6 August 1988
Paddy Reilly was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. His 1983 live album, featuring modern Irish folk ballads like ‘The Fields Of Athenry’, was one of the few cassettes my father had in the car, so on long rainy Sunday drives when there wasn’t a big Gaelic football match on the radio we got to listen to the whole thing. Amazingly, despite all that enforced listening I still like the sound of Paddy Reilly’s strong, clear voice, though I’m not a fan of Irish folk ballads and I have attended plenty of Ireland international rugby and football matches without ever singing ‘The Fields Of Athenry’.
‘Flight Of Earls’, like the Wolfe Tones’ 1981 number one ‘The Streets Of New York’, was written by Bagatelle frontman Liam Reilly (no relation) and is another corny nostalgic ballad about Irish emigration, this time a general treatise on its brain-drain effects on Ireland. It tries to be both traditional and modern at once: it references Ellis Island, which closed as an immigration processing centre in the 1950s, but also namechecks Bono and U2 as reminders of home, but then tells you to “switch off those new computers” in a dismissive Luddite tone, then has our young emigrants missing “Guinness and the rain” even though I can vouch for New York having both, and can’t make up its mind if it is criticising mass emigration or romanticising it.
On top of all that, Paddy Reilly was also famous for owning several successful Irish pubs in New York, thereby arguably profiting quite nicely from the emigration of others – as do the writers and performers of ersatz Irish folk ballads bemoaning emigration. In short, this is a contrived, confused and condescending dirge which can also face the charge of brazen hypocrisy: nothing to write home about.
