How A Massacre Created Modern Capitalism: The Huguenot Legacy

0:00David McWilliams: Today is the anniversary, the 24th of August, 1572, of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Huguenots in France. We are going to talk all about the impact and economic legacy of French Calvinism, the French Huguenots, the French Protestants, how they arrived in Ireland, what they did in Ireland, what they did all over the world, and why their story is as relevant today as it was 300 years ago. That's all coming up in a couple of minutes.

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1:58David McWilliams: How are you doing there? It is, as you know, time for the podcast. The podcast that, let's remind ourselves, tries to make economics a little bit more comprehensible, a little bit more tangible, a little bit more relevant to your everyday life. If you are, just join us. Have a gander at our previous podcasts. We cover all sorts of stuff. You will enjoy it. It'll give you a sense of the range. If you are a weekly recidivist, it is great to have you as always. And of course, if you are a Patreon, it's even better to have you because you keep the whole thing going. Just so you know, Kilkenomics, which in effect is the podcast writ large, is going on sale on the 4th of September.

2:47David McWilliams: Although if you join us on Patreon, you will have first dibs. That is davidmcwilliams.ie forward slash crew. Sign up there and you will have first dibs on Kilkenomics. We have amazing, amazing guests, both economists and comedians. and we have a new series which is called The Marble Sessions, which is going to be music. Some amazing young musicians we are going to showcase as part of this year's Kilkenoffics. Anyway, enough of that carry on. John, do you know that today marks an auspicious day? Another auspicious day. Another auspicious day. What day is this now? It is the 24th of August. So this podcast will go out to Patreons on the 24th of August to the rest on the 25th.

3:35David McWilliams: But the 24th of August, 1572, John, was the Saint-Bartholomew-Day Massacre. Right. You're up to speed on your Calvinist history. I'm not, but I'm sure we will be by the end of the pod. So go on, tell me what happened. This happened in Paris, John. Right. And the reason we are focusing on this today is I have just spent a little bit of time in France on Millehors, and I have come across more than one or two little Huguenot temples, Calvinist temples, down the back streets typically of French cities. I was in Aix-en-Provence there the other day. Beautiful. Little small, little small. You know that place?

4:17David McWilliams: Gorgeous place. I did an album there many years ago. It's gorgeous. Did you? Really lovely. Yeah, yeah. A guy called Frank Eshigu. He had one big hit and kind of petered out after that. But still, I know. And then he got a brutal producer and his career never came back again. Question, this is a mastermind quiz for the Dave McGrinders podcast. Who destroyed the career of Frank Eshigu? It was from John Davis. Anyway, so, but the reason, so the Bertolement Days massacre is a massacre of French Calvinists, which was carried out on behalf of Catholic aristocracy who saw the French Calvinists, which are called the Huguenots, They saw them as an insider rebellion, as sort of a fifth column, a Protestant, in a sense, parallel power base in the French crown, in the French court.

5:11David McWilliams: Of course, France at that time was the biggest country in Europe, the most powerful country in Europe, but surrounded by Protestant enemies, England being the first one, Holland being the next one, and of course, further to the East, you had the Prussians and the Hessians and all sorts of various German states and statelets, which had converted to Lutherism, actually, over the course of the 16th century. Okay, so why are we talking about the Huguenots? Apart from your jollies that you had in France, what's going on? What's the relevance? The story of the Huguenots is the story of refugees. It is the story of expelled people.

5:52David McWilliams: It's the story of exile. but it's also the story of the beginning of what you would call capitalist economics. And this is interesting. It's also the story of the alliance, for the first time ever in economic history, of merchants and priests together. So it's a general way of looking at power and politics, John, over the course of human endeavours, since humans started to leave the nomadic existence, which we started to settle. You can look at politics and power through the lens of three distinct power bases. One are the priests, the priestly class, the Brahmins, whatever you want to call them, religious folk, who used superstition as a way to subjugate the masses.

6:44David McWilliams: So that's one power base. The second power base are the warriors, are the kings, and the warrior class used violence to subjugate the masses. And the third power base are the merchants and the merchants used money to buy influence and become the dominant creatures in the firmament. And if you look at economic history as a sort of a battle between these three extraordinary powerful subgroups, only in the last 200 years have the merchants emerged as the most powerful group. So up until then, it was really a battle between kings, priests and merchants. And the interesting thing about the Huguenots and the Calvinist revolution is that for the first time, up until Calvinism, the priests largely sided with the warrior classes against the merchants.

