Soldiers' Songs, and the Irish National Anthems

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Thinking about the anthems booming out in Brazil during the World Cup turns the attention to our own anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann.

It’s a funny thing but in a country that loves its first language passionately up to but not beyond the point of learning, speaking or promoting it, the nation is insists the National Anthem is always sung in Irish.

While Irish is the State’s first language, it is not Amhrán na bhFiann’s. The lyrics to the Soldier’s Song were first written by Peadar Kearney in English in 1907. The music was written by Kearney’s friend, Patrick Heeney, and it was as a marching song for the IRB with lyrics sung in English that the song became popular.

The Soldier’s Song was translated into Irish by a man named Liam Ó Rinn, who was one of the almost forgotten legion of civil servants who laid down so much of the state Irish in the 1920s – for good or ill. The details of the translation are sketchy, like so much of the work of those men and women at that time. It seems the first translation of the lyrics was published in 1923, but there are claims the translation was done as early as 1917.

No matter. The Soldier’s Song was adopted as the national anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926 and that’s what it’s been since. When the Irish translation became the default isn’t at all clear but the Irish translation has been used for so long now that to find someone who knows the words in English would be an achievement.

It’s even sung in Irish by people who are not comfortable in the first language, because to not do so would be somehow outrageous. The most memorable of these in recent years was a rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann by a very beautiful model named Nadia Forde before a game between the Republic of Ireland and Sweden last year at the Aviva.

It’s always a difficult thing to criticise someone’s diction in a language that has no received pronunciation, and that counts for double when it comes to singing, but Ms Forde went to a seldom-visited place in her rendition. If she had sung the thing in Xhosa, the famous clicking language of South Africa, it could not have sounded stranger.

For the four years before Amhrán na bhFiann was made the National Anthem, the anthem of the Free State implored God to save either the King or Ireland, depending on which foot you relied on to dig your potatoes. As far as the Ascendency was concerned, God Save the King was the anthem in a State whose cabinet swore allegiance to the King, while God Save Ireland, a rollicking ballad about the Manchester Martyrs, seems to have been the favorite song of everyone who ever wore a broad black brimmer and a Sam Browne belt.

Parnell credited the Manchester Martyrs – three Fenians who were executed by the British as a result of a jailbreak gone wrong - with the awakening of his own nationalism, and the song was extremely popular in the revolutionary movement all the way through the Land Wars, Home Rule, the Easter Rising and war of Independence.

However. As an anthem, God Save Ireland is not quite the thing. The tune is borrowed from a US Confederacy prison song, and who wants their national anthem set on a gallows? WT Cosgrove’s own favourite song was The Soldier’s Song, and this may have played no small role in its eventual adoption as the National Anthem.

If Amhrán na bhFiann is the national anthem, the Fields of Athenry has become the people’s anthem. When the fans at Euro 2012 started singing the Fields of Athenry as much-maligned Giovanni Trappatoni’s team were getting eviscerated by Spain, it sparked a national debate about who were are, really – a proud warrior race, or just a pack of gimps, happy to make up the numbers?

It’s interesting how the Fields of Athenry, of all songs, has burrowed its way so deep into our hearts. RTÉ made a documentary in 2010 about the song, claiming that “In many ways The Fields of Athenry reflects the unbreakable spirit of the Irish people through times of past difficulty - political unrest, poverty and forced immigration.”

Beautiful, but not quite true. The actual reason the Fields of Athenry has become a sporting anthem is because it’s been sung at Celtic Park, Glasgow, since the 1980s. Not only has it been sung, but the good old Bhoys have added their own call-and-response section to the chorus.

This addition is about the one thing more appealing to the Irish psyche than the strain of eternal longing that runs through the lyrics and melody of the Fields of Athenry. It is, of course, the tremendous impulse of the Irish everywhere to act the maggot and see what happens.

We know that we’re very naughty to sing about the IRA, and that’s why we do it. If you don’t like it, you just don’t like having the craic. We’re Irish, we’re crazy, we break all the rules and everybody loves us. Look at us, aren’t we great?

There is one other national hymn, a song that could have been a national anthem, were the nation a little more united or culturally richer than we are now. It is not a well-known song, but to those that know it, it is the real anthem of the Irish, Gaelic, united and free.

It’s a song called Gile Mear, which loosely translates as Shining Spear. Sting sang an awful cover version of it on a Chieftains album twenty years ago, and it is not widely known outside of Gaeltacht or traditional music circles. But when Liadh Ní Riada was elected to the European Parliament, her friends and family sang Gile Mear to celebrate the victory. And why wouldn’t they? It was Ní Riada’s father, Seán Ó Riada, who rescued Gile Mear from obscurity – if not the entire canon of Irish traditional music itself, if truth be told.

The signing of Gile Mear drew no attention from the national press at the time. In a Raidió na Gaeltachta feature on Ní Riada’s election, the song played a central role. Two anthems. Two Irelands.

