Special Guest Episode: Paddy Cullivan & his Michael Collins US Tour 2026

I'm happy to welcome Paddy Cullivan to the show. His "The Murder of Michael Collins" tour kicks off on April 3rd and will run until April 14th. If you can make it, please go. If not, you will still get great intel from this episode!

Michael Collins was riding in an open-top vehicle when he was shot in Béal na Bláth on August 22, 1922. We're officially told that it could have been a ricochet or it could have been a man named Sonny O'Neill who was a marksman. 

But what if this is not true? What if this is another JFK - Lee Harvey Oswald story?

👉 Inside this episode:

• "At the tender age of 31, he's the most dangerous man to the British Empire in history."
• "A peacemaker. A polymath. Brilliant with money. Fundraised the entire revolution. Way too dangerous to British interests."
• "There's been a lot of conspiracy in Irish history."
• "Sonny O'Neill is our Lee Harvey Oswald."
• "No inquest. An autopsy but it went missing. He doesn't even have a death certificate."
• "We've no forensic evidence."
• "Nobody wants to know. Leave it alone."
• "Journalists used to go down rabbit holes."
• "He burns every piece of evidence." 
• "Tribalism accounts for Dev."
• "I believe history would have changed had Collins not died."
• "The British can't handle someone that they can't own."
• "When you're dealing with logic, that's one of the scariest things in the world."
• "Where's the razor? Where's the rifle?"
• "The written word was written by his enemies."
• "It's a total forgery." 
• "In the world of the British Empire, peace was unacceptable." 

Links:

https://www.paddycullivan.com/

https://www.instagram.com/paddycullivan/

https://www.facebook.com/p/Paddy-Cullivan-100063483493131/

https://x.com/paddycullivan

https://www.youtube.com/user/paddycullivan

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey hosts Paddy Cullivan, an Irish American comedian and musician, to discuss his upcoming US tour about the mysterious death of Michael Collins in 1922. Cullivan, who has performed on The Late Late Show, argues that the official narrative of Collins's death is flawed and that Collins was a complex figure who negotiated with British leaders and was a master of urban guerrilla warfare. Cullivan's tour delves into the conspiracy theories surrounding Collins's death, including the possibility that Collins was assassinated by British intelligence. Cullivan also discusses his research into the death of Wolfe Tone, another Irish revolutionary, suggesting that Tone's death was also a cover-up.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Michael Collins, Irish history, conspiracy theories, assassination, British intelligence, Easter Rising, Irish Republican Brotherhood, Civil War, autopsy report, tribalism, historical revisionism, Wolf Tone, Irish heritage, cultural tour.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in tonight. I have a special episode, and I am so glad that my guest Paddy Cullivan was able to join me on the fly before he kicks off his Michael Collins US tour. It's going to start in just a couple of days. This will hit the broadcast on April the first, and he'll be out on tour April 3 through April 14. Cullivan, who hails from Galway and who considers himself a backwards Irish American, since his New Jersey born Ma, immigrated to Ireland to marry his Caven born Da, started crafting historical entertainments in 2016 for the centenary of the Easter Rising, equal parts comedian, educator, showman, satirist, and you know, we love the satire around here. Composer and musician Paddy wheeled into prominence as the front man of the Camembert Quartet, the indie house band of Tubridy Tonight, followed by the Late Late Show. Though he stopped his nightly appearances on The Late, Late Show in 2019 Cullivan still performs with the band and other arenas, so his US tour the murder of Michael Collins is sponsored by Culture Ireland. It's a hit show about Ireland's greatest revolutionary gun down under mysterious circumstances in 1922 and it marks Paddy's second visit following last year, sold out. I can't believe it's not Ireland part investigative journalist, part multimedia wizard, culliven spins a tale for the ages that is both gripping because of the many unanswered questions surrounding Collins's death, and eerily resonant with our own turbulent times. This is Ireland's JFK assassination story, says cullivan. It is indeed the greatest mystery in Irish history. Ronan McGreevey, of the Irish Times, calls the show mesmerizing stuff, a complicated story, brilliantly told. He'll kick off April 3 in Portland, Maine, then move on to Boston, Port Jefferson, New York, a couple of shows in New York City, and then be in Chicago on April 14. Whether you can attend or not, please stay tuned, because the next hour is incredible.

Just a reminder, Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next non fiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now, back to the show.

So this episode came together quickly, and I'm so happy that it did, because you have a tour coming up in the United States. I want to make sure that you have ample opportunity to talk about that, because a lot of my listeners are here in the US. And in fact, I think owing to the amount of times that I've talked about JFK and RFK, I do have a pretty substantial listening pool in places like Boston, Chicago and New York, where there's a really vibrant Irish American community. So first and foremost, before I get too far ahead of myself, I want to really thank you, Patty for coming on the show tonight and for giving us some some insight into you and and I can't wait to hear more. So thank you for coming on with us.

Thank you so much. I'm really excited. Thank you good.

So here's where I want to start, because I have been interested in the life and death of Michael Collins for years, and in discovering your work, I'm wondering just how much that I have had wrong for all this time I've watched Neil Jordan's biopic, I don't even know how many times it deeply moved me. I was still just a teenager in 1996 when it came out. I saw it in the theater, and was just absolutely gobsmacked by what I saw. And I think part of it for me was being so amazed that Michael Collins was only 31 when he died, because Liam Neeson is playing the role. And while I love Liam Neeson, I think he's a fantastic actor. He's like, what, 44 or 45 and so I think my teenage brain automatically assumed that Michael Collins was probably middle aged as well. And so finding out that he was murdered at 31 was like, wait a minute, what? How on earth did this man, he must have been an absolute powerhouse to have accomplished so much. And what I here's, here's the bare bones of it. I won't go through everything, but I just want to give you the bare bones, and then you can tell me, like, Okay, here's perhaps where the common ideas are wrong. So we have Michael Collins, who's a revolutionary. The Easter Rising was something that, in a lot of ways, started to turn the tide of Irish opinion towards favorability for a revolution the brutality of the British. Then again, you have Bloody Sunday. That's another place where the retaliation of the British put into the mind of the Irish citizen, like we need to get rid of our. Pressers, you have Michael Collins, who, for all intents and purposes, is the the originator, the founder of what we would consider to be modern urban guerrilla warfare. He is, in some way, set up, I'm using air quotes here, set up by Eamonn de Valera. De Valera feels that whenever it's time to go to the negotiating table, the British are not going to give the Irish full independence, and he doesn't want to be the one to bring those terms home to the general public. So he sends Collins in his stead. Collins goes and he's with these heavy hitters, these British heavy hitters, like David Lloyd, George Winston, Churchill, Lord Birkenhead. But he gets to the negotiations, and he holds his own. He comes home with this proposal, this treaty proposal, that's like the partition of the six counties in the north, as well as an oath of allegiance to the Crown and the founding of the Irish Free State. It's not accepted by the anti treaty people, one of whom is de Valera. They keep fighting. Collins goes down to the southern part of Ireland. He goes to beyond the blah, and he's saying like, they won't shoot me in my own country. They'll listen to reason down there, I'm one of them. However, he's in an open top vehicle at beyond the blah. Someone, maybe Sonny O'Neill, we don't know, but someone pops him. He passes away, and it's the sad, tragic ending to the story. And the man writing with him is Emmett Dalton. Emmett Dalton says that he he has this fatal wound, and he's holding Collins's head and kind of using the cap to try to keep blood and brain matter in, and he's crying and saying the last rights and all this sort of thing. And Collins expires, and and it's just this big, sad tragedy. But other than Sonny O'Neill is a possible suspect, we really just don't know who shot Michael Collins that day, and that, that's the bare bones of it that I think a number of Americans would say that they know. Those who do know about Michael Collins would say that that's more or less what we've been told over here across the pond. Now I want to shut up, because I want to give you the opportunity to tell me where we're all wrong.