7:39David McWilliams: So if you take the Roman Empire, if you take even the Greeks, if you go all the way up through the Reformation, if you go all the way up through the various different feudal monarchs, if you look at the way in which, for example, the divine right of kings, remember that idea? So that the king got his power from the divine. And that was just an alliance of convenience between the priest class and the king, right? Now, always and everywhere, there has been this suspicion of the merchant because the merchant used money to buy power. And the merchant begins to emerge in, as we've said before, in the medieval time with the emergence of banking.

8:24And then the emergence of banking is in a way the artillery of the merchant to loosen the power both of the church and the power of the king. Now, up until Calvinism and Huguenotism, the priests always sided, as I said, with the warrior class to subjugate, A, the masses and undermine the merchants. Because the merchants were seen as slightly cosmopolitan. They were wedded to money, which wasn't religious. It was a different power. They tended to be more live and let live. They tended to want to be peaceful. They tended to want commerce. And one of the things you see then throughout the ages is city-states, which were largely driven by merchants, always avoided war.

9:09Right. Yeah, yeah. Because they realised that war was absolutely contrary to making money because nothing more destroys wealth than war. So what you see is city-states were always... Until you get to America these days, where it's all about making money.

9:27David McWilliams: But it's not a city-state. I mean, America is a big nation-state. America is a massive nation-state. But if you look at the small, what they were called, free cities, there's a German expression called Stadluftmacht frei, which is a German medieval expression, which means the air in the city makes you free. And what this was, was this idea that when the people leave the countryside, they come to the city, they get ideas, they get notions of sovereignty, they get notions of aspirations, of careers, all that sort of stuff. And so what you get typically is free cities or places where there was more open discourse, there was more ideas, all that sort of stuff.

10:02But what makes the Huguenots interesting was that the Huguenots created through Calvinism a bizarre alliance of the church, the new church, and the merchants against the kings. And this is why they were so violently subjugated. and this is why so many things in Ireland have Huguenot names. That's the interesting thing. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. What interests me is two things. One is what happened to the Huguenots, but the other one is this strange idea that when something happens which seems completely unrelated in one country, like the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre in France, within 70 years, this had to translate it into a significant dispossession of Irish Catholic landlords by Protestants after the Battle of the Boyne and a significant chunk of those Protestants were Huguenots.

11:02So it's a kind of an interesting thing how the world works. And they are directly related, aren't they?

11:07David McWilliams: They're all directly related. So we're talking about this story. So it's a fascinating story. It's a summer story, dear listener. It's a summer story of economic history, of me farting around Exxon-Provence And a good old massacre. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I was also in a French city called Ansi last week. And Ansi was where the counter-reformation happened. So there was a reformation in Geneva. And then I was about 90 miles away from Ansi. And Ansi, the counter-reformation happened. So I was contemplating all these things. And then it was you who told me that today is the anniversary of the Bartolomeo Day Massacre.

11:45David McWilliams: So why not have a podcast? on the said thing. Okay, this gives you, if you're social ammunition in the pub, right? If you're going to sit down and talk to somebody today, tonight, you're going for a few scoops and you say, did you know, my friend, that today marks the anniversary of, this is what the podcast is all about. Anyway, so it's all about the Huguenots, power, the merchants, exile, and of course, the impact of Huguenots in Ireland. Okay, so let's start at the beginning then. And without going into deep, deep history, but give us the context of this and how we got to where we are today with a Huguenot cemetery on Merian Row.

12:27And a lot of the street names in Dublin are named after some of the Huguenots. How did all that happen?

12:33David McWilliams: Well, actually, we'll give you even a little bit more than just, do you know, if you go to Waterford, John, there's a thing called the blah in Waterford. A breakfast blah. And a bla is, in effect, a white bun. Yeah. And the bla comes from les blancs, from the French word blanc, which was a Huguenot baker introduced it from France in the 17th century. And it was a little type of bun that the French folk ate called le blanc. Blanc became bla, and bla became synonymous with Waterford. Now, why did they go to Waterford? because Waterford was the closest city to France. And so they all hoped when they were kicked out of France, we'll talk about that in a second, that they could probably get back in at some stage.

