Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Influence of rebel songs on today's youth is debatable

Luke Kelly sings On Raglan Road on RTÉ
Luke Kelly sings On Raglan Road on RTÉ Luke Kelly sings On Raglan Road on RTÉ

‘Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-el-bar’.

In the immortal voice of Luke Kelly this is the ‘rebel song’ (and how about that for a dated term) that I like best. The liking is not at all a fond, proud reflection on the Easter Rising of 1916 or so I like to think. ‘Rebel songs’ like ‘The Foggy Dew’, of the vintage before the most recent Troubles, are for me part of an emotional tool kit, some to be kept, the rest ditched. The thought is maybe shared in the northern nationalist generation who became adult as ‘civil rights’ crested, and another rebellion emerged.

All personal, very debatable. Like the proposition that songs are one way into history, and that a sense of unfinished business is the simplest, possibly best explanation for independent Ireland’s split mind on republicanism, and ambivalence in singing about it.

This paper’s history is of support for constitutional nationalism and strong opposition to ‘physical force republicanism’ as it used to be called. Not even the paranoid southerner most inclined to equate northern nationalism with Sinn Féin could credibly traduce the Irish News as sneaking regarders. It records, reports, notes. One day last week the front page headline was ‘IRA claims responsibility for bomb under PSNI officer’s car.’ (The ‘IRA’ was in quotes, a reminder that this is merely the most aggressive amalgam now of those who still oppose the 1998 settlement.)

The next page of news was entirely devoted to the story of how an IRA squad commandeered a car to carry guns. But this car was used by another IRA in another time, almost a century ago. The story was the alleged rediscovery of the vehicle immortalised in the rollicking ‘Johnston’s Motor-car’, best-known in the gravel-voiced version by Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners (also Luke Kelly’s group.) Johnston was a Protestant doctor, a County Donegal man who apparently didn’t want his car back after the IRA were done with it in 1921.

It was Luke singing Raglan Road, not the Foggy Dew, that was judged the nation’s favourite ballad on RTÉ the other week. Nothing republican about Raglan Road, and since Luke’s political views we’re told were closer to Official Republicanism than those of the Provos, that might have suited him too. Kavanagh’s poem has all of Kavanagh’s gifts. It took the Kelly gift to fit it to the tune. But the Foggy Dew has too many twists and turns in it to be a publicly-acknowledged anthem.

Heavy weather to make of a song? But ‘rebel songs’ have always raised temperatures. Were they not written, and sung, for that very purpose?

There was another example in the previous day’s paper, in Eamon Phoenix’s On this Day from June 1919, when a Labour MP asked Solicitor-General Denis Henry why a Roscommon man had been jailed for singing ‘The Felons of Our Land’. Likely to cause disaffection, said Henry. Was he not aware it had been ‘sung in Ireland for fifty years?’ Henry, Catholic from Draperstown, one of the three Ulster Unionist junior ministers in Lloyd George’s government, said ‘No sir, I am not.’

Stop, say some, singing about the past in words that could be used to praise killing still, by today’s ‘IRA.’ Stop encouraging audiences to revere murderers, defying the law of the land and escaping its penalties, or suffering them, nobly. People who would like republican songs banned have rarely, if ever, been so keen to silence ‘The Sash’, though it celebrates the reason for being of the Orange Order, its triumphalist commemoration of crushing the Catholic Irish.

And oh how history twists. At the end of his public life the writer and controversialist Conor Cruise O’Brien sat smiling foolishly on-stage in the Ulster Hall with the Reverend Ian Paisley, while some in the audience sang ‘Up to our necks in Fenian blood.’ Earlier, as an Irish minister, he had banned Sinn Féin from the airwaves and urged censorship of Dublin newspapers which published pro-republican letters. His first career was as a government propagandist against partition.

Do rebel songs fire up the human fodder for today’s ‘IRA’? The best of them I like, as songs; personal taste. The past week suggests that Derry’s youth have more devils driving them than old bombers and the unfinished business of republicanism. Do physical force republicans take any responsibility for their own districts? It’s hard to see how they convince themselves that the misery of drugs and suicide is all the fault of Britannia’s Huns.