Re: Irish Rebel Songs (Lyrics)
H-Block Song
I am a proud young Irishman.
In Ulster's hills my life began;
A happy boy through green fields ran;
I kept God's and man's laws.
But when my age was barely ten
My country's wrongs were told again.
By tens of thousands marching men
And my heart stirred to the cause.
So I'll wear no convict's uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand lreland's fight
Eight hundred years of crime.
I learned of centuries of strife,
Of cruel laws, injustice rife;
I saw now in my own young life
The fruits of foreign sway:
Protestors threatened, tortured, maimed,
Divisions nurtured, passions flamed,
Outrage provoked, right's cause defamed;
This is the conqueror's way.
So I'll wear no convict's uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand lreland's fight
Eight hundred years of crime.
Descended from proud Connacht clan,
Concannon served cruel Britain's plan;
Man' s inhumanity to man
Had spawned a trusty slave.
No strangers are these bolts and locks,
No new design these dark H-Blocks,
Black Cromwell lives while Mason stalks;
The bully taunts the brave.
So I'll wear no convict's uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand lreland's fight
Eight hundred years of crime.
Does Britain need a thousand years
Of protest, riot, death and tears,
Or will this past decade of fears
Of eighty decades spell
An end to Ireland's agony,
New hope for human dignity;
And will the last obscenity
Be this grim H-Block cell?
So I'll wear no convict's uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand lreland's fight
Eight hundred years of crime.
__________________
The traditions of the Irish people are the oldest of any race in Europe north and west of the Alps, and they themselves are the longest settled on their own soil
- Edmund Curtis (A History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to 1922)
The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world, and are from as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth.
For it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very anciently and long before England; that they had letters anciently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men, from the Irish.
- Edmund Spenser (writer, and British Government Official in Ireland, AD 1596).
The renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy. And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilisation.
- Arsene Darmesteter, Professor of Old French and Literature
Ireland can indeed lay claim to a great past; she can not only boast of having been the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries . . . but also of having made strenous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual fountain of our present continental civilisation.
- Heinrich Zimmer, Professor of Celtic and Sanskrit, Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
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