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We shall never conquer Ireland while the Bards are there.—Elizabeth I of England.
Of course, there were songs about other things too. But Irish history in the popular mind has always been overshadowed by the English connection.
This book follows the course of the history of Ireland as it is told by these songs of the people of Ireland. Naturally, this approach gives a particular slant to what follows. The political and economic struggle against Britain has shaped the lives of generations of the common folk, so the accompanying history that gives context to the songs will concentrate on this. Also, whole types of song have been excluded. It's folk music: so no Tom Moore; it's history in song: so no "Down by the Sally Gardens".
In an essay published in 1872 called The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche examined and criticised the very notion of historical objectivity in the academic sense, and posed the idea that such objectivity might be not only impossible to achieve in practice, but even that the attempt to attain it might be harmful. He advocated instead that what he called a "pre-academic" history, an interpretation of the past springing from today's needs and aspirations. He saw this process occurring in three stages. First, monumental and heroic, then critical and, finally, antiquarian. In the first, the past is enshrined as an inspiration for the future. In the second, the past is condemned and criticised, but again, as a way of gaining the impulse for new action. In the third, they preserve and conserve the past as a reminder of their roots.
He might have been defining the way history has always been treated in Irish folk memory.
The following two extracts from Polly Devlin's memoir "All of Us There", about growing up in rural Tyrone in the 50s, are a fine summary of the folk tradition in Ireland.
"Yet every story he tells holds in it too a morsel of the pain of his country. The pain finds its most poignant expression in the songs that, terribly out of tune, he sings to us at night. We are moved by his voice, by its cracked timbres, its unconcealed sensual sadness, as though he is mourning, having to leave his home to become another Irish exile, although he has never strayed or wandered. That voice off-key and out of tune, also contains nostalgia for a past that, as we recognise from our beginnings, remains in many ways his present.
He is not a good singer, unlike most of the men of the district, who sing in voluptuously sad voices as a natural expression of their feelings. They sing two kinds of songs, both handed down orally over generations: ballads known as "come-all-yees", because they start with the words "Come all ye lads and lassies"; and laments, long threnodies of grief and exile, banishments, hunger, disease and death and hopeless rebellions, the sad ways of our Irish life, elegies for those who emigrated and dirges for those who stayed behind. There is, though, an element of celebration in the songs, acknowledgement of endurance and survival; and in the words, in their utterance and in the music there is, too, that compassion -- the use of the imagination to encompass the condition of others -- that is so characteristic of many of the Irish.
Life in lamented in these songs: it is the only appreciation of beauty we see and hear -- the apprehension of sorrow, the waste of love, the wastage of people. Through these songs we learn our history. There is no other way to learn it -- certainly not at school where Irish history is a subversive subject; and as we learn, it becomes literally a sob story, as indeed it is. There is the squeeze of pain in every episode, and although people sometimes say that the Irish are great lickers of wounds, they have had many to lick.
Perhaps no other nation is more ready to cry, to be more borne down by the sadnesses inherent in human existence. The great national monuments in Ireland are dead heroes -- preferably those who died young, unfulfilled and beautiful, leaving legend and inspiration behind, but rarely tangible improvements in the lot of those they inspired; and if such a hero left a young girl bereft, inctacta and keening, behind him, so much the better for a sad song. Many of these songs have layers of special connections and meanings for us -- Slieve Gallion Brae for example, one of the most beautiful of the ballads regularly sung in the evening in my father's little pub, is about a mountain that lies on the horizon only ten miles away. We know its every contour.
"It was a characteristic much noted by officials and previous settlers of wherever the Irish fled to, that they, above all other nations, clung to their memories of their lost land", wrote an historian; and listening to these songs, we know with certitude that these emigrants felt Ireland as a living part of them which had been wrenched away. As a man whose leg has been amputated feels a phantom nerve twitching in the night, so Ireland shivers at the extremities, and the loss in the song is matched by the loss of those who are left behind. There is often apparent around us a wild extravagance of grief, as though it is the only possible or permissible show of emotion; and when my father evinces this in his singing, our world is revealed in its reality as a place of grief and exile."
"There was always a great deal of singing, and in the evening when we brought out a mug of tea from the house to the pub, a hundred yards away, we would hear old men singing songs or reciting verses. We knew them all, the singers and the songs, but we thought of them as the embarrassing outbursts of men stocious with drink. Only when we grew up and left home and looked back were we able to appreciate, at an irrecoverable remove, the secret life that subsisted in that deep countryside -- the music of a hidden Ireland with its complex harmonies and quavering grace-notes, the passionate concealed underground life of another country whose difference was deceptive, because the common language seemed the same.
If the men in the pub were asked to sing these songs when they were sober they would become what they called `bashful'. `They're only auld come-all-yees', they'd say, `rubbidgy old songs. Yous don't want to hear them.' Such attitudes obtained all over Ireland. When music producers from Radio Eireann, the Irish radio station, went around the country in the 1950s in the vanguard of the folk-boom to record the fiddlers, the tin whistlers, the pipers, the singers of the countryside, they found an enormous reservoir of talent. But the people were often reluctant to reveal themselves as traditional musicians, because such music was despised; and some fiddle-players went to join fellow-musicians with their fiddles hidden under their coats because they were ashamed to be seen.
