Onward Christian Soldier’s Song – Frank McNally on a possible Protestant paternity for Amhrán na bhFiann

It is commonly assumed that, as part of any agreed united Ireland, Amhrán na bhFiann will have to make way for a new anthem, respectful of both the island’s traditions.

But if reader David O’Shea is correct, the Soldier’s Song already has impeccably ecumenical credentials. For whatever about lyrics, he suspects the music is rooted in an old Protestant hymn, written by a 19th-century unionist.

On foot of yesterday’s column about Peadar Kearney, who composed the words and may also have collaborated (with Patrick Heeney) on the air, David – an organist and student of Victorian church music – shared with me his theory that both were influenced by the work of one Sir Robert Prescott Stewart.

In 1883, Stewart edited a collection of music for Church of Ireland services, Chants and Responses, which included (at No. 271) a piece he wrote himself. The latter, says David, “bears an uncanny resemblance” to the refrain of Amhrán na BhFiann. The opening phrases of both songs, he adds, are “identical”.

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Kearney was born in 1883, Heeney two years earlier. Stewart’s collection would have circulated widely in the Dublin of their childhoods and with its hundreds of melodies, David thinks, might have served “as a useful handbook for a budding composer, regardless of his religious allegiance”.

He acknowledges that “musical coincidences” occur all the time, a point underlined in New York this week by Ed Sheerin’s copyright victory. Even so, David argues, a mere coincidence in this case seems unlikely, given the “singular character” of the religious chant.

If he did help inspired the anthem of independent Ireland, Stewart would hardly have appreciated the distinction. A measure of his politics is that when noting his musical doctorate, he used the abbreviation “Mus. D”, rather than the usual “Mus. Doc”, because “Doc” was also short for Daniel O’Connell. Perhaps adding to his suffering in Purgatory, he is now commemorated by a statue beside Leinster House.

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Speaking of singular characters, and still on the subject of Anglo-Irish musical collisions, Myles na gCopaleen of this parish once found reason to pour scorn on a man named Gearóid Ó Broin.

An Irish language and culture revivalist, Ó Broin had recently (it was 1958) given a talk at a “folk school” in Skerries, which exhorted everyone, as Myles summarised it, to “learn Irish, admire Irish step-dancing, Irish music, round towers, shrines, bells, etc, [and to] play chess and hurling because, among other reasons, ‘a nation without its traditional culture is like a dog without a pedigree’.”

After defending the rights of mongrels against the tyranny of breeding records, Myles went on to attack Ó Broin for factual errors, including a claim that the composer Handel had been so enamoured of Irish traditional songs that he would have sacrificed all his oratorios to have written “Eileen Aroon”.

On the contrary, claimed Myles the pedant, it was the Cuilfhionn (aka the Coolin) that Handel is said to have so envied. And if that’s true, Handel had something in common with Brendan Behan (Peadar Kearney’s nephew, also featured yesterday), because Behan loved the Coolin best of all old sings and is still preserved singing it on YouTube.

Whether any of the Coolin ended up in Handel’s music, I can’t say. But as great a composer as Mozart was not above such imports. I’m told that somewhere in the Gloria Excelsis Deo section of one of his Masses lurks part of an old Irish drinking song – the same one that gave Myles the title of his long-running Irish Times column: Cruiskeen Lawn.

That Gearóid Ó Broin must have been the same one who, at a Gaelic League Congress of 1943, was reported elsewhere in these pages to have lamented the un-Irish repertoire of Ireland’s Army band. During a recent concert in Galway, he complained, they had played The Old Bull and Bush and other “foreign” music, while ignoring Irish songs and also encouraging “tap dancing” rather than the indigenous kind.

But perhaps Ó Broin was not a singular character, after all. For the name crops up repeatedly in those years, including an occasion in June 1953, when like this weekend, London was playing host to a coronation.

In Dublin, some people watched that event on the few television sets then available, having to put up with a “bad reception”, according to newspaper reports.

But nowhere was the reception as bad as in a pub in Marlborough Street, where a hatchet-wielding protester smashed the TV .

The man then stormed out, saying: “Get out of my way. Ireland is still free.” He was later identified in court as one “Gearóid Ó Broin”.