St. Patrick’s Day means a good deal to me, since I’m half-Irish and my middle name is Patrick. Many Catholics will pen essays about the day’s religious significance. So they should. What made Ireland distinctive from Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland was that it was not merely Celtic. No, it clung to its “old religion” despite persecution over centuries.

If later this month, it abandons it by legalizing abortion, then it will squander that proud history. If the Irish adopt the same slack laws that leave the unborn unprotected, its independence means nothing. It will finally have converted to the same religion as England: a bland, senescent post-Protestant suicide cult.

The old expression for an Irishman who betrayed his faith or nation was this: “He took the soup.” That comes from the days of the catastrophic Potato Famine, when one in four Irish died, and half the survivors fled. The nation’s population fell by 50% in just a few years, and has not yet recovered. (My mother’s grandparents were among the malnourished who sailed to New York in “coffin ships.”) Some English missionaries offered help: mobile kitchens offering nourishing soup. There was just one catch: You had to convert to Anglicanism. That was the price of “taking the soup.”

The soup on offer now is poisonous, of course, compared to 19^th-century Anglicanism. And the Irish aren’t starving. In fact, they’re too rich, fat, and happy. It’s not a condition natural to the Irish, and they don’t handle it well. (See Teddy Kennedy.)

Today I’d like to look at two pieces of Irish patriotic music, and see what they teach us about the issues we face in the U.S. today: Racial resentment, “intersectional” leftism, and the politics of Victimism. (Victimism was philosopher Rene Girard’s term for those who pervert the urge for justice into revenge.)

I love both songs. Each one is great to sing along to over a pint of Magner’s or a shot of Jameson’s. But one of them I like because it appeals to my healthy instincts. It stirs in me love for my ancestors and the sacrifices they made to keep faith with church and nation. The other taps into my darker side, a side that I see with chagrin I share with the campus radicals of Antifa. It goads me to pick a fight.

For each I’ll give a video, then analyze the lyrics.

The Foggy Dew

Here’s the most beautiful version I’ve heard of the first one, “The Foggy Dew.” It’s sung by the troubled but gifted Sinead O’Connor. The video features images from the powerful film of the Irish fight for independence in 1916, The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
 

 
The full lyrics of the song (she skips a stanza) follow. They were penned to a traditional Irish tune by a priest, Canon Charles O’Neill. He wrote just three years after disarmed Irish rebels from the failed Easter Rising of 1916 were summarily shot by the British government. Ironically, the Rising itself was deeply unpopular in Ireland. More than 100,000 Irishmen had volunteered to fight for Britain in World War I.

Cruelty Backfires on the Brits

But the cruel treatment of the rebels swung Irish opinion radically against the British. Worst was the execution of a wounded man, James Connolly, whom the Brits had to tie in a chair to keep him sufficiently upright to shoot him. British brutality backfired. It goaded the (ever sentimental) Irish into demanding autonomy, under the Irish Free State. Those who wanted full independence formed the Irish Republican Army. They launched the Irish Civil War, which ended with a partial victory for the original IRA: No ties at all to Britain, but six counties of Northern Ireland with Protestant majorities still under the Crown. Rent Michael Collins with Liam Neeson for one view of that conflict.

As down the glen one Easter morn
to a city fair rode I.
There armed lines of marching men in squadrons passed me by
No fife did hum nor battle drum
did sound its dread tattoo
But the Angelus bell o’er the Liffey swell
rang out through the foggy dew

Right proudly high over Dublin town
they hung out the flag of war
’Twas better to die ’neath an Irish sky
than at Suvla or Sedd El Bahr
And from the plains of Royal Meath
strong men came hurrying through
While Britannia’s Huns, with their long-range guns
sailed in through the foggy dew

’Twas Britannia bade our Wild Geese go
that small nations might be free
But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves
or the shore of the Great North Sea
Oh, 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

But the bravest fell, and the requiem bell
rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide
in the springing of the year
And the world did gaze, in deep amaze,
at those fearless men, but few
Who bore the fight that freedom’s light
might shine through the foggy dew

Ah, back through the glen I rode again
and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go
and I kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead,
When you fell in the foggy dew.

Celebrating the Dead

A wonderful poem and a beautiful song. It celebrates actual heroes, who gave their lives in what seemed a Quixotic fight against 400 years of occupation and religious discrimination. It criticizes Irishmen who went and fought for England. But in a mild tone. It doesn’t mock their suffering, or sneer at the dead. It simply observes that their memories would be held in higher esteem had they died for their country — not England’s king.

One of these songs appeals to my healthy instincts. It stirs in me love for my ancestors and the sacrifices they made to keep faith with church and nation. The other taps into my darker side, a side that I see with chagrin I share with the campus radicals of Antifa. It goads me to pick a fight.