Well, Sara, that is fantastic synopsis. The first conspiracy we have to deal with tonight is like your skin care and fitness regime. How could you be in your teens in the 90s, you look way younger than that. So that's just my Irish Charm. Get over and that. But it's no it is fascinating because you if you were, if you did see the movie back then in 96 you've done a beautiful synopsis of what, not only what the movie does, which is basically what we call high school history, it's official history. It's what we're all taught in school. It's the paragraphs we learn. And well done. It was a great synopsis. It was great. And I'm here to tell you that every single word in that movie is a lie, including and, and, but to Sara misquote Mary McCarthy, and that's that's not Neil Jordan's fault. He was making a fun gangster movie. He wanted it to have elements of the godfather. He wanted to show you the basic, broad overview of Michael Collins life, which is absolutely fascinating. But what I do in my show is I show you a completely alternative history. I especially go into his younger years, which are vitally important. Michael Collins is a figure at the point that he dies at 31 years of age in 1922 in August, he's the most famous Irishman in the world. He's the most important Irishman in history, because he's the first guy who negotiated any kind of deal out of Britain in 700 years. And his death is front page news all over the world at 6am the morning after he shot at about eight o'clock in the evening. So the New York Times has photos. The whole story is everywhere. And this is how we've gotten this story down through the ages. A lot of guys must have been on phones, including Ember Dalton and the pure campaign in Dublin must have been just ringing every newspaper office in the world, because it's incredible how the first edition of every paper on Wednesday the 23rd of August has the entire story, and that's the story that we believe since then. So it's not your fault you got it all wrong, Sara, I hope you don't mind me saying you got it wrong, but I'm here to tell you what really happened.

I love to be corrected, because official narratives, as you have said, it is high school history, and here in the United States, you have a figure like Alan Dulles, who was literally on the board of scholastic so if somebody says, hey, look, high school history didn't do you the right way, I want to know the full scoop.

Well, listen, Sara, if Alan Dulles had been around in 1922 I'd be blaming him for Mike Collins death, because he got a lot of things to answer for. But we won't go there yet. Here's the thing about Collins. And you know what a lot of people get wrong is that, you know, he's born in 1890 his dad is 75 years of age when he's born. So there's hope for all of us. But you know, he moves to London when he's only 16. He moves in with his sister, and by by 1909, at 19 years of age, he is now a British spy. He's already worked an Irish spy. He's working for an organization called the Irish republican brotherhood. He's spying on the British establishment. Seven years before 1916 rising even happened. So this guy is involved long before many even you know, institutions are formed, like the Irish Volunteers or Sinn Fein or Sinn Fein is already there, but in Irish republican history, the Irish republican Brotherhood is the most important organization of all. They believe that they are the true leaders of the country. And whoever is the leader of that institution is the actual de facto leader. Now, this is why the whole thing about de Valera years later, negotiating with Lloyd George and realizing, Oh God, I'm not going to get what I want. And then he, you know, this idea that he orders Michael Collins over, it is rubbish, because, in actual fact, Collins is the de facto leader of Ireland, because he's leader of the IRB. I know these things seem very, you know, kind of complicated, but it's very important to know that Collins is the man in the hot seat, and that's why he makes the final decision. But the final decision is made because, you know, he's done something incredible. Instead of sitting inside of buildings and waiting to get blown out of them over five years, he uses intelligence networks to wipe out the British intelligence network in Ireland, he takes very few innocent lives because he's only attacking the important people. It's very selective. And for the first time, instead of Irish people rising up with some big kind of, you know, attack against far superior forces, this is how he takes the British Empire down. He makes them unable to operate in the country. And that's why he's incredibly dangerous. He's most comparable in history, I'd say, to Lawrence of Arabia, who did the same in the Middle East. And in fact, they magically meet once, if I ever make a movie, it'll be a proper movie, you know, with lots of Colin's bedroom activities, because he was a big hit with the ladies, because he was a an absolute movie star. But also the fact that he meets with people like Lawrence of Arabia, and that, you know, at a tender young age of 31 he's the most dangerous man to the British empire in history. He really is. And in fact, they did a poll recently about Michael Collins saying he was the second biggest enemy to, you know, England after or Britain after George Washington. Of course, George Washington won the eastern seaboard of America and was 3000 miles away from Britain. Michael Collins took away their allotment. And you know how much the Brits like their allotments?

