10 March 2017
Steve Earle’s Galway Girl was from Dublin. Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl was from Limerick. Alliteration, rhythm and other mysteries of lyric writing were probably the forces prevailing over mundane accuracy in both instances. That said, fans of feminist and post-colonial theories will recognise the trope of a western male tourist or voyager feminising a cultural ‘other’ as a signifier both of romanticised self-discovery and also colonial superiority. (The cringeful video, in which Dublin and Galway blur into a mythical stage-Irish idyll where Ed Sheeran is beloved by the common local, plays into this.) In Ed’s case I’m sure this Orientalism—or Occidentalism, since he’s looking west and to the west of Ireland—was all subconscious, if only because I can’t imagine Ed putting much intellectual candle-power into the lyrics of ‘Galway Girl’.
So, ‘Galway Girl’ is the usual bland, basic Ed Sheeran folk-pop for first dances, but this time packaged as tourist-trap tat to condescend a whole country. For Dublin people who all love Garth Brooks so much that they’re always trying to have huge Garth Brooks concerts in Croke Park in Dublin, it’s a bit like the time Garth had a song called ‘Ireland’ on which he sang about “fences made of stone” by which he probably meant “walls” and which I’m sure irked the Dubs because dry stone walls are in the west of Ireland and not in Dublin where all our Garth Brooks fans are from so he probably doesn’t even like Dublin people even though they all love him as much as coddle and Dustin. Or, if you were a hipster in the ’00s, it’s like your beloved Johnny Cash when he sang that bleak and harrowing cri du cœur ‘Forty Shades Of Green’.
I’m more interested in why Ed Sheeran’s ‘Galway Girl’ actually went to number one in Ireland for two weeks as our most bought and streamed track from his new album, briefly displacing the months-long reign of his milquetoast juggernaut ‘Shape Of You’. Do we actually like such national condescension? Well, yes we do. We crave it. Every international movie star or pop star on the promotional circuit who’s faced with an Irish interviewer gets asked some variant of the question: do you love Ireland? Our regular Eurovision semi-final failures conjure up a banshee wail of latent psychological trauma: Europe has stopped loving us! Irish people abroad, in Irish bars and even non-Irish bars, will strain every sinew to be acknowledged by the locals as whatever in the native dialect means “gas craic”, “mad yokes” and “the Irish”. And what is the whole “best fans in the world” routine, in which a heaving mass of Ireland supporters in a foreign stadium or piazza performatively belt out ‘The Fields Of Athenry’ or ‘Zombie’ despite the team being fustigated, if not a nation proclaiming in one voice: results don’t matter; goals and tries don’t matter; what matters is that you love us! On ‘Galway Girl’ Ed loves Ireland, in the video Ireland loves Ed, and everyone is happy. I bet it’s a while since you listened to it of your own free will, though, unless you work in Carrolls Irish Gifts or drive the Paddywagon.
‘Galway Girl’ is also a significant Irish number one in marking how Ed Sheeran broke the Irish charts. The week of 10 March 2017, sixteen tracks from his newly-released album ÷ (which is commonly referred to as his Divide album, though the symbol is called an obelus) occupied the top 16 places of the Irish charts – that’s all twelve on the standard album package plus the four bonus tracks. A quick re-write of the rules followed, and today an act can only have three tracks in the Irish singles chart at one time, with the exception of them featuring on someone else’s track. Ed will have some more Irish number one singles in subsequent years, but I note that his 2025 album Play didn’t have any tracks at all get into the Irish top ten. That’s how you deal with colonisers.
