Danny Boy by Malachy McCourt Read Free Book Online

scientific by any means, but the sentiments were clear. To the question “Would you give your son to die for Ireland, or indeed America?” the replies were mixed: “Have you seen a doctor lately?” “I couldn’t give him to anyone. He’s too rowdy,” “No, he always comes home for dinner,” and so on.
    Furthermore, if the mothers ever did manage to bring a hundred sons into the world, they wouldn’t mind ninety-seven or so joining the army, provided they avoided an actual war. Unanimously, the mothers were unable to reconcile the words “holy” and “battlefield” and believed it unlikely that God would approve of death in the name of war.
    Another verse harkens back to simpler times when gunpowder was unavailable to the revolting peasantry:
    But should I live and should you
    Die for Ireland
    Let not your dying thoughts be
    All of me
    But breathe a prayer to God for
    Our dear Sireland
    That He will hear and He will set her
    Free
    And I will take your place and pike
    My dearest
    And strike a blow, though weak
    That blow may be
    To help the cause to which your heart was nearest
    and you will rest in Peace until I come for thee
    Once more, a warlike parent dispatches a son to spill blood for Ireland. And in the best traditions of martyred motherhood, she enjoins him not to think of her as the blood bubbles around his lips in his last moment of life. Rather, Danny should be praying “for our dear Sireland.” Note the gender change from Mother Ireland to Sireland. Bad poets will sacrifice anything for a rhyme.
    Further along in the verse, the bloodlust has over-taken the poor woman as she is ready to whack the nearestEnglishman with a pike. This, despite the fact that the pike is more a spear-like weapon, practical for impaling or penetrating an enemy, but somewhat inept in the whacking department.
    As Michael Robinson said, the image of Danny’s gray-haired mother in her black-tasseled shawl, tottering off to war with a big pike to turn the red coats into shishkabobs, is fairly ludicrous. Historically, the women did do their part in defending the country, particularly at the Siege of Limerick in 1651, where they threw stones at the Cromwell army. Nearly forty years later in 1689, the Siege of Derry began, and once more the Irish were forced to take sides in the complicated politics and wars of continental Europe. James II, a Catholic, had antagonized the Protestant power elite in Britain by ceding Ireland to his brother-in-law, Tyrconnell, who restored Catholics to full participation. Outraged, the Protestants implored William of Orange to oust Jimmy II and restore Protestant values, and so the war commenced. And where did this war, The Willimaite War as it came to be known, begin? Why, in the land of Danny Boy, of course.
    This ancient city of Derry was the site of a monastery founded by the great Irish scholar St. Colmcille around the fifth century. The word Derry derives fromthe Gaelic word doire , which means “oak tree.” The whole of the island of Ireland was covered by oak forests and when a tree grew close to a well, it became a holy place where ribbons and adornments and later on, medals were hung in supplication to the spirits who resided there. In the numerous uprisings and revolutions that occurred after the English pope, Adrian IV, granted dominion over Ireland to Henry II, oak forests provided ideal hiding places for the rebellious Irish engaged in guerilla warfare. But the Brits had a judicious response to the pesky problem of these mighty oaks. They knocked ’em down, an effective tactic of deforestation and defoliation which preceeded the United States’s own chemical version, centuries later, in Vietnam. Besides flushing out the mad Irish from their lairs, the English used the oak to build the grand ships of the British navy and to line the interiors of their majestic cathedrals, for the glory of God and the rule of Brittania.