Indeed. So the whole thing about Collins is what many people don't know, and what I try and explain in the story is that he's working with the anti treaty side. It's not that civil war is inevitable, but it's that there are various factions within Irish republicanism. When the treaty is signed and he becomes the leader, the head of Ireland. He's a Minister of Finance. He's the he's the head of state. He's also the head of the army. In fact, a lot of people say that he had become a dictator, and because after the elections in June of 22 the cabinet are not allowed to meet again until he deals with the civil wars, which begins in late June 22 but he's very comparable in history to people like Ataturk who modernized turkey. He's very comparable to people like Tito who unified Yugoslavia six different ethnic enclaves, like three Northern Ireland, you know, of different religious backgrounds managed to keep them unified from 1940 to 1980 he's got that kind of individual power, you know, when it kind of gives him a kind of individual responsibility, like, I say the movie star looks he's adored by the Irish people. And at some point, the Civil War starts on about the 22nd of June, not properly in our in Dublin, but with the assassination of Britain's top general in the streets of London. Now, many people have tried to say, Oh, that was an old order or something like that. And a lot of historians and academics kind of push you away from that and go. But that is the reason the civil war starts, because Lloyd George can no longer trust this guy who, despite signing the treaty, despite agreeing to everything Britain agreed to, is privately building up an army is privately hope, you know, wants to bring the war back to the north within six months, once they get in enough arms and enough people, because up in the north there's a terrible ethnic conflict going on between Protestants Catholics. There's a lot of refugees. It's very like Ukraine. And so he does want to do that, and part of that ethos is that he assassinates Britain's top general, Henry Wilson on the streets of London, and that effectively puts a gun to Colin's head, because the IRA, the anti treaty IRA, are in possession of the Four Courts in Dublin. But, but when he attacks the Four Courts, we don't even know that it's him that does it. I mean, in the movie it has him walking up to the door and knocking on the door, but actually we don't know what Colin's involvement in that was. All we know is that Emma Dalton, the guy who's always there when everything goes wrong, comes down and launches the attack on the Four Courts, and that's when the Civil War begins. But that order for Henry Olson's death could only have come from Michael Collins. So what was he playing at? What was going on in July, he's allowed to grow his army to 50,000 men to defeat the. Treaty side, because Lloyd George thinks he can trust them to do that. But then in July, he mentions to WD Cosgrave, who succeeds him, that we now have an army to deal with the North. So his so he was not going to stop being militaristic. And yet we've been sold this pop that he was the peacemaker, the one who wanted to, you know, end the war, end the war with the North, you know, keep the partition, all of those things. He was a far more calculating person, but I think he also had the skill necessary. He wrote our constitution of 1922 he's an incredible person, a peacemaker, a polymath, brilliant with money, fundraise the entire revolution, way too dangerous to British interests. And I believe that that power that he had is what got him killed on that lonely road in West Cork in 1922 Wow.

Okay, this is deep. This is this is getting deep. So we've heard that Emmett Dalton was sitting next to him at the the time of the murder, and that maybe it was this guy, Sonny O'Neill. Supposedly, Sonny O'Neil was there. Maybe he was, like, up on a high ridge. He was a marksman. And it sounds like perhaps maybe we've been sold a sort of Lee Harvey Oswald bill of goods. About Sonny O'Neill. Do you think maybe that's what happened?

Well, you see, during covid, I had a lot of time on my hands. You know, I was a successful musician. I was, you know, playing on TV a lot. I was, I didn't have time to put real work into my shows. I had begun them in 2016 kind of very kind of broad Irish history shows with the 10 dark secrets, I would say, because there's been a lot of conspiracy in Irish history. But I could never deal in depth. So during covid, I went really in depth with this, and I kind of contacted people, and people helped me out and stuff. And I started to look at this Sonny O'Neill thing, which is Sonny O'Neal's Our Lee Harvey Oswald. So think of Michael Collins as JFK Sonny O'Neil is, is our Lee Harvey Oswald. He's a guy named in 1989 1990 on a TV documentary by a guy who wasn't even there. And if you come to my show, it's about an hour. The first half is about an hour of contact. The second half is another hour. But so it's a very deep dive, but it's full of comedy and full of farce, because this is where everything becomes absolutely farcical, and he's guarded by 25 men on four vehicles, goes into a kind of a steep, narrow valley, winding road, and kind of acts completely out of character.

A few a tiny amount of very badly armed men supposedly launch an attack on this convoy of heavily armed 25 professional soldiers, but armored car, you know, he's in a weird, open top car, but there's two Louis there's machine guns. Does everything. These guys are trained. So it's very odd that 30 people go into the valley of death, five anti treaty, 25 of the Free State, which is who are guarding Collins. And there's only one casualty, and that casualty is the most important man in Irish history, and because it was so impossible to figure out what happened the immediate cover up afterwards. I mean, the most shocking thing about this is there was no inquest into his death, even though he was the leader of the country at the time. There was an autopsy, but it went missing. He doesn't even have a death certificate. We don't even have a cause of death. It's claimed that he's shot from far away by a trained sniper with an elephant gun that makes gives him a massive wound at the back, bottom, right hand side of his head. And that's the story we were given, you know, and I go through all of the details of this and the fact that they blamed it on a ricochet for 80 years because, you know, got everybody off the hook. But eventually people start saying, Oh, the deathbed confession. And this guy who died in 1950 did it, and he was a sniper, and he was a marksman. And I did a lot of original research. I got guys in a good friend of mine, Johnny Taylor in England, who's big into military history. He went over to Germany, looked in the archives. Sonny O'Neil was a prisoner in Germany. He never did sniper training. He lost 40% of the use of his right arm in 1918 when he was shot in January of 1918 in the arm, and never recovered that the use of that arm. So if it was a sniper, he was a one arm sniper. Okay? And, you know, I've started to take this all apart, pull it apart and really go, what's the real? What's the fake? I go to the newspapers of the time, which are full of absolute rubbish, you know. And it's even stranger than JFK, Sara, it's, it's, you know, because, you know, we got the zarutter movie in 1975 or whatever. There's no, there's, there's no witnesses to this. You know, anyone who the weird thing about bel nabla is anybody who said they saw what happened wasn't there, and anybody who was there didn't see anything. We've no bullets. We've no forensic evidence. The car was taken away a month later and sold to a guy in Africa. I mean, even jfk's car was reupholstered after being photographed by the FBI. You know, which I find it bizarre I've. A joke in the show about it, you know, like, the fact that LBJ went round in the same car as JFK is actually kind of freaky. You know, I wouldn't be seen dead in it. But, you know, the car that Collins was in was fully reupholstered and all damage taken away. They should have been studying that, looking at it. And yet, there's a guy who's who's rebuilt all of the vehicles down in County Cork in Ireland. And I went to him, and it really nice guy. He's fascinated by the whole thing. And I said, Why didn't they keep the car? And he goes, why? I said that it's evidence. And he goes, evidence of what you know, because even in County Cork, to this day, nobody wants to believe that the story is different to how they remember it, or how their ancestors remember it. And what I do as well in this show is I do a kind of a psychoanalysis of memory and of how we put history together. You know, in the Irish context, I call it. I knew a fellow who knew a fella. Basically everything is third, third hand whispers one, one person to the other until we get this completely garbled version of events. None of the soldiers was ever interviewed. That was there. The five attackers never met till 1961 and all agreed they couldn't remember or see anything. I mean, it is, it is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. And I take you using 300 images, I use a couple of songs, there's a lot of jokes, and I just take you right through the whole thing, very forensically, and I show you that this is one of the most incredible stories we don't know about, about somebody we should know everything about, you know, because he was so important. And, and I it says, it says, How can I put it? It says, wrapped up. I mean, there was 200 witnesses to JFK. There's no witnesses to this. This is witnesses to this. This is, this is, it's actually insane. So it, that's why it becomes a kind of a farce. It's a humorous show, but it's also shocking, and it kind of, I've ended with a song called bail in the blah blah blah, because everything we've been told is absolute garbage, and nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to actually get it right. I've had phone calls after I started doing the show in 2022 people just synonymously phoning me, saying, me leave it alone. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? You know, leave the poor guy alone, as if Michael Collins wouldn't want to find out who shot him in the head. You know, I actually proved some I point through the in the there was witnesses who said he was shot in the back, and there was another wound in his head as well. So it's a fascinating tale. I use photographs, and I use this original photographs from the time and everything, and I kind of pieced together this crazy Tale, which not just questions what happened, but also, why does academia, why do historians? Why do politicians? We have politicians, our last two leaders in Ireland, I put the question directly to them to say, Can we dig up Michael Collins and do a forensic analysis of his skull? And both have refused publicly. Why don't they want to find out the truth? It could be so easily found out. So this is what I'm dealing with, Sara, I know you've been dealing with many of the similar, similar things, but it's, it's it both drives you crazy. But I did want to tell the story, because I think if we, if we just leave it to the movie, the 999, Neil Jordan movie that you buy in Dublin airport, I think we're doing the great man a disservice.

