Eamonn Lynskey recalls the rebel songs popular in his youth
It’s a Saturday afternoon and Leo Maguire’s Radio Programme is fading out with his weekly admonition: ‘If you want to sing, do sing an Irish song!’ Simpler times they were then, the 1950s. Or were they just times like the present but with simpler entertainments? – No TV, except for some snowy BBC reception. No social media, unless you include newspapers and magazines. No mobile phones either, so we were not preoccupied (obsessed?) with looking into the lives of our friends and neighbours, constantly sharing photographs and commenting on the latest fads and fashions. Innocent times! However, it is safe to say that if the world-wide-web had been around then, people would have availed of it just as much as they do today.
Leo Maguire signed off his last programme in January 1981, still voicing his familiar slogan ‘if you feel like singing, do sing an Irish song’. Great ballads all, but by then much less heard than previously
But we had radio and that, for most people in the Republic of Ireland, meant Radio Éireann. We were all avid listeners to our national broadcaster (we had little other choice) and we really did enjoy programmes like The Foley Family, an urban working-class saga later to give way on TV to the much more serious and realistic Tolka Row. We were also enthralled by episodes of The Kennedys of Castleross, a long-running soap-saga of daily happenings in a rural community. Again, with the arrival of television the weekly programme The Riordans took over that audience. These two very different TV programmes featuring two very different lifestyles were popular with both city and rural dwellers – perhaps because we had not yet learned to categorise ourselves as either town mice or country mice. Whatever the reason, the radio programmes of the time were a common topic of conversation wherever one went and with whomever one met, rather as in succeeding years TV programmes were before the advent of the wide variety of channels and streaming platforms available today.
Post-war Ireland of the late 1940s and the 1950s was a very homogenous society. Emigration had taken its toll since the foundation of the State in the 1920s (and of course for long before that) and immigration was practically non-existent. It was a time when the only ‘black’ people one saw were doctors in hospitals. There was a kind of comfort in this sameness, a sense of belonging to a single identifiable unit – to a nation. And this after so many hundreds of years condemned to being a mere province of an alien power.
Hence the popularity on radio of songs which highlighted ‘the fight for freedom’ and which extolled the glorious exploits of past rebellions and individual rebels. Only one generation had passed since the 1916 insurrection and the war of independence and civil war were still fresh in the memory of many who had lived through those turbulent times, and were still living. And because of the border imposed by Britain in 1921 cutting off the northern part of the island, the generally held view was that Ireland’s fight for freedom was still an ‘unfinished business’; and that Robert Emmet’s famous declaration that his epitaph should not be written ‘until Ireland took her place among the nations of the world’ still held true. And it was understood that he meant all of Ireland.
Leo Maguire was also a prolific song writer and one of his compositions If You’ll Only Come across the Sea to Ireland last was memorably recorded by Joe Lynch – later to make the transition to TV as Dinny in the weekly rural series Glenroe, a successor to The Riordans
So it was that the national broadcaster played many popular ‘rebel’ ballads. On one programme in particular the fare was completely and unabashedly Irish: Leo Maguire’s 15-minute lunchtime slot, sponsored by the Waltons Music Store. Leo himself was a prolific songwriter and wrote over 100 songs, some of the most popular being The Whistling Gypsy, My Auld Old Killarney Hat and If You’ll Only Come across the Sea to Ireland, the last-named memorably recorded by Joe Lynch – later to make the transition to TV as Dinny in the weekly rural series Glenroe, a successor to The Riordans.
The above song titles indicate the kind of programme that Leo presented: old songs of nineteenth and early twentieth century composition, especially those celebrating the struggle for Irish independence from British rule. This was the 1950s, a time before we in the south became sensitive to the views of the Unionist people in the northern part of the island and before we would become cautious about glorifying our past violent disagreements with our former colonisers.
The imagery of courage and sacrifice in a song like Thomas Moore’s The Minstrel Boy (published in 1813) struck me then – as now – as quite wonderful, with its backstory of the lad who shouldered his late father’s harp and sheathed his late father’s sword (‘his father’s sword he has girded on / and his wild harp slung behind him’) to go into battle. It stirred a vague fervour inside me (as it was meant to do) even though, being very young and still in the early years of Primary School, I had only a very inexact idea of what the fight was about. Nor was I clear about why Moore called Ireland the ‘land of song’. At that time, for me, it was simply a great story, guided by the most wonderful of melodies. Later I would learn that the song is, of course, first and foremost a paean to the fight for Irish freedom, driven by the same romantic nationalism that sent Moore’s friend Byron to fight and die for Greek independence. It is charged with that 19th century Romanticism which in Ireland held its own well into the early twentieth century.
While The Minstrel Boy is redolent of that genteel nationalism that entertained many a Victorian drawing-room, much of Leo Maguire’s fare had a more directly insurrectionist content. The Foggy Dew, for instance, written by Canon Charles O’Neill around 1920 makes reference to the 1867 Fenian rebellion and to the 1916 rising and its leaders:
O had they died by Pearse’s side,
Or fought with Cathal Brugha
their names we would keep
where the Fenians sleep
‘neath the shroud of the Foggy dew.
Furthermore, this ballad and those like it gave vent to a bitterness felt at the time (and which was to linger for many years) over the fact that many Irishmen had joined the British army to fight for ‘plucky little Belgium’ and ‘the freedom of small nations’ rather than join in the fight for Irish freedom. It was a time when there was little talk of commemorating ‘all Irishmen and women who fought in all wars’. Many people at the time thought that the only battles worth commemorating were those fought in Ireland down the centuries against foreign rule.
