Explicit

Give Ireland Back to the Irish

Published Apr 3, 2024, 4:01 AM

This episode deals with themes and events surrounding the Northern Ireland conflict. As such, this episode may be traumatic or emotional for some listeners.

Paul McCartney doesn’t view himself as a writer of protest songs. But the events of Bloody Sunday sufficiently moved him to use his voice. Rush released as Wings first single in 1972, “Give Ireland Back To The Irish”  was banned in Britain by the BBC and in the US radio avoided playing it. However, through any criticism, McCartney stood steadfastly behind the release which ultimately reached number one in Ireland.

“McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries.

The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; written by Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O’Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with assistance from Jake Gorski and sound design by Pejk Malinovski. The series is executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman, Scott Rodger and Paul McCartney.

Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.

Pushkin. Hi everyone, it's Paul Moldoin. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus.

The organizers of this civil rights march promised.

That they would be no fun. There seemed to us to be a perfectly peaceful demonstration that had gone wrong, and that our army boys had acted indiscriminately and had fired on innocent period.

The army have said throughout the day that they hope to use minimum force, But three hours after the procession began, this has ended up as Comes onto the Box side, as the worst ever confrontation between the army and the Catholic people of the Kragan and Bog side.

It just seemed so sort of wrong to me that, even though I wasn't a writer of protest songs, I just felt I had to try and say something about this.

Why don't you just get alan back.

To the I'm Paul mlldoon for a while now, I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era, and will.

You look at me, I'm going on to I'm actually a performer.

That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together other on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.

It was like going back to an old snapshot album looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.

This is McCartney, A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode give Ireland Back to the Irish, one might well ask who had taken Ireland from the Irish. When Ireland gained independence from England in nineteen twenty two, the northern region of the island remained under British rule. Those who felt Northern Ireland should continue forever as a part of the United king Kingdom were known as loyalists, and so for decades they were locked in conflict with Republicans, those who wished for a united Ireland with no tie to Great Britain. This was all further complicated by centuries of antagonism in the country between Catholics and Protestants, and had burst into political violence in the late nineteen sixties and seventies, a period called the Troubles. British soldiers were installed in border towns and the Northern Ireland capital of Belfast. The mainly Catholic Irish Republicans who lived in Northern Ireland came to fail that they resided under a kind of occupation. On Sunday, the thirtieth of January nineteen seventy two, British soldiers shot twenty six un armed civilians at a peaceful protest in the northern Irish city called Derry. Several of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and others were shot while trying to help the wounded. There's an image from that day of a priest, father Daily, moving through the crowd with this white handkerchief held out as a flag of truce. That's absolutely seared on my mind's eye.

Father, how many dead have you seen in the box side appearing you to be dead?

There are the three in that Saracen car.

There are two men laying at the end of this block of flats. There's another man at least very close to being dead.

There's one, there are two others up there.

Fourteen people die. The incident became known as the bog Side massacre or Bloody Sunday.

There was immediately a cover up. No, they wantedness and throughout rifles they're all there. But when you saw the footage of it all, it just looked, yeah, they could have just left these people to be and if you've been shot then maybe you know. But it seemed to me like it was a reasonable demonstration, the kind of which had been happening in the black communities and then all sorts of communities throughout recent history and throughout history. So I was kind of shocked by this whole idea, mainly that our soldiers had perpetrated this, because up until that point I thought our boys were all great. I was great supporter.

You are to me, nobody knows that that really what army doing.

In a land across the see.

I just startedn't wait a minute, you know what if there were Irish.

Soldiers behaving that way in Liverpool where I was growing up, and you couldn't go here. You couldn't go there because these soldiers were God's aren't soldiers were going to stop you going down the street. What do you lie?

They've gone your way to work, you were stop by restorers?

Would you lie down?

Do you?

Would you give?

And so it just seemed so sort of wrong to me.

Why don't you going to United Island and get down because to sort it out.

Even though the Beatles were writing in the nineteen sixties during what seemed like a renaissance of protest music, they had never released a song that was overtly political. After the dissolution of the Beatles, however, McCartney went to New York and paid a visit to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Greenwich Village, where political art was very much part of the zeitgeist.

This song is called The Luck of the Irish, and the proceeds from this song and record will go to the Civil Rights Defense in North Island, Civil Defense, whatever it's called.

John and Yoko had written The Luck of the Irish at the end of nineteen seventy one, inspired by a protest they attended the year before in support of the Irish Republican Army.

If you had the luck of the ariage.

You'd be sorry and wish.

You were dead.

You should have the luck of the herrige, and you'd wish you was English instead.

In early nineteen seventy two, in a furious response to the Bogside massacre, John and Yoko also wrote Sunday Bloody Sunday.

For Sunday, bloody Sunday.

When the shot the people were to cry a diaty modest.

Build a breed very head?

Is there any one amongst you?

Instead of payment on the kids?

Not so jah?

I was reading When They Live.

McCartney was similarly furious about the British soldiers unprovoked attack on Irish civilians, even though he's rarely found anger to be generitive for his art.

I realized this actually, that sometimes I really want to sit down and write.

A song that sums up my.

Dismay and anger at the political situation that I read about every bloody Moore, you know, and I read about politicians saying this and this and this and this.

It's like, God, what t work? This guy is a complete idiot, you know.

So I'll sit down and say, Okay, you are an idiot, but.

I can't do it. It doesn't really work. I wrote a song was called angry. There was an attempt at that, but it's not angry, you know. It seems to be something I can feel in myself. I can't easily try and slate that into a.

Song. Yeah, so that's not one of my genres.

