EARLY EPISODE: The Fenian Ram
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A half-blind Irish immigrant to the US freelance develops the first modern submarine with funds from the Fenian Brotherhood. This leads to a lot of arguments and a late-night submarine jacking.
SOURCES:
Davies, R. Nautilus: The Story of Man Under the Sea
Lyons, Chuck. The Holland Submarine. Military Heritage. August 2008. Vol 10, no. 1
Devoy Tells Story of First Submarine: Holland Warship Purchased for Clan-na-Gael, The Original Owners, by Harry Cunningham”, The Gaelic American, New York, 09 July 1927
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1935/august/fenian-ram
https://www.millrivertrail.com/learn/famous-stolen-submarine
Comments (41)
Lewis Nixon I, the guy who worked with Holland, was the grandfather of Lewis Nixon III of "Band of Brothers" fame.
O'Penheimer splits the potato.
“we should forgo getting paid to build the world’s first podcast ship” - the Armenian Ram ?
The concept of potato fission has me in stitches.
Lol “Edmunds’ Fitzgerald.” What a great reference.
Oh god I totally forgot the "throw wet TP at the ceiling" nonsense. Very funny when you noticed someone stuck a very brown wad up.
This episode has made me very, very sad in a way that only fellow fans of Sir Terry Pratchett will understand. 29 years ago saw the publication of Jingo, in which Havelock Vetinari, Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon used Leonard da Quirm's Going Underwater Safely Device to stop a war with Klatch. Leonard's Device was a submarine powered by Nobby and Colon pedalling bicycles. And now I'm wondering what marvellous creations were never spawned from STP's vast knowledge of science, geography, history, engineering and Stuff. Before this I was only always sad that we never got the case where Sam Vimes and Miss Susan have to team up to stop the Auditors of Reality.
Slaps was a good game...there was also knuckles, which was similar.
That hacky sack game was definitely played in Australia as well. We called it "horse" if you fucked up and it hit the ground you'd get the letter "H" and so on if it kept happening. If you ended up spelling the full word you would pretty much need to stand against the wall and somebody would piff the hacky sack at you. The alternative was called "arse", same gameplay but the loser would have the hacky sack thrown at their arse.
I never played the Horse version. Only the Arse version.
19thC metal gear ass story
It wasn’t until a ways through the second time I listened that I realized you said “[adjective] mecha”, not “Mecca”. I was just imagining an Irish flying Qabba each time
This episode seems like a WTYP topic that they avoided due to it likely being 5 hours if they got a hold of it
Joe plays Squad! One of us!
a footnote that i think was left out: Holland would found a company to build submarines, called the "Holland Torpedo Boat Company". It would go on to form a major part of the "Electric Boat Company" in 1900... which would go on to become *General Dynamics* A direct line can be drawn from Holland to nuclear submarines!
I was just gonna say this too, lol
Thank you for this show. Holland was a childhood hero of mine I hadn’t though about in years.
Truculent Zebra and Sensual Camel are excellent band names.
Pol Pot was secretly in charge of that shipyard.
“I think that’s the closest that I’ve ever come to mentally cuming.” Joe Kassabian March 17th, 2026
Don't need to be over 40 to have shuddered at the mention of the Christian Brothers. Enough horror stories to make me wonce when I heard it.
Hmmm smart whale, fenny ram... that's the Capricorn goatfish
Camels cheat at beauty pageants
Well the orcs are less based on the Irish but on the fomorians (the big eye & everything) but the TdD are conceptualized as a people that was there before the Irish so... are the Irish fomorian
Overlap between Irish & Spain it's the iberocelts; the Galicians.
legitimately could have been me calling joe’s buddy a stinky croat
"Spitting and trampling is my love language." - A camel, probably
Or a llama.
I love this guy. He just wanted to make the cool thing, and he completely succeeded.
"Nothing to do with fur suits" Joe Kassabian - 2026
Water based Soulja Boy? Sailja Boy.
Book pre-ordered. it sounds interesting, I look forward to reading it.
Tom has a retroactive Lathe of Heaven
Nothing to do with fur suits.
Tom: Irish will invent the Dyson Sphere I mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_sphere (OK, they’re not quite the same thing)
I'm not generally inclined to believe there are inherent differences between boys and girls but the last ten minutes of this episode are testing my principles
For those who don’t get the joke ab Dominic Burke being part of a long line of men who wait outside of schools: it’s a reference to Enoch Burke who was a school teacher who got fired because he was being a chud about student pronouns, and in protest waited outside of his former school. His family regularly does shit like this.
Using a submarine as a tool of hit-and-run warfare is actually extremely common. Convoy raiding is a major application for them in large scale wars. I don't see why it wouldn't have worked for the Irish aside from the inherent cost and unreliability of it being the first ever.
I think it was these guys who had an episode on the accidental Confederate suicide submarine, which killed three entire crews of desperately-needed technical experts and wasted a huge amount of scarce resources and time. To this day, countries which lack a robust ship-repair industry rule out even trying to operate a standard off-the-shelf model which you can just buy wholesale as part of a production run of like 20, like the ones the Germans sell at bargain-basement prices. The price is not the problem, the maintenance and crew are
Turns out the first actual Irish space program produces Spudnik.
If this is mentioned in the episode, I apologize in advance. But the Wolfe Tones actually have a song about the Fenian Ram. https://youtu.be/RIjN-e-OdtQ?si=_y12rMI_L7F_JTnp