13:21David McWilliams: And so they settled, a lot of them settled in Waterford and Cork, A, because they were important mercantile and merchant centres, but also they were the closest parts of Ireland to France just in case they were let back in. You did talk about names. For example, De Lear Street in Dublin. Yeah. Huguenot name. Mercer Street, Huguenot name. French Street, obviously, Huguenots. La Touche Bridge in Portobello, named after William La Touche, who was the director of the Grand Canal Company that made the canals. Hipsters who hang out in Fumbly Lane, you know, the cafe, Fumbly Lane. That's another Huguenot name.

14:01David McWilliams: And of course, even the restaurant Hugues on Marion Row takes its name from the fact that it is adjacent to the Huguenot Cemetery, which is in Europe. Gotcha, right, okay. So they clearly had a major impact in Ireland, but who were they? Tell us about them. So they are products of the Reformation. So the Reformation is kicked off by Martin Luther in 1515 to 1545, that period. And Martin Luther is, in effect, a one-man propaganda machine for a new religion called Protestantism or Lutherism, right? Protestantism comes from I protest. So I protest against the Catholic Church in Rome, but the Catholic Church, the Christian Church.

14:51David McWilliams: So the fascinating thing about Lutherism, it spreads like wildfire. And Luther himself was an extraordinary, I've said it before, propagandist. And not only that, he was amazing at using the social media at the time, which was the printing press. And he also used what would have been the Twitter or X at the time, which is that Luther never wrote sentences. He wrote bullet points because he understood that very few people could read. But if he could get the people who could read to read the bullet points, they would then relay that to other people. So he was very, very clever as an agitator. Extraordinary.

15:30David McWilliams: He would be now regarded, John, as an influencer supreme, right? I was going to say, yeah, it's very kind of social media style, isn't it? And I suppose things haven't changed much. It was basically, he was doing Instagram reels before Instagram reels. This is Luther, okay? Little bite-sized messages. Now, of course, the French Calvinists were followers of Luther, but they were followers of a guy called John Calvin. So Calvin. And he set up shop in Geneva, right? because the Swiss Federation, or Confederation, they decided to become Protestants. And he began to convert thousands of people to this rebel cause.

16:11David McWilliams: And he mimicked Luther in the sense that his anti-Roman ideas were spread. They were spread by pamphlets. And his rebel pastors began gaining positions in urban parishes and larger free mercantile cities, consolidating this network. So it was really, really like social media. It was a network effect. Now Luther, of course, was the originator. He was at the centre of everything, churning out the ideas. But the network of pastors were communicating these thoughts to the congregations, who in turn were spreading the word. So you can imagine it's a viral movement, this anti-Rome rebellion. And of course, what we forget is that each discussion, whether it's in the back of a tavern, at a toll turnpike, at a market square, amongst the artisans' guilds, each discussion mandated people, who were never previously asked their opinion on anything before, apart from, let's say, the weather, right?

17:03So being mandated gave these people a feeling of sort of group participation. This is where the social media analogy is quite interesting. So wives were talking to husbands, bakers were arguing with butchers, goldsmiths with moneylenders, and the topic centered, of course, on these eternal questions of life, morality, the afterlife, and of course, salvation. So for the first time, people start talking about issues that had previously been the preserve of the priesthood, the Catholic priests, who said, don't you guys be worried about that.

17:38David McWilliams: Carry on. We'll figure it out. You just come to mass on a Sunday and we look after everything else. So what the Calvinists were doing is they were kind of liberating people. And this is the interesting thing about money, right? Because it wasn't all about morals. Money also drove Protestantism. So a major attraction of the new religion was that if you were a prince or a monarch and you converted to this new religion, you could then immediately deem the old religion to be null and void. but the old religion owned all the convents and owned all the monasteries and owned all the money. So, for example, Henry VIII in England, you know what we hear about Henry VIII?

18:20Henry VIII basically converted to Anglicanism, the religion he set up, not to marry all his wives but to rob the Catholics. And, of course, so he robbed all the monasteries' money and for him, he was always running out of money. He was called the great debaser because he used to always try to debate the currency, right? He was a brutal money manager. My aunt actually used to always say about Henry VIII that Anglicanism was born in the bollocks of Henry VIII.