The National Anthems World Cup

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The World Cup isn’t quite what it was. This isn’t just old men getting misty-eyed after misspent youths, when hours in front of the telly were followed by the serial demolition of mothers’ flowers in the garden because not everybody’s eye for goal was quite as sharp as Emilio “The Vulture” Butragueño’s.

Once, the World Cup was the gold standard of soccer. But now, in the era of the superclub, how many national teams could keep it kicked out to Real Madrid, or Manchester City, or Bayern Munich? The softening of the ill-feeling against England in international tournaments may not be so much due to “moving on” as a vague feeling of pity for the poor eejits.

So why watch, especially when Ireland aren’t even in it? Because the World cup isn’t just about a game and who plays it best. The World Cup is about nation and identity and pride and who you are and who you want to be.

And anthems. Lots and lots of anthems.

Assessing the national anthems is one of the great hidden pleasures of the World Cup. It’s like watching the pint settle – no-one would buy pints if they couldn’t drink them, but savouring that moment when the pint turns completely black under its collar is one of the exquisite joys of life.

Disappointingly, most anthems are, not to put a tooth in it, cat. This is bad news for the smaller countries, for whom the anthem means so much. While you’re hearing some terrible dirge, salt tears of raw pride are streaming down everybody’s face back home in the competing country that Whereveria has finally taken her place among the nations of the earth.

Spain are the current World Champions, and Spain is one of those countries that has no lyrics to its national anthem. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as lyrics in national anthems aren’t always very good.

On the other hand, there are also anthems that have no end of lyrics. Step forward Greece, whose national anthem has a genuinely staggering 158 verses. Happily, they only sing two of them, or else the Greek anthem would last longer than their actual matches.

The most under-rated of the national anthems, in this neck of the woods certainly, is the Belgian anthem. La Brabançonne is surprisingly interesting and strangely beautiful. A plangent horn is sounded at the start, followed by a martial thrump-thrump-thrump of strings and drums, and then all the band sails in to sound a marvellous salute to king, law and liberty.

La Brabançonne isn’t a widely-known tune here because Belgium doesn’t play rugby and doesn’t get to that many international soccer tournaments. But the Belgians are dark horse bets for this World Cup, so maybe we’ll be hearing a lot of more of it.

An anthem that will not be heard often at the World Cup but that is very familiar to us thanks to Hollywood is the Star-Spangled Banner. This is interesting as an anthem because it’s such a difficult song to sing, with its huge range. Most anthems want to give that notorious fellow, the man in the street, some chance to bawl along in his or own fashion. The man in the street will not be reaching the rocket’s red glare or bombs bursting in air without a step-ladder at the very least.

One of the few sensible decisions taken by the current Russian Government was to use the old Soviet anthem as the anthem of the post-Czarist independent Russia. The USSR was a house of horror for the republics of which it was comprised and the serf nations it terrorised throughout its existence, but the Soviets cannot be faulted in their choice of soundtrack.

The Italian anthem, surprisingly, is a disappointment. The home of opera should have a better anthem than Fratelli d’Italia. What’s wrong with it? It doesn’t flow – it’s full of false starts, unsubtle changes, and bizarre stops, as if to give the singer(s) another lungful of breath. It sounds like a song written by a committee who never met, with the different pieces assembled together like Frankenstein’s monster, sent into the world to make the best of it.

It’s such a pity when you consider some of the best music produced in the western tradition is in Italian opera and could serve any nation as an anthem. You could use the Te Deum from Tosca if you’re a country that likes invading other countries and salting their fields. Alfredo’s first act declaration of love in La Traviata would do very nicely for a shoulders-back, chest-out sort of nation, and there’s the thrilling Di Quella Pira from Il Trovatore – who wouldn’t follow someone into battle with that ringing in their ears?

No such problem for the Germans, who are one of very few nations to have the music of their anthem written by a composer of genuine renown. Franz Joseph Haydn was a contemporary and friend of Mozart and a teacher of Beethoven. When you find yourself being swept away by the German anthem, know that it was written by a master.

And for all that, the greatest national anthem in the world was written by an amateur. La Marseillaise, the glorious national anthem of France, was written by an officer of artillery, Rouget de Lisle, in between battles in 1792. It proved so popular that it was adopted as the national anthem in 1795, and it’s been sung since.

The lyrics of La Marseillaise are surprisingly gory, with references to bloody banners and ferocious cut-throat soldiers. But there is something magical about how the first two lines of the chorus - “aux armes, citoyens! / Formez vos bataillons” - sit on the fanfare of their music that is unmatched in any anthem, anywhere.

Three years after the French adopted La Marseillaise as their national anthem, Napoleon sent an army here, under the command of General Humbert, to see what they could do to promote liberty, equality and fraternity in Ireland. It is quite something to think of La Marseillaise ringing out as that army marched down Bohernasup and into Ballina over two hundred years ago and what the natives must have made of it all. Vive la Republique!