A boy is christened David Anthony, but his father calls him William and his mother calls him Pat. That is the whole joke of "The Orange and the Green," and it only works because everyone listening already knows the setup: a Catholic mother, a Protestant father, and a child being raised inside both Irelands at once.

The song tells it as comedy — the christening, the schooling, the two sets of loyalties pulling at one kid — but the divide underneath it is real, and the song has lasted because mixed families lived exactly what it jokes about.

Written in Liverpool: Anthony Murphy and "The Biggest Mix-Up"

The song was written by Anthony Murphy of Liverpool, and it is also known as "The Biggest Mix-Up." Liverpool matters here. It was the most Irish of English cities, the port generations of emigrants passed through or settled in, and the divide crossed the water with them: Liverpool's Orange lodges march every July for the Battle of the Boyne (1690), just as they do in Ireland.

So Murphy was not writing about a faraway quarrel. He had both colours in his own street. A comic song about a Catholic–Protestant marriage lands differently when the two traditions are not abstractions but neighbours, workmates, and in-laws — which in Liverpool, as in Belfast or Derry, they were.

What the Flag's Colours Actually Mean (Meagher, 1848)

The song's title is the flag's. On 7 March 1848, Thomas Francis Meagher flew a tricolour from 33 The Mall in Waterford, and in April 1848 he set out what the colours stand for, in words worth quoting in full: "The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between Orange and Green and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood."

Green stands for the Catholic, nationalist tradition. Orange stands for the Protestant tradition and the followers of William of Orange. White, between them, is the truce — not either side winning, but the two living under one flag. One common question: is it orange or gold? It is orange. The Irish government's own flag guidelines say calling it gold is a misrepresentation.

A Mixed Family Is the Flag in Human Form

Meagher designed a flag about two traditions sharing one country. Murphy's song is about two traditions sharing one house, and one child. William to his father and Pat to his mother, the boy in the song is the white stripe — the truce, walking around in human form, claimed by both sides and belonging to both.

Meagher's own life turned the flag into an Irish-American story as well. He was transported to Van Diemen's Land for his part in the Young Ireland rising, escaped to America, and went on to found the Irish Brigade in the US Civil War. The man who designed the tricolour ended up an Irish-American soldier.

The tune adds one more layer. "The Orange and the Green" is sung to the air of "The Wearing of the Green" — the same melody as our post on The Rising of the Moon, a rebel song about 1798. The comic song and the rebel song are one tune: the divide and the hope of ending it, carried on the same notes. For the other side of Ireland's divisions, see Four Green Fields, and for the same hope stated straight, On The One Road and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Want the official version? The Department of the Taoiseach's National Flag guidelines give the government's own history of the flag and its protocol. For the tune's darker history, Inside Irish Music's The Deadly History Behind "The Wearing of the Green" covers the air this song shares. And here's a quick Short of us playing it.

— hear us play it live (video above).