Music and Politics in Ireland The Specificity of The Folk PDF

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Music and politics in Ireland: The specificity of the folk

revival in Belfast
a
May McCann
a
Lecturer in the Dept. of Social Anthropology , Queen's University, Teaches in Irish Studies and
Women's Studies , Belfast, BT7 INN, Norhern Ireland
Published online: 31 May 2008.
To cite this article: May McCann (1995) Music and politics in Ireland: The specificity of the folk revival in Belfast, British
Journal of Ethnomusicology, 4:1, 51-75, DOI: 10.1080/09681229508567238
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VOL. 4 BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY 1995
Music and politics in Ireland: the

specificity of the folk revival in Belfast
Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 23:32 06 January 2015
May McCann
Academic definitions of folk song have excluded Irish patriotic and nationalist song
which, in conjunction with the cultural avoidance of politically sensitive issues endemic in
northern Irish society, facilitated the integration of middle-class Catholics and Protestants
in the folk revival. This paper contextualizes the folk revivial in Belfast within the
historical and contemporary setting of Irish nationalist politics and song and explores how
song has been used to construct identities in "the battle of two civilisations".
The shamrock, rose and thistle and the lily too beside
They do flourish all together, boys, along the Faughan side.
A LOCAL POET'S EXPRESSION of the fusion of cultures in the northwest

x x D e r r y folk song repertory (quoted in Shields 1981:13) is a point made more
generally by Breandan Breathnach, who writes that Irish folk music includes not
only the older songs and melodies of the Gael but also the Anglo-Irish and
English ballads of the countryside and the rich vein of dance music which belongs
exclusively neither to Gaeltacht nor Galltacht (Breathnach 1977: 2).1 However,
strands have been separated out and cultural traditions isolated. Such social
constructions are products of history, created, of course, by people. This paper
will explore some of these constructions of cultural identity as articulated within
the domain of traditional music in Ireland.
Irish culture is prone to revivals. Some would take issue with this statement,
arguing that, since the music tradition has never died, it is inappropriate to say
that it has been revived.2 The perceived strength of tradition in Ireland has been
the basis of its appeal to outsiders, academic and otherwise. The relatively healthy
state of things traditional in Ireland is related to the uneven economic develop-
ment characteristic of colonial situations (Strauss 1951), which in Ireland
1
Gaeltacht refers to Irish language-speaking districts, Galltacht to English language-speaking
districts.
2
The issue of whether or not the folk music tradition died out in Ireland is part of a wider debate
currently being explored in domain of language. See Hindley 1990 and Ó Ciosáin 1991.
51
52 British Journal ofEthnomusicology. vol. 4 (1995)
maintained the life of the rural peasant society in which thrived the folk tradition.
Culture is central to ideological control, hegemonic or counter-hegemonic
(Gramsci 1971). Irish music, as well as language, literature and religion, became
centrally involved in power relations and in the construction and reconstruction of
identities of both colonised and coloniser. This paper demonstrates that it may be
in the interests of both coloniser and colonised to preserve, revive or appropriate
aspects of Irish culture, including musical culture.
By "specificity", as used in the title of the article, I wish to draw attention to
the historical context of the folk revival in Ireland, and more specifically in
Belfast, where its meanings derived from its part in a complex history of socio-
economic, political and cultural relations. The first part of the paper will consider
the work of some twentieth-century collectors of, and commentators on, folk
music in Ireland, drawing out the delimitations of the category "folk" music, and
demonstrating the consequent relative absence of political song in such
collections—collections which have more than academic significance, given their
use as a repository of material, for contemporary singeTS and musicians. To
confuse "folk song" with "songs of the people" at any given point in time would
be to seriously misrepresent what was relevant, musically and otherwise, to the
people of Ireland.
In the second part, I present an overview of the relationship between music,
music collecting and politics in Ireland, indicating some more or less apparent
connections between the antiquarian and political interests in music and song, and
highlighting the centrality of political balladry in Irish nationalism. It is suggested
that in nineteenth-century Ireland folk music was one of several areas of culture
contested in a battle of "two civilisations" (Moran 1905)—coloniser and colon-
ised, Anglo-Irish and Native Irish, English and Irish; the Anglo-Irish colonial
stock claiming a legitimating, Irish identity and the native Irish, oppressed
Catholics, coming to assert their cultural heritage and claim to nationhood.
Analysis of the Protestant antiquarians Thomas Davis and Samuel Ferguson in
terms of their involvement with song indicates similarities and differences
between colonisers of nationalist and unionist persuasion.
The latter part of the paper considers twentieth-century developments,
especially in Belfast, in relation to cultural identity and traditional music. It is
suggested that the folk revival of the 1960s in Belfast provided a social context in
which young Catholics and Protestants could interact within a shared cultural
framework. More specifically it might be partially understood as a short-lived
opportunity for a progressive, educated middle-class minority of Northern Ireland
Protestants to claim/construct a British and ultimately Ulster folk heritage/culture
distinct from the triumphalist street band culture of Orangism. For some pro-
gressive young Catholics the folk revival offered a transitory alternative to a
nationalist-imbued traditional culture, squeezed in, as it was, between two
radically different periods of Catholic nationalist assertion of identity through
Irish culture. The apparent apolitical nature of folk song enabled this oasis of non-
sectarian music-making in Belfast, mirroring as it did the fundamental social
McCann: Music and politics in Ireland 53
strategy of avoidance of sensitive political issues which facilitated the peaceful

operation of sectarian practise in Northern Ireland prior to 1969.
Folk song, an apolitical category in Irish music scholarship?
Academic writing on folk music and song, certainly in Ireland, tends to segregate
folk song from political song, and indeed from popular song in general. This is
partly a consequence of the general, much rehearsed delimitations of the concept
"folk song". Oral transmission and anonymity have been central, although more
substantive criteria such as being pre-industrial, rural* sanitised and apolitical,

