The Sons of Róisín Died Not for This - A Meditation on the Patriotic Poem’s Modern Relevance

Refrains of God Save Ireland or Óró Sé Do Bheatha Abhaile have been popular at anti-mass immigration protests in Ireland for the last handful of years. One piece that has been seemingly neglected at these demonstrations, despite its resonance today, is Luke Kelly’s lament, For What Died the Sons of Róisín?

The poem is a reflection on the direction Ireland has taken since the revolutionary period at the beginning of the twentieth century, the “Róisín” of the title being a reference to the poetic by-name for Ireland ‘Róisín Dubh’, or Black Rose. Her sons, then, are the patriots of the past that gave their lives to liberate the nation from foreign rule and occupation, and deliver it into a new era of freedom and self-determination. Kelly poses the question, ‘is this what Irishmen fought and died for?’ It was written at some point during the 1970s, a time which was the genesis of much of our current economic and social malaise, with a few direct parallels to Ireland’s current predicaments. The global oil embargo leading to fuel shortages and price increases being one example, the country being opened up to ever more overseas investors being another.

I would implore the reader to listen to Luke Kelly’s powerful spoken word performance of this piece. My reflections can not begin to compare with how effectively the poem’s message is conveyed through that great artist’s mournful and at times rabidly resentful rendition. With that out of the way, I will highlight how some select lines of the piece perhaps have more relevance than ever in Ireland’s modern social and political paradigm.

“For what flowed Ireland's blood in rivers

That began when Brian chased the Dane

And did not cease nor has not ceased

With the brave sons of ’16

For what died the sons of Róisín, was it fame?

(...)

For what died the sons of Róisín, was it greed?

Was it greed that drove Wolfe Tone

To a pauper’s death in a cell of cold wet stone?”

The fight to free Ireland was not done for profit or praise, the soldiers who took part in it were not grifting with their patriotism. It was an undertaking done out of unshakeable belief in a principle: that the Irish alone bear the right to rule Ireland. It was the delay in passing the Home Rule bill that sparked the Easter Rising, and the execution of its leaders that in turn galvanised widespread support for not merely a local parliament under the authority of Westminster, but a truly independent and sovereign Ireland. In a time when 70% of new legislation for this country originates with the unaccountable apparatchiks of that anti-national project, the EU, it seems our rulers have forgotten that this is precisely why this nation fought and bled to have its genesis.

National self-determination was the cause of Ireland’s revolutionaries, and even if it resulted in destitution, it ought still be fought for because it is right. Is this not what was decided during the Easter Rising and the War of Independence? That the laws that govern Irish people should be made in Ireland by Irish people for their benefit, instead of overseas by foreign politicians who know little and don’t care to learn more about Ireland? Why have we replaced Westminster with Brussels and Strasbourg, and why is there a cohort of the Irish population all too ready to bend the knee and facilitate that? It is exactly because we have forgotten what the “Sons of Róisín” died for.

“Will German, French or Dutch inscribe the epitaph of Emmet?

When we have sold enough of Ireland to be but strangers in it

(...)

To whom do we owe our allegiance today?

To those brave men who fought and died

That Róisín live again with pride?

(...)

Or the faceless men who for Mark and Dollar

Betray her to the highest bidder!”

There is a battle in the country today for the soul of Ireland. What should the core of the Irish nation be, the memory of the brave patriots of the past “who fought and died/That Róisín live again with pride”, so that Ireland could be independent and sovereign? Or the soulless bureaucrats, “the faceless men,” that are indistinguishable from the hollow suits in charge of the rest of Europe, that are managing, not leading, our nation into a decline by facilitating the auctioning off of Ireland to foreign funds, developers, hoteliers, and asylum seekers? If the latter is to define what it is to be Irish, then Irishness ceases to mean anything and the country becomes a province of the neoliberal world order, nothing more. The purpose of Ireland is not profit, it is to be the home of the Irish nation.

“For what suffer our patriots today?

They have a language problem, so they say

How to write “No Trespass” must grieve their heart full sore

We got rid of one strange language

Now we are faced with many, many more…”

Language is, in many ways, at the heart of the intellectual battle for the patriotic core of Ireland today. A “language problem” or perhaps, problem language, calls to mind the favourite spectre of the so-called rules-based international order: hate speech. Advocating for the rights of Irish people to their homeland, in their homeland, is characterised as no more than bigotry and a problem serious enough to justify criminalisation, such as with Justice Minister McEntee’s stated need for hate speech legislation even after that very section of her disastrous “hate offences” bill was removed after popular uproar. This is also a problem of waning sovereignty, as such laws are commonly advocated with appeals to “keeping up” with neighbouring countries and fellow EU members on the continent.

To write “no trespass” must grieve them indeed. Ireland’s political class not only open our borders at the behest of the European Commission, a body which is ever more difficult to distinguish from the Soviet politburo; not merely give billions of taxpayer-backed money to NGOs in order to supply every asylum chancer with a tent when bribing hoteliers to house them fails to meet demand; not simply invite as many of these swarthy adventurers to our shores with the promise of their “own front door” in eight languages; but they also wish to criminalise any dissent from this globalist schema of supplanting the indigenous populations of Europe with what they perceive as more pliable and diverse units of labour, whose votes they can of course count on. It’s inherently anti-human, it calls to mind the plantations which surely occupied space in Luke Kelly’s psyche, and frankly it borders on self-parody when one considers that the aforementioned tents are universally of the ‘Trespass’ brand.

Ireland today is evidently faced with many more strange languages than we ever knew in our colonial past. Despite all the empty reassurances that these modern newcomers will integrate, there is little sign of this happening. Gaelscoileanna are being forced to abandon Irish-medium teaching to accommodate migrant children for whom English is scant spoken at home. GP offices and courts now require a legion of interpreters to properly perform their duties. An overwhelming number of the “new Irish” come from cultures that prohibit alcohol, so they are not fraternising with their new neighbours at that locus of Irish community: “the local.” They care not for the GAA, traditional music, song, or dance, any of our culture or history as a nation and it is because they are not here out of an appreciation of what it is to be Irish, they’re here for the free stuff, or as the managerial newspeak would have it, “a better life.”

This message of immigrant integration is further undercut by the concurrent message of diversity being our strength, or in a word, multiculturalism. This dichotomy reveals the farce. You can not be multicultural if the bearers of other cultures are integrating into the national culture, and you cannot have integration if you insist on being multicultural, on respecting and appreciating difference. It is an insult to the Irish that politicians speak from both sides of their mouths in this way, expecting nobody to notice. It calls to mind the image of a used car salesman laughing at his guileless customer behind his back, or more aptly, a mortgage broker circa the early 2000s pawning off an adjustable-rate loan on an equally oblivious first-time buyer. Let us not forget, those who currently hold power in Ireland are the same class of people that oversaw our descent into the great recession and subsequent austerity, the very same that Kelly was railing against in the work that is this article’s inspiration.

On the subjects of sovereignty, the economy, and culture, For What Died the Sons of Róisín holds as much relevance and cutting critique of the state of Ireland today as it ever did, perhaps more. I once again beseech the reader to give it a listen. You will be moved to longing for the patriotic spirit of 1916, and rage at its betrayal.