The Mystical, Mythical, And Marvelous Wise Traditions Of Ireland With Stephen Kavanagh

A mythical island known as the “other Atlantis,” Skellig Michael where monks once dwelled, and the story of how oysters saved humanity are just a few of the many highlights from today’s episode. Marine biologist Stephen Kavanagh gives us an overview of wise traditions in Ireland. Stephen shares the earliest accounts of life in Ireland—from what the people ate to how they embraced art and beauty. In essence, he takes us on a tour of his beloved Ireland.

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Listen to the episode here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Stephen Kavanagh.

There is a mythical island known as The Other Atlantis, another island where monks once dwelt, and foods that ensured that you’d live to see another day. This is episode 508. Our guest is Stephen Kavanagh. You might remember Stephen from episode 499 where we talked about oysters as a superfood. Stephen is a marine biologist with over 30 years of experience producing and processing shellfish. He’s also the Head of Marine Healthfoods.

While we do touch on oysters in this episode, for example, we talk about the restoration efforts underway in Ireland, we also zoom out for a broader view of wise traditions in Ireland. Stephen shares lessons learned from Skellig Michael where monks lived in the fifth century. He also discusses mystical Irish myths like that of the island of Hy-Brasil along with touching on the importance of art and beauty in Irish culture. Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to subscribe to the show wherever you get your shows so you don’t miss a thing. We’re also on YouTube. Go to the Weston A. Price Foundation channel and subscribe there too. Thank you for tuning in. You’re tuning in to the show.

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Welcome to the show, Stephen.

Thank you for having me.

Stephen Kavanagh is a native Irish man whose Kavanagh clan is very well-known here in Ireland. We want to talk with you about wise traditions in Ireland, some of the ancestral secrets, and health ways that have been overlooked. You took me on an amazing one-week tour of various parts of Ireland. Maybe we should go in order of what we saw and its significance.

The Importance Of Oysters In The Traditional Irish Diet

It was quite a whirlwind trip to Ireland. We got a few percent of what you can do in Ireland in six days. There’s a lot more to see, but by all means, we go through the road trip.

Let’s take it from the top.

You flew into Dublin and we brought you to a beach on the East Coast. We’re in the oyster industry or the oyster business. That’s what we do. The purpose of the visit was to highlight the importance of oysters, oysters in the traditional diet and in the wise traditions diet, and how they can help with human health and nutrition.

Before we even got there, you took us to lunch at Cavistons, which is this wonderful, well-known market in Dublin. You said it had mostly the freshest fish and the best ingredients. That was a lovely stop.

Cavistons is an institution on the side of Dublin. It’s a fantastic food hall and they have a restaurant next door. We had amazing food there. You got to see one of the best fish counters in the country as well as fresh fish and seafood. It was an amazing place. He was the first guy to sell one of my smoked oysters many years ago when I started the business. He’s helped so many artisan producers get a foothold and get established in Ireland. There is so much providence in that shop. Many small artists and producers sell their produce there. He has helped. Peter Caviston is still around. He’s still knocking about in the halls there.

He wasn’t in the halls when we got there, but we got to taste that amazing food. I had hake fillet and crab, all the best. You did take us to the shore. Which bay did we go to first?

We went south then to County Wicklow, where I live, which would’ve been home to one of the biggest oyster fisheries in the world at the time in the 1800S. I brought you to the beaches there and showed you old oyster middens where discarded oyster shells are. Some of those middens are over 4,000 years old. An oyster midden is a big pile of oyster shells that humans have left there from their activity from eating them, fishing them, processing them, or doing whatever they were doing with oysters. They’re 4,000 years old.

If you believe that the pyramids are 4,000 years old, there are some human prehistory structures in Ireland, and New Grange is one of the most famous, that predates the pyramids. People were here many years ago, for sure. It seems oysters were a big part of their diet. Ireland, in the last ice age, which was many years ago, was covered in two miles of ice. There was nobody here. There were no plants and no animals. When the ice sheets retreated, the colonization of plants, animals, and then humans came. It would appear that oysters were a really important part of that early human immigration into Ireland. It was a big part of their diet.