The ritual preceding and during these outbursts of songs in the pub was always the same. A fisherman, his natural bashfulness dissipated by the Guinness in his veins, would suddenly be moved to sing and would rise shakily to his feet. Gradually the talk would die down and, swaying slightly, eyes closed, and often supported by a nearby but equally unstable friend, he would embark on the ceremonial song. The manner of singing and the reception of the song were governed by convention, ritual and ceremony. Men caught in mid-sentence by the giving voice would stop, tilt their heads, and remain frozen from the sounding of the first notes till the end, which was often an unconscionably long time coming. The songs were plaintive, slow, lamenting, and during the long pauses there were certain acceptable phrases of encouragement launched towards the singer: `Good man yerself', or `You're a brev man', or sometimes a reiteration of the last words of the verse, all of which served as a kind of chorus, necessary for the esteem of the singer and the continuation of his song. At its end a swell of voices would repeat the same phrases, the highest praise being `By God and he can sing', although there were occasionally murmurs of dissent especially if someone used this precious phrase about someone who actually could not sing, but was so drunk as to forget this fact. Even then the listeners, though bored and amused by the singer's conceit, observed the formalities and politenesses, although occasionally a recalcitrant voice might mutter, `He's none at all'."
"On the field of Baginbun
Ireland was lost and won"
After great initial successes, the Anglo-Normans proved too few in number to hold their conquests, and in a remarkable "Gaelic Resurgence" in the 13th Century, the Gaels pushed them out of many of their newly-won lands. The Gaelic counter-offensive was not limited to the political and military spheres. Culturally, the Norman invaders "went native", so to speak, inter-marrying with the Celts and adopting their language and much of their customs; becoming, indeed, as an irate English courtier remarked, "more Irish than the Irish themselves". And so Gael and Gall came to fight together against the common foe across the water, against the growing might of the nascent English nation-state. The power of the bards was a formidable weapon in this struggle, so much so that the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 even prohibited musicians and poets from entering English households, a forlorn measure to prevent the assimilation of the latest wave of foreigners by the native culture. By the dawn of the 16th C, English power in Ireland had almost disappeared, restricted to Dublin and environs, an area called "the English Pale". However, with the rise of the Tudor monarchy in England and the emergence of the modern English nation-state, more sustained efforts were made to subdue the English monarch's troublesome Western kingdom, and the final and successful effort to suppress the turbulent Irish began. And it is here that our history as told in song begins, with several ballads looking back on the final eclipse of Gaelic Ireland.
The struggle against the Tudors was waged both the the "Old Irish", a mix of true Celts and Norman-Irish, and the "Old English", descendents of the first English settlers. Both sides, though traditionally hostile, found themselves coming together in opposition to the English throne, especially after Henry VIII broke from Rome. For with the English Reformation, religion becomes a factor in Irish political life. The struggle against the Tudors, first Henry, then Elizabeth and Mary, went badly for Ireland, despite some splendid victories in the field.
Finally, the old Irish leaders, one by one, saw no alternative but flight. The most important departure was in September 1607, when the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, the leaders of Ulster sailed from Lough Swilly with their followers. This signal event became known as "the Flight of the Earls". It marked the end of Gaelic Ireland, for Ulster had been the last stronghold of the Gaels. Many natives remained, but no longer was a Gaelic political system present in Ireland as a counter-balance to the foreigner. The struggle continued, but leaderless and doomed. The first plantation of Ulster dates from 1609.
The old Irish poem , Roisín Dubh , dates from this time. Although it's not a song, it stands here as a reminder of the old Gaelic tradition destroyed by the English, of which the later ballads in both Irish and English are a forlorn reminder. The poem tells in allegorical terms the hopes of the native Irish that the Pope and the King of Spain might come to their aid. Here it is in a free translation by James Clarence Mangan.
The personification of Ireland as a woman is persistent throughout Irish culture, from the Roisín Dubh of the anonymous poet at the court of Owen Roe O'Neill; through Yeat's Cathleen Ni Houlihan (of which he later wrote, "Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?"); to Tommy Makem's "fine old woman". Sometimes she is an old woman, broken in body but in spirit still proud; sometimes a young maiden to whom the poet or singer pledges himself true. All too often, as we shall see, loving Mother Ireland means dying for her: hence Joyce's cynical definition: "the old sow that eats her farrow".
A fine example of what Cromwell's policy entailed is described in the lament, O'Dwyer of the Glen. The O'Dwyers, a County Tipperary family, had their woodlands cut down by Cromwell's forces to prevent guerilla warfare. Diarmaid Ó Duibhir was chief of the O'Dwyers of Kilnamanagh who lived in Cloniharp Castle in County Tipperary. Seán Ó Duibhir (John O'Dwyer) was Diarmaid's son. He may have fought in south-east Ireland with his uncle, Colonel Éamonn Ó Duibhir, against Cromwell. In 1651 Éamonn Ó Duibhir surrendered and, along with 4,500 of his men, joined the Spanish army. He was killed at Arras in August 1654.
Not only the old Gaelic families fell, but all those who opposed the English. Kilcash tells of the fate of one old Norman-Irish family, the Butlers. The Butlers of Ormonde owned vast tracts of land stretching from Roscrea to Wexford. Cill Chais, or Kilcash, at the foot of Sliabh na mBan near Clonmel in Tipperary, was a great fortified mansion, the centre of their power. The ruined tower of Kilcash still stands today.
The battle of Aughrim lives in Irish folk memory as Ireland's greatest defeat. It was at Aughrim that the power of the Irish Jacobite army was broken. After Aughrim's Great Disaster tells of the consequences of the battle. Gallowglasses were heavily-armed foot soldiers, often mercenaries. The Dutchman is general Ginkel.
After Aughrim's Great Disaster
A song written by a Limerick man, The Jackets Green , commemorates the men who fought at Sarsfield's side. Michael Scanlan left his native land as a young man and went to America, where he became a Fenian. He wrote many ballads, of which this is probably the most well-known.
After the battle of Aughrim came the siege and surrender of Galway and Sligo. Then, it was Limerick's turn again. Though the city had already withstood one siege, this time, with no prospect of relief the situation was clearly hopeless. Sarsfield asked for terms, and signed the Treaty of Limerick. Ironically, a French expeditionary force landed not long after. But Sarsfield, honourable to a fault, declined to break the treaty and resume the fight.
