Meet The Preppers of Ireland

MENU sunday april 5 2020
Phelan runs Eagle Ridge Survival in Co Wicklow and has been practising survivalism since his teens at
G A RY A S H E
LIFE
Having the last laugh? Meet the preppers

Graeme Lennox talks to Irish survivalists about how they prepare for
disaster — and whether they think society will learn lessons from the
Covid-19 pandemic
Graeme Lennox
Sunday April 05 2020, 12.00am BST, The Sunday Times
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Well, you can’t say they didn’t warn us.
For years, preppers have been readying themselves for the sort of
situation we find ourselves in now. Mocked for obsessing over
doomsday scenarios portrayed in disaster films, building bunkers and
talking of “bugging out” at the first signs of societal collapse, they are
the ones having the last laugh.
Co Wicklow-based survivalist Shayne Phelan looks as if he has
crawled o the pages of a post-apocalyptic novel, but he is in no rush
to say “I told you so”.
“I’m more worried about people than I am the virus because there’s no
empathy,” he says. “I’ve seen someone taking shopping from an
elderly person’s trolley in the supermarket and there are videos of
people in fist fights over toilet roll. Panic is the paralysis of intellect.
When we start panicking, we stop thinking and become lemmings. If
the shops run out of supplies, things could get messy very quickly.”
Preppers have a mantra that says at any given time we are only nine
meals from anarchy. The heavily tattooed Bray man reckons our best
chance of survival in any doomsday scenario is arming ourselves with
knowledge rather than food. While he hates the term “prepper”, he
has stockpiled more than 1,000 litres of drinking water and an eight-
month supply of food.
A survival condo in Kansas

BRADLEY L GARRETT
Phelan started learning bushcraft in his teens, after reading John
“Lofty” Wiseman’s SAS Survival Handbook in a single sitting. He runs
Eagle Ridge Survival, a survival-skills firm with
courses from €60 that teach beginners how to make a fire and build a
shelter.
“In the past two weeks I have been inundated with inquiries, but all
my courses have been cancelled because of lockdown,” he says. “The
first thing we need for survival is to maintain our body temperature.
Within three hours we require some sort of shelter; within three days
we need water or we are in trouble. People panic about food because
it’s hardwired into us, but we can all go three weeks without it and
there are a few people who’d benefit from it.”
Skinning rabbits and maintaining pantries may have been part of

everyday life for our grandparents, but we have become a society of
consumers rather than producers. When the fragile safety net
collapses and the things we take for granted become scarce, we panic.
The survival condo’s plush interior

BRADLEY L GARRETT
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs depicts a five-tier pyramid with notions
such as self-esteem and friendship at the top, and physiological needs
including water, food and warmth at the bottom. If those most basic
needs are not met, society quickly starts to unravel.
“They say it’s survival of the fittest, but it’s really survival of the most
adaptable,” says Phelan. “Preppers stockpile whatever they feel is
going to be required when the shops are closed. The problem is these
supplies need to be replenished. In modern history, the first thing to
go down is the water supply and the second is electricity — so what
good is your freezer full of food when there’s no power?
“I might look like this Rambo guy, but I don’t embrace the Hollywood
way of survival. There are only three times you run in a survival
situation: if your fire is going out; if someone is chasing you; or if
there’s a potential rescue coming your way. A mechanical injury in
this situation is catastrophic.”
While the coronavirus has taught us to treasure the things we

previously took for granted, the post-Covid era is likely to see a
resurgence in self-sustainability.
Dr Bradley Garrett from University College Dublin’s faculty of

geography, spent four years observing preppers while researching his
book Bunker: Building for the End Times, which will be published in
August. He says the image of gun-toting hillbillies is well wide of the
mark.
“I’ve seen the entire spectrum, from the guy who has a ‘bug-out bag’
stashed in the boot of his car, to the €30m missile silo someone has
turned into a subterranean condo complex,” he says. “These are some
of the coolest, calmest, most rational people I’ve ever met. For most of
them it’s just an insurance policy they hope never to use.”
While about 3.87 million Americans identify as preppers, numbers are

much lower here. Garrett says the coronavirus will make preppers of
us all.
Dr Bradley Garrett from UCD
“The more the social safety net is hacked to pieces, the more people
have to take responsibility for themselves,” he says. “I’ve talked to
people growing secret groves in Florida. They can escape into forests
where their food supplies are waiting for them. I have spoken to
people who have built religious communities with these incredible
radio networks and food systems that can be rotated family to family.
“There are people building o -grid houses out of hay, drilling their
own wells and learning how to grow food. I went into bunkers that had
fish farms and aquaponic systems where they could keep going for
ever. One bunker in Indiana had 35 people pay €30,000 to have a
room during a catastrophic event. They opened up the walls and it had
a five-year supply of food.
“Bunkers with biological air filters are perfect for dealing with the
coronavirus. You can self-isolate to the most extreme degree and not
just preserve your life but the lives of everyone around you.”
Frank Deegan, 52, from Co Kilkenny, is a co-founder of the Irish