We were talking about how oysters save humanity. Many years ago, homo sapiens were living on oysters in South Africa. That possibly saved them from extinction because they were nearly out-competed by the Neanderthals. By foraging for oysters on the shore, which were a heck of a lot easier than hunting mastodons, mammoths, or whatever that kind of stuff, they had this good source of protein, all the Omega-3s that oysters contained, lots of zinc, and all the minerals.

They exploded out of Africa many years ago. Those same people arrived on these shores as the earliest arrivals to Ireland, and it seems they were eating oysters too. Quite possibly, oysters helped humanity and homo sapiens migrate all around the world because they would’ve come around the coastlines, following this really good food source that was easy to catch and had everything they needed to sustain health. It’s an interesting story.

What is so fascinating is we’re always counting our macros or trying to figure out what are the nutrients in this food or that food. They were thinking about survival. They might not have even realized all the value in oysters but probably could see, “That fellow lived to a ripe old age. I want to do the same, so I’m going to take it.” My curiosity is do you know who opened the first oyster?

As an Irish poet once said, it was a brave man who had the first oyster. Jonathan Swift was accredited with that saying. That happened many years ago. How they opened it, I don’t know, but I’m sure it was with something heavy. It wasn’t quite as sophisticated as the way we do it. Maybe a piece of obsidianite as early oyster knives because they would’ve eaten a lot of them. That would’ve been an interesting study for somebody.

There are a couple of oysters guaranteed you’d see the next day, that’s for sure. They had all the nutrition you needed to get you from one day to the next. They were easy to get and they were everywhere. Oysters have been around for 300 million years. All the coastlines and all the estuaries would’ve been full of bivalve oysters, and not just oysters, mussels, clams, cockles, winkles, all those kinds of shellfish. They were such an important part of early human nutrition and a very old wise tradition, for sure.

I’m thinking about what I learned too. The bivalve has the property of doing some detoxing or cleansing of water. Is that right?

They’re filter feeders. They feed on plankton from the water, so they clear the water. That process of clearing the water allows more light to penetrate for more algae to grow. They’re what we call an ecosystem engineer. They create the conditions that are conducive for all other marine life to live. These are at the bottom of the food chain, oysters, algae, and eelgrass beds. When we have good, healthy communities of them, then the bigger fish species survive much better. There’s more of them. The whales, dolphins, and seals can’t survive without the species further down the food chain.

The modest little oyster makes a difference all the way up the food chain.

Our poor oyster gets overlooked. We have cuddly little seal pups or little furry dolphin toys for kids. I haven’t seen any oyster toys yet. That’s an idea for somebody. We wrote a book about oysters for kids called Sammy Spat to help educate kids in school about oysters and how important they are. It’s about a little baby oyster. He is one in a million.

That’s so cute. I want to see that book. Going back to food though, before we had the capability of hunting, we had to scavenge and be scrappy to survive. We’re eating oysters. This leads me to ask you about Irish food traditions.

We went from Wicklow where we’ve seen what you would say were prehistoric oyster middens that the first hunter-gatherers who would’ve come to Ireland would’ve lived on. We went to the West Coast where there are a lot of 4,000-year-old oyster middens. It was happening all around the coastline in Ireland. We went to Tralee Bay in the Southwest and we took a tour there of a working oyster fishery.

The Tralee oyster coop there has about 120 fishing boats. These are traditional fishermen who survive in that oyster fishery. It runs for about 4 or 5 months of the year. It’s the last working native oyster fishery in Ireland and Europe too, almost. There are 1 or 2 others in Europe. It’s very rare. It’s the last properly working disease-free native oyster fishery.

The guy we met there, Dennis O’Shea, has done Trojan work and tremendous work recovering that fishery, maintaining it, and sustaining it. Huge sections of it have been sealed off for restoration of conservation efforts to secure that for future generations. It’s incredible work they’re doing there. I was amazed when they did the trawl and they pulled up the amount of oysters in it. I wasn’t sure what would be down there. There were thousands of oysters in the trawl we saw. I was glad we did that. That was a great trip.

Talk to me about the native oysters versus the invasive ones. What does that mean, native oysters? Why is that so special and unique?

This is really important and everything we talk about with oysters. We have two species of oysters in Ireland now, but when we are talking about many years ago, the native oyster is Ostrea edulis. This was the only oyster in Europe. For 4,000 years, this was the only thing people knew as an oyster. In the 1970s, we brought this guy from the Pacific Ocean. This is what people in America would know as a West Coast oyster. This is an exceptional specimen. These were brought here for aquaculture. They were farmed here because they grow twice as fast as the native oyster.

