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Let the people sing? Irish rebel songs, sectarianism, and Scotland's Offensive Behaviour Act1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2016

Stephen R. Millar
Stephen R. Millar*
Affiliation:
School of History, Anthropology, Politics, and Philosophy, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1NN, UK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Irish rebel songs afford Scotland's Irish diaspora a means to assert, experience and perform their alterity free from the complexities of the Irish language. Yet this benign intent can be offset by how the music is perceived by elements of Scotland's majority Protestant population. The Scottish Government's Offensive Behaviour Act (2012) has been used to prosecute those singing Irish rebel songs and there is continuing debate as to how this alleged offence should be dealt with. This article explores the social function and cultural perception of Irish rebel songs in the west coast of Scotland, examining what qualities lead to a song being perceived as ‘sectarian’, by focusing on song lyrics, performance context and extra-musical discourse. The article explores the practice of lyrical ‘add-ins’ that inflect the meaning of key songs, and argues that the sectarianism of a song resides, at least in part, in the perception of the listener.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , October 2016 , pp. 297 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on a paper that was delivered at the IASPM Biennial UK and Ireland Conference, University College Cork, on 14 September 2014. I wish to thank those who attended, Kay Goodall and the article's two anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions.

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Discography

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