Brian Kaller's articles on politics
Road to the Riots
Our Bitter Elections
Our Bitter Elections
More than 20 percent of Ireland’s population is now foreign-born, and the number of asylum-seekers increased by 415 percent last year. Seventy percent were male, and almost 40 percent had false or no passports.
Our Bitter Elections
Our Bitter Elections
Our Bitter Elections
On Election Night 2016 I was part of a panel on Irish television, and I was struck by how everyone called it “the most contentious election in U.S. history.” I remarked that the 1860 election, which resulted in a million deaths, might have been a bit worse.
Keeping Speech Free
Our Bitter Elections
The Lost Classical World
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Most of us imagine that if we had lived when slavery existed, or the Nazis were taking power, we would have been on the side that we now know to be right. If you think that, ask yourself this: do you have the same opinions as all your friends?
The Lost Classical World
The Lost Classical World
The Lost Classical World
Irish teachers formed underground networks to teach the classics, and children across Ireland secretly learned them. P.J. Dowling repeats reports by eighteenth-century travelers of poor, ragged boys “well acquainted with the best Latin poets.” One visitor in the 1840s reported that even the poor farmers of Country Kerry knew their Latin.
A Stranger Here Myself
The Lost Classical World
A Stranger Here Myself
When you see your countrymen tear each other apart online—and from across the ocean you have no other points of reference—it is easy to forget that most people don’t spend all day on Twitter; they are too busy working, trying to keep their finances and sanity together. They are not crusaders in a war so much as bystanders in a Godzilla movie, trying to dodge the fallout from the battle overhead.
Nation of the Learned
The Lost Classical World
A Stranger Here Myself
The belief in progress, held by almost every man, woman and child today, crumbles the instant one reads books or journals or letters or school-papers from a century ago. Children used to read sophisticated literature that few college students attempt anymore. So did mechanics and farm-hands, house-wives and fishermen.
Brian kaller's Articles on traditional ireland
Secret Life of Children
Secret Life of Children
Secret Life of Children
Running beneath our official history is the unofficial history of childhood games and rituals, many of which were passed down for generations; children inhabited a separate universe of traditions, contests, solemn rituals and codes of honour, like a Viking horde living in your house unnoticed.
Keeping Crafts Alive
Secret Life of Children
Secret Life of Children
Author Rod Dreher says that “By sharing memories of the Irish elders, Brian offers a penetrating critique of modernity, and shows us that the way forward to a more humane future is through the past.”
Singing Lessons
Secret Life of Children
Singing Lessons
The songs told children who their people were and why this day was different. They kept the rhythms of churns and scythes, of tanneries and looms, and grew and changed as they were passed on. They were sung secretly about the days when earthly kings would be overthrown, by farmers who feared a rapping at the winter door.
Real Prosperity
Christmas during the Forgetting
Singing Lessons
I grew up a few miles from the highest-crime ghetto in America, with a median income of $33,000 a year. Irish people in the 1970s were making far less, so you’d think they’d have far more problems. Yet Ireland then had so little crime that a single murder was a nationwide event, robbery and drugs almost unknown, and almost everyone kept their doors unlocked.
Christmas during the Forgetting
Christmas during the Forgetting
Christmas during the Forgetting
In every place we have been human – mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, teenagers and children gathered around campfires and hearths, around tables and altars, and shared the songs and stories, skills and recipes, that made them who they were. Now only the older people remember such things, while the kids sitting next to them have an interior world formed by screens.
Silence of the Corncrake
Christmas during the Forgetting
Christmas during the Forgetting
When farmers heard the cry of the corncrake, they knew the hay was ready to be cut, Mary Fogarty said. Her mother added a special addition to the rosary, and the priest said a prayer for sunshine. All the farmers for miles around brought their pitchforks and scythes and formed a team–a meithal [pronounced mee-hall]—to cut each man’s fields one by one, making light work by their many hands.
Brian kaller's articles on homesteading
The Lives of Others
The Lives of Others
The Lives of Others
We accept buying meat from strangers for the same reasons we buy everything else in our lives from strangers these days; because we trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing. We don’t picture supply chains so long and cobwebby that we can’t find out what kind of animal it used to be, or in what country, or how it lived.
Pickling Apples
The Lives of Others
The Lives of Others
Almost every food in Nature, whether foraged, hunted or harvested, remains edible for only a brief time unless preserved. Since humans need to eat all year round, however, thousands of pre-refrigerator generations depended on how well they could preserve food by making it too dry for microscopic critters (grains, herbs), too acid (vinegar pickles), too alkaline (limewater eggs), too salty (sauerkraut, bacon) or sweet (jams).
Butter from a Bog
The Lives of Others
The World Made by Hand
For thousands of years people have been burying butter under the spongy surface of boglands, where organic matter doesn’t rot as it does elsewhere. These large chunks of butter or beef tallow might be 2,000, 3,000, even 5,000 years old, and they are usually still (technically) edible, though they’re said to have a sharp, cheese-like smell.
The World Made by Hand
The World Made by Hand
The World Made by Hand
They were made for a nation of craftsmen -- saddlers, thatchers, farriers, smiths, cobblers -- people who bore in themselves the power that all humans once had, to reshape wood and hide and stone into a human landscape. It was a world that humans had known and made and remade through the ages of the world, until less than a century ago.
History of Woven Boats
The World Made by Hand
History of Woven Boats
Humans around the world, whether jungle tribes or Eskimos, whether in the Stone Age or the Industrial Revolution, wove baskets into boats. Who first thought of it we don’t know; the first basket fragments we have were about 13,000 years old, but we have circumstantial evidence that humans might have been weaving boats almost four hundred centuries earlier. Not four hundred years, by the way – four hundred centuries.
Building with Cob
The World Made by Hand
History of Woven Boats
Cob is a mixture of sand, straw and clay – the subsoil under most topsoil will do fine. To make a cob mixture, you combine the elements in a certain ratio and mix them together wet, usually by treading on them with your feet. Then you pick up handfuls of the mixture and stack them on top of each other in a row. Finally, you stand on the row and tread it in, and you get a wall. The effect is one of sculpting your own building.