Under the terms of the treaty of Limerick, the defeated Irish were given the chance to leave the country. Many did so, and signed up to fight for England's enemies on the continent. They became known as "the Wild Geese". Sarsfield was one who joined the Irish Brigade of the French army, and saw much service. At Landen in 1693, he commanded the left wing of Luxembourg's army, and was there mortally wounded. It is said that as he lay dying he put his hand to his wound, and drawing it forth covered with blood, he lamented that the blood was not shed for Ireland. The "Irish Brigades" were the most famed, feared and formidable fighting formations of all Europe in their time. George II of England himself admitted: "Cursed be the laws which deprive me of such subjects!". One such brigade was Clare's Dragoons. one of the most renowned regiments in the James' Irish army which also became famous on the continent in he service of the King of France. "Clare" was Daniel O'Brien, 3rd Viscount Clare.
Hardly was the ink dry on the paper than the treaty of Limerick was broken. Wholesale dispossession and planting continued. Those Old Irish who hadn't flown were often forced to take to the bogs and hills and forests, there to lead a life that was half-rebel, half-bandit. They were known as Tories in the wake of 1603, and as rapparees in the days of William of Orange. A typical specimen is remembered in The Outlaw Rapparee.
The parliament of Ireland in the 17th and much of the 18th C was a colonial body, subordinate to Westminster, but in the latter half of the 18th C, that body began to show the same restive shaking off of restraint that previous generations had shown. The Irish parliament claimed the right to legislate for Ireland over Westminster's head, subject only to the British sovereign, who was accepted as king of Ireland also.
This development was but one instance of a basic pattern in Irish history under British rule. Successive waves of settlers, having first been used according to the classic formula, divide et impera, gradually coming to identify themselves more and more with the national interest; and time and again the British beating them down and imposing a new order. Again and again, we see the nascent Irish nation-state, and the unity of different creeds in the nation, rent apart and disrupted. The essence of this British policy in Ireland was succinctly expressed as long ago as 1633, by Wentworth: "The truth is, we must there bow and govern the native by the planter, and the planter by the native."
Economic factors also played an important part in the birth of national aspirations among the Protestant Ascendancy. The Irish economy was warped and distorted both by the influence of the larger British economy and by overt British political action. On the other hand, Ireland's backwardness can't be attributed solely to English perfidy. There were other factors: lack of capital, etc. The way to rectify Ireland's weaknesses was clearly by following the path typically followed by other nations in this period: in the days before free trade, the growth of a strong state, able to give aid and succour to native industry, was a vital factor for the national well-being. It was precisely this strong state that was missing in Ireland, and not for want of trying: as we see clearly with the growth and eclipse of "Grattan's Parliament", whenever Ireland did start out along this route, Britains' response was destructive.
Just as in the 13 colonies in America, where what were once loyal British settlers began to discover that their own interests and the interests of Westminster and the Crown were not merely not identical, and diverging with evry passing day, but at least at times diametrically opposed, so too in Ireland.
The weapon of the '98 rebel was the pike, easily manufactured and stored, and even at that late date, not ineffective against cavalry and musket-armed infantry. The Rising of the Moon was written by a young Fenian, John Casey, who died in 1879 at the age of 24, of ill-health partly attributed to his harsh treatment in prison.
The greatest successes of the Rising were achieved in the South-East, where the rebels took control of the counties of Wexford and Waterford. They were victorious in battle at Boolavogue and The Harrow. The rebels then attempted to move north and west, but were first halted at New Ross and Arklow, then decisively defeated at Vinegar Hill. The song Boolavogue describes the course of this campaign.
During the Wexford rising, "John Kelly of Killanne, County Wexford was detailed by the Commander-in-Chief, Bagenal Harvey, to bring in all the available men from the Barony of Bantry for the attack planned on New Ross. He was seriously wounded in Michael Street, New Ross, following the successful attack on Three Bullet Gate. He was recovering in Wexford Town when it was recaptured by the British. A Yeoman sergeant who was a neighbour and whose life he had saved some days before, gave evidence against him. He was hanged on Wexford Bridge, his trunk conveyed to the waters and his head trailed and kicked along the streets before being spiked. Friends recovered the head and brought it to Killanne for burial and a monument was later erected on the spot. The farmers of east Shelmalier were accustomed to shoot wild fowl on the North sloblands. Their "long barrelled guns" proved to be very effective weapons during the Rising."
The Ulster risings failed to link up, and were defeated in detail. As the name suggests, Roddy McCorley was an Ulster Protestant, before that term became almost synonymous with the forces of anti-Irish repression. His short life and glorious death are immortalised in song.
Another great Ulster Protestant, Henry Joy McCracken, led the men of Antrim. A street ballad to his memory is typical of so many of these songs, in being at once a narrative love-song, a lament for the dead, and a political song of '98.
Yet another patriotic Presbyterian from "up there" was Henry Munro, who led the men of Down.
As we've seen, the United Irishmen, the Irish Jacobins if you will, included many Protestants, including Ulstermen. A contemporary group of balladers who continue the long tradition, The Wolfe Tones, have a song about that.
Several French attempts to lend assistance came to naught, the most memorable being Humbert's landing in Mayo. After proclaiming a republic there, he marched east in an attempt to link up with the survivors of Vinegar Hill, scored a victory over the British at Castlebar ("the races of Castlebar") but was defeated in battle at Ballinamuck in county Longford. Those Irish members of his army who survived the battle were massacred by the British forces. Humbert's expedition is remembered in The Men of the West.
Great things were expected of the French Republic during the Rising. "Sean Bhean Bhocht" is Irish for "poor old woman", a traditional symbol for Ireland. It's pronounced "shan van vocht".
Speaking of the French, the air of Rouse, Hibernians should seem strangely familiar to any French readers.
