“From Tassagart to Clonmore
There flows a stream of Saxon gore…

And now for Black Fitzwilliams head
We’ll send it over dripping red
To Queen Liza and her ladies”

I received my earliest musical education at about the age of nine or ten from Brother Lynch in my primary school. He would form the class into a choir and taught us songs I still remember, as anyone who has heard my rendition of The Foggy Dew can attest. It is a song honouring those who fought in the Easter Rising, an armed rebellion against British rule. Brother Lynch used the Cathal Brugha lyric in preference to the De Valera one, doubtless on account of Brugha being more militant. He also taught us the Woody Guthrie song Deportees which is probably banned now in the United States. Here is a version by Johnny Cash.

The first LP that came into our house was Four Green Fields by the Flying Column. It had been recommended to my mother by a friend of hers who was involved with The Peace People, a women led movement against the violence in the north of Ireland at the time. She had lost an eye in a murder attempt against her.  The group’s name is also what some IRA units were called during the War of Independence.  It’s mostly a collection of revolutionary nationalist songs but includes a former teacher of mine reciting a Seamus Heaney poem about a peasant uprising which involved doing unpleasant things to British soldiers.  “We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike”, as Heaney put it. As far as everyone who bought and listened to the album was concerned it was wholesome family entertainment, not like those people on Top of The Pops dancing around half naked with the boys looking more like girls.

These days, Christy Moore can fairly be considered the patriarch of Irish music and is firmly a man of the internationalist left. The lines above about doing unpleasant things to English people and chopping the heads off British military leaders are from Follow Me Up To Carlow, which he sings on the first Planxty album, which all reasonable people agree probably remains the greatest Irish album of any genre ever made. He also set a Bobby Sands lyric to music and was a fixture at benefits in support of Republican prisoners in the 70s and early 80s.

Shane MacGowan had politics which are virtually indistinguishable from those of Kneecap and a few days ago was talked about in the warmest of terms in a Times article. He also wrote these lines referring to an ambush in which eight members of the IRA were killed by British soldiers, the sort of thing British journalists approve of, MacGowan not so much.

“May the whores of the empire lie awake in their beds
And sweat as they count out the sins on their heads
While over in Ireland, eight more men lie dead
Kicked down and shot in the back of the head”

A Bulgarian friend described her country’s folk music as mostly being about maidens and young men falling in love, unrequited love and killing Turks. Given the country’s experience under the Ottomans you can understand why this is reflected in the country’s music. A lot of the most rousing Irish songs, the ones that get hordes of enthusiastic, drunk young people singing along to groups like the musically abominable Wolfe Tones every year in Belfast and Dublin, have an emotional resonance connected with a memory of struggle which the British politicians and journalists queuing up to stick the boot into Kneecap despise and don’t understand.

Now, let’s all sing along with Steve Coogan’s uncle from Mayo in a chorus of Come Out You Black and Tans, a song about Irish peasants fighting British troops.