Time for pundits to grow up and get over their Wolfe Tones fixation

DURING the week a member of the Wolfe Tones folk group gave a radio interview, complaining bitterly about Fintan O’Toole for essentially being anti-national.

It was probably also partly in reaction to a blistering critique by one of Fintan's colleagues, Kevin Myers. Kevin complained about their "cretinously nationalistic caterwauling lyrics of imbecilic banality". I think we can take it that he doesn't like the Wolfe Tones or their music.

Describing them as "an important social phenomenon," however, he wrote that they "provided the soundtrack to over 30 years of war." It was a nice soundbite, but a hysterical distortion.

Judging from the sounds emanating for musical pubs lately, it would seem that the old rebel songs that were so popular in the 1960s have been making a comeback. Back in the 1960s before the outbreak of the troubles in the North, the Clancy Brothers rescued Irish folk music from the Walton's programme on a Saturday afternoon, with the doleful voice of Leo Maguire urging: "If you feel like singing, dooo sing an Irish song." Even the Christian Brothers ridiculed that programme, which probably suggests that it had more merit to it than people thought at the time.

Folk music became particularly popular in the Republic in the 1960s. The Festival of Kerry, which styled itself as the Folk Festival of Ireland, had a folk village of old-style horse-drawn caravans for visiting musicians as one of its early features. Many people came from Northern Ireland for the festivities. At night there were inevitable sing-songs. One of the groups that first made their name in Tralee was the Wolfe Tones.

A particularly popular song at the time was The Sash, the loyalist anthem. When people would begin singing that song, however, the mouths of the Northerners would drop. They would assume a look of absolute incredulity. Most of them would eventually join in the chorus, and afterwards they would remark, somewhat breathlessly, that nobody at home would ever believe them.

In 1963 a young Donnacha Ó Dulaing recorded RTÉ's Munster Journal at the festival, where he met the Wolfe Tones for the first time. He actually recorded them singing The Sash. That was their first song ever played on the air. It was also the first time that a radio critic in any of the national dailies ever commented on any of Ó Dulaing's programmes. The critic wrote that he "found it extraordinary to hear a group of young men with rather pronounced Dublin accents singing The Sash in the Deep South!" The Wolfe Tones were certainly not loyalists, and it is safe to assume that the vast majority of those who joined in were not loyalists either. None of them would have viewed their singing as any kind of sectarian endorsement. None of them were Protestant sectarian bigots.

In the same way most of those who sang along with the rebel songs were not Catholic sectarian bigots either. The rebel songs that they were singing 1960s were certainly not celebrating any of the events of the last 30 years, because those had yet to happen. In the 1960s most of the people in the south had a very simplistic view of the difficulties in Northern Ireland. Partition was seen as a problem that was created and perpetuated by the British for their own imperialistic purposes. If the British would only withdraw, the people of the North would resolve their political difficulties without much trouble. That was what we were told, but anyone who believes that today is naïve to the point of utter stupidity.

The kind of bitterness that we have been witnessing on the news nightly has been coming from both sides of the sectarian divide. Unfortunately there are some in The Irish Times who seem to think that we should view the problems as having all been created by the IRA. There were wrongs on both sides, and even the IRA has admitted that by apologising.

It is time that the Cruiser and that quasi-unionist clique in the Dublin media recognised that fact. Some of them have been perverting our history by acting as if the Great Famine never happened, or the Black and Tans never existed. They also depict our wartime neutrality as a shameful policy, but when challenged to justify their arguments, they don't resort to facts. They resort to what has been discredited propaganda, but they have been getting away with this because too many people are ignorant of our real history.

It is a tragedy that the British were allowed to forget what happened on Bloody Sunday 1920, when Crown forces fired into the crowd of spectators at Croke Park, killing 15 innocent people, including one of the players on the field. It is often said that those who are ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it. Bloody Sunday in 1972 was unfortunately a repetition of what happened little over 50 years earlier, but it has had consequences extending over 30 years.

The first Bloody Sunday was essentially overlooked because of what happened subsequently in the civil war. People became preoccupied with the arguments about other matters.

Next Thursday will be the 80th anniversary of the killing or Michael Collins, which was a traumatic event, the real consequences of which have been generally ignored. For various reasons we have not faced up our own history. Some insist on depicting those events in black and white terms, instead of the more realistic shades of grey.

We were not always on the white side the side of good and decency. But it does not rectify the situation to paint us as always on the black side, as the quasi-unionist clique would have us believe. Maybe they think they are giving us a balanced perspective, but what they are producing is a balance of distortion not a balanced perspective.

One can understand the fears of those who feel that a whole new generation are being introduced to the rebel music of the Wolfe Tones, if this is being used to justify some of the horrors what have in the last third of the 20th century things like the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen or the Assumption Thursday bombing in Omagh.

Those responsible for the Omagh bombing defiled what is the most Catholic of holidays, and they have the audacity to pretend that they are fighting for the rights of downtrodden Catholics. It is an absurdity that even the most simple of minds should see through. The way to combat republican and loyalist distortions is through education and the teaching of history, not propaganda.

People who grew up before the 1970s are unlikely to have covered any 20th century history in school. The curriculum has changed since then, but now many schools do not even teach history. During the 1990s the government published a White Paper suggesting that history should be dropped as a core subject from the junior cycle. Clearer heads prevailed, but the subject has still been treated with such disdain that well under a quarter of our students study history for the Leaving Certificate examination.

The system should encourage a good grounding on a broad perspective on our history. Then nobody would have to fear the songs of the Wolfe Tones or anybody else. For myself, I do not dread the thought that they might revive the old rebel songs, but what I would most like to hear is them singing The Sash again, because the Good Friday Agreement can only work if the people are prepared to live and let live. If our history teaches us anything, it should be that there has been too much killing and dying.