Irish Funeral Traditions. In that episode I mentioned a superstition that existed in Ireland in the past about it being bad luck to open a grave on a Monday. In that episode I mentioned an old superstition in Ireland that it was bad luck to open a grave on a Monday and I asked people if they knew if it continued into the present. John O'Kellig, a listener got in touch with this fascinating insight. Sir John said, Hi Finn, I was listening to your podcast about Irish funerals. I had to dig a neighbour's grave a few years ago, burial was on a Tuesday so the norm would be to dig the grave the day before which would be a Monday. Sunday morning I started to hear about not opening the grave on a Monday, it had to be opened on a Sunday, measured and taken the sod off and it could be finished on the Monday. I had work on a kids match so I couldn't do it and I talked to one of the other lads and he couldn't do it either. I kind of hoped someone else would do it but no one did so the grave was opened and dug on the Monday but there was a good bit of talk around it and even people asking about it the next day and why it had not been opened on the Sunday. I think the pishoge is that one of the grave diggers will pass away within a year if the grave is opened on a Monday. I think that we're all still alive touch wood, I'm not sure where the superstition comes from, keep up the good work regards John. I found that fascinating to hear that it still continues on into the present. So thanks a million John for sharing that one. If you have any feedback on any episode I make, please do share it. I'm going to include more listener feedback at the end of each show. I found that insight from John really fascinating. Next week's topic might provoke a lot of feedback. Hopefully it's going to be on the German plans to invade Ireland in World War 2. And I say hopefully because we might not get the interview edited on time. Meanwhile, though this Friday, Brian Hannity will be back with the next episode in Brothers in Pain. That's a global history of the Irish War of Independence. Until then, Sloan.