Ireland's songs of rebellion

As 1916-related events hit their peak, Marjorie Brennan looks at the country’s rich tradition of songs about rebellion

The 1916 centenary celebrations have provided us with an opportunity to re-evaluate and reflect on our sometimes ambivalent relationship with our troubled past. Rebel songs, from Four Green Fields to Kevin Barry, Sean South of Garryowen to A Solider’s Song, are a key part of that relationship, and one that is also ripe for reassessment.

Terry Moylan of Na Píobairí Uilleann, the pipers’ club, has just published The Indignant Muse: Poetry and Songs of the Irish Revolution, a selection of more than 500 songs and poems created in the years before and after the Easter Rising. How exactly would he define a rebel song?