The British army and yeomanry ran amok in the immediate aftermath of the risings, looking upon anyone clad in green as a rebel and executing many such wretches in a variety of gruesome ways. The Wearing Of The Green commemorates this. The Napper Tandy our narrator meets was a leader of the United Irishmen and an organiser for that movement in County Louth.
A hairstyle known as the French crop was popular among Irish Republicans during this period, hence the title of The Croppy Boy. It has been said that there's a version of this song for every county in Ireland. Here's perhaps the most well-known version.
To a traditional air, Tone Is Coming Back Again is a nostalgic lament for the dead hero. A song popular in Ulster ever since.
Unhappily, '98 proved to have sounded the death knell for what historians sometimes call "the Protestant nation". From the Act of Union in 1801 on, Protestantism in Ireland became increasingly identified with reaction and allegiance to the English crown, although there continued to be individual Protestant patriots -- Parnell and Roger Casement being only two of the most famous -- and of course many Catholics were loyalists too.
The leader of the rising, Robert Emmet, was tried for treason and executed. His speech from the dock The concluding period of his speech from the dock is famous: "When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then let my epitaph be written." His epitaph remains unwritten, but the fate of the Bold Robert Emmet has been immortalised in song.
A modern account of the famine in song is a moving piece by John Gibbs, called simply The Great Hunger.
One of the first to join the renascent nationalist movement which was to become the Fenians was Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. He was typical of the type of irreconcilable nationalist that the Feninans attrated.
O'Donovan Rossa's Farewell To Dublin
The Fenians' first attempt at insurrection came in 1867. The plan was ambitious: Fenians in America were to invade Canada in conjunction with a rising at home. Their organisation was riddled with informers, and the affair collapsed. Indeed, "1867 Rising" is a very grand name for a set of great schemes that largely came to nothing.
An attempt was made to rescue the leaders of the '67 rising, and in the confusion a policeman was killed. Though none of those in the dock were directly to blame for the death, three of the four were sentenced to death and publicly executed. Allen, Larkin and O'Brien thus became known as the Manchester Martyrs. God Save Ireland! became the battle cry of the Fenians, after those defiant men shouted it from the dock on hearing their sentence. For fifty years, the song of the same name was to be the unofficial national anthem of Ireland.
The Fenians will be remembered forever, if only for keeping the flame alive when the cause seemed lost. Down by the Glenside expresses this very well.
Despite the seeming success of the National Party, the physical force tradition was not forgotten: the Fenian movement lived on, and from time to time struck a blow at the Crown. The song Joe Brady tells of one such deed and its consequences.
That's a song collected by, though on the evidence of the closing couplet quite possibly written by, the bould Brendan Behan. "He died a Fenian blade", says Mrs Kelly. A blade was a term for a dashing young man; but a blade was also the instrument that Mrs Kelly's son and his comrades used to cut down two of the most prominent members of the British state in Ireland. On the evening of 6th May 1882 Lord Frederick Cavendish, recently appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland and just arrived in the country, and his Under-Secretary, T. H. Burke, were set upon by a band of assassins while they were walking in the Phoenix Park in Dublin and hacked to death with twelve-inch long surgical knives. The killers belonged to a secret society, the Irish National Invincibles -- more commonly simply, "the Invincibles" -- composed mostly of former IRB men operating independently of IRB centre. An IRB statement issued after the deed stated that the men who had carried out "this execution...deserve well of their country".
Parnell at once expressed his shock at the killings, and offered to resign from leadership of the Irish National Party. Well, now. Parnell, like any great politician, held his cards tight to his chest. Was he really so shocked by the killings that he was prepared to cast away his life's work, and resign from political life? It's unlikely. But it was clearly in his interest to persuade Gladstone of just this. Whatever of Parnell's inner relationship to the affair, the short-term fallout in the public world was predictable: a halt to progress on the constitutional front, an increase in coercion. The long-term impact? Nix. For the British knew full well that they must engage with the constitutional arm of Irish nationalism, or wage in Ireland low-intensity warfare, to use the term of another era, for the foreseeable future. Gladstone, being a statesman in the true sense of the term, chose the former alternative.
A vital lesson of Irish history which the Phoenix Park affair throws into stark relief is the mutual dependence between the pike in the thatch and the orator in the House or on the doorstep. So, Parnell owed his power and influence not only to his great gifts, undeniable as those were, and to the mass movement which he led; but also to the dark shadow that ever loomed behind, too tall and imposing to be cast by him or any one man: the shadow of the gunman.
Carey, the informer, eventually met a fitting end, slain by Pat O'Donnell while fleeing to a new life in another part of the British Empire.
Another song tells of flight from the harsh conditions and uncertain future of the rural communities of the time. Slieve Gallion Brae comes from the country round about the Sperry mountains of Derry and Tyrone. A contemporary source gives a telling description of the blight of emigration that afflicted such communities:
The population of Ireland has been steadily diminishing. In 1861, it was 5,798,564; in 1871, 5,412,377; in 1881, 5,174,836; in 1891, 4,704,751; in 1901, 4,458,775. The decrease is due to emigration, and as the great majority of the emigrants are Catholics, the Catholic population has suffered most. In 1861, it numbered 4,505,265; in 1871, 4,150,867; in 1881, 3,960,891; in 1891, 3,547,307; in 1901, 3,310,028. In the period from 1851 to 1901 the total number of emigrants, being natives of Ireland, who left Irish ports was 3,846,393. No less than 89 per cent went to the United States, the remainder going to Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The saddest feature of this exodus is that 82 per cent of the emigrants were between 15 and 35 years of age. The healthy and enterprising have gone, leaving the weaker in mind and body at home, one result being that the number of lunatics increased from 16,505 in 1871 to 21,188 in 1891.
A stark view of the social consequences of the hunger for land is given by As I Roved Out. In those days, any bit of property at all was enough to tempt a man to jilt his true love in favour of the "lassie with the land".