McCartney may not feel protest music is an easy genre to access, but Give Ireland Back to the Irish is a passionate protest song. Instead of focusing on anger and accusations, though, the song is an appeal for empathy, asking the British to imagine themselves in Irish shoes.

What do you lie.

If your way too well?

You wis the.

Ressol does? Would you lie down?

McCartney wrote Give Ireland Back to the Irish from the British perspective, but the conflict in Ireland must have struck a personal chord due to his family's Irish roots. In fact, the two opposing signs represented in the troubles were replicated within McCartney's own household.

My mom was Catholic, being more Irish than my dad. My dad was like Liverpool Irish when a few generations back. My mom was a bit more recent right from Ireland and so she was cutting. My dad was Protestant, very red, must be free.

You mean it looks like me because I look Irish.

What it means is no, not really. I was thinking that deeply into it. Well, I see that now as I'm kind of rereading it. No, I was more meaning that it could be me. Yes, it could be this guy. This muld be me if we're talking about England where we were. How would you like it if on your way to work? So as a man looks like me, there's just a way of saying, you know, he's it's just like you. I could have said, or it's just like you and me.

Yeah, he's not other.

An means.

Anything.

As I revisited this song, I couldn't help but think about my own childhood in County armyor just one county over from County Monaghan, where Paul McCartney's family had lived.

Were you involved in the troubles?

Not as an active participant?

No? No, No, who was at around about that time wouldn't be in consumable.

No, not at all.

It could easily have happened, honestly. But my mother, I think, very like your mother, was a very protective person. And she wanted us to do well in the world, and she didn't want us to get involved in these guys who were done at the end of the lane.

This period of history has of course crept into my own poetry. There's a poem, for example, called Ireland, which goes as follows, Ireland, the Volkswagen part in the gap, but gen ticking over. You wonder if it's lovers and not men hurrying back across two fields and a river that somewhat ominous feel at the end there of men, probably armed, probably up to no good, going about their business in the country, and the river of course representing the separation of those two fields.

So when you talk about that in your poems, yes, you're recounting stuff just.

When I was there being a person on the street.

With it all happening around you.

Yeah. City.

Paul McCartney was still on his trip to New York when he heard news of Bloody Sunday. He rushed to organize a recording of the track with some of the musicians from his new band Wings. It was the first Wings recording that included the guitarist Henry McCullough, who was himself a Northern irishman.

So we made the record and then I sent it over to EMI. Immediately got a phone call from Sir Joseph Lockwood. It was the head of AMI, but Sir Joe, he said.

Paul, you can't put this record of the Irish situation. I said, look, said, Joe said.

The thing is, I'm not really a protest songwriting, but this is a factory deeply, and I feel like I've got to say something.

He said, oh record, he said, please don't put it out reconsider So I gave it a couple of days and just running back. No, you know, I've got to.

He said, it'll be better and it'll get banned. OK, I've got micro straton. This thing was big enough event in my history, in my country's history to.

Take some kind of a stand.

Joseph Lockwood's concerns about the song were perhaps vindicated. When the song was released, the BBC Radio Luxembourg and other organizations banded from broadcast. It was too provocative, they said, too controversial. Most radio stations in the United States also avoided playing the song.

The British Broadcasting Corporation will play your song.

What do you think about that?

I think they're silly, you know. I think any kind of repression like that, you know, it always ends up in the person who is being banned getting more out of it than the people who ban it. Witness this, you know you want an interview about it. It's such big news because they ban it and all that.

On an ABC special report, McCartney was explicit in his support of the Irish nationalists.

You think the British should get.

Out, Yeah, you know, eventually, that's what I think.

Yeah.

I was brought up to be proud of it. You know, the British Empire and obviously own most of the world at one time, almost gradually had to sort of give it back because people said, hey, listen, it's ours, you know, not yours, and they want to back Well, I just see that's the same thing in Ireland, you know, it's a little bit of territory we've gained in the past. And I think this bloody Sunday you know, where the British parachute Regiment went in and sort of shot at the people. Me as a British citizen, I don't like my army going around shooting my Irish brothers. In a way, if people are shooting at them. They can't just sit there and not shoot back, you know. So whilst I don't dig it, it's inevitable, you know that if they get shot at, they'll shoot back.

Give Ireland Back to the Irish may have been banned in Britain and overlooked in America, but in Ireland it hit number one on the charts. It also curiously hit number one in Spain, where McCartney believes it may have resonated with the Basque struggle for self determination. Much of the violence surrounding the troubles came to an end with the nineteen ninety eight Good Friday Agreement, which restored self government to Northern Ireland, but the aftershocks of Bloody Sunday still reverberate, and they raise questions about what, if any punishment should be faced by those involved in the killing.

Yes, it was a moment.

Where, you know, there was a sense that art could respond to that situation, which, by the way, is a situation still hasn't really been resolved.

Bloody something itself.

No, no, no, I know this is a very thorny issue.

Give Ireland Back to the Irish a single released by Paul McCartney and Wings in February nineteen seventy two.

In the next episode, John, being older and at art school, would go to art school parties which Nat George normally wouldn't have an entree into.

But I remember going to one and I took my guitar, so I'm sitting enigmatically in the corner with my black pole and neck sweater. I remember sort of lounging around and trying to look interesting to this older crowd. So one of the weapons that I used was to play this sort of frenchy sounding song and sort of make gottural noises, kind of half thinking that someone will think, well, he's French.

Probably Michelle. That's next time on McCartney A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL and Pushkin Industries.

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics offers listeners the opportunity to sit in on conversations between Paul 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 26 clip(s)