have been involved in the history of this debate about the selectivity of collectors
such as Child, Sharp and Lloyd (see e.g. Watson 1983, Harker 1985).
Shields (1981), discussing the normal repertory of the traditional singers he
collected from in Magilligan, notes the influx into the rural areas of town-
produced cheap song books, and later the broadsides, and of the music hall hits
and vulgar poetry of urban inspiration which circulated in these sheets alongside
texts in traditional style. Rural singers did not exclude such items from their
repertory, but despite their acquisition of a certain traditional character in the
process of native performance, they were too little influenced by local usage to
merit inclusion in a work on "folk singing". Some local compositions are
included, for example Carrowclare [no. 13], which demonstrates "an unusually
good change within the framework of conventional expression." But topical, often
satirical and malicious, songs are not represented, nor sectarian songs, which
while known, were performed only in limited, non-offensive contexts.
Breathnach opens his classic Folk music and dances of Ireland with a
recognition of the gulf between folk song and the songs of the people. "If one
were to make a collection of the songs of the Irish people, one would hardly
hesitate about including The Last Rose of Summer and Silent, Oh Moyle from
Moore's Irish Melodies, patriotic songs like My Dark Rosaleen [see discussion
below], The Memory of the Dead, and Boolevogue, and some of the songs by
Percy French" (Breathnach 1977: 1). But however national, however popular,
these would all have to be discarded as folk song. The basis of selectivity in this
instance is anonymity.
Political ballads which have survived, often topical songs, tend to be part of a
written tradition with more or less acknowledged authors. One must seek analysis
of political songs as a category of "songs of the people" independently of the folk
song scholarship in such works as Zimmerman's compilation and analysis of late
eighteenth- and early nineteendi-century political street ballads and rebel songs
(Zimmerman 1967). Thomas Moore, author of enormously popular Irish songs
which passed from generation to generation in the home and in school, and whose
output was one third patriotic in sentiment, has been criticised for his patriotic
song writing (1967: 77) as well as for his manipulation of traditional tunes
(already faultily transcribed) to suit his own verses, which were "nostalgic,
pseudo-historical, whimsical, sentimental productions suited to the drawing
rooms of the nineteenth century..." (O'Boyle 1976:13).
54 British Journal cfEthnomusicology, vol. 4 (1995)
Categories other than "folk song" such as the very broad "Irish Song"
(O'Boyle 1976), narrowing to "Irish Broadside Ballad" (Neillands 1986) and the
yet more specific "Irish song chapbooks and ballad sheets" (Shields 1986) in their
differing foci, permit of an alternative range of "songs of the people" which more
or less include political song. In his study of Irish broadside ballads in their social
and historical contexts, Neillands calculated that 26.4% out of a corpus of 2,459
songs are concerned with themes of "politics and history". His two other thematic
categories were "religion and faith", and "sex, courtship and marriage".
Shields points out that the precisely defined subject of his article, the eight
collections of nineteenth-century song books and chapbooks housed in the library
of Trinity College, Dublin, though not abundant, are quite representative of the
varied subjects and styles found in the Irish popular press of that century. He
groups the texts into three categories. The first consists of "traditional songs in
folk idiom, including numerous songs of English or Scottish origin...from very
early ballads to quite recent songs, and a very diverse Irish repertory...the
majority composed in the English of Ireland." The second category includes
"Social or political songs of local, newsworthy or ideological interest.... This
category derives much of its style from the preceding one." And the final group is
"Songs of urban origin, British and Irish, stylistically marked by an original
theatrical, literary or sub-literary environment, including some songs imitating
folk idiom" (1986: 200).
The notion of "street ballad" used in collections ( 6 Lochlainn 1968,1984) and
compilations (Healy 1969) attempts to provide a notion of the range of songs die
people may have heard and sung, and although 6 Lochlainn, following one of the
rules of folk-song definition, omits all songs by known authors, one finds many
political songs in his volumes. In his introduction he expresses some regret
regarding his exclusivity; "many fine ballads by Samuel Lover, Michael Scanlan,
P J . McCall almost demanded inclusion. Perhaps I shall do a book of these yet, if
the Lord spares me" ( 6 Lochlainn 1984: viii).
Music and politics in Ireland
Virtually since we have knowledge of music in Ireland, its relationship to politics
has been evident in terms of song content, music, and cultural meanings. Irish
music per se, not just the sub-section "political song", has been within the domain
of cultural politics throughout Ireland's colonial relationship with England. While
colonial influence in Irish music in the seventeenth century was concerned with
extinction, the eighteenth century seemed bent on preservation. Colonial concerns
with absorption and eventually modernisation affected the social structure which
supported the music. The development of cultural nationalism, and political
nationalism's use of music and song, breathed further new life into the tradition.
The colonial process, in one way and another, has played a significant part in the
maintenance and development of Ireland's distinctive traditional music.
In 1603 a proclamation was issued by the Lord President of Munster for the
extermination by martial law of bards, pipers and poets because of their role in the
last upsurge of Gaelic Ireland against the English. Throughout the seventeenth
McCann: Musx and politics in Ireland 55
century they were persecuted and singled out as an "important moral resource"
for the society the colonisers were trying to subdue (de Paor 1986: 171). All
musical instruments savouring of popery were destroyed. O'Boyle makes the
point that this occurred just at the time when European music was undergoing the
change from modal to modem tonality, thus precluding Irish music, a patron-
based, courtly music, from participation in this development. While Giraldus
Cambrensis, twelfth-century chronicler of the Norman invasion of Ireland, found
in the native music nothing dissimilar from the music he had heard all his days on
the continent of Europe, to the cultivated ears of the eighteenth-century English