In 1879, the Irish National Land League was founded, and for the next decade Davitt and the agrarian militants worked hand in hand with Parnell and the Irish parliamentary party. Among other things, this "Land War" gave the English language the word "boycott", after a particularly harsh landlord, a Captain Boycott of Mayo, was ostracised by the local community. The Land War also gave the Irish peasantry, for the first time in centuries, the right to secure tenure and ultimately the chance to buy out their holdings.
The UVF imported arms and ammunition with impunity. When the "rebel Irish dogs" tried the same, in 1914, they received rather different treatment.
With the coming of the First World War, the great majority of the Irish Volunteers signed up for the British army, encouraged by their Nationalist leaders. However, not everyone was as bright-eyed and naive, as this song about The British Army shows.
A song from around the turn of the century tells of many women's reliance on "ring money" i.e. a payment they received while their husband, or alleged husband, was serving in the British army.
of course, taking the King's shilling, as it was known, was nothing new in Ireland. Often, there would have been drink involved, as in the case of Pat Reilly.
As an aside, I should note that the Irish seem to have done well for themselves in the British army. One of the few generals in that army ever able to handle armour was an O'Connor!
The Rising itself was largely confined to Dublin, and lasted little more than a week. After the surrender, the ring-leaders wre tried by court-martial and executed. The men killed were:
The effect of the rising is most eloquently expressed in W.B. Yeat's "Easter 1916."
The mentality of those men who went out to die was well expressed in the closing words of Patrick Pearse's speech at O'Donovan Rossa's funeral in 1915:
Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! -- they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.
James Connolly, labour leader and Irish patriot, was one of those shot by the British in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. He was so badly wounded that he had to be tied to a chair for the firing squad.
Three other deaths:
Another great name of '16 is Roger Casement. He spent the early years of the Great War in Germany, trying to raise an Irish Brigade from Irish POWs captured by the Germans. Most of these poor wretches, having volunteered to fight for Britain, were however most reluctant to fight for their own country, and Casement gave up in despair. He was in on the plans for a rising, and arranged with the Germans for a shipment of arms to be sent to Ireland immediately beforehand. And now, the song Banna Strand takes up the tale. It was on this beach in Kerry that Sir Roger Casement put ashore from a German U-boat just before the Easter Rising. The German ship The Aud was carrying several thousand rifles and ammunition for use in the insurrection,.but was captured by the British. Casement was also soon arrested, taken to the the Tower of London, tried for treason, sentenced to death, and executed. Like Robert Emmet before him, he made a memorable speech from the dock.
"So we're all off to Dublin in the Green..." A song David Trimble wanted banned from the radio in the South of Ireland, as it "glorifies the IRA". Yes, David, indeed it does!
The Foggy Dew is one of the few songs about the Easter Rising, indeed one of the few about any period, to mention the uncomfortable fact that far more Irishmen have died for England than ever for Ireland. For many Irishmen serving in the British forces, the Easter rising was the clarion call that awoke in them a sense of self and an identification with their nation.
Martyrdom is a concept deeply-ingrained in the Irish psyche, and is perhaps best expressed by this plaintive lament:
Many young men went off to fight, and not all of them came back:
Another lament for the fallen:
is a jolly little tune about the enthusiasm with which young men picked up the gun in these early days.
The course of this war can be divided into three phases:
Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland?
Kevin Barry, as the song tells us, was just 18 when he was hung by the British. Kevin was a medical student, in his first year at UCD; and an IRA Volunteer, member of H company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade. On 20th September 1920, he took part in an ambush of a party of British soldiers in Dublin in which three of the enemy were killed. Afterwards, Barry was captured. Although subjected to torture, Barry refused to betray his comrades, and the British exacted their murderous revenge. Kevin Barry was sentenced to death by hanging, and the sentence was executed in Mountjoy Jail on 1st November, 1920. His execution provoked national outrage.
With Dan Breen and Seamus Robinson, Seán Treacy was a founder member of the Tipperary IRA. He was shot in a Dublin Street in 1920 by British soldiers, while working for Michael Collin's "squad".
No less a British soldier than Montgomery, later Field Marshal and Viscount Alamein, fought against Tom Barry in Cork, but found him a tougher match than Rommel. Percival, later general and commander of the garrison at Singapore, was also in Cork during the campaign, and as intelligence officer for the Essex regiment gained an unsavoury reputation for using torture and terror to extract information. He seems to have had less taste for a straight fight: at Singapore, he surrendered that powerful fortress and his 30,000 men to a force of 5,000 Japanese.
One of the West Cork Brigade's most famous victories is commemorated in The Boys of Kilmichael.
In this ambush, 18 Auxiliaries were killed, two armoured lorries burned, and arms and ammunition captured. IRA casualties were three men dead. It was following this that the British, unable to match the flying columns in the field, took their revenge by burning Cork city.
Barry's column wasn't invariably successful. Upton, in West Cork, was the scene of an ambush in which several IRA men lost their lives.
Kerry was also a strong IRA county. Captain Paddy Dalton, along with other Republican soldiers, Éamonn Dalton and Danny Welch, were murdered by the Black and Tans in 1921 in Knockanure. The Valley of Knockanure tells their story.
Johnson's Motor Car gives us a lighter look at the war. This is indeed how many Volunteers solved their transport problems!
The RIC was essential to British rule in Ireland, which never recovered from the beating given to the force by the IRA in the first stage of the Irish War of Independence. Its role was largely taken over by two bodies nominally part of the force, the infamous Black and Tans and the less notorious but more lethal Auxiliaries.