Yeah, I Okay. I want to, I want to digest all of this, because you've said some very important things, and it's like one of the things that's coming to my mind is David Lifton wrote a book and then also put together a little miniature documentary called best evidence, because he had, he was going through some old memorandum things like that, and had found evidence that a surgery had been performed posthumously on JFK skull. And he was like, why would you perform a surgery posthumously? It doesn't even make any sense. And so he begins to follow this rabbit hole. Goes down this rabbit hole as to what had been done to alter the body. I mean, jfk's brain is missing things of this nature, like, what, what has really happened to this poor man? And I'm thinking of that as you're talking about, okay, an autopsy was done on Michael Collins, but What? What? What happened to the evidence of it? And then you've also said that there's no death certificate. So do you have any theories or any information about, number one, what happened to the information about the autopsy? And then number two, why does this man not have a death certificate?

Well, it's, it's, it is incredible. I mean, and I know that story about JFK, and you know, it's quite similar. When Collins is laid out. You know, a nurse kind of has to turn him over and kind of clean his wound and do everything. But she was a trained nurse from the Somme World War World One, and she saw, she clearly saw a singe mark and a hole in his back, in his jacket, and but, of course, this evidence is poo pooed. It's thrown away. And. And sometimes I tweet something out, and you will get journalists. You will get journalists of 30 years standing who are deputy editors on Irish newspapers. Sara saying, Ah, stop. He was drunk. He ran out in front of the fire and he got shot in the head. Sure, that's what happens, you know, stop these conspiracies. I mean, one guy told me, Don't go down the rabbit hole. And he said, You call yourself a journalist, right? The whole job of a journalist is go down the rabbit hole, find out the interview all the rabbits, and find out the extent of the Warren. You know, don't tell me not to go down rabbit hole. That used to be what journalists used to do, Sara, they used to go down rabbit holes. And I mean, I just find this willingness to ignore real evidence I found. And, you know, like, there's great academics like Ronan McGreevey and people like that have written a book on Henry Wilson. He's mentioned my research in the book. He was on with Tom Holland and Dominic sandbrook from the rest is history. Now, they were kind of, you know, he said, I don't agree with paddy on his theory, you know. And then they were kind of laughing, saying, was it the Cubans? I get it. It's fun. It was a bit of fun. Nice to get mentioned on the world's biggest podcast. Biggest podcast, but I did take it. I took them to task. I said, guys, you're gonna have to come to the show now, because you can't just bring up the Cubans, you know, and say that this is me, not because I've done my work. I've done the work and the hard research, the autopsy Sara is incredible, both you know, the descendant of Albert power, who did his death mask, you know, said that there was no bullet wound in the forehead. It was all that around the back, and that he definitely think he was shot at close range. Very famous people are involved in this. Oliver St John gogarty, the famous Irish writer, but who was also a doctor, very close to Emmett Dalton, famously in Ulysses. He is book Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus, friend who lives in the tower at the start of the book. But he did. He said he did an autopsy, and he he said he looks like he was shot at very close range, but then he publicly stated it was a ricochet. And so I asked the audience, have you ever heard of a close range ricochet, unless he was standing like lying an inch off the road? You know, there's something very odd going on here, the autopsy and everything else. One of our leaders in the country, and one thing I do want to bring to bear to people, is Ireland, not unlike America, has had dynastic families in politics. You know? You know, we have an economist at the moment, John Fitzgerald. His father was Gareth Fitzgerald, but his father was Desmond Fitzgerald, who was Minister for Justice at the time. And in 1932 10 years after Collins death, he burns every piece of evidence to do with the executions of the Civil War, but also a large file marked Michael Collins, and burns the autopsy report as well. So most of the evidence destroyed by the Irish government 10 years after they came into power, because de Valera, though he lost the Civil War and went into political exile for 10 years, does come back and become the leader of Ireland for the next almost 40 years. So they wanted to burn everything before those guys got into power, the losers of the war. But I will disappoint everybody here right now and say that devil era has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Collins death. This is something far more nefarious. This is something far more planned. And it's, it's um, it, you know, I feel bad about Sunny, because I feel like Sunny was the Patsy of this whole operation, and that really, there are darker forces. And I'll be very fair with you, Sara, I don't say exactly who did it, but I give you as good an idea as you possibly can have, because I, again, it's so important to me to be accurate, so important to me that I, you know, I'm telling a story based on no evidence. But what I what I do with the what I try and tell people is based on the evidence we have, which is none. Here's also what could have happened, and in fact, I find it a far more believable series of events.

