The Rebel Black Dot Irish Song o' the Day

The Pogues, "If I Should Fall from Grace with God" from The Very Best of the Pogues (The Last Angry Irishman)

Commentary:

"If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me,
If I'm buried 'neath the sod,
But the angels wont receive me—

"Let me go, boys!
Let me go, boys!
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry.

"This land was always our,
Was the proud land of our fathers,
It belongs to us and them,
Not to any of the others—

"Let them go, boys!
Let them go, boys!
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry…"

Sorry, politics again: Though only a part of "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," the song does contain a sad counterpoint to Tuesday's plea for today's immigrants to be welcomed more warmly than were yesterday's Irish immigrants: A strain of Irish Nativism—tied up in the twentieth century at least with republicanism—that took a dim view of "others," including those who had resided in Ireland for centuries, such as the Protestants of Northern Ireland, most of whom have been in Ireland longer than the Irish have been in America. If the far-famed Kennedys & your humble narrator are Americans, some of our ancestors having only arrived in the Americas in the nineteenth or even the twentieth centuries, then how are the men of Ulster not Irish, their ancestors having arrived on the Emerald Isle in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries? At some point, immigration is a fait accompli.