Although nominally policemen, the Black and Tans are more truly described as a band of mercenaries. They were in the main recruited from ex-Army men in Britain to bolster the RIC during the Irish War of Independence. The name derived from the unusual uniform of the first batches of recruits. So hasty had their assembling been that there was not time to issue them with proper RIC uniforms, and they arrived clad in oddments from British army stores. They first appeared in Ireland late in March 1920. Undisciplined, not at all trained for police work, and with a fondness for drink, they were no match for the IRA flying columns, and vented their spleen on the ordinary people of the country, gaining a well-deserved reputation for rapine and outrage. In August 1920, another attempt was made to support the regular police with a force more effective than the dissolute "Tans". This was the Auxiliary Constabulary, a smaller force of about 1,500 men, recruited from ex-officers. The Auxiliaries, as they were known, proved a more effective fighting force than the Black & Tans, but were still worsted in the fighting in Cork and other active IRA areas.
So infamous are both bodies in Irish folk memory, that most modern rebel songs give them at least a mention, and some even take their name: Black and Tan Gun, for example, or Come Out Ye Black and Tans. The latter, written by Dominic Behan, Brendan Behan's brother, is supposed to be an account of their father's taunting of their loyalist neighbours when he had a few drinks in him!
Let Tom Barry speak for those IRA men who opposed the Treaty:
...the Irish Republican Army was a stronger and more effective striking force when the Truce came than at any other period in its history. In West Cork it had twice as many enrolled volunteers, three times as much armament, although the ammunition worry remained, and ten times as many toughened and experienced fighters than it had twelve months previously. Its morale and confidence had grown as that of the enemy slumped, and the Brigade had not only survived long summer days of enemy operations, but had increased its pressure and number of attacks in those later months.
The Civil War was noted for a degree of bitter violence that surpassed that of the War of Independence. Added to this was the agony of fratricide. In all, 77 Republicans were executed by the Free State in the 7 months from November 1922 to May 1923. The first was Erskine Childers, tried in camera and shot on 24th November. On the 8th December, 1922, without even the pretence of legality, four soldiers of the IRA, Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett, were taken out and shot by order of the Free State cabinet. Ireland divided indeed.
The Free State begaan to shoot IRA prisoners in reprisal for actions against the Free State forces. Charlie Daly, Seán Larkin, Daniel Enright and Tim O'Sullivan were executed by a Free State firing squad on 14th March, 1923. They are forever remembered in song as The Drumboe Martyrs.
The Drumboe of the title, from the Irish Droim Bó, Cow's Back, is a small town in the county Donegal. Tyrconnell, or Tír Connaill, Conal's Land, was the old name for the county. The Finn and the Swilly are its two main rivers. Soldiers of '22 recounts the names and deeds of some of the great men of the IRA from this period.
The Treaty meant the abandonment of our fellow countrymen in the new six counties statelet, where there was also civil war. Though strife was nothing new to Belfast, the two years from July 1920 to June 1922 were among the bloodiest in the city's history, with 455 people killed and more than 2,000 injured in sectarian attacks. In addition 23,500 Catholics were driven from their homes and 9,000 men (all Catholic) were forced out of their jobs. The wave of terror that swept the truncated province is epitomised by the activities of the Nixon Murder Gang. But the Ulstermen fought back, as the Belfast Brigade relates:
Meanwhile, back in the fledgling "Irish Free State", with the new government commanding the support of a war-weary people, and well-supplied with arms and ammunition by the British, the end of the struggle could not be long in sight. The Republican forces declared a cease-fire on 27th April 1923.
A Song of the Loyal Irish takes satiric look at the new Ireland, the "Irish Free State" that was neither free nor included all of Ireland.
To the air of The Jackets Green, here's McAlpine's Fusiliers , a song about the Irish "navvies" who built and rebuilt England.
The theme of emigration also lent itself to more traditional treatment, as in the plaintive air of Spancil Hill.
The Ould Orange Flute takes a humorous view of the religious conflict, but there was and is nothing funny about the vicious religious bigotry used and excused by Irish "loyalism". Loyalism: now there's a funny word in itself. For in Ireland, the term refers to those who are not loyal to Ireland, but pledge allegiance to a foreign monarch!
The Yeomanry and Orangemen give it to us straight in Croppies Lie Down. Croppy is a derogatory term for patriots in the Six Counties to this day. As "Bono" is rather too fond of saying, this is not a rebel song! "Soldiers of Erin", mar dhea! The heads on them, and the price of cabbage!
However, a small section of incorrigibles refused to lie down and die. Though ceasing hostilities, they remained true to the ideal of the 32-county republic. Truly, they were the Legion of the Rearguard, a phrase coined by De Valera in an address to the IRA at this time.
However, de Valera and the IRA didn't remain friends for long.
"Three years later [1926] "Dev" abandoned military methods. He resigned from Sinn Féin and announced the setting up of a constitutional republican party known as Fianna Fáil, or Soldiers of Destiny, a name that was chosen to appeal to the militarist tradition from which the party sprang."The vast bulk of the IRA followed de Valera, and IRA units were transformed overnight into Fianna Fáil branches, or cumainn. Those who rejected Fianna Fáil did not like what they saw but were confused about what to do. Some were content to wait and see whether de Valera did deliver on the republican rhetoric, especially after election victories brought the party to power. ...
"At first de Valera welcomed IRA support ... but the alliance was to be short-lived. In 1932 de Valera won enough seats to form a coalition government, and within four years he moved against the IRA and declared it an illegal organisation."--Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp.47-8
A song that encapsulates all the bitterness of the Republicans betrayed in the years after defeat is the Dominic Behan composition, The Patriot Game.
Nostalgia for the good old days, at a time when it seemed the IRA had slowly faded away, is evoked in "The Boys of the old Brigade" (actually written in the 70s, when the struggle had flared up again in the North). Likewise, Broad Black Brimmer is a song looking to the past, but expressing also some hope for the future. Trenchcoat, "Sam Browne" belt and broad-brimmed hat was the distinctive attire of the IRA man.
