I got a real shock when the crowd in Rostrevor sang A Nation Once Again when they heard who had won the presidential election. It is a terrific song. I sing along with it myself when it turns up on the Luke Kelly tape I have in the car, but it is designed to rouse, and it does rouse. I wouldn't be able to belt it out in public without hearing and having an immediate internal conflict about the words.
If the Rostrevor people had been through the same self-censorship process we have been over the last 25 years, they, like us, would have instinctively substituted The Star of the County Down, but does this mean that all the harm has been taken out of us? Would we say that ours is a mere cultural nationalism? That there's not a drop of atavism in us?
This is not exactly self-delusion, but it doesn't bear much examination, either. Not that I'm ashamed of that - we have to have some delusions or we couldn't manage the complex burden of our identity at all. I remember thinking when I was watching a Panorama film about Prince Charles that it must be a wonderful thing to have an unproblematic relationship with the past.
There he was in the chapel of Windsor Castle, standing on the tombstone of a predecessor, a King Charles or William. Tradition stretched back - unbroken and proud and comfortably positioned on the winning side. Not for him - or most of his people - doubt or regret, even about Northern Ireland, whereas we must come to what terms we can with a history whose sadness all but impels one to hatred of others and self-hatred. And the history is in the songs.
The unforgettable Famine Diary is hardly finishing in this paper (the word `Westminster' coming out of it tainted again) when we face into another commemoration of another tragedy - the pathetic, half-idealistic, half-desperate rebellion of 1798 - and contemporary politics can't be kept out of that at all. Sanitise it as you may, 1798 was an uprising against the monarchy in the name of republican principles and that is still, I assume, the rationale of the armed militants of today.
There is already on the market a version of songs from 1798 done by the same smart people who did the Faith of Our Fathers CD. It is the official 1798 bicentenary commemorative album, called Who Fears to Speak. The old songs are absolutely swathed in genteel arrangements involving the Irish Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. The presentation is generally grand and ceremonial. The fine rich voices of contributors like Aine Ui Cheallaigh and Liam Clancy distract our attention to the art of singing itself, but we have not put our past tidily away. The words of the songs still make themselves heard, as they did in Rostrevor, and they still shock.
The Boys of Wexford are "ready for another fight/ And love our country still". The memory of the dead will "cheer our strife for liberty/ And teach us to unite". Hibernians are roused by the thought of "cruel tyrants who oppressed you/ Now with terrors see their fall!/ Bless the heroes who caress you/ Orange now goes to the wall." The men of the west assert that "though all the bright dreamings we cherished/ Went down in disaster and woe/ The spirit of old still is with us/ That never would bend to the foe."
God is called to grant mercy on brave Father Murphy "and open heaven to all your men/ For the cause that called you may call tomorrow/ In another fight for the Green again." The Sean Bhean Bhocht says "the French are on the bay/ They'll be here without delay/ And the Orange will decay". Len Graham (himself a Belfast Protestant, by the way) sings a song of the time with an even more subversive message than the hostility of Orange and Green. The words of The Liberty Tree have by no means lost their edge:
"For Church and State in close embrace is the burden of the Human Race/ And people tell you to your face/ That long you will repent it/ For Kings in power and preaching drones are the cause of all your heavy groans/ Down from your pulpits, down from your thrones/ You will tumble unlamented."
It is not just the ideas in the songs but their personnel - their shining heroes - which can still seduce. The men shot on Dunlavin Green whose "souls in white pigeons a-flying to heaven were seen"; Henry Joy McCracken on the scaffold in Belfast:
"He kissed his sister then went aloft/ He bid his last goodbye/ My God he died and I turned and cried/ They have hung poor Henry Joy"; Kelly of Killane with his heroic stature; Roddy MacCorley, "smiling, bright and young/ About the hemp-rope on his neck/ The golden ringlets clung"; and above all, Wolfe Tone, who "perished in prison alone/ His friends unavenged and his country unfreed/ `Oh, bitter,' I said, `is the patriot's mead'. "
There are love songs on the CD, too - Agha doe, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but the patriotism sounds just as natural as the love. It is so long since I heard these songs that it came as an unwelcome surprise to realise that I am perfectly at ease with this particular type of patriotic rhetoric. It must have been everywhere, when I was a child.
It must have been coming out of the wireless. I haven't heard the likes of The Rising of the Moon sung in public for decades, I haven't heard pikes mentioned except by Albert Reynolds, yet I know all these words, I know these songs.
The voluntary suppression of them in Southern culture at large, since the Troubles began, seems to me to have been right and proper. As the North went through its worst throes, the least we could do was put this repertoire away, but the silence was never going to last.
Not because of unexpected triumphalist moments like the celebration in Rostrevor, but because these are our songs. You can't suppress a whole heritage - you shouldn't need to, except in crisis.
Is the crisis of the island over? Are we ready to let any form of words back in now? Are certain sentiments now purged of harm?
I think this is still an open question. Twice recently I've gone to a singing club which meets in a Dublin pub on a Friday night. The way songs are respected there, as songs, shows up how they are used in ordinary life not with the performer's detachment but as propaganda. Where, after all, do the spores of knee-jerk sectarianism linger, if not in words and old emotions? Yet we cannot do away with our own past. We can only stand a little away from it and be conscious of the complex messages it sends and be careful of our applications of it in the present. Remember when Conor Cruise O'Brien was in charge of broadcasting and he wanted to rebroadcast BBC television into the Republic instead of developing a native service? That kind of imposition of cultural manners is over for ever. Still, I'm glad they stopped short of playing A Nation Once Again at the inauguration.
The argument continues.