From crashing winds and lashing sea

Ah, right. Saint Patrick’s Day, and I’m feeling no need at all for alcohol, but a whole lotta need for rebellion. So let’s have a couple of rebel songs to rally the masses against the latest round of repressive government.

Pretty appropriate, actually, given how many generations of Irish immigrants have nourished the ideals of freedom in this country and at home—but who likely would not have made the cut in the current administration’s idea of acceptable additions to the nation, being largely poor, non-Protestant and bad hombres.

So I’ll start you out with “The West’s Awake”—lamenting Ireland’s history of internal warfare that left it open to the predations of its Anglo-Saxon neighbor. For much of it, as England lops off section after section of Ireland, Connaught (the last holdout of Irish language and culture, the province that was not profitable enough for English colonization), in the west, lies asleep. And the song looks forward to the day when the West awakens, breaks its chains and reclaims the entire country.

Here the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem sing it:

Ireland is often depicted symbolically as a woman—Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, Sean-Bhean Bhocht (Poor Old Woman) are a few of the personas. This may to a certain extent have been a masking function: no, ya Sassenach gobeen, we’re not talkin’ smack about your poxy queen, we’re just singin’ a little thing or two about our sweetheart…

It also helped that they were frequently singing in Gaelic.

“Óró sé do bheatha abhaile” uses that construct—speaking of the afflicted woman in chains, whose fine land is in the hands of thieves. I particularly like the reference to Gráinne Mhaol—known to the English as Grace O’Malley, who as commander of both land and sea forces  scared the bejesus out of them during the last half of the 16^th Century—coming over the sea with armed warriors as her guard.

Gráinne was from Connaught.

This version by Sinéad O’Connor is somewhat atypical, but I believe it’s appropriate in this time of the pussyhat to have a bolshie chick singing this particular song.

Because my people did not leave Donegal in coffin ships 170 years ago to have their descendants return to the yoke of any unjust government. Especially one with a feckin' Orangeman at its head.