Dermot Hegarty – ‘Nineteen Men’

12 September 1974

‘Nineteen Men’ is the sixth number one song in Ireland in the space of just three years about someone in prison, and the eleventh in eight years. What’s more, Dermot Hegarty’s previous Irish chart-topper was also a jailbird story, ‘Twenty One Years’. Was this really such relatable pop-culture content at the turn of the ’70s? I wouldn’t put it all down to internment in the North, especially as we in the twenty-six counties were adept at turning a blind eye to the Troubles. Maybe westerns and war movies had romanticised the image. (I note that both of Hegarty’s chart-topping songs about prison came out on Release Records.)

To get more specific, ‘Nineteen Men’ is, after ‘Up And Away (The Helicopter Song)’ by The Wolfe Tones, our second chart-topping comedy folk ballad in ten months about a contemporary IRA jailbreak in the Republic, this time in Portlaoise in August 1974. This doesn’t say much about our prison system or our charts. Given the few weeks of turnaround between prison escape and single release, don’t expect much of ‘Nineteen Men’ – all we get is mild bar-room witticism set to the same old Irish air as ‘The Wearing Of The Green’. Like the Wolfe Tones song, it’s more a satirical dig at the powers that be than a Republican rebel song. Similarly, ‘Nineteen Men’ was also banned-slash-not-played by RTÉ – as legend has it, pulled mid-play by a producer while Larry Gogan was spinning it live on air. Busted!