Many of our traditional songs rose out of political situations.
In Ireland there are thousands of songs which were made as a direct result of the the Irish struggles for independence from Britain - 1798, 1876, 1916 to 1922.
The emigrations following the Famine produced, and are still producing the second largest section of the Irish repertoire (the first being love songs).
The jewel in the crown of the British repertoire (IMO), the transportation songs came into being from a situation caused by the siezure of common land by the English aristocracy.
The Jacobite wars produced its own Scots repertoire.
The Chartist movement led to pages of songs being published weekly in political journals of the time.
The Industrial Revolution gave rise to many songs about conditions in the mills and mines, at sea, in the armed forces.....
Political events throughout the 20th century produced songs on nuclear disarmament, South African aparthied, Viet Nam, Cuba, Chile, the miners, Turkey, Chile, Thatcher....
I haven't started on the hom-grown US repertoire, - the War of Independence, The Civil War, the dust bowls, the unionisation of the mining industry...... let's face it - folk song has always covered politics to one degree or another.
The very fact that our folk songs are the direct creation of working people - a class that, up to fairly recently, has been said to have no creative culture of its own, is a political statement in its own right.
Having said that, there is another side to the argument.
We (2 Brits) were visiting this part of the west of Ireland throughout the latest 'troubles'. At the time that Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers were dying we arrived to black flags draping the streets of Miltown Malbay. Everywhere we went we heard support for the strikers and contempt for the Thatcher Government for allowing such an atrocity to take place.
We never once met with hostility and were welcomed as friends.
Jim Carroll