The first printing of 'The Soldier's Song' State Papers: Echoes of the past from the archives
Controversy over the Irish National Anthem is a continuing matter. It was certainly so in the late 1980s
To some, ‘The Soldier’s Song’ seemed inappropriate for today. A nun from Bessbrook wrote to the Taoiseach that she had attended an event at which the audience of priests, nuns, and families with children were not soldiers. None of them wanted to go anywhere near “the gap of danger”. The words of the anthem were quite meaningless to them, and ought to be changed to words that were.
In a letter in the file Charles Haughey himself strongly disagreed.
He thought ‘The Soldier’s Song’ had stirring historical associations, and many found it moving.
He took the example of ‘La Marseillaise’ (“Aux armes, citoyens!”) – when played in France, even French aristocrats stood proudly to attention to this anthem of revolution in the 1790s.
It is very doubtful if this was the case, though attitudes changed perhaps after the Charlie Hebdo affair and the attacks on Paris. But it is doubtful if any of the surviving Legitimists and Orleanists, aware of their history, feel that way. Certainly the lyrics about the people’s fears of Royalist troops are fairly graphic:
In the countryside, do you hear
The roaring of these fierce soldiers?
They come right to our arms
To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!
In fact countries often change their anthem, as Mr Haughey ought to have known. In France the Marseillais has been the anthem only since the creation of the Third Republic after the debacle of the Franco-Prussian war and the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870.
Before that the Napoleonic anthem had been ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ (composed by Hortense de Beauharnais), adopted again under Napoleon III’s Second Empire. After the Bourbon Restoration in 1815 the royal anthem was ‘La retour des Princes Français á Paris’ – a singularly boring piece of music.
Under the July monarchy 1830-1848 the anthem was ‘La Parisienne’.
So anthems do change with changing times. And, of course, when this island is reunited, perhaps as federated state of some kind, a new anthem will be essential.