They caused problems when they came here because they brought a disease that wiped out 70% of our native stocks. That on top of the fishing pressure in the 1800s that collapsed quite a lot of the fisheries around the coast means that we have less than 1% of our native oysters left in Europe. 99% of the beds have been wiped out. There are massive restoration efforts going on all over Europe to restore these native oyster beds. It’s very important to make a differentiation. Your native oyster is Ostria edulis and Crassostrea gigas is the Pacific oyster.

It’s really important. Part of the work that we saw done on this trip was the restoration of both the native and the invasive oysters. We don’t want to overfish oysters in a sense, right?

Absolutely. We have to restore the areas where the native oysters were prevalent. That’s a big part of the work that we do at Marine Healthfoods. We’re actively involved with the NORA Project, which is the Native Oyster Restoration Alliance. There are projects all over Europe happening. We started the NORRI Project here, which is Native Oyster Reef Restoration Ireland. We’re working with the Tralee coop, the old project in Galway, and a hatchery on the West Coast. We’re doing some research and development trials to figure out better ways to restore those oyster beds and how to do that. That’s a big part of what we do. We want that to be our legacy. What are we leaving for the next generations? We want to leave a vibrant marine environment with a high biotic index. It’s important.

For me, the biggest problem is the exploitation of the coastal strip. A few kilometers from the coastline where most of our marine life was and a lot of the important marine biological processes happen, we’ve over-exploited and devastated that because that’s where humans come in contact with the ocean. That’s where we all want to live, play, have fun, eat seafood, and all but we’re not conserving it, restoring it, and managing it properly. We have to change that attitude and change it fast. The ocean is very resilient and then we’ll recover. In the EU, the European Parliament ratified the EU 2030 Restoration Law, which stated that by 2030, 30% of our waters have to be designated for restoration.

The greatest problem we’ve had in the last 100 years is the exploitation of the coastal strip. We’ve over-exploited it because that’s where humans come in contact with the ocean.

This is in Ireland?

All over Europe. I’d love to see this happening in America too because that’s a big push. It’s a big boost to our efforts. It’s in law in Europe. We can use this to put pressure on governments, agencies, and everyone else who should be doing what they’re supposed to be doing and say, “We’re backed by the law. The law is there now. We have to do this.” It’s 2030. We’ve got six years to do it. We’re doing proof of concept on some of our restoration efforts. We hope to have that in the next year or two. When we have proof of concept, we can present that to the government and say, “You want to restore? You have to restore. Here’s how you do it.”

This reminds me. The eleventh principle of the wise traditions diet is to prepare for pregnancy and look out for the future of the next generations. That’s exactly what you’re doing here. It’s preparing for pregnancy too because oysters are great for fertility. On the side, you are looking ahead. You’re not doing what’s good for us now. You’re doing what’s good for your children and your children’s children.

The future generations. That’s the wisest tradition of all to look after the next generation.

Where did we go after that?

After that, we got into Mystical Ireland. We went to the Skellig Michael, a remote rocky outcrop in the Southwest of Ireland. Monks in the fifth century set up a monastery on the top of this. It was breathtaking. They built these little stone beehive hoots. It’s where some of the scenes from the last Star Wars movie were shot where Luke Skywalker was found. It’s called Skellig Michael.

There are two islands there. They’re quite small. They’re both UNESCO World Heritage sites, the Skellig Michael that we were on because of the monastic settlement that was there and its neighboring island called Skellig Beag, or Irish, small baby Skellig as they call it, is a gannet colony. The wild seabirds come there from May to September. When we were there, there were 250,000 breeding pairs of gannets. The whole island was white with the guano coming down cliffs and everything. It was amazing. They’re beautiful seabirds. They spend May to September on Skellig Beag nesting, and then they spend the rest of their life on waves and wings at sea. They come back every year and do that.

