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Mar 20th 2016!⃝Hello, I'm Irish and i've noticed some of these interpretations are wrong so i'll give you the full story behind this song:
This song is about the conflict mainly between the Irish and the English, but it's also about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Ireland was colonised by the English in 1536 in the province of Ulster, it was here that the first English settlers stayed and converted the local population to Protestantism (so at the time of writing this article the lyric "500 years like gelignite" would actually be "480 years like gelignite") and we had successive waves of Kings and Queens colonising us, But we fought back all the time to keep ourselves under our own control.. We were forced to convert to Protestantism when we were colonised and our culture, religion and language (Irish Gaelic) was banned under the Penal Laws. We set up "Hedge Schools" where we would be taught the forbidden material away from the eyes of the English. During The Great Famine (or in Irish "An Gorta Mór"/"The Big Hunger") we were hit by the potato blight that staved almost 1 million people to death and 1 million ended up emigrating to the UK, America and Canada (Irelands population at this time was about 8.2 million, so a million died and a million left Ireland, our population still hasn't recovered from this event being around 4.7 million as of 2016), This was and still is a topic of great sorrow and anger for us to talk about, Our hatred for the English grew so much that we ended up having wave after wave of rebellions, the most famous being led by Protestant Dublin born aristocrat Theobald Wolfe Tone in 1798, then Daniel OConnell and Robert Emmet (who said his famous epitaph: "Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance, asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written"). The biggest revolt that took place against English rule in Ireland was in 1916 in Dublin City. At this time Northern Ireland was mainly Protestant and the rest of the country Catholic. These 2 sides hated each other with a bitter resentment that can still be felt today, this erupted into violence and hatred in the 60's and was known as the Troubles, but a peace agreement was signed in the 90's and now Northern Ireland is a lovely place to go.
In conclusion; this song is basically a protest and ant-war song, calling for English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic to put aside our differences and realise that we can live in peace together if we let go of what happened in the past and what we're all equally responsible for doing to each other.
Hope this helped you understand this brilliant song a little better! :-)