lords Irish music sounded "quaint", "barbaric" and "very ancient" (O'Boyle 1976:
10).
There have been differences of opinion, one of which will be discussed below,
about the notion that the aisling vision poetry of the e: ghteenth century (in which
Ireland was represented as a suffering woman, young or old, with names such as
An tSeanbean Bhocht, An Druimionn Donn Dillis , Roistn Dubh or Caitlin Ni
Ullachdiri) was an allegorical expression of political discontent (Breathnach
1977: 23, Zimmerman 1967: 52). However, Tom Garvin, respected by revisionist
intellectuals, is critical of recent scholarship that portrays popular Irish nationalist
ideology solely as a product of the nineteenth century, arguing that the "real
emotional taproots of Catholic nationalism was...in the political and social defeat
of the Catholic landed aristocracy in the seventeenth century and in the
subordination of the Catholic community after 1690" (Garvin 1981:15).
Aisling poetry lamented the decline of Gaelic and Catholic power, and ideas of
a potentially subversive nature ran through the Gaelic written and oral tradition in
the period 1700 to 1850. This popular tradition was spread around the island by a
class of itinerant bards, teachers and storytellers, most of them literate and acting
as entertainers, teachers, instructors and news-bringers to an illiterate but
receptive population. These purveyors of subversion were capable of quickly
turning treasonable sentiments into a more acceptable appeal to theories of civil
rights depending on their audience. The popular ballad tradition displayed a
similar two-facedness; bilingual ballads existed in which Irish and English verses
alternated, the English verses expressing impeccably loyal sentiments, while the
Irish verses expressed satirical or subversive political opinion (Garvin 1981:17).
To the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarian mindset the native Irish
culture—language as well as music—was perceived as a relic of an increasingly
respected ancient Celtic civilisation. Preservation of the "ancient" culture became
the preoccupation of the great collectors who published instrumental settings or
settings for voice; Edward Bunting (1796,1809,1840), O'Farrell (1810), George
Petrie (1855), Patrick Weston Joyce (1873,1909), and perhaps most influential in
modern times, Francis O'Neill (1903,1907,1910,1913).
From the perspective of contemporary ethnologists, ethnomusicologists, and
folk enthusiasts, these collectors were guilty of the errors of their time: setting
pianoforte accompaniments, manipulating original notation to create what were
regarded as correct harmonies, and sanitising texts. One practice, the bringing into
"urban" centres of rural-based traditional musicians, such as during the Harp
Festival in Belfast in 1792, bears some resemblance to folk revival practice of the
mid-twentieth century. The reason for the interest was undoubtedly informed by
patriotism.
The Belfast Harpers Festival, for which Edward Bunting was appointed to
notate the airs played, was organised by some patriotic gentlemen in Belfast who
hoped to preserve the music, poetry and oral traditions of Ireland. Petrie's
motivation included a duty and desire to aid in the preservation of the remains so
honourable to the national character of the country (Breathnach 1977: 108). It is
arguable that the work of these antiquarian scholars had immediate political
relevance since it suggested that people who had inhabited Ireland before the
Anglo-Norman incursion had shown considerable cultural competence (Garvin
1981:100).
While the antiquarian scholars collected what they perceived as the endangered
ancient music of Ireland, the people in Ireland, rural and urban, listened to, sang
and composed popular song. Of the political variety, broadsides in English
dealing with local politics were published in Dublin at the beginning of the
eighteenth century; the Volunteer Movement, inspired by the American War of
Independence, claimed freedom from English economic shackles in song as well
as other media. Influenced by the French revolution, the Society of the United
Irishmen, founded in Belfast, developed into the first militant republican
organisation and also expressed its political sentiments in song, the largest
number of which are to be found in the series of booklets known as Paddy's
Resource, or The Harp of Erin. The first volume appeared in Belfast in 1795
"being a select collection of original and modern patriotic songs, toasts and
sentiments, compiled for the use of the people of Ireland."
While Celtic antiquarianism was initially literary, it came to assume greater
political overtones. Most of the United Irish leaders and apologists were men of
broad interests in a culture that did not segregate politics and literature into
separate intellectual endeavours. Among their diverse influences, the United
Irishmen, like the Volunteers before them, made use of the new literary images
fostered by celticism. From antiquarian research, for example, both movements
adopted the harp as symbol, and a harp with the motto "It is new and shall be
heard" became the official insignia of the United Irishmen. The bard also became
a significant political image for the movement.
In terms of political propaganda, the United Irishmen recognised the appeal of
song and satires over dry prose work. Song and satire were major tools in their
campaign to capture the hearts and minds of the Irish people. Both formally and
informally, music and song animated the United Irish Society. According to Mary
Helen Thuente, who has convincingly argued against the received historical view
that Irish cultural politics is an essentially nineteenth-century development, the
selection of a "captain" within a local United Irish society, which met in taverns,
was at times determined by a man's singing ability, or by the candidate with the
greater number of songs (1994:15).
The latter quarter of the eighteenth century marked the emergence of Belfast as
a great urban concentration of industrial and commercial power on the basis of
which the population began to rise. The Catholic population, which by 1808 rose
to 16%, peaked at around 30% in the early 1860s, declining to about 25% in the
1960s. Presbyterians, still somewhat economically, socially and politically
disadvantaged by comparison with members of the Established Church, but not
nearly so much as Catholics, played a major role in not only the economic, but
also in the social, cultural and charitable life of the city.
Antiquarianism flourished, stemming from the activities of the Belfast Reading
Society, many of whose members were involved in the Belfast Harp Society
which organised the Harper's Festival in 1792 ( 6 Buachalla 1978: 32).3 It was
this same Presbyterian middle class that formed the backbone of the Volunteer
Movement and the United Irishmen, although only a limited number took the
revolutionary path culminating in the armed rebellion in 1798.
After the rebellion, and the subsequent Act of Union in 1802, the intellectual
life of the city recovered with the formation of many historical, philosophical and
musical societies. Anxious to avoid political and religious dissension, many
intellectuals agreed to ban discussion of controversial political issues from their
meetings (6 Buachalla 1978:48)—a theme explored further in the next section of
this article.
The connections between collectors, popular music, politics and political
balladry continued into the next century during which the political ballad became
established as the prime element of national popular culture. Thomas Moore,
sentimental populist who adapted airs collected by Bunting, was a friend of
Robert Emmet, executed leader of the armed rising of 1803. A Dublin newspaper
claimed that "Moore has done more for the revival of our national spirit than all
the political writers whom Ireland had seen for a century" (quoted in Strong 1937:
137). Yet as Zimmerman notes, some nationalist writers of the 1840s disapproved
of his "whining lamentation over our eternal fall, and miserable appeals to our
masters to regard us with pity" (Zimmerman 1967: 77). Despite this, Thomas
Davis, most renowned political balladeer of the nineteenth century, took Moore as
a model.
The Young Irelanders, ultimately militant off-shoot of Daniel O'Connell's
Repeal (the Act of Union) Campaign, elaborated their position, primarily through
their new weekly publication, The Nation, founded in 1842 by Thomas Davis and
northern journalist Charles Gavin Duffy—most popular were the ballads (Cronin
1971: 31). In three years Davis published more than fifty ballads and aspired to a
"Ballad History of Ireland". In his '"Essay on Irish song" he advised would-be
political balladeers to listen constantly to Irish airs before starting to write. The
first thing to do was to define the character of the chosen melody,, which would
in turn determine the tone of the tune, "the sentiment of the words". This method
of adapting words to airs was Moore's influence (Zimmerman 1967:112). W.B.
Yeats described Davis' Lament for the death ofEoghan Roe O'Neill as having
3
Ó Buachalla's work is translated by Gordon McCoy, PhD student at Queens University,
Belfast.
"the intensity of the old ballad". The Times described The Nation as a publication
whose verse "breathed rebellion" (quoted in Cronin 1971: 32).
While Breathnach claims that only a few of the ballads published in The Nation
achieved a permanent place among the national songs of Ireland (1977: 31),
Foster describes Davis as author of some of the most popular Irish ballads of his
own and later ages (Foster 1988:311). The Nation had a weekly circulation of
10,000 copies and an estimated readership of 250,000 (Cairns and Richards
1988:34). Certainly they were not entirely ephemeral, several ballads of the
"Nation" were sung at least sixty years later, at the time of the Easter Rising
(Ryan 1949: 145). Davis's A Nation Once Again became the anthem of the
Nationalist Party, predecessor of the contemporary Social and Democratic Labour
Party in Northern Ireland. The song has entered the psyche of the country and has
again acquired anthem-like status in contemporary Republican Belfast.
Religion, politics and music: "The battle of two civilisations" 4
The attribute "civilised" in relation to Ireland has been, historically, a matter of
contestation. It was not only Irish music that was designated "barbaric" by the
"civilised" colonial neighbour, but the entire society and culture. Antiquarian
scholarship distinguishes between "Irish", which appears to mean "Catholic", and
"Anglo-Irish" Gaelic scholarship. The latter was preceded by the former, which
was inaugurated by the bardic scholar and chieftain of his Galway clan Roderick
O'Flaherty. He published a history of Ireland in Latin in 1685 which was
translated into English and published in Dublin in 1793.
Catholic antiquarians
Charles O'Connor (1710-90), founder of the Catholic Committee, who published
tracts on the state of the Irish Catholics and wrote on the subject of Irish history in
general, edited O'Flaherty's work. It was in his capacity as a marginalised
Catholic country gentleman that he had patronised poets like Turlough Carolan,
regarded as the chief musician of Gaelic Ireland at his death. Historian Roy Foster
describes CTConnor's moderation as such that his writings were thought to be that
of a liberal Protestant (1988: 199). However, in a literary critique, Seamus
Deane's analysis stresses the political context of his antiquarian studies (1992:
29):
Remember that this was 18th-century Ireland, the period of the Penal Laws, and
the Glorious Revolution, the golden century of the Anglo-Irish. What O'Connor
did was to claim that the Catholics had a noble and ancestral and long-standing
cultural and literary tradition. In other words they were not barbarians....
Deane argues that the significance of his work was not that you should read the
Gaelic bards, but that you should give Catholics civil rights because, according to
4
I wish to acknowledge David Cairns and Shaun Richards, authors of Writing Ireland:
colonialism, nationalism and culture, for their stimulating analysis of culture in nineteenth-
century Ireland.
the standards of the British system of the time, a cultivated people deserve to have
civil rights.
Protestant antiquarians
Most antiquarians, however, were of the Protestant faith, although not uniformly
of the same political persuasion. Indeed the leadership of radical, more or less
separatist political movements in Ireland in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Ireland was to a large extent Anglo-Irish Protestant, and in the North,
Presbyterian of Scottish descent also. Belfast-born and of Scottish descent,

Samuel Ferguson, however, was a unionist. He was ardently opposed to the
Catholic Church. And he was a prolific writer and researcher, engaged in
facilitating the emergence of Gaelic culture into English prose and poetry. Yet it
was the Protestant nationalist political balladeer of The Nation, Thomas Davis,
who inspired Ferguson's quest for the past. Indeed they were friends. Ferguson
surrounded his Lament for Thomas Davis in a prose essay in which he distanced
himself from the politics of the founder of Young Ireland, while admiring his
motives and his character (6 Diiill 1993: 5). Their interest in the past, including
its music and song served different political agendas.
ILLUSTRATION l: THOMAS DAVIS AND IRISH IDENTITY