It’s amazing because they know they’re safe from predators. I haven’t talked to the gannet birds exactly, but from what I could tell, they seemed very happy and they were thriving on that very remote island. The other thing that came to me in terms of wise traditions is that there were these monks who were far from everything. Talk about diet also. They were eating seals and whatever fish they could catch. They were also sometimes having cattle, chickens, or goats on the island. I don’t know how they got them there, but they apparently did. They had their water estuaries.

Fresh water was a big issue for them. They managed to do that. They had the bird’s eggs. They traded eggs from the gannet colony with passing ships. They would’ve traded certain commodities that they maybe didn’t have on the islands. They tried beekeeping but it didn’t work. The queen bees wouldn’t stay on the island so they had no honey. We debated whether or not they had alcohol living out there. They possibly traded that with passing ships too along with tobacco and things they didn’t have on the island. Who knows if they were into that kind of thing or if they’re living a very pure life?

We’re about food farming and the healing arts at the Weston A. Price Foundation. They had the element of the healing arts in that they spent their lives dedicated to their work, to God, and to intercession. One of the guides on the island pointed out that they built little platforms where they would pray with their arms extended. I also saw the sense of community because they slept together in these beehive-like structures, 2 or 3 monks in a space. They had to get on pretty well to manage to be together.

This wasn’t big. This is a tiny little place with six of these little beehive stone huts. There are only twelve monks and an abbot there. When one died, there was a waiting list to get in. Wealthy people at the time would send their kids out there for education to learn from the monks because they were the only ones who could read and write and they were scribing out there. It’s fascinating what was going on there.

We discussed the island of Hy-Brasil, which is from human prehistory. Some of you may be familiar with the work of Graham Hancock. They map the famous Piri Resi map, which pinpointed an island off the West Coast of Ireland, which some people have hypothesized was the other Atlantis. In folklore, they say that the island of Hy-Brasil appears once every seven years. You can see it but you can’t land on it. It was described by the monks and other people in their writings out there.

It even appears on some ancient maps.

We don’t know what that was exactly, but there are a lot of theories around that one.

I was keeping my eyes peeled for it. I didn’t see it but it doesn’t mean it’s not out there.

We talked about St. Brendan as well who was around at the time. The monastery on the Skellig island started in 500 A.D. St. Brendan was ordained a priest in 512. He existed and built his monastery around the same time but he was on the mainland in County Galway. He was born near the Skelligs in County Kerry. He apparently discovered America in the fifth century. He wrote a book called The Navigatio Sancti. Christopher Columbus read that book 1,000 years later. They believed that that’s what inspired Colbus to sail West to find America. They think that St. Brendan found it in the fifth century. He wrote a book. They call him St. Brendan the Navigator. He had oyster shells in his pockets.

The native ones.

He possibly brought oysters with them on his journeys when he was sailing as a source of food. Who knows? He had oyster shells on the boat. He was at sea. It was easy to keep him alive with a bucket of water that you keep putting fresh water in with live food. Maybe they brought oysters as a food source with them when they went on their trips.

Who knows? You need strength when you’re exploring.

That was about 540 A.D. when they reckoned he found America. 1,000 years later, it was Columbus who put it on the map.

When you read your history books, there may be more to it than what meets the eye.

From there, we needed a wise traditions pit stop, didn’t we?

We did.

We had to although we had a lot of seafood, so we were doing okay, but we were doing great. Some of the hospitality business can be very hit-and-miss when you’re used to a wise traditions diet. We stopped at Rigney’s Farm. We met the Southwest chapter in Ireland here of the Weston A. Price Foundation. With Brendan and Caroline, we stayed in Rigney’s Farm Bed and Breakfast where they raised all their own food. They have their own herd of rare breed pigs, cattle, and eggs. We had a beautiful dinner with beef rib and breakfast with our own organic, free-range bacon and eggs. It was divine.

We had kefir and raw milk. Raw milk is legal here.

Raw Milk Revival: The Fight For Food Freedom In Ireland

Those guys down there were all involved in that raw milk campaign, fighting to get raw milk made legal. What happened to the raw milk? That was back in the ‘80s. The Irish government didn’t want raw milk here. The EU said that raw milk was okay. It was crazy at the time. We were fighting for raw milk here. I went on holiday to Sardinia. I remember walking down the street and there was a vending machine where people were coming with their bottles and filling up raw milk. All the scientific literature was printed and on display there. You could read about all the scientific research on why raw milk is better for you.