I'm glad that you brought up de Valera, because I've noticed over the past, I don't know, maybe 20 to 25 years in the United States, it's become more and more fashionable and more and more acceptable, even in polite conversation, even in so called polite company, to blame LBJ for the death of JFK. That used to be a sort of No, no, you just you, you wouldn't have ever dreamed of blaming Johnson for it. But now he's become a villain, and and more has come out about his true criminal dealings and being involved with murderers and ne'er do wells and just general scumbags, if I may say so it's, it's super fashionable in America now to say, well, we look at who benefits from a political murder like that. Obviously, LBJ benefited the most because he then became president. So he he sort of gets elevated from someone who obviously benefits from the murder to being the mastermind, the person who sat back and nefariously planned all of it like the most calculating schemer in all of mankind, which I think is bunk. I think. That, yes, of course, LBJ benefited from it. Was he potentially involved? Did he have advanced knowledge? That's possible, but I do not believe that he was the ultimate mastermind of JFK murder. And I see a similar notion to that in Irish history and in Irish circles where it's like you do have a certain cadre of people who say it must have been Dev. It had to have been de Valera. And Neil Jordan doesn't come out and say anything like that in the movie, but even in the biopic, it's a bit hinted at, you know, you see this idea that devalera is super jealous of Collins's popularity, of his handsome good looks and all of this. And there's this rivalry between the big fella and the long fella, and he finally gets the opportunity to take Collins out. So I'm just wondering, like, because you've said, I hate to disappoint everybody, but it wasn't Dev. Like, can you speak to this idea of why dev becomes an easy target for blame, and then if you feel like there's a bigger power structure at play here, like, what can you tell us about that bigger power structure?

Well, remind me to come back to tribalism, Sara. But you know, let you know, you know what always gets me about the LBJ thing is that, if he's such a criminal mastermind that desires power so much, you know, that he could be president for the next eight years, why does he not contest the 1968 election?

You know, you know he he feels he's failed miserably over Vietnam, and he just doesn't want to go through it. And, I mean, that doesn't look to me like a man who's craving power to such a degree that, you know, he'd want to shoot his his president in the head. Look, they were all nefarious people. I think JFK again is one of those things. You'll go down a rabbit hole, and it's very difficult, because there's so many different players, and America has so many different enemies. I think in the case of Ireland, you know, we really had one enemy, which is Britain, and tribalism accounts for Deb. Like Deb was Deb was actually near bel neblah Collins was actually on his way to meet him. What people don't realize is, Dev had the rank of a captain in the IRA. He had no actual rank. He was not a military officer. He was not, you know, or he was a private, sorry, a private in the IRA. And in fact, he wanted to meet Collins because he wanted to go back into politics, because that's what he was. He was a political animal. And we see that later on, that 10 years later, like he puts together the final organization. Incredibly, he all the money that has to be sent back to America after the Civil War. He begs back $3 million worth of that and sets up an organization that runs Ireland for the next 50 years, right? He really is interested in politics. I don't think eaves isn't an assassin. In fact, in 1916 when he's at bullets Mills, you know, they say he had a kind of a breakdown, so that war actually frightened him. So, I mean, but the tribalism comes in, and the simple history of good versus bad, you know, comes in. It's a thing that is ruining our history. It's ruining our countries at the moment, this this tribalism of believing that there's a complete good and a complete bad in everybody, and not doing what we did in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, and actually saying, Look, our opponents are human beings, and we better come to an agreement here, bit like Reagan and Gorbachev, you know, let's get back to that type of thing. Okay? Because it's ruining our histories. It's ruining our ability to analyze history. And dev did not do it, you know, and I don't, and, you know, I can't give the game away, because you got to come and see my shows, you know, between April 3 and April 14. But it's, it's, it's important that we just realize we got to move that chess piece off the table. Okay? And there are some very interesting books. A guy called John Tory believes that devil air was a British spy himself, but Dev had no military power, and Dev didn't have the military skill either to either do that or know anybody who could do it. So there is another character in it, Emmett Dalton, who, I believe has to answer an awful lot of questions. But you know, people will go to YouTube videos of the older Emmett Dalton showing us around bail in the blonde Sara, and go, What a gentleman and what a man is, almost in tears. Think about Collins. But here's what we have to remember, Sara, that Collins was on the verge of restarting the Anglo Irish war. And regardless, you know, some of these people were all war veterans, a lot of them in government. You know, first of all, the guys who just become the government didn't want to go back to war because they have nice, cushy jobs, and they weren't living in bogs anymore and shaving, using river water, you know. And the British don't want to go back to war because they are fighting wars on a million fronts around the world. Okay? And so even if, even if Collins, even if people loved Collins, there still might be somebody who would turn and say, I have to shoot this guy. I have to, even though I love the guy, he's too dangerous. He's out of control. In fact, it's funny. I use a quote. In the show by the great historian, John M Regan, who says, if there was no crisis after Collins died, maybe it's because Collins was the crisis and and this is where, this is where you have to look at people like JFK and Bobby Kennedy as well. I believe history would have changed after Collins died. I believe history would have changed after JF, you know, or if Collins had not died, I believe history would have changed if JFK or Bobby Kennedy had not died. Now, a lot of people turn around and historians and academics especially going, No, no, no, no, he would have ended up the same as the rest of them, going to church, loving the Catholic Church, doing this, doing that, not true. Collins was a very advanced person. He was a very much about separation of church and state. I think women would have had a better role in the state. I think he was a far more advanced and kind of progressive leader, not in today's terms, aggressive, because that's now terrible. But you know what I'm saying? He really was about modernizing Ireland. He really wanted to make it a modern state, not one that went back to the Druids. This is our this is our problem here now with the kind of the battle between America and indigenous countries. You know that we see this nobility in every other country but America, you know? But, but Collins was part of the Western world. All he was saying was, I want to run our part of it. I don't want us to be part of Britain anymore. I want Ireland to run our own beautiful island, not he didn't want us to turn into druids or go back to living in fields. He literally wanted us to be a modern state. And this is the issue. When historians and academics turn around to me, as they have at festivals or various debates, and they say, No, no columns. Was the same as the rest of them. He would have been the same. I say, Well, why shoot him? Then, if you, if you think this guy isn't going to change the world, why did you shoot him?

Yeah, wow. I want, I want to get some clarification, because one of the things that we've been told is that he, you have this man of war who has become a man of peace, which is definitely a narrative for me as an author, as a biographer, that I just think is endlessly fascinating. But even setting that trope aside, we have, on the one hand, this idea of a man of war. The modern urban guerrilla warfare was incredibly good at it, well versed in it could like in the movie you know, Harry Bolin says you leave them sitting in a Halfpenny place, like you're just someone, someone completely different. So we have this, the one narrative of the man of war becomes the man of peace, and maybe he's popped in his own country because of the anti treaty forces that want the war to keep going. But then you said something else interesting that sort of captured my attention, where you're talking about Collins could have kept the Anglo Irish war going, but then you have these bog men that are like, Oh, tell with that, I don't want to go back to war. I don't want to go back to living on the run. So help me suss that out. Help Help me. Help me. Because I want to understand better exactly why Collins was so dangerous, and in fact, dangerous enough that he had to be killed.

