“In the past two weeks I have been inundated with inquiries, but all my courses have been canceled because of lockdown,” he says. 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. Phelan started learning bushcraft in his teens, after reading John “Lofty” Wiseman’s SAS Survival Handbook in a single sitting.

While he hates the term “prepper”, he has stockpiled more than 1,000 litres of drinking water and an eight-month supply of food.Ī survival condo in Kansas BRADLEY L GARRETT Bushcraft The heavily tattooed Bray man reckons our best chance of survival in any doomsday scenario is arming ourselves with knowledge rather than food. Preppers have a mantra that says at any given time we are only nine meals from anarchy. If the shops run out of supplies, things could get messy very quickly.” When we start panicking, we stop thinking and become lemmings. “I’ve seen someone taking shopping from an elderly person’s trolley in the supermarket and there are videos of people in fistfights over toilet roll. “I’m more worried about people than I am the virus because there’s no empathy,” he says. 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”.

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. For years, preppers have been readying themselves for the sort of situation we find ourselves in now.

Preppers stockpile