I took a photograph and I sent it to guys in Ireland. I said, “What’s going on? We’re supposed to be in the European Union. It’s supposed to be the same laws for all of us. They’re selling raw milk in vending machines in Sardinia.” The guys in Ireland have been put in prison for it, nearly. It was not far off, but they were threatened with their farms being closed and everything. In the end, they won the battle. There were some sad results for some people. It was a very tough battle for them along the way. We have raw milk in Ireland. We had lovely raw milk and kefir there. We had all the bacon, beef, and eggs. We got ourselves set up for the next leg of the journey.

What’s so beautiful is someone who is so well-nourished, like Caroline Rigney of Rigney’s Farms, she is making her whole place a healing space. When we were there, she was talking about having different healing modalities and protocols available there so that people can come for retreats. I hope to have a return visit there.

It’s going to be a pit stop on my Western adventures from now on.

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Coming up, Stephen describes a particular oyster restoration project that he’s familiar with. He also highlights the benefits of seaweed baths among other wise traditions in Ireland.

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Restoring Ireland’s Native Oyster Population For Future Generations

I spend a lot of time in the West on oyster business. Rigney’s will be on my agenda from now on. After that, we went to the hatchery in County Clare in the Burren, which is a very unique landscape. It’s almost like a lunar landscape. The water there is exceptionally clean. There’s a hatchery there run by Iarfhlaith Connellan. Iarfhlaith is doing a trial for us on the oyster restoration.

We have a lot of this oyster shell from our production process. These oysters, when they spawn, like to settle on other oyster shells. They have a little free-swimming larval phase, and then they stick to a substrate. A lot of the time, that substrate is an oyster shell. These oysters, when they’re spawning, like to find places where other oyster shells have been and stick to them. It’s them saying, “There were other oysters here before, so it must be a safe place to live. If the other guys survived here, we could survive here.” They do that.

We don’t have so much of that shell. We have a lot of this shell, which is the introduced gigas species. We’ve put this shell in huge ponds there at the hatchery. There are a million liters of water in each of these ponds. The oysters are spawning at the moment. That’s why we went to check on the progress. There is a really good settlement on these oyster shells. He had ranged from 4 to 17 oysters per shell settling. They are tiny baby oysters, only about half a millimeter in size at the moment. You need a microscope to look at them. That’s positive.

We’re going to put those shells out into the sea there and see how they survive. This is all part of our proof of concept so we can then turn around and say, “He has ten ponds there. We can fill these with oyster shells, put the adult oysters in, and let them settle on this oyster shell. We take the oyster shell out, put it back out at sea, recreate the whole oyster reef system again, and start the process.” We can do this all around the coastline and create what we call meta populations of oysters. As they grow and then come to maturity and spawn, we restart the whole process again. Do you remember with the old cars, you had to wind the engine up?

I wasn’t alive at that time, but I’ve heard of it.

It’s a bit like that. We’re trying to wind up the system again to get it started again or kickstart the whole reproduction process for the native oysters. They’ll take over themselves and it will be self-perpetuating and self-generating from then on.

That’s so encouraging. You replenish the oyster population in that area, and then hopefully, that will be replicated in other places.

When we put the initial population, and that should self-sustain, there are still a lot of questions we need to answer on that. How many do we need to put in? How big is the area? What are the oceanic conditions in the area? There’s a lot of work to do. That’s what we’re at at this point, is proof of concept. Groups from all over the world can come and look at our sites and we can say to them, “This is how you do it.” They can go back to their countries and say, “This is how we restore the oysters in our country and bring this really important source of food back to the table again.”

As you pointed out to me, this source of food is the epitome of slow food because it takes three years for the oyster to get big enough for us to harvest it and benefit from its significant meat, right?

Absolutely. These ones are even slower. These are 4 or 5 years to grow. The introduced species can be in 2 and a half to 3 years and they can get up to a size that we can eat them. It’s even less in some places where they grow very fast.

They have so many important nutrients to the body. It’s a wonderful source.

The original paleo food and the ultimate in nutrient density.

You start every day with oysters, right?

Most days. At least 5 out of 7. I have a few oysters in the morning as part of my routine. It’s a great way to start.

I’m hooked.