Davis adopted the necessarily pluralist position of the Irish-Protestant nationalist,
stressing the inclusiveness of the Irish tradition. The Irish must "sink the
distinctions of blood as well as of sect," combine the descendants of Gaels,
Normans, Welsh, Saxons and Scots, Catholics and Protestants in a union making
for a tolerant and flexible character in literature, manners, religion and life, of any
nation on earth" (Griffith 1914: 8-9). Their definition of Irishness and Irish nation
precluded racial essentialism; hence the motto of The Nation, to foster Irish
Nationality and make it "racy of the soil". Nationality was to be based on
residence, and there should be an identification between the coloniser and
colonised. For the coloniser, perhaps more than for the colonised, this
identification entailed a willingness to acknowledge Irish rights and duties. Davis
therefore dissociated his cause from that of the landlords, that is, from the
Protestant Ascendancy. He aspired to a cross-class, cross-sectarian alliance bound
together by a secular nationalism. Neither Celtic origins nor Catholic faith were
relevant in this definition which remains the theoretical basis of Irish nationalism
and republicanism. It was a definition of the Irish as all those who regarded
Britian and the British as "other" (Cairns & Richards 1988:34).
Duffy and Davis agreed that the best way to teach history to a semi-literate
people was though ballads. It also allowed them to communicate to audiences as
large as those their political adversary, Daniel O'Connell, was attracting to his
"monster meetings" and to combat his "playing of the Catholic religious card"
with their pluralist message. Reconciliation between all groups in Ireland in a
common ownership of, and pride in, Ireland's past was a constant theme in the
ballads of The Nation.
ILLUSTRATION 2: SIR SAMUEL FERGUSON AND IRISH IDENTITY

While Davis hoped to persuade fellow Protestants to embrace an Irish identity in
pursuit of a nationalist "imagined community" (Anderson 1983), Ferguson
identified it as necessary for the legitimation, and greater efficiency of Anglo-
Irish, unionist governance of Ireland.5 He saw Protestants as the natural leaders of
Ireland and aimed to "nationalise" the mind of the gentry so that it would be more
fitted to lead the population and be more accepted in doing so. While never the
majority-Protestant view, there was a growing reading market increasingly
conscious of its Irishness, its conservatism and its Protestantism. Respectful as he

was of Ireland's heroic Celtic past, he described pre-Plantation Ireland as in a
state of total anarchy which required the imposition of law and order, necessarily
from the outside.
Association with Ireland's heroic, warrior Celtic past provided the antiquarian
Celticists not only with a point of identification with Ireland, an Irishness based
on an emotional attachment to the land, their birth right through conquest, but
also with a model of a stratified aristocratic society, clearly mirroring the super
ordinate role of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Ferguson's personal sense of place
was associated with his native east Ulster whose individuality and
endangeredness is a dominant theme in his poems and prose. His personal
"warrior-identification" seems to have been with "Fergus son of Roy," Fergus
MacRoy, who he favoured over Cuchullain—the hound of Ulster—as a literary
subject (6 DuiU 1993).
The focus on pagan Ireland side-stepped the contentious issue of Catholicism
which represented a formidable obstacle to the Ascendancy's identification with
Ireland. In Ferguson's work it is apparent that there is a role for the native Irish in
his version of the Irish nation, but not as equal partners, they were at worst,
primitive in their ungovernable passions, at best, excitable and imaginative, but
either way incapable of self-government. In Ferguson's view little genuine
contact was permissible until they had abandoned that which most sustained their
sense of separate identity, their Catholicism (Ferguson 1834c: 448).
Catholic versus Protestant antiquarians: Roisin Dubh

The debate around the aisling song Roisin Dubh provides an example of one
skirmish in "the battle of two civilisations". The Gaelic song, metaphorically
identifying Ireland with a woman, was composed in the seventeenth century, one
of many poems employing this literary device. James Hardiman published a
translation with notes, in his Irish minstrelsy, or bardic temains of Ireland (1831),
a collection of Gaelic poems and songs with translations. Hardiman interpreted
the love poem as a political allegory of Ireland awaiting the help Red Hugh
O'Donnell was seeking on the continent:
5
It would be incorrect to suggest that Davis did not also make assumptions concerning the
continuing leadership role of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland. But he did so less consciously, and in
contradiction with other of his views.
There's wine....from the Royal Pope,

upon the ocean green;
and Spanish ale shall give you hope,
my Dark Rosaleen!
my own Rosaleen!
In doing so, Hardiman was claiming, indirectly, as well as directly elsewhere in

the publication, that these cultural possessions belong specifically to the Catholic
Irish.
The need experienced by some of Ireland's Protestants to espouse an Irish

identity and to belong as a super ordinate class, was undercut by Hardiman's
translations, for the poetry could be read as political allegories whose central
concern was the advocacy of an Irishness which had no part in it for the
descendants of the coloniser. Ferguson responded vehemently, in a four-part
review ( Ferguson 1834), to what he interpreted as Hardiman's appropriation of
the poetry to the nationalist cause, describing it as "politically malignant and
religiously fanatical". He offered an alternative reading of Roisin Dubh as the
song of a priest in love, who had broken his vows: "We sympathise with the
priest's passion, we pity his predicament; but we despise his dispensatory
expedients, and give him one parting advice, to pitch his vows to the Pope, the
Pope to purgatory, marry his black rose-bud, and take a curacy from the next
Protestant rector" (quoted in Caims & Richards 1988: 31).
Hardiman noted that the allegorical meaning had been forgotten and that it was
known only as a plaintive love ditty (Hardiman 1931.1: 254). Whatever the
original truth of the matter, political allegory, story of a sinful priest or "plaintive
love ditty", Roisin Dubh soon became one of the classics of Irish nationalist song.
James Clarence Mangan's much reprinted version (quoted above from Walton's
treasury of Irish songs and ballads, n.d.), in which the political allegory noted by
Hardiman is most overt, first appeared in the Nation (30 May 1846). Padraic
Pearse also included Roisin Dubh in his Songs of the Irish rebel (n.d.). It was to
re-emerge as politically powerful throughout the course of the present century.
Irish-Irelanders versus West Britons

The expansion in popularity of the Gaelic revival, with the foundation of the
Gaelic League (1893) and Gaelic Athletic Association (1884) and other "Irish
clubs" promoting not only sport but dance, music and song, was part of the
emerging pre-eminence of Irish Catholic nationalism. In direction opposition to
Ferguson's aims, the Gaelic revival at the end of the century was informed by
"The necessity of de-Anglicising the Irish"—title of an address given in 1892 by
Douglas Hyde, Protestant founder of the Gaelic League.
Although, like Davis, Hyde did not find a contradiction between such ideas and
the pluralist needs of Protestant nationalism, other Protestants did. Hyde was very
conscious of the task of nation-building in which he was involved. Appreciative
of the various strands involved in Irish culture, he wrote of building "a new Irish
community out of the materials inherited, whether the native tradition and all that
62 British Journal afEthnomusicology, vol. 4 (1995)
it had assimilated, the unabsorbed colonists, or the "relicta" of the departing

conqueror" (quoted in Nowlan 1972: 47). He claimed that the mould would be
cast anew "by reforging the cultural continuity of our past history.... The matrix
of the Irish people is the Gaelic tradition and in this mould they must be cast"
(ibid).
The political and propagandist nature of the Gaelic movement caused it to lose
many of its early rank and file Protestant supporters (Boyce 1982: 242). It was
D.P. Moran who elaborated the "philosophy of an Irish Ireland" advocating a
thorough political, cultural and economic nationalism (1905). In his newspaper,