Well, I just think, like I said, Collins was one of those genius guys that figured out, you know, we could have a pitched battle here with superior forces, or I can just take out their top guys. And that was kind of the genius of of Collins, that he was the first kind of black ops guy. He was the first guy to kind of go Osama bin Laden on it, if you know what I'm saying, like, rather than go and declare war on Pakistan, let's go in and just get the guy in a house, you know what I mean? And I, you know, I kind of admired that type of warfare, because there's minimal civil civilian casualties. There's million minimal, what we call collateral. And so he was brilliant, for that reason. He knocked out the entire British intelligence network in Ireland, and then knocked out the next one. And at this point, yeah, there's, there's actual war going on all over the countryside between small forces. But really it was what Collins did to intelligence and how he was able to take out Britain's top general on the streets of London, that really what made them go, Look, this guy is too much, you know? He's, he's a he's a genius, you know, but, but he would have used all of this effort in an effort to just get peace. And you have to remember that for Britain, the embarrassment of losing, you know, what they considered part of their mainland, which is Ireland. I mean, you know, Britain lost Congo and places like that, or, you know, various parts of Africa. You know, they lost America, obviously, but, but it's losing part of the British Isles that really irked them, you know. And so that's why they insisted on the oath to the king. That's what really split the entire movement here, because people like my grandfather, who were very religious men, had already made an oath to the Republic, so to change that and make an oath to the king, Collins was one of those pragmatic guys who went, look, I made a note to Republic. Now I'm going to make the oats of the king, but don't worry, we're going to get what we want in a few months time. And a lot of guys just couldn't handle that. You know, they couldn't handle his kind of duplicitousness. They couldn't handle his ability to be one thing to one man and one thing to another. They couldn't handle his ability to be a peacemaker and an ability. Three genius, really, it was, it was too much for people. And I think you might think that the anti treaty side had something against him, but he believed, as well, he was going to meet them and hammer out a peace deal. Because, remember, Collins was down there to say, here guys, none of you are going to prison. I'm not going to shoot any of you, just I'm going to hand you a rifle, put you in a green uniform, and we're going to turn our guns on the north, okay, where there was a large standing British Army, and so, whether he meant it or not, Sara it was there the the the threat of it, but also the duplicitousness of it, and what the British can't handle is some of the account own. You know, you know, we've known for many years that, you know, in the country, you know that that Britain has always had to keep an eye on Ireland. It's it's behind it. It's to its flank. You know, it stood alone in World War Two. You know, in my opinion, to Ireland's detriment, even though develer was trying to make a point about neutrality. But like, you know, we were dealing with the Nazis at this point, it was not really a there was a different kind of enemy. But look, look, the point was Collins was dangerous because nobody knew what he was going to do next. You know, now I don't want to bring on, I don't want to bring up current American politics. But actually, that is a very effective thing, whether or not you like it in a leader, when you have someone who's kind of crazy enough you don't know what they're going what they're going to do next, you can actually get a lot done. And I'm not gonna, I'm gonna not say anything apart from that.

Yes, no, I'm picking up what you're putting down.

You know what I mean, you know what I'm talking about. Because I the general ability to negotiate and do this and do that, you know JFK had the same elements. I mean, when Bobby Kennedy comes out and says, Kennedy comes out and says, I'm shutting down this, you know, I'm ending the Vietnam War, and I'm doing this and I'm shutting this down, that sets a lot of hairs on edge. That sets a lot of people off because they're there, going, this is that we can't control this guy. And I mean, if you want to see, if you want to see how unpredictable somebody is see how much criticism they get. You know, I mean, Collins did a Collins did a perfectly normal constitution, and Winston Churchill called it communist, and it was no such thing. Collins was not that type of person, but, but, but he had to bad mouth him because it was too logical. You know, man, when you're dealing with logic, that's one of the scariest things in the world.

Yes, you're giving me a lot of pull quotes,

exactly, exactly and, and I want to bring up also the work that you've done with Wolf tone. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna just kind of give you that, not that wolf tone is exceptionally well known in the United States of America, he is not but what, what I remember from studying Irish history is this idea that wolf tone is captured. He tries to commit suicide in jail by cutting his own throat. It doesn't work very well, so he sort of lingers around for about a week, probably from, you know, the wound as well as a blood infection. Who knows? But finally, after you know, about seven days from the initial wounding of himself, he passes away. And so he dies via suicide. And that even you know just, I think, as you get into adulthood and you start questioning that, like, who would even do that? That's a very bizarre way for a person to try to unalive themselves. But you have also done some work on wolf tone and exposing that that narrative is false as well. So I'd love to give you the opportunity to discuss wolf tone as well.

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, the show is a murder. Michael Collins, but I preceded that with the murder of wolf tone. And these did start as online documentaries as well. Sara, so you know, I've taken, I've extrapolated the live shows out of them, but I'll hopefully bring wolf tone next year. But I will be doing Collins everywhere I haven't done it, and I'll do wolf tone where I have done Collins, and I have another show about the future of Ireland as well. So, but, but tone is a fascinating character, because he's the guy that kind of would have been a hero to Michael Collins. You know, the way that, how would I put us? You know, he would have been Washington to, let's say Theodore Roosevelt. You know, you know, a founding father of Ireland, Protestant, brilliant young lawyer who, you know, got the French to send four fleets to help us in the 1798 rebellion. Wanted a fair fight. But of course, they didn't fight fair at all, and then eventually, on the last mission, he's captured, brought to Dublin, put on trial, sentenced to be executed on Monday. And then at 4am as you said, you know, decides to slit his own throat rather than face the crowd on Monday at 1pm It's nefarious garbage. It's been sold as real history for 250, years. So it's it's even worse than the Collins Tale, which has no evidence, because I have no evidence from zero evidence from from 250 years ago, Sara. But you know, as I like to say, I come up with some what. One way I find of getting answers in conspiracies like this is i. What's the obvious thing, you know, who didn't lock the theater, the theater door, you know, right, when John, when John Wilkes Booth was hanging around, you know, like, where were the guards? You know, it's a bit like, you know, you know, Epstein's video going out for half an hour, and everyone was missing. And, la, la, la, yeah. So, I mean, the wolf, if the Collins thing is like JFK, the wolf tone thing is a little bit like Epstein, right now, I don't really go down the Epstein road, because for me, you know, I have a real problem, Sara, with conspiracy theory, per se, because for I sometimes find that there are real conspiracies, there are fake conspiracies. To put you off the real conspiracy. And then when people buy the fake conspiracy, or they buy the madness, they they do a disservice to those of us who are out there trying to find a real truth, okay? And you know, so, you know, let's say in the early 2000s because my politics have changed, because I think that's normal as you get older, you get older, you know. But I was, you know, I was a progressive, lefty, whatever, you know. But I'm also an American citizen. I'm, you know, from New Jersey. My mother's, my mother was from New Jersey. I was born in Ireland, so my dad's Irish, so, but, you know, so I have a huge interest in both fields, you know. And rather go down this anti American thing, you know, at 911 shocked me to my core. I couldn't believe it, but then I kind of bought into all the conspiracy theories and all the rest of it, instead of just looking at it, at it for what it was, which was a horrible sneak attack. But you know, and you know, while I was thinking about tensile steel and all the rest of it, it took me to read the Looming Tower to find out that it was just really bad communication between people, some of whom might have had some nefarious involvement, and then a guy who was just trying to investigate it and find out and make sure it didn't happen before it happened. And ends up, you know, horrendously, John O'Neill, the head of security, on the 10th of September 20, 22,001 in the Twin Towers, and dies there the next day.