The only slight problem with them is they’re the greatest hors d’oeuvre in the history of gastronomy. They’re really stimulating digestive uses. If I start with four oysters, by lunchtime, I am ravenous.

Your body’s like, “Where’s the rest of it? I’m ready now.”

We went to see our oyster restoration. We saw ancient middens from many years ago. We saw a working fishery in the modern day that has been sustained well. We then saw our restoration efforts on the West Coast, which are going to be brought back to the East Coast and all over the world eventually, hopefully, and certainly all over Europe to restore the oysters.

It’s like the past, the present and the future.

We looked at another tradition which was horse riding. It is a very old tradition as well, a man and beast as one. Hilda went horse riding on the West Coast in County Galway on a Connemara pony. We asked where the Connemara pony came from. It turns out that the Spanish Armada, when they were shipwrecked in the West of Ireland, let their horses go and they bred with the native species. The Connemara pony was born. Like Hilda, they’re half-Spanish.

That’s right. There’s something about the Irish landscape. It really is stunning. The sheep grazed on the hills, which we could see from the pony’s back and the sea. I even saw cattle by the sea, which I didn’t expect to observe. I’ve never seen that before.

The cattle like to go down the beach and eat the seaweed. Seaweed that washes up from the kelp beds offshore, they eat that. It is a part of their diet. Cattle like salt. It’s quite salty. They probably go down there for their salt and other nutrients. I am not in agriculture, but they put salt blocks out for the cattle to lick. They like salt. The sea would’ve been a great place to get into and come out of the sea. We did a wise tradition of horse riding, and then we did the seaweed bats. That was our wise traditions cosmetic treatment.

Everything that comes from the earth has more goodness in it than we may realize. There is a little spa there in this local town. Clifton offered seaweed baths. You would drop a bath and have the seaweed in it. The seaweed was so rich in its nutritive elements that we ended up with this algae-like substance all over.

It’s like jelly. The alginates come out of the seaweed. When you were rubbing it off, it was incredible. It was my first time to have one. I’m going to do that more often.

It’s amazing. In case we look very young, it’s because of the glowing effects of the seaweed.

There’s a seaweed industry here in Ireland and all over Europe. The alginates from those seaweeds are used as food thickeners in the food industry and the cosmetic industry a lot. In a cosmetic tube of face cream or whatever, it needs tiny amounts of the fucoid and different compounds from the seaweed. This is the way to do it. It was a nutrient-dense cosmetic treatment that we had. It was amazing. You could use the seaweed as a scrub. I highly recommend that to anyone, for sure.

Wise Traditions | Stephen Kavanagh | Ireland — Ireland: Nothing is wasted in nature.

It reminds me that nothing is wasted in nature either. Most of us modern people go to the beach and we think, “Why is the seaweed here? This is so annoying.” It’s part of the food chain and part of the nutrition that’s available to us if we would only take it in. We did this in a little spa setting. The next time you’re at the beach, get some of that seaweed, rub it on you, and see what happens.

Love is a wise tradition and a very important aspect of who we are, and very important for your overall health and wellness.

Go take a bath. Our last endeavor on the West Coast was the Galway Arts Festival, which is a fantastic arts festival that runs in Galway in the summer for two weeks. We went to see a play by a contemporary Irish playwright called The Map of Argentina. That was a story of love and all the things that love can do to you and all the trouble it can get you into. We discussed that. Love is a wise tradition. It’s a very important aspect of who we are and what we are. It’s important for your overall health and wellness.

We were discussing how loneliness has a higher mortality rate than cigarette smoking. Studies have been done on this. Babies that aren’t touched tend to wither away and die because they lack that human connection. We’ve felt the love in all of our adventures with you but also as a wise tradition as part of Irish culture. We felt it all.

Loneliness has a higher mortality rate than cigarette smoking. Babies that aren’t touched tend to wither away and die because they lack human connection.

It’s that coming together of men, women, families, and communities. It’s that love that keeps them together. That’s so important for health, longevity, and everything. My son told me about a study they did where they put different groups of professionals together in conditions to see how they would survive. Some had groups of scientists, lawyers, doctors, and all these people. You would think the ones with the lawyers, doctors, and scientists would’ve survived better. It was the one with the artists that survived the best because you can’t work all the time. It was the downtime.

