It is not often that I get what I want for Christmas. Hints do not work…but oddly this year, I actually got two tickets to see the Wolfe Tones in concert in Dublin in July.

Supposedly their last ever concert but as Frank Sinatra is still performing farewell concerts in Las Vegas, the Wolfe Tones could be doing farewell concerts for years.

It is not really about a Dublin “stadium” in 2026. It is more about standing on the cold lino on the sloping floor in a condemned slum in Devonshire Street in 1956.
My older cousin taught me how to stand to attention for A Soldiers Song when Radio Éireann closed down.
1956 and 2026.
Seventy years.
The funny thing about Life is that it does not move forward to some end date in the 2020s, 2030s. Rather Life is a return journey to where it all began. The scenic route back to 1952.
The 1970s, 1960s and 1950s seem more familiar than anything I have seen in recent decades.
Does your life really FLASH before you?
If it does, it flashes very very slowly.

My mother did not really approve of my cousin teaching me bad habits.
Like so many Catholic mothers, she sought respectability and of course temperance and not offending the neighbours. And rebel songs were not exactly respectable.

Although every Twelfth we had an Orange Lodge and band come into the street to pick up their Worshipful Master, Devonshire Street was “mixed” and in her view, rebel songs was the kinda thing that they did in Leeson Street, Plevna Street and Sultan Street.
Around 1960, we were at a family Christening in Balaclava Street and there were some rowdies in a back room (seemingly with drink taken) who were singing a song ” about when they ambushed the Specials in Raglan Street”.

I thought that song sounded interesting but my mother was outraged. Drink at a Christening. Women drinking and a rebel song.

Of course in the 1950s we mostly had no TV. So there was Radio Éireann and their sponsored programmes. The Walton Programme and my mother approved. “If you must sing a song, sing an Irish song” was the catchphrase. And there was an entire genre of Irish song that is decidedly not political…the Whistling Gipsy, Star of the County Down but others like Slievenamon, that have an undercurrent of History.

But what did we sing in our school just around the corner in Slate Street? Well teachers wrote words on a blackboard.

Skye Boat Song…seems a bit political for 9 year olds. We knew that Flora MacDonald was guiding her hero, Bonnie Prince Charlie to safety while the cowardly redcoats stood on the shore “follow they will not dare”. The Jacobites are the good guys.

Tramp Tramp Tramp, The Boys Are Marching…a song from the American Civil War. Too militaristic? The teacher told us it was the same tune as God Save Ireland. Is it? Songs as History. Songs as Politics.

And Clare’s Dragoons, a Jacobite song. Lines where “the victor Saxon backward reeled” and “Viva A la,,,for Irelands right, Viva a la for Irelands wrong”……Spanish steed and sabre bright. Surely nothing political about that.

All good fun of course. But too heavy for 9 year olds?

In the early and mid 1960s, it was possible to walk around Smithfield and hear rebel songs played from a record shop. There was even a record company which produced local folk music. The 1950s IRA campaign gave us “Sean South” and “The Patriot Game” (is that a rebel song?).

And maybe 1966 and the Easter Rising Anniversary introduced new rebel music. “Up Went Nelson” and “The Merry Ploughboy”. Everyone in the local media knew that these songs were popular and on reflection it seems an indication that attitudes were softening. When a folk group including BBC journos, Vincent Hanna and John Bennett appeared on local TV singing Kelly The Boy From Killane, it seemed almost bizarre.

In the 1960s we were surely not that diverse.

That seems very decent of the Beeb. I cant see the BBC allowing that in 2025.

But the Beeb did have another regional outpost in Scotland and the Corries and their songs about “Glencoe”, “Culloden”, “Killiecrankie” and assorted laments about Bonnie Prince Charlie were part of their repertoire.

Of course Scottish nationalism was largely expressed in kilts, Edinburgh Rock and shortbread tins. Irish nationalism had at least partly succeeded and was actually still dangerous.

