Written in the H-Blocks: Bobby Sands' Poem of Exile

“Back Home in Derry” was written by Bobby Sands, an Irish republican prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (the Maze Prison). Sands led the 1981 hunger strike, protesting the British government's refusal to grant political status to republican prisoners, and died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days without food.

The song he wrote is not about his own time, at least not on the surface. Its narrator is a rebel of an earlier Ireland, taken from his home in Derry and shipped in chains to Australia, looking back at the town he will never see again. But nobody who knows where the words were written hears it as only history. A man in a cell in 1980, writing as a transported rebel of 1803, was writing his own situation into the long Irish story of prison and exile. That is the whole song in one move: the cell and the convict ship are the same place, 178 years apart.

1803 Robert Emmet's Rebels Bound for Botany Bay

The narrator sails in the aftermath of the rising of 1803, Robert Emmet's short, doomed rebellion in Dublin. Emmet's execution is in the song, and the men in the hold with the narrator are his rebels, “sixty rebels now bound for Botany Bay.”

Transportation was the British government's answer to rebellion: instead of a grave in Ireland that people could gather at, a convict ship and a one-way journey to the far side of the world. Between 1788 and 1868, roughly 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Sands' sixty rebels were one shipload in a traffic that ran for eighty years — and for the men on it, “home” became a word for somewhere you described to your children but never saw again. Our post on Black Velvet Band tells the same journey from  a different angle: a Belfast girl, a stolen watch, and Van Diemen's Land.

How Christy Moore Heard It in Derry and Put It on Ride On (1984)

Moore was playing in Derry and staying with the Barrett family on Chamberlain Street when a young man, just home from the H-Blocks, sang him the verses and wrote them out for him. The next night, in Bellaghy, Colm Scullion — who had shared a cell with Sands on the blanket protest — sang him another Sands song, “McIlhatton.” Moore put “Back Home in Derry” on his album Ride On (1984), produced by Dónal Lunny, in a version shorter than Sands' original poem. That record is how a lyric written in a prison cell reached the world: carried out in memory and on paper, sung in two houses, and recorded within three years of its author's death.

Moore's page for the song has the full lyric and his account in his own words — it is the best thing on the internet about this song, and it is linked below.

Why a Canadian Shipwreck Song Carries It

If the tune sounds familiar, it should. Moore set Sands' words to the air of Gordon Lightfoot's “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — Moore himself suspects the air “has earlier origins,” but Lightfoot's shipwreck ballad is the shape everyone knows. We have a whole post on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the pairing is not an  accident of convenience: a song about men lost at sea in 1975 carries a song about men shipped over the sea in 1803, and both are about the ones who never came home.

This is one of a small cluster of prison songs in our set. Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a decade earlier, The Auld Triangle is Mountjoy's, and Grace ends in Kilmainham. Sands knew exactly which shelf of Irish  song he was writing for.

Want to dig deeper? Christy Moore's own page — lyric and the story of hearing it — is the primary source. Kilmainham Gaol Museum's Transportation page lays out the system the song's narrator was shipped through. On video, Inside Irish Music tells the story behind “Back Home in Derry” in a Short, and Davy Holden's interviews recorded after Sands' death — republican and unionist voices both — have been watched more than 200,000 times.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Auld Triangle" is a prison song from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, sung along the Royal Canal. It is usually credited to Brendan Behan, because it opens his 1954 play The Quare Fellow. The best-documented account says Behan did not write it: the writer was Dick Shannon, a Dublin friend of Behan's, and Behan himself said so, on the record, more than once.

Behan first performed the song publicly in 1952, two years before the play, on RTÉ radio's The Ballad Maker's Saturday Night. The song's world is the prison day — the triangle struck to mark waking, meals, and lockdown, and the canal outside the walls carrying on without the men inside.

Mountjoy Prison and The Quare Fellow (1954)

The Quare Fellow is set in Mountjoy on the night before an execution — "quare fellow" is prison slang for the condemned man. The song hangs over the play the way the triangle hangs over the prison day: it is the sound of the routine that continues whatever is happening in the cells.