The importance of the arts to our quality of life can never be underestimated. It’s really important. As you go back through time through all the wise traditions, art, entertainment, laughter, and community, all those things were an important part of ancient cultures. In Ireland, for example, the chieftains supported the arts. It was incumbent on them to support the arts. They all had musicians, poets, and writers in the castles . They were a big part of it. It wasn’t all work.

The importance of the arts to our quality of life can never be underestimated.

When we were at the National Museum here in Dublin, we were observing ancient ornamental jewelry for ancient people’s collars, crowns, bracelets, buttons, and little things that do add to life. It’s not just about utilitarian function. It’s about connection with beauty.

We did that and then we came back East. We took two little pit stops on the way, one at another castle because Hilda loves castles. W e then stopped to see what probably is at the core of wise traditions, a newborn baby. My nephew and niece had a newborn baby. We stopped to see a two-week-old baby, Itha Henry.

The future right there in our arms.

That’s what it boils down to. Everything we do is about the next generation or the future generations to make sure that what they inherit is fit for purpose. It was great to see her. We paid her a visit and then onwards to Dublin, which is where we are. We had our last day in Dublin where we went to the National Museum. That was the history of the people that lived on this island. They found bodies in the bogs of preserved human remains that are thousands of years old. It had all the gold that was found, all the history of the jewelry, the artifacts of everything.

These bog bodies, what was impressive to me is they were able to study even what they had eaten before they passed. They could determine what season it was by what they had eaten. If they had a lot of plants and not a lot of meat, it meant it was spring or summer. If they had a lot of meat, they probably died in winter when meat was plentiful. They were able to hunt resting or hibernating venison or deer. I’m not sure. They were able to analyze that. Also, I feel like at the museum, I was looking at the ancient spaces like Tara, which we didn’t get to visit. It showed me how much more there is to explore. It showed me lands where people inhabited and established some settlements. Some of them are not there any longer, I suppose.

There’s more to see. We did that and we went to Trinity College. Kknowledge again. We went to the old library at Trinity College, which has 250,000 manuscripts. They’re in the process of renovating and restoring the whole library, an incredible building. It goes way back in time. It was built on the site of aLL Hollows, which was an old monastery that the early Christian nuns occupied. They have 250,000 manuscripts there. Another wise tradition, transferring knowledge through books and literature to the next generation

From the floor to the ceiling. We’re talking tomes of books. Some of them were removed for restoration, cataloging, and so forth. It was so impressive. The hall was one that the cinematographers for Harry Potter copied in making their little hall where they were having the kids eat at school at Hogwarts. It was fantastically long.

There is a replica of it in Harry Potter. That’s right. The Trinity College houses the Book of Kells, which is an ancient Irish manuscript with 600 pages of the most intricate detailed calligraphy by the monks. It was found in a bog. The Vikings stole it from a monastery. They kept a gold case and threw the book away. Somebody found it and restored it.

You can go see that at Trinity College. The artwork is incredible. It makes you remember what these guys were doing in all the monasteries here. They were transcribing the gospels. It was incredible work. It was very important work all over Europe at a time in the Middle Ages when Europe was ransacked by the Visigoths. A lot of the libraries were burnt to the ground. After that when they went away, they were able to come to Ireland to these monasteries and get copies of all the important manuscripts and bring them back to Europe. It was an important repository here for literature.

These copies were painstakingly written by hand, especially the Book of Kells, which was the four gospels. The detail and the care which they had to put into it. No errors could be made. There were illustrations to embellish the words and maybe bring home some of the content for those who couldn’t read. It was very impressive. We only got to see two pages of the Book of Kells itself but we read a lot about it and learned about it. We were filled up to the brim with knowledge and also good food. You took us to the best places.

There’s fantastic food all over the country.

That takes me back to the question I asked you earlier, and I love this. When I asked you, “What are the traditional Irish dishes?” You said, “It’s not so much the dishes as the ingredients.”

I wouldn’t say there’s what we call Irish cuisine like you have in France or Italy because Ireland has had such a tumultuous past. I don’t think it had time to develop. Certainly in France, Italy, and Spain, you have a different culinary tradition. Here, we have incredible seafood, lamb, beef, and dairy. With those ingredients, you can do so much. You don’t need a lot of sauce when you’ve got good ingredients.