The Leader, he denied maintaining that no one but a Catholic could be an
Irishman, but argued "when we look out on Ireland we see that those who believe,
or may be immediately induced to believe, in Ireland a nation are, as a matter of
fact, Catholics." "In the main non-Catholic Ireland looks upon itself as British and
Anglo-Irish," he alleged, and those non-Catholics who would like to throw in
their lot with the Irish nation "must recognise that the Irish nation is de facto a
Catholic nation" (The Leader 1901).
Cultural implications of partition
A combination of circumstances, not least the democratisation of electoral
politics, brought about the demise of landlord-led politics in Nationalist Ireland,
as well as the demise of any real inter-confessional nationalism divorced from
social and religious issues. (Garvin 1981: 70). After the bloody war of
independence (1919-21) and the Anglo-Irish Treaty Settlement (1921) which
partitioned the country, a Catholic state was set up in the south of Ireland and a
Protestant statelet in the North. The resolution created new problems for southern
Protestants, many of whom found a modus vivendi and many of whom left or
chaffed, and for northern Catholics who constituted a much greater proportion of
the population, one third.
In the South a subversive culture of religion, language, music and rebel songs,
became established; The Soldiers's Song written by Peader Kearney in 1907, and
sung, among others, in the lulls between the fighting at Easter 1916 became the
national anthem. The national broadcasting company used O'Donnell Abu, first
published in Th'e Nation, 1843, as its signature tune. They put up plaques, and
statues, and renamed streets in honour of nationalist heroes, and they paraded
annually to commemorate nationally significant dates, places and people, all to
the accompaniment of Irish music and involving Irish song.
While some northern Presbyterians and Episcopalians had once been willing to
espouse an Irish identity distinguishable in cultural terms, their numbers greatly
declined in the light of the political changes during the course of the. nineteenth
and early twentieth century. In the north, a Protestant unionist culture was literally
established; that is, it received full state endorsement and support, a fact most
overtly illustrated by the integral role of the anti-Catholic Orange Order (O.O.) in
the political and patronage system of the newly created one-party statelet, with its
in-built permanent majority.
Protestant, unionist musical culture was manifest in the marching bands, which
accompanied the many triumphalist annual parades of the Orange Order and its
associated perceptories. Triumphalism was expressed in the songs, in the manner
of playing music and above all, the location of the parade route. Choice of route
was unlimited and frequently involved "coat-trailing", that is, the deliberate
routing of a parade through Catholic areas so as to mark out power relations. The
Lambeg drum played solo or as part of the bands, was die other significant
musical symbol of identity. It was irrelevant that many of the tunes played were
Irish, whatever the bands played tended to be categorised as Orange music.

The Catholic nationalist population expressed itself in a parallel institution, the
Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.), with culturally parallel bands, banners and
regalia, and annual commemorations. Their music was categorised as Irish,
including papal hymns. The repertoire was based on the nostalgic, sentimental,
and rebel rousing patriotic and nationalist music of the previous century. A.O.H
and O.O. demonstrations did not have parallel status. Hibernian parading was
limited to places where there was no possibility of offending the loyalist
population, which, given the sectarian geography of northern Ireland, amounted
to a few small villages. Very occasionally they were permitted to parade in the
predominantly Catholic towns of Newry and Armagh. While Hibernian parades
suffered frequent bans, re-routing, and arrests of members carrying the Irish tri-
colour, northern Republicans found their expression of political and musical
culture further confined, essentially to church yards and cemeteries, where they
commemorated the dead of 1916 at Easter time.
No longer was Irish culture and identity contested. Irish identity was equated
with Catholic and within the context of northern politics, subversive. The ceilidhe
was a less public context for the expression of Irish musical culture and was part
of the northern Catholic's need to express their national culture in a new, alien
political unit. Even attendance at ceilidhes could be dangerous—in clubs where
names had to be given in order to gain admittance, people often gave false names,
knowing that the records were inspected by the police. The contest now was one
of political and cultural legitimacy. Part of it was fought out in the competition
for public space, and not solely on the roads and streets of the parade routes. It
was a major achievement, in the face of great difficulties, that some Catholic
organisations managed to acquire the prestigious Ulster Hall as a venue for a
ceilidhe morin 1941.
The ceilidhe: a participatory musical gathering modelled on "folk culture"

According to Ernest Gellner, nationalism "usually conquers in the name of a
putative folk culture, its symbolism drawn from the healthy, pristine, vigorous life
of the peasants" (1983: 57). The Anglo-Irish literary revival and the Gaelic
revival, both of which developed out of Celtic antiquarianism, looked to the Irish
peasantry. But they differed in the meaning which each attached to these
contemporary custodians of the past. Attention focused on those who live the
most isolated and therefore unspoiled lives, the inhabitants of the Gaelic speaking
west of Ireland. Yeats, for example, identified peasant mysticism with occult
64 British Journal ofEthnomusicology, vol. 4 (1995)
spirituality in what was an essentially pagan Celtic vision of Irish identity, while
the Gaelic revivalists found an equally idealised pious, puritanical Catholic
peasantry. For the literary revival, the lifestyle of the western seaboard provided
an interesting relic of an inspiring heroic past (and interesting subject matter for
creative writing), whereas for the Gaelic revivalist the inhabitants of the West
provided inspiration for a heroic present and future, an exemplar of a language, a
piety, a way of life morally superior to the materialism of modern urban living
emanating from London, capital of the British Empire. "Cooring", the mutual aid
provided between peasant farm families formed the socio-economic backbone of

Irish peasant society. Its social concomitant was "night-visiting", or "ceilidhing".
In the city of Belfast, the ceilidhe was a popular musical entertainment among
young Catholics in the first few decades of the new statelet. Ceilidhes, some of
which were organised by the Gaelic League, although primarily Irish dance
events, incorporated other Irish cultural activities such as singing and reciting. It
was important that any piece performed should be Irish: sentimental ballads,
songs of the emigrant, patriotic songs, or poems. There was no concept of folk
song in use, people described what was sung as "Irish songs", the main distinction
being between English- and Irish-language songs, the latter being highly
respected.
In Belfast the distinction between wholesome Irish ceilidhe dance and English
dance, involving not only dances such as The Military two-step, but the even
more corrupting jazz dances of the time, was clearly made—not least by
concerned parents and clerics (McCann 1983). But whereas in the field of sport it
was made socially difficult to actively support both Gaelic and English football, it
was possible to attend both kinds of dance. English/Irish dance segregation was
less significant in rural areas which often featured "ceilidhe and old time events".
The format of the ceilidhe also appealed to protective parents. A familial ethos
was aspired to, with a key role ascribed to the fear a toigh (lit. "man of the
house", meaning father), who oversaw the entire proceedings, announced the
dances (sometimes in Irish as well as English), organised the floor singers, and
kept good order, for example separating young couples who may be sitting
together too intimately. The Gaelic League ceilidhes were renowned for a further
degree of control. In pursuit of purist standards a dance set might be interrupted,
admonished and taught the correct procedure.
The model for the event was an idealised "Donegal House ceilidhe", Donegal
being northern Ireland's nearest Gaeltacht, situated on the western seaboard.
People used this rural domestic event as standard by which to judge the larger-
scale urban events. Although the participants of the Belfast ceilidhe were of one
family, or even one local community, it was hoped to recreate the atmosphere of
community—a rural, Irish, nationalist, Catholic community.
The association with the Gaelic-speaking west was invoked in more formal
pageant or play-like stage productions of the ceilidhe using cottage interiors,
exteriors or barns as settings. At ceilidhe mor (grand scale, formal ceilidhes) the
same "west of Ireland cottage" scene might be used as a backdrop for the band,
and one popular Irish language centre in Belfast had such a scene permanently
painted on the wall behind the stage.
Irish music, dance and song were involved in maintaining boundaries as well
as in a battle for legitimacy, seeking at most full Irish independence, at least,
parity of esteem. These battles were of course fought on grounds other than
cultural. Over time, as a consequence of coercive legislation, reprisal policies
against the entire Catholic community, sectarian practice in relation to the
franchise, jobs and housing, and workplace expulsions, resistance was worn down
and Irish Catholic culture in Belfast became ghettoised.
"Telling": sectarian modes of social interaction