Mountjoy is one of the two Dublin prisons that run through this repertoire. The other is Kilmainham, where Joseph Plunkett married Grace hours before his execution in 1916. A generation separates the two songs. The buildings, and the system behind them, are the same subject.

Dick Shannon: The Man Behan Said Wrote It

Behan's biographer Michael O'Sullivan records that Mícheál Ó hAodha, who produced the RTÉ programme on which Behan first performed the song in 1952, said Behan never claimed authorship and asked him to send the copyright to Dick Shannon.

Introducing his own 1960 recording, Behan said it plainly: "This song was written by a person who will never hear it recorded, because he's not in possession of a gramophone. He's … pretty much of a tramp." Shannon's family — his nephew Deasún ÓSeanáin and his grandson Tom Neary — have made the case publicly: Shannon wrote it, he was an articulate man from the Liberties, and he never received a penny in royalties for it.

Why Dominic Behan's Name Is on It Too

Dominic Behan, Brendan's younger brother, made the first commercial recording of the song, on his 1958 Topic album Irish Songs. The liner notes describe it as "a song of Mountjoy Prison … made popular in the play 'The Quare Fella'" — without claiming he wrote it. Even so, some secondary sources credit Dominic as the writer, which is how his name became attached to it.

Dominic was a major songwriter in his own right — Come Out Ye Black and Tans is unquestionably his — and the Behan family thread runs through this set in both directions: in Streams of Whiskey, Shane MacGowan dreams of meeting Brendan and taking his advice. The authorship of "The Auld Triangle" stays disputed in print. The documented account — Behan's own words, his producer's account, and Shannon's family — points to Dick Shannon.

The Triangle Still Hangs in Mountjoy

The triangle in the song is real equipment, not a symbol invented for the lyric: a large metal triangle beaten to mark the stages of the prison day. It still hangs in Mountjoy at the point where the wings meet, its hammer mounted beside it, and it is no longer used.

The song is still working in Dublin, too. It is now sung as a terrace chant by supporters of Bohemians FC, whose ground stands near the prison — a prison song carried out of the play, onto the records, and into a football crowd a short walk from where it is set. Prison writing in this repertoire did not end with Behan: Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a later generation, written out of the same experience of men locked up and time marked for them.

Wikipedia's article on the song gives the fullest available account of the Shannon claim, the 1952 first performance, and the recording history, and links to the Mudcat Café discussion where Shannon's family make their case in their own words.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Men Behind the Wire" was written in 1971 by Paddy McGuigan and recorded by the Belfast group Barleycorn. It is about internment: the British government's policy of imprisoning people without trial in Northern Ireland. Within weeks of its release, the song was No. 1 in Ireland, its royalties were going to the families of the men it was written about, and the man who wrote it was in prison himself.

This is a song that works as a primary source. Almost everything in it can be checked against the record, and the record is stark.

Operation Demetrius: The Dawn Raids of 9 August 1971

Internment began on 9 August 1971 with Operation Demetrius, a sweep of dawn raids across Northern Ireland. In the first sweep, 342 people were arrested — and not one of them was a loyalist. The arrest lists were badly out of date: 104 of those taken were released within 48 hours, and the names on the lists included civil-rights figures who had never been in the IRA.

The men behind the wire were held at Long Kesh, at Magilligan, and aboard the prison ship HMS Maidstone. Internment ran until December 1975, and 1,981 people were interned in total. Rather than ending the violence, internment drove support for the IRA up — a result the song's furious reception made plain at the time.

The archive record of internment is kept by CAIN, Ulster University's conflict archive; the dawn raids and the numbers above are set out in their Internment summary. The songs around this one on the blog tell the surrounding story: Come Out Ye Black and Tans is the earlier generation's fight, and Sean South of Garryowen is the rebel song of the generation before this one.

Banned by RTÉ, No. 1 for Five Weeks

Barleycorn recorded the song in Belfast. It was pressed by Release Records in Dublin and released on 14 December 1971. RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, banned it in early January 1972 — and Radio Éireann was flooded with complaints at the refusal.