18:47David McWilliams: Well, there you go now. But what I'm going to say is your auntie was half right. I'm saying the other thing that was really attractive is you could confiscate church lands. Right. And you could expropriate church property. So this was an incredibly attractive thing for princes and kings all over Europe because in effect it was a printing press. It allowed them to print money. So that's the first thing. So a noble man who was bankrupt, and typically noblemen were always bankrupt because it's still the case, the aristocracy are shy with money. Posh people are useless with money, right? That's why you always see them getting hoodwinked by swindlers and hustlers and everything.

19:26Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:27David McWilliams: Because they always say, we don't want to dirty our hands with commerce and things like that. And that's for the plebs, the commerce stuff. You know, we want to involve ourselves and the high arts. So they're brutal with money. But then they figured out, look, if we convert to this religion, we can rob all the money. So in a way, it was a one-way ticket out of bankruptcy for princes. So you can see there's two things going on. One is that it's a sort of a get-rich-quick scheme for indigent poshies if they switch. And who wouldn't go for that option? It's a brilliant option. So money is central to it.

20:01But the other thing about money is, and this is the crucial thing, So Christianity was held together by a couple of money-free beliefs, mainly articulated by Jesus when he said the meek will inherit the earth. So the idea was that having money in this world is not good. The rich man can't get through the eye of the needle, all that sort of stuff. The poor man is virtuous. So that's the message of Christianity. Now, whether or not the priests involve themselves with that, it doesn't matter. That's a key part of the brand of Christianity. The Protestants had a different view. And this is fascinating.

20:37So they stumbled upon a way, what they basically said is, everybody is predestined. And how do you see who is predestined or not? It is how they behave in the real world in this life. So basically what they said was, if you're involved in making money, if you're involved in free enterprise, if you were doing good works, using that money to do good works, then you are a chosen person. What a spin, huh? It's a great spin. Now, I think that basically early protestantism, John, okay?

21:18David McWilliams: It wasn't just a protest. Yeah, it's a tricky one, though, Mac. It was a tax avoidance strategy by kings, right? And small prince, right? But basically what they did, it constituted a break from older forms of Christianity because it celebrated acquiring money through hard work and good deeds and involving oneself in enterprise. So therefore, this radical approach to religion for the Calvinists meant that being rich and saving your money were earthly signs that you were predestined to a place in heaven. And this, of course, flipped traditional Christian thinking on its head because money and wealth were regarded as dodgy in old religion.

22:00So no longer will the meek inherit the earth. In fact, the wealthy and the people who are involved in good works will inherit the earth, according to the Calvins. Because it was proof that they worked hard for God. For God and for the good of society and all this.

22:16David McWilliams: So in a way, you can see that money acquired a religion through Calvinism. Because with Calvinism, the sacred and the profane joined forces for the first time ever. Now, they also required, Cavanagh also required, because it said that the relationship you have with God is personal and you don't need a priest to mediate it, therefore it required its members to read the Bible. So they promoted literacy everywhere. The Huguenots invest heavily in schools and reading. They produce populations that had measurably higher, what they would call now, human capital than the Catholic neighbors because everybody was reading.

22:57David McWilliams: So the Protestants were reading and the Catholics weren't. This is the fascinating thing, because the Catholics were told, you don't read the Bible, the priests will read it, the priests will tell you on Sunday what to do, you just get on with your life, right? The proletariat said, no, you go to work, you work hard, you come home, you read the Bible, and in order to read the Bible, you have to learn how to read. So they began to become much more literate than the Catholics, right? And of course, higher literacy rates, they had higher technical skills, they didn't also show their wealth. They were very austere.

23:30That's why if you look at, for example, any of the Dutch masters, right, which were peak Calvinism, everyone was in black. I don't know if you've ever seen that. If you look at all the Dutch masters, all the people wore black. And the irony is, wearing black was to signal that they were humble. But in fact, in reality, black was the most expensive dye in the world.

23:54David McWilliams: So it was a sort of a half signal, half not signal. But be that as it may, what you had was they reinvested, they didn't consume ostentatiously, they were literate, they were technical, and they also had strong, what they would call inter-Calvinist networks. So they banked with each other, they lent to each other, they did business with each other, and they did business across borders. So France to Holland, Holland to Hessian, Hessian to Germany, Germany to Britain, all those sort of things, right? Between Protestant countries, in other words. Between Protestant merchants in Protestant countries.

