Dominic Behan wrote "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" in the early 1960s, a generation after the events it argues about. It is one of the best-known Irish rebel songs ever written — and most people who sing the chorus have never looked at who it is actually aimed at. It is not, for the most part, aimed at the Black and Tans at all.
Behan knew this world from inside his own house. He was the son of Stephen Behan, an IRA veteran, and the younger brother of Brendan Behan. The song is family memory set to music: a son writing down his father's Dublin, in his father's voice.
Who Were the Black and Tans? Ireland, 1920–21
The Black and Tans were reinforcements sent to Ireland in 1920–21, during the War of Independence, to strengthen the Royal Irish Constabulary against the IRA. Most were British veterans of the First World War. A shortage of standard uniforms put them in a mismatch of dark RIC tunics and khaki army trousers — the two colours that gave them their name.
Their reputation was earned quickly. The Tans became known for reprisals against civilians — burned homes, beatings, killings — in answer to IRA attacks. A century later, the name still works in Ireland as shorthand for the worst of that war.
The Twist: Behan's Song Is Aimed at His Dublin Neighbours
Here is what the verses actually do. The song opens not on a battlefield but on a Dublin street, in the 1920s and 30s, with Behan's father Stephen coming home drunk and calling out the neighbours.
Those neighbours were working-class Dubliners, Catholic and Protestant, who had served in the British Army. Stephen Behan's taunt — the line that gives the song its chorus — invites them to come out and fight like men, and to show their wives how they won medals down in Flanders. "Black and Tans" is the insult he throws across the street: in his mouth, it means men who took the King's shilling and served the empire, not the uniformed force of 1920.
Only after that street row do the verses widen to the whole history Stephen is arguing from: Parnell, the executed leaders of 1916 — the men whose story our Grace post tells from inside Kilmainham — and the empire's other wars, in the song's words, how they slew poor Arabs two by two, and Zulus with spears and bows and arrows against rifles.
A Republican Anthem Sung to a Loyalist Tune
The melody carries its own argument. Behan adapted an old Jacobite air, Rosc Catha na Mumhan, and that air traces back to The Boyne Water — an Ulster loyalist song. A republican anthem, sung to a tune with loyalist roots.
That is not an embarrassment to the song; it is how Irish music has always worked. Tunes were common property, and both traditions in Ireland ended up singing some of the same airs with different words and opposite loyalties.
The Behans run through this blog. Dominic's brother Brendan is the writer tied to The Auld Triangle and sung about in Streams of Whiskey — one Dublin family, three posts. And the rebel-song tradition Dominic wrote in runs forward to Men Behind the Wire, the next generation's song about the next round of the same fight.
January 2020: No. 1 in Ireland, as a Protest
The Wolfe Tones recorded it in 1972, on Let the People Sing, and their version is the one the world knows. In January 2020, it proved the song is a living thing and not a museum piece.
When the Irish government proposed an official commemoration of the RIC, the public argument was immediate, and the Wolfe Tones' recording was its soundtrack. The song went to No. 1 on the Ireland and UK iTunes charts, No. 1 on the Scottish singles sales chart, and No. 29 on the Irish chart. The Wolfe Tones gave the proceeds to the Peter McVerry Trust, a homeless charity.
A song about a drunk man shouting across a 1930s Dublin street topped the charts in 2020 as an act of political protest. We play it because that is what it is for: it keeps an argument alive that Ireland is still having, and it does it the way Stephen Behan did — out loud, in company, with the neighbours listening.
Want to dig deeper? Wikipedia's article on Come Out, Ye Black and Tans gives the full account of the song, its verses and the tune's history, and its companion piece on the Wolfe Tones recording covers the 2020 chart run. On video, Davy Holden's The History Behind: 'Come Out Ye Black and Tans' tells the song's story at length.
— hear us play it live (video above).