THE FIELDS OF ATHENRY

A cousin posted this video of The Dubliners performing what is basically our clan's theme song: "The Fields of Athenry." Athenry (pronounced "Athen" "rye") is the town in County Galway closest to the crossroads where the thatched roof dirt floor peasant "cottage" my Irish grandfather—my father's father and the progenitor of our branch of the clan in the USA—grew up in.

His and my name, Michael, is mentioned at the start of the song ("by a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling, 'Michael they have taken you away, for you stole Trevalyn's corn so the young might see the morn, now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay'"). And the fields were the same fields he grew up around, and I have been to many times, and many among my siblings and cousins and nephews and nieces, as well as my own three children, have been to and have images of forever in our minds.

By the way, Trevalyn was the man the English government put in charge of the so-called "famine"—it wasn't a "famine" because the English and the Irish Protestants didn't starve, they had plenty of food to eat, it was the Irish Catholic peasants who starved, when deprived of their basic staple, the potato, and were kicked off the land they lived on with no other means of paying for food.

There was a great outpouring from around the world, including from freed slave societies in the USA and native Americans, as well as governments. Shiploads of food were sent to Ireland for the starving, but Trevalyn, under the auspices of the English political establishment of the time, believed in "laissez faire" capitalism so concluded to distribute the corn to the starving would be interfering with the "free market" (sound familiar?) and thus a third of the population starved to death, while another third emigrated, which is why it was "so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry" (though in the song's specific sense, the woman is lonely because her husband and the father of her children is on a prison ship heading for "Botany Bay" in Australia).

There's many versions of the song, including a more "punk" one by The Dropkick Murphys, but this live version touches me because what was for decades a little known song dear to my heart has become almost a theme song of the Irish, as you can hear in the reaction to the first beats of the song from the live audience. The sing-a-long is corny for sure, but also to me very moving.