Maggie, if you had a daughter instead of a son we would be related.
You did miss my favs though. "the long road", and "the broad black brimmer"
Do you mean "On the one Road" by the Wolfe Tones?
If so, I think of that more of a "peace" song than a rebel song:
"We're on the one road
Sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road
It may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares
North men, South men, comrades all
Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Donegal
We're on the one road swinging along
Singing a soldier's song
Though we've had our troubles now and then
Now is the time to make them up again
Sure aren't we all Irish anyhow
Now is the time to step together now."As for the Broad Black Brimmer, I never liked that song.
Don't know why, as I had family members who wore that uniform.
I cringe when they get to the line:
"And a holster that's been empty many a day (but not for long)".
Maybe it's my experiences in England, seeing two little children and their mother in the wreckage of a Provisional IRA bomb.
Seeing soldiers and their horses lying in bits in Hyde Park, London........
I regard the old IRB and IRA of the War of Independence as Rebels
with a cause, just as were the men who fought in the American Revolution.
However, the Groups in Northern Ireland, funded mostly from the USA and the Middle East, did not involve men of the same calibre. I wish they had called themselves by a different name other than the Provisional IRA, the "Real" IRA, the "Continuity" IRA, but of course they wanted to appeal to the sentimental Nationalist spirit of those sending them money, whose grandfathers had told them stories of the true heroes of 1916.
I saw what that money did, and it was ugly.
Neither do I condone what the British Army did there, especially on Bloody Sunday.
I had cousins, working in London, who were automatically taken for questioning every time the Provisional IRA exploded a bomb in London.
One especially, who had no terrorist connections at all, took a philosophical view and said he was "Guilty of having an Irish accent, and having the map of Ireland all over me face".
However, he worked in London long enough to qualify for a State Pension.
Last time I saw him at home in Tipperary, he was laughing, "The Queen sends me a few pounds every week, and says she's sorry for the trouble!"
So anyway....bottom line.....I regard the songs prior to 1948 as Rebel Songs.
Some of the songs about the Troubles in Northern Ireland are clever, such as "The Men behind the Wire" and "the Helicopter Song", but they don't have anywhere near the same meaning for me.
Most people in Ireland just want to move on from the Troubles, remember the heroes, learn from the events, but forget the bitterness.
