25 April 1966
Right after ‘The Sea Around Us’ we have another Irish republican ballad at the top of our charts. ‘Black And Tan Gun’, though, is a painfully antiquated and simpering ’50s-style country-&-Irish showband number telling the maudlin tale of a fallen Irish soldier, shot near Bantry by the notoriously fashion-uncoordinated British army unit of the title, asking his comrades to bury him in the mountains so that he could look down over the battle scene. Lost to us, sadly, is the verse clarifying whether his comrades waited until he died before burying him, or whether they buried him up a tree to give him a better view. You’d want a bladder of stone not to be moved by this.
Mention of the Black and Tans in this 1966 song, coinciding with the Easter Rising 50th anniversary celebrations, gives us the opportunity to point out a 26-county doublethink about republican violence. The IRA of the War of Independence—with Michael Collins and comrades fighting the Black and Tans—and the subsequent Civil War soon become “the Old IRA” with the gravitas of state-sponsored respectability, allowing Irish society and the Irish body politic to distance itself from the Troubles-era Provisional IRA while still retaining a veneer of Black-and-Tan-fighting outlaw glamour. Newspaper columnists clutching their pearls at young Irish people singing republican ballads would do well to remember that Official Ireland has always been perfectly happy for us to sing “Ooh Ahh, Up The (Old) ‘Ra”.
Irish Number Ones 