I am more pressed for time so this will be short. I am going to have to come back to the central issue - what did Sands achieve, and was he hero or villain, soon.

But right now I do want to say that having thought quite a lot about it while driving back and forth to visit my wife in hospital over the last few days (funny how the human mind turns things over while apparently doing something else), I do feel that this thread is more than just another BS thread. Like disco music in pop and rock, Irish music has come to occupy a huge part of the stage of folk music. We should try to understand the songs we sing. We should even try to understand the songs we don't sing (and I don't sing many Irish songs, partly because I don't agree with many of them, and partly because I could understand the rage of an Irishman who found an Englishman born into the upper middle classes occupying not just his homeland but also his music. So, although the impish glee of "the Old Alarm Clock" makes it an attractive song, I avoid it. Comparably I would never sing "Champion he was a dandy (a/k/a the twenty pound dog)". I abhor dog-fighting.

So it is important to folk music to get to grips with it. And because of the importance of Irish folk music to folk music generally (a flute and whistle player I know, who although an upper-middle class Englishman also owns a cafe in the West of the ROI once infuriated an Irishman who objected to him, an Englishman, playing Irish tunes by riposting that Irish music was too important to be left to the Irish) it is important for all folkers to understand the English conquest of Ireland and its consequences. Some songs we may sing as a result. I certainly am not afraid to play (I have not the tenor to sing) "Young Ned of the Hill". If I were good enough I could do "the Praties they were small". I do not support the Cromwellian occupation or the boycott.

So this thread is important to the music, and so it has a place here.