So it was that old ballads such as Down by the Glenside (‘Glorio, Glorio to the bold Fenian Men’) and Kelly the Boy from Killane with their ringing refrains (‘the boys march at dawn from the south to the north’) were regularly heard in the Republic during the 1940s and 50s. New ones also appeared. Sean South of Garryowen chronicled the heroic death of a young volunteer of the (illegal) Irish Republican Army during an attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in 1957 during one of the ill-fated ‘border campaigns’ of that period. His song shares the tune of another ballad about a rebel, Roddie McCorley, (‘who goes to die near the Bridge of Toome today’).
Roddie McCorley, (‘who goes to die near the Bridge of Toome today’)
All this national feeling arose from the legacy of the brutal response of the British Government to the 1916 insurrection which changed the course of modern Irish history. Similarly, the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s unprovoked and vicious attack in 1969 on a civil rights march at Burntollet in Co. Derry initiated a sea change in the current of Irish affairs, north and south. The attack was reported world-wide and its garish and shocking TV images of bloodied marchers left severely injured were remarkably like contemporary TV coverage of police brutality towards black people protesting in the southern states of the USA. However, this worsening situation in the north of the island was destined to act as a brake on the airing of rebel ballads rather than to increase it, as in the past.
Even though most people in the Republic had grown somewhat apathetic to the predicament of the nationalists in Northern Ireland by the 1960s, the brutality of Burntollet and successive punitive actions against the Catholic population brought about a sharp change in attitude. Suddenly the 1921 partition of Ireland and its consequences for northern nationalists emerged from a nostalgic fog of songs about Ireland’s past and became searingly relevant to Ireland’s present. The British government’s decision to intern people without trial produced yet another rebel ballad to add to the canon – the iconic The Men Behind the Wire – but attitudes in the Republic had begun to change. One manifestation of this change was in attitudes towards freedom ballads – towards ‘the songs our fathers sang’, as Leo Maguire would call them in his weekly programme catch-phrase.
The regular televised accounts of bombings and shootings on the streets of Belfast and other cities and towns in Northern Ireland ensured the stripping away of any veneer of nostalgia from these old ballads and revealed a new historical relevance. Figures such as Sean South acquired a modern-day resonance that disconcerted many. The Republic of Ireland, striving to emerge as a cosmopolitan European State was uncomfortable with these paeans to a violent past, a past now catapulted into the present. Long-held views regarding the unfinished business of ‘the six counties’ which had morphed over the years into a somewhat tokenistic aspiration threw up questions that now needed to be confronted.
In what way did the newly-formed and deadly earnest Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and their murderous methods differ from the freedom fighters celebrated in the old ballads? Although the British Army’s actions and Loyalist atrocities against defenceless nationalist communities were outrageous, were the violent responses of PIRA, which in turn cost so many more lives, justified? These were uncomfortable questions for many in the Republic and so the old patriotic ballads began to disappear from the airwaves. They continued to be sung lustily in pub-singing sessions and house parties but a new caution about their lyrics began to creep into the national consciousness.
The Broadcasting Act introduced by the Irish Government in 1990 sought to limit the airing of strongly nationalist sentiments on radio and television (and was especially directed against appearances by Sinn Féin politicians, a political party widely seen as the political wing of PIRA). The Act did not place any ban on the playing of the old rebel ballads on radio, but for some time before this Act their playtime on the national airwaves had become increasingly restricted. It was simply the case that the whole matter of the unification of Ireland had become an explosive topic and consequently a kind of self-censorship set in. Kelly the boy from Killane was less frequently allowed to lead his troops ‘from the South to the North’ on the airwaves after the late 1960s and finally he was not heard at all. Similarly with songs like Kevin Barry. There was the feeling that nothing should be done to make the bad situation in Northern Ireland any worse.
This gradual disappearance of the old songs from the airwaves was not all a consequence of political upheaval. From the 1960s onwards, young Irish people were becoming more inclined to sing songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones rather than take Leo Maguire’s advice to sing the songs their fathers sang. ‘Britpop’ had invaded America and put an end to the Everly Brothers and similarly in Ireland, Sean South was swept away by the ‘Merseyside Sound’ and the glamour of the Irish Showband era. Pride in the sung heritage of the past began to take on a tinge of being ‘out of touch’ or, in the preferred word of the day, ‘square’. The conviction was still strong that the political division forced on the country half a century before was intrinsically unjust, but there was also the feeling that the time had come for the Republic to embrace outward developments such as European Union membership (1973), rather than getting stuck in the past shouting across the border.
So it was that increasing caution began to be exercised in the Republic regarding the rendition of songs such as Boolavogue which commemorates the courage of Father Murphy of old Kilcullen (summarily executed by the British for his part in the rebellion of 1798); and ballads like Bodenstown Churchyard (from the pen of the Young Irelander Thomas Davis) commemorating the ill-fated nationalist leader Wolfe Tone. These songs are kept very much alive still in traditional music sessions and in the recordings of performers like The Wolfe Tones, a group named after the patriot just mentioned. But they are now rarely heard on the national airwaves and are not so much part of the national consciousness as once they were.
Leo Maguire signed off his last programme in January 1981, still voicing his familiar slogan ‘if you feel like singing, do sing an Irish song’. Great ballads all, but by then much less heard than previously, and since. Hopefully though, at some future date when Irish History becomes less fraught, we will not mind singing about what was endured on the way to statehood, and the old songs may recover some of their one-time widespread popularity.
