The Rise of the Podcast
Kendall Breitman’s 2025 article for Riverside summarises the statistical significance of podcasts from 2006 onwards. According to his compilation of data, by 2030 “the number of podcast listeners worldwide will grow to 619.2 million,” and the market for podcasts will be “worth $17.59 billion.” According to his research, Gen Z listeners consume podcasts to “dig deeper into topics” and stay “up-to-date.” They also do this to hear “unique perspectives not covered in media.” Impressive as many of these figures and qualitative factors are, the podcaster I have chosen to highlight here is far more concerned with the craft of storytelling. His primary aim is to democratise (make accessible, in other words) history, art, and culture. While Breitman’s statistics are interesting, the podcast I am exploring does not focus on marketing and monetisation. His preoccupations lie elsewhere, some of which I am discussing in this article.
The Blindboy Podcast
I would like to nominate Blindboy Boatclub as one of the greatest minds of our generation. He is an artist, musician, author, and host of The Blindboy Podcast. His podcast is hosted independently on Acast (but is available on other platforms––I listen on Spotify) and hardly ever sponsored by an external firm. Without advertisers, he enjoys full control over his content and subject matters.
I listened to “How Ireland Invented Spaces Between Words” (June 5, 2024) mid-August last year, and subsequent episodes have shaped my studies and creative endeavours. The podcasts are structured by resonances, unlikely connections and coincidental associations that Blindboy weaves into stories. He spends each week researching synchronicities to create episodes which are not only entertaining but also incredibly informative. In the podcast mentioned above, he begins with a description of pupils in Ireland completing their leaving certificate, then warns listeners about far-right sentiments emerging across the country, before circling back to school, scholarship, and medieval monks.
His hypothesis is that medieval Irish monks invented spaces between words in Latin religious scripts written in continuous prose. According to Blindboy’s theory, these spaces mimic the rhythm of Irish poets walking across the land as they share and preserve folklore. He connects these subject matters via the overarching theme of sunshine.
His work encompasses: Irish mythology; colonial and Irish histories of food items (ranging from chicken fillet rolls, to Kellogg’s cereal, to pumpkin spice lattes); biodiversity and climate change; mental health; and creativity. As a speaker of Hiberno-English, he celebrates the language and expands on Irish Gaelic etymologies, phrases, and names relevant to his diverse subject matters. His live shows and interviews feature guests like Cillian Murphy, Hozier, Manchán Magan, and many others.
Though “How Ireland Invented Space Between Worlds” is a great segue into Blindboy’s style and creative thinking, I would like to propose “The Return to Yurty’s Couch” (November 1, 2023) as an introduction to new listeners.
For context, Yurty Aherne is an otter which Blindboy saw in the River Shannon, and the couch refers to their resting site. To hear what the otter himself has to say, I recommend this interview (fictionalised, of course) available via Limerick Live. Staying faithful to Blindboy’s commitment to storytelling, reflecting the oral tradition of Irish folklore, I shall walk ye through the significance of this little island on the Shannon – telling the story from memory, in my own style.
The Return to Yurty’s Couch
A couple years after college students disturbed his regular meditation by the riverside, Blindboy returned to Yurty’s Couch, carrying with him the memories of rain beating against his exposed cheeks, or the rare Irish sunshine gracing the landscape.First and foremost, he noted the rising water levels, but immediately afterwards, the theatre of his mind brought forth the nettle he spotted all those years ago. Like the hazelnut in the palm of Julian Norwich, Blindboy’s nettle presented itself as a symbol of an abstract unified creation that refused to wither as the years passed.
A deep meditation preceded the moment when Blindboy first caught sight of the nettle. Entranced by the easy swinging of the leaves, Blindboy’s heart and mind were filled with empathy for the plant. As though his human form intertwined with the plant, he loved it like they were of the same blood. For an instant, the anxious tempest caught between the currents of past and future time dissipated, as if the bubbles of the Shannon had swallowed it. His love grew so strong that Blindboy did not bother demarcating boundaries, he embraced the feeling. Envy, anger, and insecurities faded against the light of empathy for the nettle.