A modus vivendi was reached involving a considerable degree of physical and
social segregation. When mixing, many people adhered to rigid patterns of
behaviour. An important strategy, where possible, was to simply keep one's head
down so that people did not know who you were, and what were your politics.
But this was only possible in the most distant of contacts. An alternative, noted by
the anthropologist Rosemary Harris in her 1950s research published as Prejudice
and tolerance in Ulster (1972), involved clear display, by means such as pictures
in one's home and wearing badges of one's allegiance. By making loyalties clear,
people made it possible to use the appropriate behaviour patterns that made
peaceful relations possible.
The other side of this interaction involves what Burton (1972) has called
"telling". This is not so much the deliberate indicating of cultural signs, as the
ability to read the signs that are there, no matter how minimal. And in Belfast the
bus stop a person stands at, their name, and undoubtedly knowledge of the school
attended, is more than enough "to tell". When used benificently these practices
allow people to interact amicably but superficially, avoiding the fundamentals of
religion and politics. Negative use allows people to identify targets for sectarian
attack. But either way "telling" can be seen to underwrite sectarian practice since
it precludes critical discussion. It was the beneficent use of avoidance strategies
that allowed for peaceful cross-community interaction, such as that involved in
the emerging folk revival movement.
The folk revival in Belfast
Socio-political context of folk revival
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the benefits of the British 1947 Education
legislation. In addition, mass media and American/English popular culture
challenged more traditional leisure pursuits. Youth sub-cultures, including their
musics, emerged and a more permissive society began. While the traditional
nationalist and Catholic musical culture continued, the number of ceilidhes
decreased, and only a few venues remained to provide a focus for such activity.
They were mainly associated with sport, the Irish language and the Church. Many
young people, Catholic and Protestant, particularly among the educated middle
class, felt disaffection from the cultural pursuits of their parents" generation, and
looked beyond the apparent stultification of northern Ireland politics and clerical
66 British Journal cfEthnomusicology. vol. 4 (1995)
control to a broader world of international culture and to the anti-nuclear and

other progressive political movements.
The Irish political situation in which these developments became possible was
one in which the armed Republican Border campaign (1957-62) failed almost
before it began. The lack of support from northern Nationalists was apparent from
the 1959 election results (Farrell 1976: 220). Even the Unionist party, normally
skilled at marshalling Protestant support on the border issue, were unable to make
enough capital out of the crisis to resist inroads on its vote by the Northern
Ireland Labour Party (Rumph & Hepburn 1977: 159). According to one
commentator, "Ireland in the sixties seemed more concerned with the fruits of the
good life than the bootless ambitions of the romantic past" (Bowyer Bell 1979:
349).
In the republic, Sean Lemass succeeded De Valera as Taoiseach in 1959 and
rejected the traditional policy of protecting native industry ("Irish-Ireland") in
favour of one of attracting foreign investment through subsidies—the new
economic policy. He jettisoned what he believed to be the last vestiges of
republicanism and signed a trade agreement in London in 1960. The subsequent
cross-border economic talks seemed a logical corollary. Even the leaders of the
Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Orange Order had talks at this time. There
were a few, but significant, Unionist dissociations from the Orange Order. A
group of Catholic graduates set up an organisation to work for reform which,
while maintaining aspiration for a united Ireland, accepted the Northern Ireland
constitution and condemned violence. In response to criticism from this body the
Nationalist Party, for the first time in the history of the northern parliament, took
their seats.
At a minimal level, however, nationalist and republican political culture
continued to reproduce itself quasi-publicly; annual commemorations were
maintained by the National Graves Association, and the 50th anniversary of the
1916 rising provided a celebratory focus. In addition to Gael Linn's film to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, An Tine Bheo [The
Bright Flame] (Marcus 1966), George Morrison's two classic documentary films
on Irish history, Mise Eire [I Am Ireland] (1959), and Saoirse? [Freedom?]
(1961), were distributed widely at this time, the former featuring a powerful
musical score by Sean 6 Riada based on the tune oiRoisin Dubh.
Folk purism versus rebel songs and pop songs

Central to my discussion is the notion that folk music, by whatever name, has a
history in Ireland, one that is integrally linked to notions of patriotism and
nationality. Therefore the folk revival of the 1960s in Ireland entered into
necessary articulation with a pre-existing tradition which had been, and still was,
part of a contested public and political domain, as opposed to simply a private,
domestic tradition.
When ballad groups like the Irish Clancy Brothers, who began their careers in
the United States, impacted on Ireland they were singing, for the most part, Irish
songs, most of which would have been commonly termed folk songs. Tommy
McCaniu Music and politics in Ireland 67
Makham (Makem) of the Clancy Brothers is the son of Sarah Makham, County
Armagh traditional singer extraordinaire. Many of their songs were Irish rebel
songs. Their first album, The rising of the moon consisted of songs of Irish
rebellion. For most southerners such songs had lost their political power and it.is
indicative of the relative harmony in the north that these groups played to capacity
audiences in large venues including the Ulster Hall.
However, groups such as these were not considered purveyors of "folk music"
among the small folk club gatherings which made up Belfast's more esoteric and
purist folk revival. The grounds for rejection were not political, but definitional
and aesthetic. The songs, for the most part, did not accord with academic
definitions of folksong, and their accompaniment and manner of performance
were not traditional. The preference in folk clubs was for unaccompanied singing
of ballads, "the big ballads", "the lyrical songs and later ballads" (Lloyd 1967),
and sea shanties. Young Irish men and some women sang in accents which
imitated the great names of the revival in England and the United States: Ewan
McColl, A.L. Lloyd, Peggy Seeger.
The democratic structure of the event, like the ceilidhe event described above,
permitted floor singers to propose themselves. Some clubs were relaxed and
"catholic" in their repertoire, engaging with the possible novel and experimental
musical outcomes. For more purist clubs, in the absence of the authoritarian
paternalism of the fear a toighe, there appeared a lamentable degree of hetero-
geneity, sometimes requiring the implementation of informal social sanctions.
Many kinds of song and music combined with the emerging British and North
American classic folksong canon to create a "bricolage" of sound. There was an
ample supply of personal compositions for guitar and voice, and of re-renderings
of established popular artists, especially guitarists, such as Bert Jansch. There
were songs from different countries and in different languages. Political songs
also made up a significant proportion of the local repertoire. They included
Woodie Guthrie ballads and McColl's political songs. There were workers songs
of protest and resistance and contemporary protest songs against nuclear weapons
and war. Nationalist songs from Wales and Scotland were also sung.
Relations with the Irish Catholic cultural scene

But initially there were relatively few Irish songs, and even fewer Irish political
songs. Two or three singers who were part of the on-going nationalist musical
tradition in Belfast would contribute the occasional Irish love song, often in Irish,
but they were not central to the folk club scene. The two traditions, the new folk
world of religiously mixed internationally oriented youth and an older world of
Irish Catholic traditional culture, co-existed. Relations were amicable and there
was some inter-visiting, but they remained discrete.
For many young Catholics, the Irish world was something to be rejected, being
associated with parental and clerical control as well as archaic politics. Those
caught up in the non-commercial folk revival were replacing the old Come All
Ye's with the new, replacing nationalist and patriotic song with folksong. Among
68 British Journal ofEthnomusicology, vol. 4 (1995)
other attractions for the youth of a puritanical culture, folksongs were bawdy
featuring "little balls of yam" and "bonny black hares".
In some ways the folk revival's apparently apolitical stance in relation to Irish
politics provided an escape from an identity based on nationality and religion for
both Catholic and Protestant youth. For Protestants, there was also an new
opportunity to tap into a cultural heritage, British, and ultimately Ulster—an
Ulster cultural heritage significantly different from that provided by the Orange
Order, which, at this time, was just beginning to loose the support of more liberal
unionists.
The song revival and the instrumental revival

It is also possible to separate out the folk song revival from the instrumental
music revival. Folk clubs were primarily singing events, which welcomed the
occasional instrumentalist, a fiddler, uillean piper, or a group of musicians
brought together. But the event was "performance" as opposed to playing in a
session. The session was the format developing for the playing of Irish traditional
music, and in Belfast in the 1960s the session might welcome in a singer or two,
but again, as something quite different and requiring a different kind of listener
response.
One could suggest that the musical revival looked south, and was part of the
developing network of traditional musicians which was being more or less
facilitated by the fleadh Ceoil organised in various provincial towns by
Comhaltas CeoltoiriEireann, founded in 1951. While singers and folk enthusiasts
were increasingly happy to attend thefleadhs, the folk club movement in Belfast,
epitomised in the Ulster Folk Music Society, looked east to Great Britain,
modelling itself on, and in a relationship of exchange with, the most famous of
folk revival clubs in England, The Singers Club in London.
Politics and the folk revival