But this is my issue, is that with Wolf tone,

for instance. So that's why Epstein, I find it too hard to go down because too many people are just linking too many things together, and it's wild. But in terms of the actual events of what happened to him on the night, Wolf tone is so similar. And I would love to come back and do more and more in detail about wolf tone when I'm bringing the show back. But you know, I find like, I just ask simple questions like, where's the razor, you know, and the same in Michael Collins show, yeah, because these guys were collectors. All the all the chiefs of police of Dublin in 1798 were avid collectors. They, in fact, they had little museums, and they would show off to each other, you know, when they were drinking in each other's parlors. And show you. Well, here's the flag I got off the friendship. We captured them. Here's this, and here's that one guy had, one guy, the guy, I believe, snuffed out wolf tone, Captain Sandys, or major Sandys. And you know, was an avid collector. He sold his death mask. His kids sold. He captured both Robert Emmet out wolf tone and got their death masks made and had them on display in his house. So where's the razor? Where is the actual razor pick? I mean, if I walked into that cell and found this bloody razor, I go, Oh, my God, it's going straight into a glass cabinet. Thank you so much. Wolf tone, I really appreciate this. No one's allowed talk to him for seven days. The papers print every story again and again. I go to the daily newspapers, which are fascinating. There's a French surgeon telling lies all over the place there, who I believe helped do the deed, and he later admits in 1812 that something else happened, that possibly he was shot in the throat, and then he had to disguise it as a throat wound, because they knew he was going to court the next day, and he's possibly going to be freed by a guy who possibly was his real father, who was the chief justice of Dublin at the time. So I go into all of this, and again, it's an amazing story, but really the story is the story is about the story Sara, but like, what I think is really interesting about conspiracy. It's a how the human mind can't deal with an alternative to what they've been browbeaten with and had planted in their brains forever. And then what does that mean psychologically? What does it mean that we cannot question things and go There is something seriously wrong here with the story, things like missing razors from a guy who famously cut his throat.

Yeah, and you, you mentioned earlier about getting resistance, having people contact you, either on social media or even anonymously, in some cases, say, leave it alone. Let Michael Collins, rest in peace. Just let it go. I imagine it would be even more so with Wolf tone like that's an even older case. Why are you stirring up mess? Why are you bringing this up to people's attention? And I'm wondering, what do you think about that? Like, whenever you get a message, whether it's been signed by somebody that's taking credit for it, or it's just some anonymous DM, it's like, Hey, man, leave it alone. Let it go. Where do you think that that comes from?

I think it's it's a little bit like, it's funny. I was watching a. Some right wing commentators who said, Look, you know, it's obviously just Lee Harvey Oswald, and people just can't get over it and all of this. And I started to think of my brain, yeah, maybe it is. But then I thought about the magic bullet, and I thought about a few other things, and Connolly getting hit seven times. I went, Well, guys, explain those three things to me, and I will go with you with the Lee Harvey Oswald thing. But if you cannot explain those things to me, then I'm not going with it. Okay? So it really is about logic for me again and all of that. But I've especially academia, you know, because I've done, I've I've printed in a few academic papers. I've printed in the national, you know, press and, you know, my theories and stuff. And I've got letters in from academics who've got terrible things wrong in what they were writing about, but it's amazing when you remind the academic about they got terribly wrong that they they never answer it, you know, because they've got their tenure, they've got their position in the college, they could just come out with any old stuff, and it doesn't matter. And they're like one radio presenter said to me, Well, you're not an academic historian, are you? And I said, Well, no, but I've read books all my life, and I did an art history degree, which I believe is very important, that you know, that you learn the history of the world through art. And in fact, this is why my shows are important, because I show 300 images in each show. The images tell you everything, Sara, this is, I mean, I'm glad we're talking here, but really a picture tells a million words, because those are the things that show us what happened, and the picture can't lie. Like we can lie to ourselves all day about what happened, but the picture can't lie, you know, I have the direction of the blood trail that happened to Michael Collins. We know what angle he was shot at. I have all of these things that refute a whole lot of evidence and garbage, you know, and and academics can't deal with it because they're not dealing in the visual. They are dealing purely in the written word. And the problem is the written word was written by his enemies. I mean, I do laugh at the amount of historians that directly quote historians who absolutely hated wolf tone and absolutely couldn't stand Michael Collins and I'm there going, well, first, I'm not really trusting their word too much. Are you? Yes, you are, because you keep quoting them.

Yeah, it reminds me of the Ouroboros, the image of the snake eating its own tail, and the tribalism that you mentioned earlier. I certainly something that I've encountered as a hammer. Should biographer being sort of portrayed by certain people as the beastly American on the outside, like you didn't, you didn't come from the right family, and you don't have the right academic pedigree. So How dare you touch the Swedish secular saint? And it's like, well, I dare, because I care about him and I and I really want the best for him and his legacy. So I really admire what you're doing, and I really admire your willingness to bring these stories back into the consciousness and to say like, it doesn't matter to me if, if some academic somewhere is committing the echo chamber and feels like, well, we just have to keep quoting the same historians as you mentioned. Some of them never even gave a toss about wolf tone or Michael Collins. But yet this, there's this Ouroboros echo chamber. Of we quote the same people, who then in turn quote us, who then in turn quote the same people, and it just becomes like this. It's almost like a hurricane. I'm thinking of the Yates poem a second, the second coming, where he talks about the gyre spinning faster and faster. It just becomes this echo chamber gyre of Let's just all quote the same people over and over again. And it also, frankly, makes me think of George Carlin saying there's one big club, and you and I are not in it. So I just wanted to say personally, heart to heart, that you know, I really appreciate what you're doing in bringing these legacies back into the consciousness, bringing them to the American mind. Because I feel like those of us living in America, whether you're of Irish extraction or not, you deserve to know that there are historical facts. There are these men that matter, and then there are so called historical facts that have been drilled into your head that really aren't facts at all.

