One Hundred Years of Ireland by Ger Horgan

One Hundred Years of Ireland

 

We’re one year shy of a century ago,

Since romantic Ireland was declared deceased,

And the greasy tills of greedy beasts,

Are still where all the money goes.

We fought for workers’ rights in vain,

And all we wanted was fair play,

But what we got was lousy pay,

And broken backs for rich man’s gain,

And what did you, the clergy do,

But send our young across the sea,

Away from loving parents who,

Were told to say the rosary.

 

But Ireland wasn’t ours at the time.

The English ruled us with an iron hand.

They sailed across the sea and stole our land,

And robbed and shot and killed us for our crime.

And what was our crime but self-defence,

Did they think we’d turn the other cheek,

To get to us they had to cross the sea,

But Wales and Scotland didn’t stand a chance.

We surely put up one hell of a fight,

The only thing to do was to rebel.

Catholic and Protestant unite,

But 1913 saw us fight ourselves.

 

1916 gave us hope,

On that Easter Monday morn,

The terror and the beauty born,

The hangman waiting with the rope

Once again ‘twas all in vain,

Once again we lost the fight,

Once again our brave men died,

And more when 1920 came:

Bloody Sunday number one,

At a friendly football game,

Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons,

Were slaughtered, paralysed and maimed.

And look what happened two years later on,

Negotiations didn’t go so well.

The scenes that followed, no one could foretell,

A bloody civil war for nine months long.

The Treaty that we signed was not enough.

This time we really fought against each other;

This time brother really slaughtered brother.

Men, those days, were made of tougher stuff.

Romantic Ireland wasn’t dead and gone.

Was the bard mistaken, after all?

Once again we lost our bold brave sons,

But at least this time we didn’t lose it all.

 

The fight continued on and on.

We had to claim our ports and land.

The Peelers and The Black and Tans,

And English rule at last were gone.

From thirty-nine to forty-five,

We suffered for a stranger’s greed,

Some even helped the enemy,

While we struggled here to stay alive.

And those that helped the enemy,

Did not know what they battled for,

Excitement brought them o’er the sea,

To fight in yet another war.

 

Our fight at home was far from finished though.

Guerrilla warfare spread throughout the land,

‘Twas a battle many couldn’t understand,

And all this happened not too long ago.

Remember Bloody Sunday, number two,

Machine guns fired through the Derry air,

Folk were blown to bits by armoured cars,

As recently as 1972.

Young men on hunger-strike in eighty-one,

In prison, strived to keep their dignity,

But their mothers and their fathers lost their sons,

Who starved to death unnecessarily.

 

Eventually we made our peace,

And gave up on our fourth green field,

Another Treaty signed and sealed,

Our battle was at last to cease.

But then another stranger came,

A dangerous green and stripy beast,

Who told the banks their tills need grease,

And the leaders of the land, the same,

Who then, in turn, advised us well:

“ Go borrow wads and make a splash,

 

Go spend and spend and spend like hell,

The country is awash with cash.”

And that’s just what we did, we spent like hell.

We fought each other for the biggest house,

We played the silly game of cat and mouse,

And ripped-the-bollix-off ourselves as well.

This time we’ve only got ourselves to blame,

We cannot point the finger at the Brits,

For landing us in debt up to our tits

Let’s hang our stupid Irish heads in shame.

‘Cause now we’re heading back to old square-one,

Now that the money’s all flittered away.

Romantic Ireland’s surely dead and gone,

I didn’t realise that in the day.

 

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It was, a hundred years ago.