The folk revival was predictably attractive to the Left. Fundamental to the
enterprise was the acknowledgement of the value of the culture of the common
people, whether rural folk or industrial workers. Such an agenda would be, in
theory, acceptable to a broad political spectrum of opinion. Within the context of
northern Irish politics it became more problematic when the folksong remit was
extended to embrace the songs of contemporary relevant movements, especially
resistance movements and nationalist struggles. Other folk revivals might sing the
songs of Irish resistance!
There were specific venues associated with various political groupings where it
was safe to sing one's politics, for example, the Communist Party, or nationalist
and republican clubs. These were more or less integrated into the folk revival,
enlarging their repertoires, and more importantly, changing the musical styles of
their singing and composition. Theballad movement emanating from the south of
Ireland, was more responsible for these developments than were the folk clubs of
Belfast.
McCain): Music and politics in Ireland 69
Other political or interest groups, such as the Young Socialists, ran folk clubs.
These tended to be of the relaxed and "catholic" variety. Organisation and
structure were minimal and performance ethos was absent. The song content,
political or otherwise, was spontaneous and haphazard, depending on the partici-
pants on any given night The clearest indication of the political nature of the
venue was the short, often inaudible, announcement made about forthcoming
meetings and demonstrations. Politics and folk song were not integrated, but co-
existed amicably and to one another's mutual benefit.
The non-aligned folk clubs came together on a musical rather than a political
agenda, albeit a musical agenda with political undertones. They were constrained
by the mixed political and religious composition of their participants and
ultimately by the underdeveloped state of class politics in Ireland. In terms of
ideal types, a dichotomy between esoteric purism and political cultural activism
was discernible. The latter was represented by a singing small faction more
interested in facilitating and partaking in a democratic song culture (Watson
1983) than in esoteric antiquarianism.
It is arguable that the specific history of the north of Ireland affected the
potential corpus of generally political songs, for although the most industrial part
of Ireland, Belfast, because of its sectarian politics has a relatively under-
developed labour tradition. Little work had yet been done on the existing songs of
the linen mills, the ship yards, or of the streets; these were even more likely to be
political or sectarian.6
Some new political songs in the folk idiom were sung by individuals, often
their composer. The traditional-sounding Fishers of Lough Neagh, while not
overtly stated in the text, was a song about a contemporary campaign for the
rights of the local people to fish their own lake which was supported by the
Communist Party and the new Left Irish Republican Army. The Islandmen was a
song about increased unemployment in the Belfast ship yards. Sectarian street
songs were not sung, with the exception of David Hammond's rendering of the
inoffensive, and somewhat distant offerings such as Sir Edward Carson's cat who
sat upon the fender, and every time he saw a rat he shouted; "No Surrender".
Songs of Irish rebellion were virtually unsung, except for the occasional
rendering of the ambiguous and cryptic songs of Domnic Behan. One song of the
1798 Rebellion, in which the Presbyterians of the North played such a vital role,
was among the repertoire of one of the leading figures of the revival in Belfast. It
was General Munroe who led the insurgents in County Down and was defeated at
the Ballynahinch in 1798.
Towards a social construction of Ulster identity and folk culture
Ewan McColl's rail against the British singer's habit of singing American (or
Greek, or Israeli) songs, and his insistence that an Englishman should sing
6
Song collecting in the areas outlined include the work of David Hammond on children's songs
and his valuable little book, Songs of Belfast (1978), and Betty Messenger's study, Picking up the
threads (1975) which sets the songs of the linen mills in a broader social context.
English songs, and American, American songs and a Scot, Scottish songs and so
forth (Woods 1979: 57) raised complexities in the north of Ireland, for Ulster was
not just another region of the Britain. Physically it was part of the island of
Ireland and historically it was part of the political entity of pre-partition Ireland.
Ulster (of the nine counties, not the six that constitute post-partition Northern
Ireland) was one of the five historic provinces of Ireland and the founder of the
fourth-century Kingdom of Dal Riada, based on the colonisation of western
Scotland. All of these pasts were available as cultural capital for a variety of
potentially competing interests.
Robin Morton's definition of Ulster identity and folk style

Robin Morton, founder member of the university folk club in Belfast and the
Ulster Folk Music Society, became involved in collecting song, and in
encouraging others to do so. His collection and innovative presentation of the
songs of John Maguire, influenced by John Blacking's concern for social context,
demonstrates but a part of the untapped folk-song resources of Ulster. Ulster's
folk song, he remarks, not entirely innocently, "with a few notable exceptions, has
been largely ignored by the scholars and collectors." Morton's claim of an Ulster
exclusion from the Irish canon is a theme much rehearsed in contemporary
literary cultural debate in Ireland. It is a position which seems to demand
simultaneous acknowledgement of inclusion and separation, similarity and
difference.
Dimensions of this difference are elaborated in the forward to his compilation
of Folksongs sung in Ulster (1970). "When people think of Irish folk music and
song they seem unconsciously to direct their minds towards the West, the lands of
the sean-nos. Certainly they never think of this province, yet you have only to list
some of the names of our singers and musicians to realise that the tradition is very
much alive 'Up North..." (Morton 1970). Ulster is clearly differentiated from the
West, at least in terms of singing style. Describing John Maguire's singing, which
shows what is best in the Ulster style, he writes: "In this we do not find the vocal
gymnastics of the sean nos singing of the west The decorations...are subtle—they
have to be listened for, but they are no less effective because of that. The story is
all important and nothing is allowed to cloud that." For Morton the word that
comes to mind in pinpointing the essence of Maguire's style is "economy".
This discussion of style may help to explain the relative absence of the Belfast
musical family, the McPeakes, from the world of the revival. With their very
ornamental style of singing, sometimes to harp accompaniment, and their use of
both Irish and English, the McPeakes had been involved in traditional music since
the early decades of the century. Ensconced in the heart of Belfast's working
class, Catholic Falls Road, they were in a sense a bridge between the old
nationalist tradition and the new folk revival. But it was a bridge not often
traversed. They were almost as likely to be playing in the Albert Hall in London
as in Belfast's Ulster Folk Music Society. Their professionalism, and therefore
commercialism, in playing such venues may also have been at variance with
purist notions of behaviour appropriate for folk singers. Members of the McPeake
family continue to be involved in the currently flourishing nationalist cultural

revival, teaching tin whistle, flute and uillean pipes to children from their local
area.
In Morton (1970) the issue of cultural identity arises most overtly in the notes
accompanying the song The Orange maid ofSligo, one of the few party songs in
the compilation, when he strongly opposes the view of those who "argue that
Orangemen are not true Irishmen, and that their songs are of no importance"
(1970: 57). To support his point he cites Charles Gavin Duffy, co-founder, with
Thomas Davis, of The Nation. In the preface of his collection of "Nationalist"

ballads Duffy says of Orange songs that "they echo faithfully, the sentiments of a
strong, vehement, indomitable body of Irishmen." Such a claim to Irish identity
would not be shared by the majority of Ulster Protestants.
While attracting many progressive young Catholics who, in anticipation of a
successful civil rights campaign, may well have been prepared to become
stakeholders in a new Ulster, it can be argued that folk revival offered an Ulster,
and to some extent a Protestant, orientation. This was achieved by distancing
itself from the pre-existing folk music of the Irish Catholic nationalist tradition—
one elderly Catholic musician described it to me as "the Protestant revival". The
separation of the music and song revival may also have contributed, given that
many people were unaware of the extent of the involvement of Protestant
musicians in traditional music, and the related belief that "diddly dee" music was
Irish, and by extension, Catholic. Association at many levels with the English folk
revival was another relevant factor, as were the limitations of the academic
definition of folk song discussed in the first part of this article. All of this, taken
in conjunction with the polite social conventions of avoidance which
characterised cross-community interaction, facilitated a religiously integrated folk
revival, and at the same time contributed towards the emerging issue of Protestant
and Ulster identity.
Estyn Evans and the Ulster folk identity