But mainly the song commemorates the patriotic dead, and honors their ultimate sacrifice. It pokes the British for the wartime hypocrisy: Calling Irish to fight for “small nations” (such as Belgium) while their own small nation remained subjugated to Britain. Its sharpest barb is “Brittania’s huns,” which compares British soldiers to the Germans who savaged Belgium. Still, these nationalistic gibes don’t shatter its tone of solemn commemoration, which culminates in piety: Praying for the dead. (It’s a Catholic thing.)

Come Out Ye Black and Tans

Let’s look at another Irish patriotic song. It was written a little later, by Dominic Behan. (His brother, Brendan, was one of the most famous Irish poets of the 20^th century.) The Behans’ father had fought as part of the original IRA, against any settlement that linked Ireland to Britain.

First a video, then the lyrics, then some analysis. This version is by the popular Irish band the Wolfe Tones.
 

 

I was born on a Dublin street where the royal drums did beat,
And those loving English feet they tramped all over us,
And each and every night when me father came home tight
He’d invite the neighbors out with this chorus:

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

Come tell us how you slew them poor Arabs two by two,
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows,
How you bravely faced each one with your 16-pounder gun,
And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow.

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

Come let us hear you tell how you slandered great Parnell,
When you thought him well and truly persecuted,
Where are the sneers and jeers that you bravely let us hear
When our heroes of ’16 were executed?

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

Now the time is coming fast and I think them days are here
When each English shawneen he’ll run before us
And if there’ll be a need then our kids will say God speed
With a verse or two of singing this fine chorus

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

From Patriotism to Tribalism

Again, it’s a heck of a song. There have been days when current politics provoke me to walk around with it running through my head. Its author’s bitterness was something he came by honestly: He saw his own father suffer for Irish independence.

The lyrics are witty and biting. They mock the British military’s reputation for courage and steadfastness. How? By pointing out that the Empire wielded fierce modern weapons against underdeveloped nations: Using “16-pounder guns” to fight “Arabs” and “Zulus” with only “spears and bows and arrows.”

Come tell us how you slew them poor Arabs two by two/Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows.

Great stuff. But look at it closer. Who’s the target of the song? Not British soldiers (among whom were the brutal “Black and Tans”). It’s Protestant civilians, who stayed behind in Dublin after Irish independence. (In point of fact, most of them took such treatment as a warning, and left the country.) The singer’s father is harassing his neighbors in peacetime, with a jeering drunken song when they’re trying to sleep.

The song taunts the neighbors about the “slander” of Charles Stewart Parnell. An early advocate of Irish autonomy, he was falsely accused of murder by his opponents. Those charges got disproven. But Parnell’s career was ruined when real charges of adultery emerged, and the Catholic clergy turned against him. That set back Irish independence by decades. But it happened in 1890. And the neighbors presumably had nothing at all to do with it. They would have been children, or not yet born.

Next the song accuses the neighbors of cruelty. They let out “sneers and jeers” when “our heroes of ’16 were executed.” No doubt some British loyalists did that. They saw the rebels as terrorists, who tried to take over Dublin in the middle of World War I, using weapons they got from the Kaiser. (During World War II, some in the IRA would collaborate with the Nazis.)

But were those specific Protestant neighbors really among those jeering when Padraic Pearse was shot? More likely the speaker is simply engaging in tribalism — blaming the nearest examples of a hated group for the sins of their distant cousins.

From the IRA to ANTIFA

The song’s rousing climax dreams of a day “When each English shawneen he’ll run before us.” The word “shawneen” is the feminine form of “Sean.” It doesn’t refer to soldiers, such as those up in Belfast. No, it’s just a way of demeaning the male neighbor’s manhood. (He’s the “Black and Tan” who won’t “come out and fight me like a man.”) So this last verse seems not to be about expelling British soldiers from Ulster (which was then and still is majority Protestant and Loyalist).

No, it seems to be a fantasy of full-on ethnic cleansing of “English” from the island. These neighbors aren’t English. They’re Irish Protestants. To the singer, this makes no difference. Only those of his creed can be part of his tribe. It’s ugly, illiberal stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy this song. But examining why I do helps me understand a little better the mindless rage that stirs ethnic activists today in other groups: Blacks who blame white cops today for slavery. Latinos who want to take back the American Southwest for Mexico, or storm across our borders without our say-so. Or those well-off white leftists who dredge up sins from past decades or centuries, to denounce Western civilization or Christianity in toto.

There’s a point where a rage for justice slides, greased by original sin, into something sinister. We see exactly how sinister today, as the South African government tears up its promise of race-neutrality, and threatens to seize all white farmers’ land. If that happens, the nation will starve as Zimbabwe does. But at least those left behind will have some knockout songs, such as “Kill the Boer.”