The beginning of the Second World War in 1939 saw the old republican slogan, "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity", resurrected, and an attempt by the IRA to reanimate the Republican cause. Attempts to gain assistance from Germany came to little, for several reasons: the Anglophilia of von Ribbentrop, German foreign minister; the amateurism of the IRA; and Mr De Valera's harsh measures. The IRA did undertake a bombing campaign in England -- not Britain, Scotland and Wales being excepting as "Celtic" -- but it fizzled out after vigorous action by the authorities. During these difficult years, therefore, the IRA was virtually moribund.
In 1956 the IRA was able to began the "border campaign" in which several reborn "flying columns" operated in the south and west of the six counties. Much effort and expense went into mounting these operations, but the people were indifferent and the crown forces proved able to contain and destroy the flying columns. Later operations were merely brief raids launched from across the border. In 1962, the campaign was called off by a disillusioned leadership disappointed with the results. Nevertheless, they kept the flame of Irish resistance alive, to be passed to a later generation.
The most notable incident in the border campaign was a flying column raid on Brookeborough RUC barracks, in which Seán South of Garryowen fell in action.
. However, it wasn't all politics. The reader of Ulysses may recall mention of a monument to "the one-handed adulterer"; and should they have paid a visit to Dublin, may have been puzzled by the gap at the head of Parnell Square where, the text assures them Nelson's Pillar should be. This little mystery is easily cleared up. On 9th February, 1966, Liam Sutcliffe, a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann, walked up the stairs inside the Pillar. He was carrying a blue hold-all bag. When he reached the the top, he wedged his bag into one of the portals, and departed whence he came. Some 10 hours later, the bomb which the bag contained exploded, destroying one of Dublin's most famous landmarks. The operation, although unauthorised, was rather popular in some quarters. Here's The Dubliners biding the admiral farewell:
The Long March to Derry was a civil rights march that got the traditional treatment -- Croppies lie down. The might of the Orange state was deployed against unarmed men and women marching for the right to equal treatment.
The national question came alive again in the wake of the suppression of the civil rights movement. The IRA revived -- and split, the most active wing being known as the Provisional IRA. and today simply as "the IRA". The split occurred at the Army Convention in Dublin in December, 1969. A new, "Provisional", Army Council was formed by those dissatisfied by the old leadership's response to events in the North. In their founding statement, they announced:
We declare our allegiance to the 32-County Irish Republic proclaimed at Easter 1916, established by the first Dáil Eireann in 1919, overthrown by force of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British-imposed Six-County and 26-County states.
At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis the following January, Provisional Sinn Féin was formed after a walk out by one-third of the delegates. The first issue of the new party's paper, An Phoblacht, appeared in February, and sold 20,000 copies.
The leadership of the Provisionals was initially based in the South, centred around Seán Mac Stiofáin and Ruairi Ó Braidaigh. Indeed, not only was the leadership Southern: elements of the Dublin government were almost certainly involved in arming the first batches of Volunteers, involvement which later lead to the Arms Trial. Not until the late '70s did the base of power shift towards the North, and only in '83 was Ruari Ó Braidaigh replaced at the head of Sinn Féin by Gerry Adams.
The other faction, the Official IRA, continued the armed struggle in somewhat desultory fashion for some years before officially "dumping arms" in 1972 -- although this did not prevent them from killing Séamus Costello in 1977.
Meanwhile, with the pro-British majority in the six counties unable to countenance treating the nationalist minority as equal citizens, law and order broke down, and was seen to do so on TV, live and worldwide. Westminster was forced to intervene in the form of British troops: "armoured cars and tanks and guns", in the words of the song. War ensued, a war which continued for over thirty years, with thousands of deaths, much damage to property, and a disastrous effect on the economy -- the area is not of course self-sufficient, and survives only by the infusion of funds from the British exchequer, amounting to several billion pounds sterling every year. The British interned suspects in concentration camps, used torture routinely in interrogation (and was condemned by the European Commission on Human Rights for so doing), funded, supplied and maninipulated Loyalist terror groups, used lethal force against civilians, most notoriously on Bloody Sunday, and even successfully manipulated voting in the Southern parliament (Dáil) by planting bombs in the South on the eve of an important division. The IRA, in addition to the traditional "fighting the forces of the crown" subjected the six counties to a wave of bomb attacks, sometimes indiscriminate, and in the 70s brought the war to Britain with a series of bombings and assassinations. They also used perhaps their most powerful weapon, the hunger strike, most notably in 1981, when the H Block Hunger Strike garnered much sympathy in Ireland and abroad.
Whatever you call it, Long Kesh or H-Blocks or The Maze or even Her Majesty's Prison Maze, it remains a notorious place. Originally an army camp, it was converted into a concentration camp following the introduction of internment. After internment had proved a failure and been stopped, it became the chief high-security installation for holding Republican Prisoners of War. The hunger strike of 1981 took place here.
It was the most unbelievable... I have travelled many countries, I have seen many civil wars and revolutions and wars, I have never seen such a cold-blooded murder, organised, disciplined murder, planned murder.-- Fulvio Grimaldi, Italian journalist, RTÉ Radio interview, 31/1/1972
On 30th January, 1972, troops of the British Army's 1st Parachute Regiment opened fire on a demonstration against internment in the Bogside, Derry. Thirteen people were shot dead, another man dying later of wounds received on the day; fourteen people were injured. It is known as Bloody Sunday.
The events of Bloody Sunday will live forever in the minds of Irish people everywhere, but the wound is still too raw for songs to be sung about it. However, shortly after the event, musical succour was offered from an unexpected source, when Paul McCartney proclaimed, Give Ireland Back to the Irish ! We must give Paul McCartney and his late wife their due, for at a time when many stood on the sidelines, they made their sympathies clear and plain. I like to think that should he ever play this at a concert, he'd introduce it with "this is a Rebel Song!" The song was recorded on 1st February 1972, two days after Bloody Sunday, and issued on the 25th of that month. The good old BBC, impartial as ever, promptly banned it. Not to be out-done, John Lennon also recorded a song inspired by Bloody Sunday. Sunday Bloody Sunday puts its vapid namesake by U2 to shame. Although neither is of course part of the Irish folk tradition, I've included them here.
