New York Rock Band Black 47 and the Irish Famine Legacy

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L to R: Thomas Hamlin, Joe Burcaw, Larry Kirwan, Fred Parcells, Geoffrey Blythe and Joseph Mulvanerty/

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Think of any major event in Irish history and a song or two will spring to mind that describes the emotions of a people. Except, that is, for the Great Famine, which left its sufferers at a loss for words to describe their anguish and devastation. With the exception of “Skibbereen,” the musical dialogue between father and son about the 1848 Rebellion, until recently few Irish spoke of the Famine let alone wrote music about it. “‘Skibbereen’ is one of the few songs, and I think that was because they were such believers in God that when this devastation came, they just couldn’t believe it,” says Larry Kirwan, frontman for New York rock band Black 47. “It changed Ireland. It changed the Irish character, and part of that is reflected in the fact that there are no songs.”

While not all of Black 47’s or Larry Kirwan’s work is about the Famine, his most recent work – impressively, a book, a Black 47 album and a musical with Schindler’s List author Thomas Keneally – is all about retroactively giving voice to the voiceless, breathing some life into forgotten or untapped histories here in America as well as abroad. The musical, Transport, which enjoyed a popular reception at the Irish Arts Center in May, is based on the story of Keneally’s wife’s great-grandmother, who was sent from Ireland to Australia as a convict in 1838 for stealing a bolt of cloth. According to Kirwan, who researched Australian history to write the music for Transport, many women and men were sent to penal colonies for seven years for petty crimes such as stealing a sheep, bread, or in the case of one Wexford man, a hat. The political prisoners were sent for upwards of fourteen years. “In 1798 they transported a huge amount of United Irishmen who were involved in the uprisings in Wexford and Wicklow. They caused another uprising themselves in 1803 and called it the Vinegar Hill Uprising after the same one in Wexford.” Similar arrests were made following the Rebellions of 1848 and 1868.

Most of the women and many of the men stayed in Australia once their sentences were served, settling down and marrying or giving up hopes to move to Ireland or America due to poverty. This, however, did not deter prisoners from keeping up on the news back home, especially as petty crimes such as food theft increased during the Famine. “One of the interesting things that happened was that most of the crimes took place during the summertime because even though the potato crop hadn’t [yet] failed, the supplies would’ve dwindled by the summertime. So in early summer they would’ve been waiting for new potatoes and run out of the old ones.”

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