Survivalist Group. He started prepping during the early 1990s while in
the Merchant Navy.
“In 1991 we were delivering a 350,000-ton ship from Southampton to
Yugoslavia when war broke out,” he says. “We were at anchor for three
months o Yugoslavia and quickly ran out of food. It took another
three months to get back to England, but we made sure we stockpiled
long-life food at every port on the way.”
Deegan, whose wife, Brid, is self-isolating because of a suppressed

immune system, continues to work as an engineer for a multimedia
company. He says alarm bells started ringing when he saw his brother
and sister-in-law return from China in February.
“They were in Hong Kong and mainland China for six weeks and I was
gobsmacked they could travel freely from Hong Kong to London and
Dublin without any checks,” he says. “Preppers are always on the
lookout for trouble. I got a feeling something big was coming in
October last year. The boys took the piss out of me, calling me
paranoid, but they are now saying they should have paid attention.”
Vivos xPoint in South Dakota — the world’s largest survival bunker complex
Deegan admits that preparing for societal collapse is a prepper trait,

but says he was shocked when he saw queues of Americans lining up
to buy assault rifles last month.
“I just don’t see the point,” he says. “Panic buyers grab whatever they
can and then realise it’s out of date. I’ve been stocking up for years,
but I don’t make it obvious. We have 200 litres of water, three freezers
full of venison, rabbits and pheasants, plus CCTV around the house
for security. One or two of the lads have gold sheets worth €7,000 that
are made up of individual squares of gold that can be used for trading.
I can reset a broken arm, but I can’t stop a virus.
“If it all goes to shit, I wouldn’t mind being the last person on earth
because I’d be well able to make things work.”
American preppers use the expression “72 hours to animal” to denote

the fragile peace between functioning society and all-out anarchy.
“Their argument is that if you prep, you’ve got three months of
security and it actually gives you the ability to operate on a higher
level,” says Garrett. “Having weapons is a by-product of thinking
through how disasters unfold. Preppers consider our current
circumstances a mid-level situation. The next level arrives when the
trucks stop coming or the grocery-store workers decide it’s not worth
the risk going into work. When the social fabric disintegrates we’re in
trouble — because that’s when people start snapping or giving up.
“I met one prepper who told me he’d gone around to all of the
neighbours’ houses in the middle of the night, figured out access
points into their properties and taken stock of all of their supplies.
That was one of those moments in the project where I started to feel
uncomfortable.”
Isolated incidents aside, he’s confident society will learn lessons from
the coronavirus. “For years preppers have been telling me disaster is a
great moment for recalibration,” he says. “We reassess our priorities
and go back to basics. For those of us who have been able to work
remotely it has been a kind of blessing.
“When I had my plane tickets and lectures cancelled I felt the stress
drop out of my body. For a lot of people it has been an amazing
opportunity to reconnect with people and to think about whether the
things we were doing before the disaster actually mattered.”
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MENU sunday april 5 2020

Having the last laugh? Meet the preppers

Sunday April 05 2020, 12.00am BST, The Sunday Times

Well, you can’t say they didn’t warn us.

A survival condo in Kansas

Skinning rabbits and maintaining pantries may have been part of

The survival condo’s plush interior

While the coronavirus has taught us to treasure the things we

Dr Bradley Garrett from University College Dublin’s faculty of

While about 3.87 million Americans identify as preppers, numbers are

Frank Deegan, 52, from Co Kilkenny, is a co-founder of the Irish

Deegan, whose wife, Brid, is self-isolating because of a suppressed

Deegan admits that preparing for societal collapse is a prepper trait,

American preppers use the expression “72 hours to animal” to denote

How to provide Tips to succeed

Successful Why do female

Comments Bradley Garrett

B Add to the conversation...

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