Pisrógs

Join us for a trans-dimensional Sweeney family reunion.

Musician, DJ, producer and Mafia Don - Rory Sweeney is part of a long Irish tradition of artists who go somewhere when they make work, and the Sweeney name has been going somewhere strange for a very long time.

Rory’s music effortlessly straddles heavenly dreamscapes and noisy dystopia, and his deep affection for Irish myth and landscape has come fully into view within the sonic and visual world of his new album Old Earth.

Luke and Rory drift through the National Folklore Collection's tales of poetic divine frenzy (buile) and discuss why Irish art has always flirted with possession. They talk liminality, second sight, fairy cavalcades and ghostly processions. Cursed clans, underground passages, haunted houses and magic sticks (which eat butter for some reason?)

Before saunas were a lifestyle brand, Ireland had sweat houses.
Luke traces the forgotten history of the teach allais. Stone sweat huts used in Ireland from at least the early 1600s, centuries before cold plunges and wellness retreats became fashionable. Built into riverbanks and hillsides, sealed shut and fired with turf, these places pushed the body to its absolute limit in the name of cure.

But these Sweat Houses were gnarlier than our boujie sauna exports. Sweating was considered a medicine, and certain instances people were bled, wrapped, sealed inside stone chambers for hours, then plunged into rivers, handed a bottle of whiskey or sent straight to bed.

But the exact extent of the use of Sweat Houses remains a mystery. 1/3 of Sweathouse remains are found in Leitrim and Cavan, and some leitrim locals reference altered states, mushroom-like hallucinations and poitín distilling.

Is sauna culture in 2026 a newfangled export, or a return to natural way of being?

Carmen joins Luke in his hovel today. A keen internet historian, Quigley had been updating her instagram followers on the recent invasion of Asian hornets to Ireland (yes this episode was recorded a long time ago) and thus the pair dive into an episode on the weird and wonderful world of Ireland's native stinging buzzball- THE BEE.

There are a whole host of strangely intricate and intricately strange laws dedicated to the Bee in ancient Brehon Law. As well this Duchás.ie is absolutely buzzing with weird superstitions, funny fairytales and Bee-obsessed facts and folklore.

A graduate of fine arts, archaeology and classics it doesn't take long to see how these three areas intersect in Carmen's work. Quigley’s illustrations draw from ancient history, as well as Irish and Greek mythology. But her elastic imagination, embodies the spirit of Irish mythology better than any attempt at clinical documentation. The pair discuss how Dublin's hidden holy wells and Irish oddities have inspired her work.