That’s true. I feel like we’ve covered almost everything.

Except last night.

Riverdance: A Celebration Of Irish History, Music, And Dance

Tell us about last night.

We went to Riverdance, which is the history of the people of this land from the earliest settlers who came here right up to the present day that is told through song and dance. It’s a visual spectacle. It’s fantastic. It incorporated all the old Irish dance, Spanish flamenco, probably highlighting the story of the Spanish Armada which had a huge effect on Ireland, and right up to the Eastern European dances, the Kazakh dancers, and all that. It was a history from the beginning to the present day through song and dance.

I like to think that on this trip, we covered a lot of wise traditions. Sometimes, what comes out of your mouth is almost as important as what goes into it because what comes out of your mouth is how you relate to the world and how you love, laugh, talk, communicate, and all these things. That is very important. It is also how you keep toxic people and toxic forces away from you. That is a big problem because our food supply has been taken over. We’ve been separated from nature. We need to get back there. We need to get back to that ecological baseline of our traditional diets and traditional ways of living.

In the Riverdance presentation, it was a whole history but it also gave me insight into the mystical beauty of Ireland. When the young women would sing, their voices sounded like the voices of angels. When they would dance, they’d look like those little fairies or sprites that I’ve heard of that are associated with Ireland. It did tie up everything with a bow. There is mystery, mysticism, and magic that is associated with Ireland too and I look forward to exploring more in the future.

You visited a fairy ring. We didn’t see any fairies. We didn’t see any leprechauns.

We tried to enter very respectfully.

We may have heard the Banshee screaming. I didn’t hear it, thank God.

I knew coming here that there were a lot of legends and folklore associated with Ireland. One I did not know about was this Banshee. One night in my hotel room, I heard a scream. It was frightening. It woke me up and my husband as well who was visiting. We mentioned it to Stephen. You can tell them the story.

It was possibly the Banshee. There’s a female deity in Irish folklore called the Banshee. When you hear her scream, there’s an impending doom coming, usually the death of a relative or someone in the community. It is said that the Banshee only screams for certain clans. Hilda might have been indoctrinated into one of the Irish clans because I’ve never heard the Banshee scream.

It was very unusual.

It’s hair-raising, they say.

We were glad that when we rode the horses, no one fell off. All has been well so far. I would like to have more encounters like that in the future, not with a banshee but with some of the mystical sprites that are about here.

We’re sitting here in Ireland, in Clontarf Castle. Clontarf was the site of the Battle of Clontarf in 1012 A.D. It’s where the Irish fought with the Vikings and the Vikings finally left Ireland. Migration is a big topic all over the world at the moment. That was one wave of migration. Prior to that, it was the Celts. There were different races that came here all the time. We’re talking about migration again. The progression of humanity comes in waves. People move and they move to different areas. That has been part of humanity since time immemorial. The earliest settlers to come here came with oysters. The oysters helped them come here.

That’s right. The oysters helped them explore. Remember St. Brendan. If you want to come over to Ireland or check out unknown territories, fuel yourself with oysters. May the wind be always at your back. How does that go?

May the road rise to meet you, the wind be always at your back, the sun on your face, and so forth. It’s quite a long one. I don’t know all that.

That’s good enough. Thank you so much for your time and for this whole synopsis of some of the beautiful highlights of wise traditions in Ireland.

There’s lots more to do here, so we’ll see you again.

I hope so.

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Our guest is Stephen Kavanagh. You can visit his website, Marine Healthfoods, to learn more. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. I’ll close with a simple reminder to follow the show on your favorite platform or download our app. We have an app. Simply put Wise Traditions in the search bar on your phone, whether it’s an iOS or an Android, and you’ll find the app so you can get the episodes downloaded immediately to your phone. Thank you so much for tuning in. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Stephen Kavanagh

Stephen is a marine biologist with 30+ years-experience in shellfish production and processing. This has culminated in a range of marine extracts made by his company Marine Health Foods, based in Ireland. The journey from childhood to University in Wales, Alaska for research, to founder of a company smoking oysters, making nutrient dense gastronomy and now dietary extracts for human nutrition has not been uneventful, to say the least. Lots to do and learn but only one life! Visit MarineHealthFoods.com for more information on Stephen’s work and products.