Of course if we went into other peoples houses we saw their LPs and new radiogrammes. Uncle Jackie and Auntie Mary (ultra respectable at the Giants Foot) had Mary O’Hara and her harp singing “Jackets Green” and “The Minstrel Boy”. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem “Wrap The Green Flag Round Me”, “Boulavogue”, “Bold Fenian Men”. My Auntie Mary would never have tolerated the Dubliners but certainly they sang “The Rising of the Moon” and “The Auld Alarm Clock”.

Perhaps the best known rebel song of the late 1960s is “Four Green Fields” and its poetry, imagery and performance by Tommy Makem makes it almost too respectable to be a rebel or rabble song.

The Showbands performing across Ireland in dance halls and parish halls always had a rebel song set. At 6.45pm on a Monday night, on Radio Éireann, Larry Gogan played the Irish Top Ten which as well as the Beatles and the Beach Boys could include “The Dying Rebel” (Tommy Drennan and the Monarchs) “The Lonely Woods of Upton” (Seán Dunphy) and “Irish Soldier Laddie” (Danny Doyle).

And then in 1969…everything changed. Utterly.

The Troubles.

Groups like the Clancys and the Dubliners agonised that the songs they sang were maybe making the situation in the North worse. W B Yeats agonised about this in 1916.

But those first years 1969-1971 (Internment) was a kinda phoney war. After Internment there was a year of incidents, an arc of events…unionist/British attrocities at Ballymurphy, McGurks and Bloody Sunday and republican attrocities at Claudy and Bloody Sunday shaped my life as a moderate nationalist and SDLP member for more than a decade.

But new songs did appear in the 1970s. “Men Behind The Wire” (I bought that). “Boys of the Old Brigade”, references the Easter Rising but it is in reality about the 1970s IRA, “The Broad Black Brimmer” again seemingly about the Civil War some fifty years before is really a proxy for the 1970s.

And “The Fields of Athenry”? Is that just too nice to be a rebel song? The Famine? The Crown? Trevelyan? Well maybe it depends who is singing it. If bhoys (sic) from New Lodge and Newry are singing it at Parkhead at a Celtic game, then it is a rebel song. But if folks from South County Dublin and men who went to ‘Rock or Marys or Terenure are singing it at a Lansdowne Road rugby game, well surely that cannot be a rebel song.

I might actually have seen the Wolfe Tones in concert during my SDLP hey day in the mid 1970s. Every August anniversary of Internment, there was trouble in West Belfast and an alternative was developed …concerts and sports events. There was a big concert at St Thomas School on Whiterock Road and the headline act was a folk group …was it the Wolfe Tones??? All I know was that the audience was kinda scary and after it was over, I walked home to New Barnsley and told my father that the atmosphere was like a Nuremburg Rally. Fanatical. Too fanatical for me.

I really don’t know if that group was the Wolfe Tones. With the aging Clancys and Dubliners partly leaving the ground, the Wolfe Tones were filling the void they left.

The reality is that in peace time, we take rebel songs as a glorious legacy but in war time …well there is nothing glorious in dying and even less in killing.

So not surprising that in the 1980s, we had a counter reality. “There Were Roses” (Tommy Sands) and “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” (Colum Sands) are about tit for tat murder and keeping your head down and staying alive thru the chaos.

If there was any comedy to be had, surely it was the 1990s Late Late show confrontation between a Dublin revisionist pundit (I forget which one) and the Wolfe Tones. A dual between a man wielding a rapier blade and three men wielding a sledgehammer. Amusingly the Sledgehammer won. But really by the 1990s, we were all too tired.

And then in 1998….everything changed. Utterly.

The Good Friday Agreement? Well in part…but it was as much about the Internet and You Tube. I was exposed to a whole new harvest of rebel songs. “The Fighting Men of Crossmaglen”, “The Lid of Me Granny’s Bin”, “My Little Armalite”, “One Shot Paddy”, “Go On Home British Soldiers”.