The next scene (appearing from behind the curtains of nostalgia) was ushered in by the trickling of the Shannon. One wave teasing the riverbank prompted Blindboy’s eyelids to lift so he could behold a glimpse of his dead father. At that moment, his mind whispered “I’m okay” and alleviated the weight of years of grief a little more. Grief slowly dissolved from the folds of his brain, and from the tip of his finger, and fixated only on the coy swooshes of the Shannon. He could not deny the healing power of the landscape. So, he got back on his bike and returned day after day until the incident with the college students.
On that day, through the pathways of his mind, his body unmoving, he travelled up for about half an hour on the Shannon up until Lough Derg. Mindful of Halloween lurking just around the corner, he recalled the dagda and the Tuatha Dé Danann who walk the earth on the 31st day of the month. The faeries cannot freely roam around mortals anymore – not after their defeat so long ago – but this one night draws them away from the Otherworld and into ours.
Then he mentally dived into Fintan’s grave buried in the lake to catch a glimpse of the only survivor of the Christian God’s Flood in Ireland. According to legend, Fintan arrived in Ireland with Cessair, Noah’s granddaughter. He survived only because he could metamorphose into a salmon for a quick thousand years and shift back into human form once the flood had passed. Those thousand years in the Shannon may have made him the salmon of knowledge that found its way into The Fenian Cycle. However, since myth travels by word of mouth, the flow of these stories does not always retain its precise currents.
His mind ventured forth on the riverbank. There is a 9000-year-old-burial site not far from Lough Derg, which offers its visitors the relic of a ceremonial axe (the oldest axe found in Europe) and whispers about the glacier pulses brought about by the melting of the Ice Caps. The landscape spoke to him, and he relayed the story.
Within a few weeks, Blindboy’s meditative spot appeared as ‘Yurty’s Couch’ on Google Maps as his podcast episode gained popularity. Through his podcast on the otter, ‘Yurty Aherne’ (November 29, 2017) already, Blindboy encoded his own mythological storytelling tradition in the earth of Limerick city.
Palestine and Ireland
Politics and international conflicts are not a central preoccupation in The Blindboy Podcast, but Irish and global affairs do not go unnoticed. In the second half of ‘The Return to Yurty’s Couch,’ Blindboy highlights David Cronin’s Balfour’s Shadow (2017), a detailed yet accessible account of British support in the establishment of Palestine and subsequent injustices done to Palestinians. The name Balfour may ring familiar to Irish readers and listeners on account of the Mitchelstown massacre of 1887 that earned the conservative MP the epithet of ‘Bloody Balfour’ (Cronin, p. 5). Throughout the book, Cronin draws connections between Ireland in the late nineteenth century and Palestine in the early twentieth century. One example I would like to share is Sir Arthur Wauchope’s correspondence with the Colonial Office, where Wauchope specifically highlighted the role of “Raymond Cafferata, a former member of the Auxiliaries during Ireland’s war of independence” who ordered a “baton charge” at Palestinian protesters during the demonstration at Jaffa (Cronin, pp. 36-7). The event at Jaffa was one of a series of protests against the dispossession Palestinian landowners and tenants experienced in the late 1920s following Jewish immigration under British colonial policies (p. 25).
David Cronin’s historical account is naturally far more meticulous than the pieces of evidence I chose for this article. However, I never would have found this resource, were it not for Blindboy. Blindboy cannot be categorised solely as an activist, or an author, or a storyteller: he does everything everywhere all at once. “The Return to Yurty’s Couch” discusses the importance of meditation, mental health, preservation of folklore (and how it is threatened by detrimental effects of the climate crisis), and intricacies of global conflicts that are either overlooked or underrepresented in more mainstream media.
Blindboy Boatclub inspires me every single day. His focus on biodiversity and climate change swayed my literature essays towards ecocriticism and topographical poetry; the mythology and folklore he weaves throughout the episodes inspired me to uncover more of my own Hungarian heritage; his insights on mental health can get me through the most difficult, most emotionally dysregulated moments. Although his style of storytelling and education is not for everyone, I firmly believe that anyone can find at least one episode they would enjoy. I am eternally grateful for his work, and I strongly encourage all of you to give his podcast a go.