Yeah. And also, I just think that they're wonderful stories to tell, because, you know, Wolf tone is lifted on high by all sorts of organizations. You know, he's the founder of Irish republicanism. But you know, for all that these guys know anything about him, it's so incredibly wrong. You know, Michael Collins is held aloft as well, but these people don't know anything about him. It's better to know about these people, because their lives were incredible. They were brilliant people. They were funny and and, you know, they had a lot of answers to a lot of questions we're asking today, you know. So I want to bring their lives alive as well. I think they're really important. One of the funniest thing as well. I During covid, I applied for all the letters wolf tones wrote, supposedly, in the last week of his life. And of course, you know, they were like, Okay, well, don't show any of these to anybody, you know. And then I, you know, I find out that one of the letters, the handwriting during the week that he had supposedly slit his throat, it's so much more beautiful and well written. So I was going, it's amazing how his handwriting got so much better after he slit his throat and was lying in a straight jacket on his back in a prison cell. He obviously didn't write the letter. But it's actually great fun exposing these things, because I have academics quoting these letters in books, and I'm going, do you not see that this letter is not written by this guy? Do you not see it's a total forgery? And I just think it does lead to a lot of comedy. It does lead to a lot of inadvertent farce and comedy. And people will come to my shows and they'll laugh as well as learn, and they'll be blown away by the visuals, but also they'll hear a story they've never heard before. And I think that's that's why it's important what you're doing as well. Sara, bring this stuff to the fore, especially with DAG, who I weirdly got it was only a few months ago with my dad. We were watching the siege of jadeville, and of course, they recreate dag flying to the Congo and dying in the plane crash. And, of course, my dad was instantly saying, Well, we know what happened there. And it's, it's, it's very obvious stuff. But again, a remarkable man like Wolf tone, like Michael Collins, who couldn't be really controlled by anybody, you know, and kind of had a third wave vision, you know the way Tito had the third wave of communism, you know, he was made a third alliance with the world. And the way everybody, you know, a lot of people, were looking for, you know, we don't have to be part of these tribes. We can actually make our own world and be friends with everybody. Remember that wolf tones? Greatest quote about neutrality was peace with all the world is our object and our desire, and in the world with British Empire, that was just simply unacceptable. But, I mean, these guys were coming up with very modern ideas at the time, and the fact that they were dangerous ideas, even though they're about everybody, everybody's life being better, that scares some people, including, you know, the wealthy and the elite, but also the kind of embittered proletariat who want to control things. You know, there's got to be a happy medium. And if you if you want a better world, you got to be listening to people by Wolf tone and Dag and Michael Collins, and not this kind of this crazy tribalism where we just believe that one side are completely evil and the other side are completely awful. I feel like we've regressed as a world in the last few years. And I just wish we had those guys around to just, you know, provide a bit of sense. I'm kind of trying to sneak those that idea into the shows as well, you know, because I really, I'm on a kind of a mission. I'm kind of an evangelical about, there's another way out of here. There's another solution to all of this stuff. And we're wasting a huge amount of time roaring and screaming at each other.

Amen. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself. And I want to give you the opportunity to tell the audience I'm going to make sure that this episode drops on Wednesday, April the first so they have time to make arrangements. So I want to hear from you what cities you'll be in, what kind of schedule you're on for this tour. So if somebody wants to go, hopefully they do. Their appetite has been whetted and they want to come and see you in person. Where can they do that?

Well, fantastic. So all tickets are available@paddyculoven.com that's Sullivan with the C so paddyculoven.com and I'm going to be in Portland, Maine, in the main Irish Heritage Center, on Friday, April 3, Greater Boston Cultural Center, Irish Cultural Center, Canton Boston. April 4. Then on Wednesday, I'm in a beautiful town called port Jefferson in Long Island, where I did a show last year because of my friend. I the best crowd ever there, even though it's not Irish either. So these are not exclusively Irish shows. These are these are shows about world figures that you're going to be fascinated by, and I think you'll learn a lot about Ireland with them. Then ninth and 10th of April, I'm doing two nights in the New York Irish center in Long Island City, fabulous place. And then finally, Chicago is the furthest West I'm going to get. I'm so sorry, Sara, on Tuesday, the 14th of April, and that'll be in the Mayfair theater in the Irish American Heritage Center. So that's six dates. Patty culvert.com, for the six dates, I'm going to do a much more extensive and longer tour, and make sure I get closer to where everybody else is. I did do San Francisco last March, but I'd love to get it over there again and just do everywhere in between, because there's these, there are these amazing Irish centers everywhere, and the crowds always come out, and they always learn a huge amount, and they're absolutely fabulous. So paddyculoven.com go to my YouTube channel. I'm at Paddy cullivan everywhere. At Paddy cullivan on Instagram as well. I don't take pictures of food, and it'll be fun. I'm a very good chef,

good so I would encourage everybody, if you are within reasonable driving distance or you can fly up, please go and see the show in person. Were I not recovering from the Rona, I would be going myself. I just think this is fabulous. And if, for some reason you can't, please connect with Patty on social media. You can find some amazing videos that he's produced about wolf tone and about Michael Collins on YouTube. And I just, again, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your day. You're busy. You're about to launch a tour for goodness sake. So thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be with us to talk about these very important topics. Well, I

really appreciate it, because you have the Rona, which, as we know, is a result of one of the greatest love stories of all time between a bat and a pangolin. Sara, so, I mean, that was, that was not a conspiracy at all. That was the first case of interspecial love creating pandemic to the world. And I'm just Sara, you're suffering under the consequences.

Yes, imagine that. But you know, if my pain and suffering comes at the at the cost of this great interspecies love affair that, my goodness me, you know, isn't Isn't it worth it that romance, love wins in the

end, it really does. It's such a great love story, and I'm glad that story was everywhere for two years, and we were meant to believe it. And if anything was to if anything was to make us feel conspiratorial, I think that would, yes, I think it would 

Thanks for tuning in. If you can make it to one of Paddy's shows, I'd encourage you to do so if you're not able, I'd encourage you to check out his social media and his website. Stay a little bit crazy, and I'll see you next time.

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