Keith has a point that romantic attitudes and pseudo- history bear A responsibility, as he said (not THE), for the conflicts of the late 60s to recently- but it's surely far from the only one, and certainly not unique to Ireland, and there certainly not confined to one side. In the same way, Kipling bears A responsibility for the First World War, and Francis Scott Key A responsibility for McCarthyism.

If we have to get our facts right before singing any song, we'll have precious few to sing and pretty dull they'll be. That's leaving aside the question of "facts" in history. And if we have to wait till a conflict is over and forgotten before we can sing about it, Ireland will have to shut up, yea even unto the 12th century...

The starting point of the thread was song (specifically "rebel" songs) as a social document. A song can document times other than the one it purports to depict. See the wonderful WAV's thread about his imagined village. All peoples use their history as a way to comment on the present, and given Ireland's rather turbulent past, it's not surprising that there's an element of projection of past wrongs into the present. As the Irish monk said to Gerald of Wales, who accompanied King Henry II's invasion of Ireland, and ragged the Irishman for their church's lack of martyrs, now that the English have come, we'll have plenty of those.