Give Ireland Back to the Irish!
"And his head it flew over his shoulder, It landed up way down the strand, And we scooped him into a wee plastic bag Tied up with a black velvet band."
The original is of course The Black Velvet Band. Callous, macabre, in the worst of taste? No doubt. But then war has that effect on people. And another little ditty puts that day into context:
"Bloody Sunday not forgotten: We got eighteen and Mountbatten."
For, hours after the assassination of Mountbatten, the IRA scored its greatest success to date against the forces of occupation, killing 18 British soldiers in a land-mine attack at Warrenpoint, County Down. Since the majority of British casualties in that attack came from the Parachute Regiment, the perpetrators of Bloody Sunday, there were few tears shed in Ireland over those deaths.
The Warrenpoint ambush began with an attack on a small convoy of paras, two trucks and a jeep carrying a platoon from their barracks at Ballykinler to Newry. A mine had been hidden in a trailer of hay parked by the roadside, and as the convoy drove past it was detonated by radio control. The rear lorry was smashed up and six soldiers killed outright. The survivors then came under sniper fire. Following the standard procedure for response to an ambush, the remainder of the platoon assembled at the best available cover nearby, a stone gatehouse some 400 metres away, and there radioed for reinforcements. However, the IRA had carefully studied British army procedure in such situations and had anticipated the use of the gatehouse as a rallying point. A second mine had been planted there. This device was triggered half an hour later, as a Wessex helicopter descended to deliver reinforcements, and once again the IRA gunmen opened up. This second phase of the attack killed another 12 soldiers, including a Lieutenant-Colonel, and injured over 20 more. For the parachute regiment, the attack was a hard blow. They had not lost so many men in a single day since Arnhem in 1944. For the IRA, it was the biggest success since Tom Barry's boys caught the Auxiliaries on the hop at Kilmichael way back in November 1920.
The link with Tom Barry does not end with the similarity to his most famous operation. The outfit that carried out the attack was one of three new "commando" units recently set up by the IRA's Northern Command, and these were in effect a recreation of the old flying columns that Tom Barry and others had led to such effect in an earlier campaign against Britain. These units, with a strength of ten hand-picked volunteers, operated mainly in the border areas. They were trained to stay in the field for up to a week at a time, taking on targets of opportunity as well as participating in well-planned attacks such as Warrenpoint. For several years, they were a constant thorn in the side of the British occupation, though after Loughall in 1987 the Brits appear to have taken their measure.
While few tears were shed for the paratroopers in Ireland, feelings about Mountbatten were mixed. He was, after all, a harmless old man, long retired, in Ireland on holiday. But there it is: one can't expect to behave as though a land were at peace while your own nation is making war on it. Lord Mountbatten made the mistake of doing so, and he paid for that mistake with his life. Lord Mountbatten thought he could treat Ireland as other English lords and ladies had treated it for centuries, as a well-stocked game reserve and boating resort, with a docile native population ever ready to tug the forelock and murmur a "soft day, tank God, sor". He was wrong. Some natives had the backbone to fight to reclaim their land. And so, Lord Mountbatten became yet another casualty in Britain's centuries-long campaign to pacify Ireland.
The first hunger strike campaign, in England in 1973-74, saw the deaths of Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg. Take Me Home to Mayo can stand as a fine tribute to them both.
The AR-15 automatic rifle, made by the Armalite company in the USA, was a popular weapon with the Volunteers in the early days of the conflict in the North, when the only supply of weapons was a trickle of small arms from American sympathisers.
Without the support of the people, the IRA could not exist, as the next song graphically illustrates. The refuse cans or "bins" have traditionally been metal and those metal covers made quite a racket when banged against the street! A useful device for spreading a quick warning to everyone in earshot, sometimes accompanied by a screech of "Murder!". The custom came into being to protect Catholic districts during the pogroms that marked the foundation of the statelet of "Northern Ireland" -- as exemplified by the nefarious activities of the Nixon Murder Gang -- and has proved useful ever since in the struggle against the Crown.
By the end of the '80s, it was clear that neither side had victory in sight. Large parts of the province were effectively ungovernable in all but name, and the IRA campaign in Britain proved impossible to halt; but the IRA could not topple overall British control in the North, and the damage they inflicted in Britain was successfully held by the security forces to what Westminster judged "an acceptable level".
In 1994, the British government admitted what everyone had always known, that they'd been in touch with the IRA for years, and, prodded along by the president of the USA, finally arranged open talks between themselves, all parties in the North, and the government of the South of Ireland. These talks culminated in the Good Friday Agreement, which saw an IRA ceasefire and the entry of Sinn Féin into a limited form of local self-government in the shape of the Northern Ireland Assembly. At the time of writing, the IRA continues to hold to an increasingly uneasy ceasefire, though dissident elements -- the "Real IRA" -- continue with a desultory campaign, notoriously at Omagh, which seemed to bring back the worst days of the IRA bombs of the 70s; and of course Loyalist terror against Catholics, who they see as synonymous with Irish nationalists and therefore unworthy of life, has never stopped.
One might also ask, what were the South's armed forces doing while war raged in the North of their country? Well, good question. Here's the Dubliners with an account of Free State nautical goings-on.
ironic that the anthem of the 26 counties should be Amhrán na bhFiann, or the Soldiers' Song, given that they couldn't even hang on to Rockall, nor prevent bomb attacks in the south, never mind protect their fellow-countrymen in the occupied North of the country.
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