24:32Yes, yes. So what you have, the staple of Huguenot culture was commerce, as opposed to the staple of Catholic culture, which was agriculture, warriors, and priests. So the merchant, back to what I might do, the merchant is crucial to the Huguenot story. and of course in time because they had better skills because they could read they had not necessarily you know they talk about the work ethic it wasn't the work ethic that actually made them rich it was just the network they were really well never right okay now of course in time they started to dominate silks textiles maritime trade for in france during the first half of the 17th century, they became the wealthiest people in France outside of the aristocracy.

25:20And of course, in many French cities and ports, merchants, Protestant merchants carried out a huge amount of foreign trade, trade with the colonies, and they dominated textiles during the 16th and 17th century. So you're saying that with a focus on literacy and education, that that gave rise to new ideas and innovation, which gave rise to economic status. Exactly. So if that was so successful then as a kind of an approach to life and economics, what happened to them?

25:59David McWilliams: But before we answer that, John, like two good Huguenots, let's make a bit of money. Do some else.

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28:09So, Mike, the Huguenots became big merchants, big networks across Europe, and they were very successful. But in France, as we spoke about at the very top, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was the Catholics trying to wipe them out, Catholic France trying to wipe them out. Yeah. But that aside, the Huguenots ended up as refugees spreading across the world. So what happened to them? Where are they now? And what's their legacy?

28:42David McWilliams: Well, the interesting thing is the expression refugee comes from le refuge, which is the French title for what happened to them, which was the scattering of Huguenots all over France. So you have, for example, a tug of war between the Roman church and this new religion. And all over Europe, you have the 30 Years' War, you have massive sectarian wars, you have incredible instability because the Protestant faith is not just a threat to religion. It's a massive threat to the old order. because what it does is it undermines, because it's a merchant-driven power base, it undermines the church, but the monarchy as well.

29:29David McWilliams: Because the monarchy is thinking, hold on a second, if these guys are not loyal to the Vatican, the Vatican and myself are tied together due to the divine right of kings. Also, France's enemies abroad are, the big one is England, and the second big one is Holland. And the third big one, further east, is Prussia, all Protestant, what they would call fundamentalist countries. The Catholics thought they were fundamentalists, thought they were really extreme. They would have seen what happened to Catholics in England. Catholics in England got their lands taken away from them, they were forcefully converted.

30:07David McWilliams: And of course, Henry VIII used the Catholic money to create a whole new loyal aristocracy, loyal to him. Of course, England is going through its own mini civil war. The sense that the Protestant kingdom of England is secure was never really a case. And of course, Ireland, unfortunately for us, is seen by the English Anglicans as the back door where Catholics will use, French and Spanish Catholics will use Ireland as a springboard into England to invade England. So we get caught up with it by virtue of geography and nothing else. And I'll come back to the Battle of the Boyne in a second. But all of this comes by 1643.

30:53David McWilliams: It's all too much for Louis XIV, the Sun King. And he says, OK, enough of this, carry on. Let's clamp down on these Protestants. Let's see who they're loyal to. So he issues about 300 restrictive royal decrees between 1661 and 1685, basically saying Protestants cannot be in the law. in key professions. They can't hold civil offices. They can't be in guilds and trade guilds, all that. And then what happens in 1685, after our Bartholomew Day massacre, there was a thing called the Edict of Nantes, where they said, okay, look, we are not going to have a full-on genocide in France against the Protestants.

31:35David McWilliams: We're actually going to allow them to do their thing, right? But we're going to keep an eye on them. This edict is revoked by Louis XIV. And basically, he says, you cannot worship as Protestants. Your temples are going to be destroyed. You are going to be forced as part of state policy to convert. Now, Huguenots then begin to leave France in enormous numbers. There's thought there was about 800 ,000 Huguenots in France in around 1680. About 10 % of the population. Wow, that's significant. About half a million of those converted back to Catholicism, but 200 ,000 of them emigrated to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Britain, America, South Africa, South America, and of course, Ireland.

32:25Any place where the Protestants were in the ascendancy as they were in Ireland in the 17th century. And that's when you see these people emerging in Ireland. and that's where you see them emerging as landowners. There was three major settlements of Huguenots, Cork, County Leash and Dublin and a few in Waterford. County Leash? That's the fascinating thing. Yeah, why Leash? So in the Battle of the Boyne, the Battle of the Boyne was fought by William of Orange against James I. Basically, William of Orange, because there weren't enough Dutch soldiers, because Holland was a very small population.