It was by act of parliament (Northern Ireland) that the Ulster Folk Museum was
established as an instrument of education and research in 1958, inspired by the
idea of a heritage shared by all sections of the community. Interestingly it was
one of the few folk museums to employ social anthropologists, and an ethno-
musicologist, one of whose first pieces of research was on the lambeg drumming
tradition. Closely involved in the movement for such an institution was the Welsh
Professor of Geography, later to become first Director of the Institute of Irish
Studies at Queen's University Belfast, EJEstyn Evans. Evans published an article
on "The personality of Ulster" in 1970, followed by The personality of Ireland
(1973). Influenced by the historian Marc Bloch, for whom "land life and history
were inseparable" (quoted in Evans 1973), Evans places identity beyond history,
locating a "sense of place" transcending human conquests—the stage upon which
Irish history has been played having taken shape through geological time (ibid:
68).
72 British Journal of Ethnomusicohgy, vol. 4 (1995)
Evans, like Ferguson in the previous century, and like Robin Morton, his
contemporary within the field of folk music, is concerned to characterise Ulster,
in the process distinguishing it from its significant other. Evans, like Ferguson,
transcends Ireland's modern politically and religiously sensitive historic period,
arriving at the physical location for the enactment of Ferguson's epic narratives in
order to trace the origins of difference.
He also shares Ferguson's focus on the isolation of Ulster. The protohistoric,
legendary Black Pig's Dyke, which was a series of protective earthworks
providing a defence for the kingdom of Ulster, epitomises the point that
differences between north and the south are not the consequence of the
seventeenth-century plantation, between coloniser and colonised. However, other
ancient differences suggested by Evans have an unnervingly Reformation ring
about them, for distinguishable among the religious beliefs of megalithic Ireland,
he claims, is a puritanic earth-worshipping northern region, eschewing
iconography, and a more artistic flamboyant sun-worshipping south (1973: 72).
The stereotypes are reminiscent of Morton's "economic" as opposed to "ornate"
styles of singing.
Ulster's distinctive identity is manifested in the sleeve notes to David
Hammond's beautiful BBC album, Ulster's flowery vale (1968), which is sub-
titled "traditional songs and music of the North of Ireland". Its location within an
Irish tradition, and within a broader British Isles-wide, Irish, Scots, and English
tradition, is affirmed. The sleeve cover includes a brief note on the Ulster Folk
Museum, one of whose exhibits was the subject of the front cover. It was a
painting of a sturdy, spacious, well kept, indeed "Protestant looking"—to use a
local turn of phrase—thatched cottage. No small, one-roomed cottage, this is the
house of a weaver, a category of colonist which distinguished the north from the
south and which laid the basis for industrial development in the North. If the
Ulster folk revival had any interest in peasant roots, it was more likely to be in the
industrious, "economical" domestic-based, rural weavers, than in the "little old
mud cabins" of the impoverished west of Ireland.
Epilogue
1968 saw the development of the Civil Rights Campaign as a mass movement in
the north of Ireland; some of the young people involved in the folk revival turned
their energies in that direction. However events overtook the possibilities of
peaceful non-sectarian protest, and Ireland was once more engulfed in a war
situation. The emerging republican nationalist movement expressed its anger,
sorrow, aspirations, and increasing resistance, in the traditional mode of political
balladry. From Belfast and other affected areas, songs poured forth into the street
and into the clubs and pubs. A whole nationalist repertoire dating back as far as
the 1798 rebellion became available to those unfamiliar with iL New songs were
written daily, about each news-worthy incident. The composers were often local
people, more or less musically trained. Local groups sprang up to perform songs
and the local recording studio produced recordings of those same people and
groups. Performance venues was frequently dominated by floor-singers.
One of the more resonant songs of the early 1970s, Four Green Fields, was a
song personifying Ireland as an old woman with the four provinces under her
care—one province, Ulster, was still in bondage. In an epoch-marking album also
entitled "Four Green Fields", the local, Falls Road-based group, The Flying
Column (a reference to a rural guerrilla military formation used in the War of
Independence), used the song Four Green Fields as a surround for an emotive
rendering of Padraic Pearse's poem about "Mother Ireland", Mise Eire, which
was musically backed by none other than Roisin Dubh, played on the mandolin.
Conclusion
I could not have written this article other than in retrospect. It is interesting to
reflect on how I might have written had I done fieldwork during the early folk
revival in Belfast. It is extremely unlikely that I would have thought to
contextualize the revival within the context of Irish rebel songs. It raises
important questions about historical perspective. My field research was, however,
on the 1970s. I studied the songs of The Troubles, which initially appalled me, in
terms of the aesthetic I had learned as a keen and purist Catholic folk enthusiast.
My research uncovered, for me, their significance in the lives of people. The
songs had a social heritage and a history, and they were part of an orally
transmitted tradition.
In this paper I have suggested that the limited parameters of the academically
defined term "folk song" mirrored and complemented the limited forms of
communication available to religiously mixed groups of people in Northern
Ireland. Both were intent on avoiding difficult issues relating to Irish nationalist
history and politics. This convergence in the broader historical context of the
1960s in Ireland," and in the Western world, allowed for a halcyon period of
fruitful musical interaction.
However, the revival was entering the domain of an older nationalist musical
culture. It could not be innocent of the politics of identity in Northern Ireland and,
whether consciously or not, took on a significant role in relation to the emergence
of a new concern with Protestant identity. In many respects the attempts to define
this identity mirror debates of the previous century. Ultimately the coloniser still
must seek a non-essentialist, place-oriented version of Irishness, and indeed
Ulstemess. The Troubles have witnessed an impressive revival of Irish nationalist
culture.
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May McCann is a lecturer in anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast where she

also teaches in Irish Studies and Women's Studies. Her research interest is the
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has been the focus of recent work on political martyrdom and song. Address: Dept. of
Social Anthropology, Queen's University, Belfast BT7 INN, Norhern Ireland.

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British Journal of Ethnomusicology

Music and politics in Ireland: The specificity of the folk

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Music and politics in Ireland: the

A LOCAL POET'S EXPRESSION of the fusion of cultures in the northwest

strategy of avoidance of sensitive political issues which facilitated the peaceful

substantive criteria such as being pre-industrial, rural* sanitised and apolitical,

the continent of Europe, to the cultivated ears of the eighteenth-century English

Presbyterian of Scottish descent also. Belfast-born and of Scottish descent,

ILLUSTRATION l: THOMAS DAVIS AND IRISH IDENTITY

ILLUSTRATION 2: SIR SAMUEL FERGUSON AND IRISH IDENTITY

conscious of its Irishness, its conservatism and its Protestantism. Respectful as he

Catholic versus Protestant antiquarians: Roisin Dubh

There's wine....from the Royal Pope,

In doing so, Hardiman was claiming, indirectly, as well as directly elsewhere in

The need experienced by some of Ireland's Protestants to espouse an Irish

Irish-Irelanders versus West Britons

it had assimilated, the unabsorbed colonists, or the "relicta" of the departing

thorough political, cultural and economic nationalism (1905). In his newspaper,

Irish, whatever the bands played tended to be categorised as Orange music.

The ceilidhe: a participatory musical gathering modelled on "folk culture"

provided between peasant farm families formed the socio-economic backbone of

and Irish Catholic culture in Belfast became ghettoised.

"Telling": sectarian modes of social interaction

control to a broader world of international culture and to the anti-nuclear and

Folk purism versus rebel songs and pop songs

Relations with the Irish Catholic cultural scene

The song revival and the instrumental revival

Politics and the folk revival

potentially competing interests.

Robin Morton's definition of Ulster identity and folk style

family continue to be involved in the currently flourishing nationalist cultural

Thomas Davis, of The Nation. In the preface of his collection of "Nationalist"

Estyn Evans and the Ulster folk identity

(1840) The ancient music of Ireland. London.

May McCann is a lecturer in anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast where she

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