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).

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is U2's song, the opening track of their 1983 album War. Its title names a real day: Sunday, 30 January 1972, in Derry, when British soldiers shot unarmed civil rights marchers. Thirteen men were killed that day, and a fourteenth died of his wounds four months later.

The song is famous for two things at once — the event it names, and the band's insistence, repeated for years, that it was not a rebel song. Both need explaining, because the second only makes sense once you understand the first, and because there is another well-known song with exactly this title that says the opposite.

Derry, 30 January 1972: The March Against Internment

The march, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, was a protest against internment — imprisonment without trial, introduced the previous August and applied overwhelmingly to the nationalist community. Between ten and twenty thousand people marched. Paratroopers opened fire. Thirteen men died on the day; a fourteenth, wounded, died months later.

Internment is the direct link between this song and Men Behind the Wire, the song written about the men interned in that same policy. One event produced both the protest song of 1971 and the march that ended in the shootings of 1972.

It is worth being precise about the name. There was an earlier Bloody Sunday in Dublin in 1920, at Croke Park — a different event, and a common source of confusion. U2's title refers to Derry in 1972.

In 2010, the Saville Inquiry reported on the day. It concluded that the shootings were "unjustified" and "unjustifiable," that none of those shot posed a threat, and the British prime minister apologised.

"This Is Not a Rebel Song": Why Bono Had to Say It

The lyrics began as music by The Edge with words by Bono, reworked from an early version that condemned the IRA into a song that attacked violence without taking a side. Live, Bono introduced it by saying, "This is not a rebel song," first at Red Rocks in 1983, waving a white flag — because the band feared it would be taken up as a pro-IRA anthem.

He kept having to say it. In Denver on 8 November 1987, the day of the IRA's Enniskillen bombing, he condemned the bombing from the stage in the middle of this song. Bono has also said the song sets Bloody Sunday against Easter Sunday — the violence of one Sunday held against the peace of the other — which is where the repeated "Sunday" in the lyric comes from.

Our post on Zombie covers another Irish song written in response to a bombing, twenty years later, and Back Home in Derry is about the same city as the 1972 march, in a different century of its story.

Two Songs, One Title: Lennon in 1972, U2 in 1983

John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote their "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on 31 January 1972, the day after the shootings, and recorded it within weeks for Some Time in New York City. Lennon's song is openly partisan: it tells the British to go home, urges "keep Ireland for the Irish," and Lennon donated royalties to the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. He explained it as a reaction, not a considered statement: he heard in New York about people shot dead in Ireland and reacted immediately.

The song we play is U2's. The two songs share a title and an event and nothing else — one was written in a day, in anger, taking a side; the other was written eleven years later by a band from Dublin determined not to. Knowing the Lennon song exists explains why U2 spent so long insisting on what their song was not.

The CAIN archive at Ulster University keeps a summary of Bloody Sunday, including both the Widgery and Saville findings. Davy Holden's Short Bloody Sunday 1972 in Derry gives the day in a minute, and Wikipedia sets out the Lennon and Ono song in full.

— hear us play it live (video above).