Samhain Strange in the Neighborhood👻

So, What’s the Craic?

Today is a big day at Shift! The first group of beta testers have their hands on the app. 💪 Next week we’ll unlock another bunch, and the week after, sure ye’ll all be invited. To the small bunch of lucky punters already in, thank you! 🙏 And for the rest of you, sit tight for now. It will be worth the wait. If you haven’t entered your details yet, head on over here to request your beta invite. And if you’ve got friends or family you want in on the action, send them to this super-secret webpage: https://gettheshift.app/beta.

News from Home

Welcome to Derry. Europe’s biggest Halloween party has its conclusion today in Derry City, with scary fun for all ages on the agenda. The event attracts around 100,000 visitors, including an increasing number of international tourists. It’s part of the wider “Home of Halloween” campaign from the Irish tourist board to bring visitors to the island to celebrate the holiday that we (kind of) invented.

U-F-NO. A mysterious object was spotted in Irish skies this week, leading to some speculation that we were about to be invaded by aliens with a hankering for creamy pints of stout and real butter. Alas, the truth was a bit more prosaic: It seemed the light in the sky was part of yer man Elon Musk’s rocket ship falling back to earth.

Back from the Grave. An entire book could be written about the filming of Divine Rapture in County Cork in the mid-1990s. The ill-fated movie, which starred Big (literally and figuratively at the time) Marlon Brando, was canned after two weeks of filming, bankrupting producer Barry Navidi. Now there are plans to resurrect the movie, although apparently only 24 minutes of footage exist. Ballycotton, the Cork town used for filming, has a headstone erected on Main Street, reading “Divine Rapture, born 10th July 1995, died 23rd July 1995, RIP”. Time to get the chisel out.

Marathon Woman. The Dublin Marathon took place last week, featuring plenty of international running stars and fair few eeijits running around in costumes for good causes. But the absolute star of the show was 19-year-old Limerick woman Ava Crean. She took the Irish woman’s national title in a time of just over 2hrs 30mins, but the amazing thing is that Ava only started running marathons six months ago. Legend.

New President. Oh, we should mention that Catherine Connelly, as expected, won the Irish Presidential race in a landslide. Heather Humphries was very gracious in defeat, saying that “Catherine will be a president for all of us, and she will be my president, and I really would like to wish her all the very, very best." If only every election ended this way.

The Craic Recommends. Many of you will stick on a scary movie tonight, probably while chomping down the “candy tax” you stole from the neighborhood kids or, shamefully, your own progeny. But rather than watch The Conjuring or Halloween for the billionth time, why not try something different? The BFI has a list of the top ten modern Irish horror movies, and there are some frighteningly good choices in there. Our personal favorite is All You Need Is Death, the tale of a failed folk singer who becomes obsessed with finding a thousand-year-old Irish ballad. Mucho spookiness ensues thereafter. 

The Irish Influence

Today’s naturally a day when many of the great Irish horror writers get recognition. But we’d like to concentrate on someone a little more quietly influential than the Stokers and Le Fanus of the genre – Charles Maturin – who published Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820. The story charts the life of John Melmoth, who sells his soul to the Devil in a pact for 150 extra years of life. Only problem for Aul John is that those 150 years are close to being up, leading him to wander in search of someone to take his place, lest he be dragged down to you-know-where to pay his dues to the big red lad with the pitchfork. Now, that’s the simplistic version, seemingly little different from many tales of Faustian pacts. Yet, Melmoth the Wanderer has also been described as stories within stories within stories. It’s a complex masterpiece, championed by the great Honoré de Balzac and American prince of the macablre, Edgar Allen Poe. Oh, and a bit of trivia: Maturin was Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle. Wilde used the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth on his release from prison in 1897.

Cúpla Focal

Oíche Shamhna – Halloween. Literally meaning Night of Samhain (November), it’s today, yay! 🎃But rather than drone on about etymological whys and wherefores, we want to point you to a place where you can learn this stuff for yourself – sceal.ie. Sceal is the global hub for the Irish language, and it’s had a revamp, making it more accessible to learners than ever before.

Blast from the Past

Back in 1999, Aslan played five sold-out shows in Dublin’s Vicar Street. The Finglas rockers have had a 40-plus-year career, but were arguably at the height of their fame in the 1990s. Anyway, during those legendary gigs, then-frontman Christy Dignam, who sadly passed away in 2023, got the audience involved in a bit of a sing-along, using a “man in a white-t-shirt” as a kind of human border to split the crowd for the purpose of said sing-along. A quarter of a century later, the band has sent out a national appeal to find said man in the white t-shirt. It’s all part of the celebrations as the band gets set to tour again. Are you a man? Did you own a white t-shirt in 1999 AD? Did you go to the Aslan gig at Vicar Street? If yes to all three, you can find the band’s appeal page here. It could be you.

And One Last Thing….

What would you do if you suddenly inherited an Irish castle? It may sound like a corny Netflix movie plot, but it was all very real for Randall Plunkett. Plunkett officially is the Baron of Dunsany, but looks more like the guy who accidentally bangs into you and spills your beer at a Metallica concert. The inheritance started a strange and wonderful journey for Plunkett, prompting him to consider both the concept of aristocracy and our wider role in nature. In 2014, he started a rewilding process, giving his land back to nature. The rewilding has been covered on and off by the Irish media over the last decade – the tabloids like to call him the “Death Metal Baron” – but it’s been remarkable to chart the transformation of the land and Plunkett himself. He has now released a memoir – Wild Thing – and it’s fascinating and inspiring, but also scary, as Plunkett’s work shows us that much of Wild Ireland – the stuff that gives us the Emerald Isle moniker – has been lost.