The ban did not work. The single reached No. 1 in the Irish charts on 22 January 1972 and stayed there for three weeks, then returned to No. 1 for two more weeks from 15 February. It sold more copies than any single previously released in Ireland. The royalties were donated to the families of the internees.

The second run at No. 1 opened in the weeks after 30 January 1972, when Derry's anti-internment march ended in Bloody Sunday — the subject of our Sunday Bloody Sunday post. Davy Holden tells this song's story in video form in The History Behind: "Men Behind The Wire".

The Songwriter Was Interned Himself

The last verse of the story wrote itself. Paddy McGuigan was picked up in a later round of internment and held aboard the Maidstone — the prison ship holding the men he had written about. Many read it as the state answering the songwriter directly.

Writing songs from inside the wire became part of this tradition, and it did not end in the 1970s: Back Home in Derry was written a decade later by Bobby Sands in Long Kesh itself.

Two sources carry the detail: Irish Number Ones on the Barleycorn single — the RTÉ ban, the chart run, and where it fell against Bloody Sunday — and CAIN's Internment — Summary of Events for the record of Operation Demetrius.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Black Velvet Band" is a transport ballad: a love story that ends, within a few verses, in a courtroom and a one-way trip to Van Diemen's Land. A young apprentice meets a woman wearing her hair tied back with a black velvet band, falls for her, and pays for it with seven years on the far side of the world.

It is one of the most singable songs in our set, and one of the most widely travelled. It is also worth saying plainly: there is no single true story behind it. It is a broadside ballad — a fiction sold cheaply on printed sheets — and its history is the history of the song itself, moving between England and Ireland and out to Australia with the convicts whose sentence it describes.

A Gold Watch in His Hand: The Story in the Song

The plot turns on one object: a gold watch. The woman steals it from a passing gentleman and puts it into the apprentice's hand. He is arrested, and the next morning he is in court with the stolen watch as the evidence against him. The judge gives him seven years' penal servitude in Van Diemen's Land.

The detail matters because it is what makes the ballad work. The apprentice is not a thief and not a rebel — just a working lad whose only crime was being flattered by a pretty stranger's attention, and the system does not care. The chorus carries his warning — beware of the pretty colleens — but the verses are sadder than the warning suggests: he still describes the woman in romantic terms even as he counts the cost of meeting her.

The song is catalogued as Roud 2146. Broadside versions set it on the Ratcliffe Highway in London, while collected versions place it in London, Belfast, Tralee, Bedfordshire, and Dunmanway in County Cork. The story stayed the same; the hometown changed to wherever the singer was standing.

Seven Years in Van Diemen's Land: What Transportation Meant

The sentence in the song was a real one, handed down in real courts for exactly this class of offence. Between 1788 and 1868, more than 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia, and about a quarter of them were Irish. Van Diemen's Land alone — now Tasmania — received some 67,000 convicts from England and Ireland between 1803 and 1853.

Seven years was a standard sentence, and for most who received it, it was effectively exile for life: even a convict who served his time rarely had the money for the passage home. The apprentice, transported for a watch he did not steal, stood inside a system that moved tens of thousands the same way.

We sing the other end of that system in Back Home in Derry, where the men in the hold are political prisoners rather than a duped apprentice, and in The Auld Triangle, where the prison is in Dublin and no ship is involved at all. The apprentice's story is the ordinary version of the same machinery: no cause, no rebellion, just a bad night and a judge.

From a Norfolk Farm Singer to The Dubliners: How It Became an Irish Standard

Here is the odd fact at the centre of the song's modern life. The version that made it an Irish standard — The Dubliners' 1967 recording — was adapted from a version Ewan MacColl recorded in 1955 from Harry Cox, a traditional singer and farm labourer from Norfolk, in England.

So the "Irish" version came through an English singer. That is not an embarrassment; it is the normal way this music worked. Songs crossed the Irish Sea in both directions for centuries, and a good ballad belonged to whoever was singing it. The Dubliners took Cox's version, through MacColl, and put it in Dublin accents at pub speed — and from then on it was an Irish song, whatever its route there.