33:07David McWilliams: William of Orange's army was a mercenary army, right? They were paid killers. And when they won, the Huguenot battalions who had come across to fight for the Protestant cause of William of Orange, they were repaid for their loyalty to William of Orange by being given huge tracts of land in Ireland. Thus, the King's and Queen's County in Port Arlington is where they settled. And in fact, up until the 19th century, French was spoken every Sunday in Port Arlington in churches. Really? Yes, yes, it's an amazing story. And the Huguenots settled there. They became farmers. These are the mercenaries of William of Orange.

33:57David McWilliams: And they were rural Huguenots. there was also urban Huguenots and they settled in Dublin and they became involved in banking. In fact, I'm going to give you a mad, mad statistic. The Bank of Ireland was set up by a family called the Latouche family. You might have remembered there was a hotel in Greystones called the Latouche Hotel. And the Latouche's also lived up in Marley Park. Yeah, Marley Park, all those sort of things. So up until, now this is an amazing fact, up until the 1960s, 60s, there had never been a governor of the Bank of Ireland that wasn't a Huguenot. Really? That is interesting.

34:35Isn't that extraordinary? That wasn't a Huguenot blood and Huguenot stock. So their influence in Ireland was huge. And their influence can be felt all over the place. We talked about the names, we talked about lots and lots of Irish surnames. Like, for example, they intermarried much more than the Church of Ireland people as a general rule. So, for example, the Irish Taoiseach, the most nationalist of Irish Taoiseachs,

35:02David McWilliams: the guy who did more fighting and pulling triggers in the War of Independence was Sean Lamas. Yes. Lamas is a Huguenot name. Yeah, of course, yeah. Somewhere down the line, the Lamases converted, but they were originally Huguenots. Yeah. And today, obviously, is the anniversary of a massacre. That's why we're doing this. But what this story tells us, it's the story of exile. It's the story of a small group of people who are terrorised by a larger group of people. It's the story of immigration. It's the story of what happens when an immigrant group arrives. And it's also the story of Ireland through the lens of the Huguenots.

35:51David McWilliams: So the Huguenot influence in Ireland is enormous. Like, for example, Samuel Beckett was a Huguenot. Oh, right. One of Ireland's most famed writers was a Huguenot. De Lear, De Lear Street, they were a silversmith family. The guy who actually designed Leinster House, Pariscourt and Carton House was a guy called Robert Richard Cassells. He was a Huguenot. Yeah. Richard Gandon, the man who designed the four courts and the custom house, he was a Huguenot. And the people who actually set up the linen works in Lisburn were a Huguenot family. And so the Northern Irish, the Ulster linen industry was also a Huguenot industry.

36:34David McWilliams: They were very involved in finance. I think the history of Ireland, when we look back at the history of Ireland in the last 300 years, what we see is a massive, massive impact. on these between 5 ,000 and 10 ,000 French people who arrived in Ireland. And they were, now, granted they were aristocracy, granted they were pro-British, granted they were very much part of the ascendancy, and they were very, very much part of the colonization of Ireland. But on the other hand, they themselves were refugees. And that leads us to an interesting issue with refugees and people who leave. Interesting thing, you would have thought that the Huguenots, having been exiled from France to Ireland, would have had a quite forgiving and understanding and sympathetic ear to the Irish Catholic Gales who were kicked off their land.

37:40But they didn't really. It wasn't proven, right? That's the interesting thing. And sometimes you see this, it's the victims of victims, John, idea. Sometimes you see that the people who are made victim in one area, leave that area, go to a new country, settle that new country. And rather than bringing sympathy for the people who have been displaced by their settling, they actually bring aggression because they are traumatized in the first place. and I think that's an interesting modern 21st century lesson from the Huguenots. But I think it's a fascinating story and it's one that I think we should hear more about and learn more about in Irish economic history because they are central to the commercialisation of...

38:30These are the people who built the canals after all. They designed the canals, they paid for the canals. These are the people who actually put the commerce into Ireland from, let's say, 1600 to maybe the mid part of the 20th century, which is actually quite an achievement for a small group. We will leave it there, John, and we will talk to you on Thursday. Well, d 'accord. Au revoir, my friend.

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