Oh, Ireland, What Am I to Do With You?
An ancestral story of grief
In honour of my Irish history on St. Patrick’s Day, the following song is a demo of a song about my great-great grandfather’s story of immigration from Ireland in the wake of the horrific potato famine—what many argue was the genocide of the Irish Catholic population by the British Empire, whose officials refused to send aid while millions died, and perhaps even more deliberately brought it about.
Anecdotally, my own grandfather is known to have turned off the TV every time “God Save the Queen” came on, the generational memory of the cruelty toward and starvation of his people still alive and burning in his heart.
It is likely that my great-great-grandfather experienced his entire life as a failure, between the possible alcoholism that was so common among the men, and the constant moving, and the lower-level ongoing persecution against the Irish that followed, as a result of the many stigmas at the time. Many of these stigmas were merited; they were often known fighters and drinkers, given to melancholy and missing work. They were also the dreaded papists.
But I was deeply touched thinking about how this man’s imperfect but courageous sacrifice was for me, and for all of his children to come—and how here I am, as a result, living a beautiful life in so many ways.
It is haunting to contemplate the lives of those in our lineage, and we should do it more. We all came from somewhere.
What were their thoughts? What did their inner life look like? How much did they suffer? Our ancestors, however messy, often had a regular heroism that we almost can’t even fathom.
This is not an exact story, but the fragmented pieces I gathered and put together with a general knowledge of a lot of the Irish immigration story through the US, and in our case, over to Minnesota to farm, from where his son, my great-grandfather then left to start farming in Saskatchewan, where I was eventually born. This song is my poetic adaptation. But I do rightfully imagine, I believe, from the contours of his story, that he remained, like many of us would, painfully haunted by his loss of home and everything, and that he likely never stopped feeling like a vagabond as long as he lived.
The video, too, was just a simple lyric video to follow along with for my website members in 2021. I hope to do the song and video at a higher quality at some point, but for now am happy to share it as is.
Interestingly, it organically came out in lengthy repetitive story stanza—it is unabashedly long, like so many Irish folk songs, in order to tell the whole story—and came out of my voice with an unavoidable Irish lilt, which I didn’t contrive. Both length and lilt just happened. The muse knows what it’s about.
I hope you enjoy.