THE scene is set for another great sporting occasion. A line of players in shiny green shirts stands respectfully out on pitch a smiling Mary Robinson gives her characteristic nod of peace and reconciliation to all as she walks along the line of children of the diaspora.
The drums roll as the band strikes up the national anthem, Amhran na bhFiann. While the players in shiny green stand in pent up silence and wait patiently for the first ball to be hooted through the air, the more patriotic members of the crowd attempt a rendition it begin's convincingly enough "Shee nah, Fee nah Fall" but then tails off into an indecipherable hum. Oh dear. Nobody seems to know the lyrics. Oh, my word. This is a soldier's song that could be renamed The March of the Long Mumble. The players are dumbfounded, the opponents look puzzled and the biggest cheer of the afternoon always comes when the Garda band ends the embarrassment of the wordless thousands with the final note.
That talented child of the diaspora, Mr Terry Mancini, was not entirely au fait with the anthem when he made his debut for the Republic's soccer team back in the dark ages of the 1970s. After the band had played the national song, he was heard to remark to one of his, team mates in a cockney twang "Gawd! I hope our one is not as long as that."
Anthem's 90 year career
The 90 year story of the anthem told by Prof Ruth Sherry in the spring issue of History Ireland is one of survival in the face of adversity. Cannons have roared and bullets have ricochet off A Soldier's Song during its 90 year career, but it has somehow struggled on through the century. It was announced as the country's official anthem with a minimum of pomp and ceremony in a reply to a Dail question in July 1926 and, since then, the song has had a somewhat feeble grip on the nation's vocal cords.
During the first five years of the Free State, the country had muddled along without an official song. Although A Soldier's Song was already a smash hit at Army events, as Ruth Sherry notes, Thomas Moore's Let Erin Remember was also played on many formal occasions and was used as the Irish anthem at the 1924 Olympic Games. A Nation Once Again was another popular melody on the new state's play list.
By the mid 1920s, the need for an official anthem was becoming pressing. It would be hard to imagine the top rhymester W.B. Yeats joining the Irish jury for the Eurovision Song Contest if he were still knocking around Co Sligo today, but he was happy to judge a contest to find a new national anthem in 1924. Along with fellow writers James Stephens and Lennox Robinson, Yeats judged a competition with £50 in prize money organised by the Dublin
Evening Mail. He was disappointed to find that the less than imaginative readers of the evening paper insisted on writing pale imitations of that dismal number God Save the King.
After their fruitless search for a half decent song, Yeats and his colleagues concluded that "national anthems have always in the past been one man's thought, written for that man's pleasure, and taken up by a nation afterwards." And so it came to pass that two years after the competition, the Free State officially adopted A Soldier's Song, a thoroughly forget table number written by Peadar Kearney with musical assistance from Patrick Heeney.
A militaristic ballad
According to Ruth Sherry, the militaristic ballad with its imagery of rifles pealing and cannons roaring had first become popular as a marching song of the Irish Volunteers in the four years before the 1916 Rising.
When Kearney, an uncle of Brendan Behan, sat down to write the song in or around 1907, he could hardly have imagined that the big nobs at the RDS Horse Show would stand to attention for the rabble rousing anthem a couple of decades later. The Irish Times described the atmosphere as "electrical" as the Free State Army struck up A Soldier's Song in July 1926 in the showground. The event was loaded with symbolism.
The horsy set may have tolerated the anthem at the RDS, but that other bastion of the ascendancy, Trinity College, did not immediately warm to a melody that had only a few years previously bee ho the lips of the IRA. There was much consternation when the Governor General, James McNeill, arrived at a garden party in the college to be greeted by the strains of God Save the King played by a British Legion, band. McNeill subsequently's boycotted the college races.
"Sworn to be free, no more our ancient sire land shall shelter the despot or the slave."
That was the idealistic message of A Soldier's Song, a ditty that was usually sung in English during its early years. The Government may well have been determined to rid the country of the despot and the slave, but it was also steadfast in its determination not to pay the impecunious Kearney a penny for filching the song. It was only after Kearney threatened to sue Radio Eireann and Dublin theatres for playing the anthem that the Government eventually agreed to cough up £1,000 for the copyright.
PR coup of the century
But how did Fianna Fail manage to get its name in the first line of the Irish lyrics which gradually took over from the English words in the 1930s (with much encouragement from the GAA)? Surely this was the PR coup of the century. It has been wrongly assumed by some commentators that the translation of "Soldiers are we" as "Sinne Fianna Fail" was a stroke pulled by De Valera to have an anthem written to order. In truth, the FF endorsement was fortuitous the Irish translation in current use was actually written well before the Fianna Fail party was founded.
There is every possibility that politicians seeking to impress lily livered types such as the Rev Ian Paisley and the fellows who beat Lambeg drums will now replace A Soldier's Song with a soothing hotel lobby melody composed by Mr Phil Coulter. If not, A Soldier's Song will probably die of natural causes it seems to have disappeared completely from RTE radio the worn out whiny tape versions that used to be such a pleasant feature of a visit to a country cinema are but a nostalgic memory and those sensitive chaps on the Irish rugby team no longer sing it when they go abroad, because it is a little too rough for the dears.