Some of the titles speak for themselves. They are not exactly subtle. Are they “too soon” to be sung? Do we need decades and even centuries to soften the words.

Back in 1998, did the people behind the Peace Process ever think that rebel songs would be confined to the dustbin of history.

Like Francis Fukuyama did they believe the Good Friday Agreement was the end of (our) History?

Are Rebels good guys or bad guys?

I suppose the answer is always subjective. Nobody ever believes the cause they fought for or supported or was supported or fought for by ancestors was a “bad” cause. Ask those other rebels and their descendants in South Carolina, Georgia and Texas if their cause …the Confederacy was bad or evil and they will talk about economics, states rights and they will ignore that the Confederate leadership made Slavery, the cornerstone of their rebellion.

By any objective measurement, Slavery is a very bad thing.

So how did the lost cause, noble lost cause myth persist in Hollywood westerns?

How is it that apologists in 2025 will wave Confederate flags and try to tell us that it is Heritage not Hate? Make America Great Again.

How is it that a rebellion crushed in 1865 effectively went underground with their exceptionalism and Jim Crow laws only really being defeated for a second time by 1960s Civil Rights legislation and arguably the high point of the Confederate defeat was the election of Barack Obama. And yet they still bounced back under Donald Trump and the people who wear MAGA hats.

Simply put the North crushing the South and the policy of Reconstruction was abandoned after just a few years. Politically expedient to abandon Freedom to elect a President.

I am loathe to make any comparison between the philosophy of the Confederacy and Irish republicans. The Irish might subjectively believe that they are on the right side of History. And objectively in Anglo-Irish history…who is more right and who is more wrong?

Nobody was militarily crushed in 1998. And yet the Good Friday Agreement seems like an attempt at Reconstruction. It was never anticipated that Sinn Féin and DUP would be framing the future.

And in recent years, it is evident that it is only the most optimistic of letsgetalongerists who think the faltering regime can survive.

In the 1950s Ed McCurdy (?) wrote and Pete Seeger sang “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” …where men gathered in a mighty room and signed a paper saying they would never fight again. And that is what the Good Fiday Agreement was…the strangest dream.

I cannot imagine that anyone in the planning of 1998 saw rebel songs and the Wolfe Tones still going strong in 2025 and Kneecap in the wings.

So what rebel song really defines us?

Well in part, “As Soon As This Pub Closes, The Revolution Starts” (Alex Glasgow) gets close. For it is often the case that alcohol and patriotism are linked.

Singing “My Little Armalite” and other rebel songs in a pub in Belfast, Derry or Crossmaglen might be seen as “authentic” by American tourists but actually I am not going to rush out to a barricade because of anything on my YouTube playlist.

Unionists are not my enemy. They do their thing. I do mine. They have songs also. And their moderates would (like nationalist moderates) deny they know the words.

No…the irony is that in 2026, the best “Irish” rebel song is not even Irish.

So for me “I’m A Good Ole Rebel” ticks all the boxes. Published in various formats in the late 19th and early 20th century, it is lost cause stuff. Southerners defeated by the economic an un American superiority of the North. The best version is by Hoyt Axton.

In the song, the protagonist makes no apology

“I only wish we’d won”, “I hates the yankee nation” “the glorious union is dripping with our blood”, “I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I done”.

“I aint gonna love them, now that is certain sure”, “I want no pardon for what I was and am”, “I wont be reconstructed and I do not give a damn”.

The protagonist cannot fight the Yankees but he is waging war on the northern moralists flooding into the South to dismantle and change Society. And to some extent for a century after Lee surrendered, he did indeed win.

I think the Good Friday Agreement was obviously a good thing. But it soured when attempts are made to tell us we were all to blame …equally…for thirty years of murder.

And I think rebel songs in 2026 are as much about flipping the bird at the professional moderates who have manifestly failed to unite us in Utopia.

I seek no pardon.

Norn Iron….I ain’t gonna love it. Now that is certain sure.