The same year, 1967, the Irish Rovers took the song to a multi-million-selling record in the United States: in a single year, one broadside ballad was carried into the charts by a Dublin band at home and an Irish band abroad. Its closest cousin in our set is Whiskey in the Jar, the other ballad of a young man, a woman, and the law — though that narrator at least fights back.

To dig further: the National Museum of Australia's page on convicts sent to Australia covers the transportation system behind the sentence, and Wikipedia's article on “The Black Velvet Band” covers the song's Roud number, broadside settings, and recording history. Inside Irish Music also takes up this song directly, asking how “The Black Velvet Band” got so popular in Ireland.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Grace" tells the true story of Joseph Mary Plunkett and Grace Gifford, who were married in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol late on 3 May 1916, hours before Plunkett was executed at dawn on 4 May for his part in the Easter Rising. It is the song people ask us about most, and the question behind most searches for it — "Grace song true story" — is simple: yes. It happened, and the record of it survives in detail.

Who wrote "Grace"? The song is far younger than the story. It was written in 1985, by Frank O'Meara, who composed the melody, and his brother Seán O'Meara, who wrote the lyrics. Jim McCann's recording reached No. 2 in the Irish charts in 1986 and stayed charted for 33 weeks, and Rod Stewart recorded the song on his 2018 album Blood Red Roses. A ballad written 69 years after the event became the way most people now meet Grace Gifford.

Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett: Married in Kilmainham Gaol, 3 May 1916

The wedding was not arranged in the shadow of the execution. Plunkett and Gifford were due to marry on Easter Sunday 1916 — the day the Rising began. Grace, a Protestant-born artist and cartoonist, had converted to Catholicism in April 1916. Plunkett, a poet and one of the Rising's planners, was already seriously ill with tuberculosis and had just undergone surgery on his neck. The Rising, the surrender and the court-martial replaced the wedding day.

What they got instead was the gaol chapel, just before midnight on 3 May, married by Fr Eugene McCarthy of St James's parish. On the marriage certificate, Joseph is listed as a "gentleman" and Grace as an "artist." The only witnesses were two British soldiers. She was taken out of the gaol a widow in everything but the final fact, and at dawn on 4 May Plunkett was shot in the gaol yard. The Rising they married in the middle of is the world of The Rising of the Moon, the older ballad of the same hope.

Historian Davy Holden tells this story plainly and well in The Story of Joe Plunkett and Grace Gifford, and we tell our own short version in our 60-second story of Grace and Joseph.

What Happened to Grace Gifford After 1916?

Grace's life did not end at the chapel door, and it is the half of the story the song cannot hold. She threw herself into republican work through her art — designing posters and cartoons for the movement — and was elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917. Her sister Muriel, widow of the executed Thomas MacDonagh, drowned that same year, in 1917. When the Treaty split the movement, Grace opposed it.

In February 1923, during the Civil War, Grace Gifford was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol — the same building where she had married Joseph seven years earlier, this time in a cell of her own. There she painted a Madonna and Child on her cell wall, the painting now known as the Kilmainham Madonna; a reproduction of it can still be seen by visitors to the gaol today. Davy Holden has filmed in that cell — his Short on Grace Gifford's prison cell in Kilmainham Gaol is the companion piece to this part of her story.

She was released in May 1923. She never remarried, lived on her art, and died in 1955. The ballad her life inspired now travels where she never did — History Ireland notes that it "is heard from the terraces of Celtic Park" in Glasgow, sung by supporters whose grandparents' generation carried these songs across the water. It belongs with the blog's other prison-and-loss ballads written long after their events: Back Home in Derry and Sean South of Garryowen.

One current note: the chalice and altar vessels used at the 1916 wedding have been lent to the OPW and are going on public display in Kilmainham Gaol Museum's "Last Words" section, as announced in September 2026 — the newest chapter in a story that is still being added to.

To read more: Kilmainham Tales' Grace Gifford page has the wedding certificate details and her own 1949 witness statement. Wikipedia's Grace (Jim McCann song) covers the song itself — 1985, the McCann single, the Stewart recording. History Ireland's Hearts Ne'er Waver tells Grace's story among the women prisoners of the Civil War.

— hear us play it live (video above).