Come Out, Ye Black and Tans”?

The notorious bestial Black and Tans were British ex-soldiers and criminals sent to Ireland around 1920 to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).

Officially, these brutal auxiliaries were there to put down the rebellion. Unofficially, they became infamous for terrorising the civilian population, burning towns, and leaving deep scars in Irish memory.

Their nickname came from their slapdash improvised uniforms, dark RIC green mixed with British Army khaki.

The pugnacious lyrics vividly depicts Behan`s Da, Stephen, who was a veteran of the War of Independence himself, coming home gargled and shouting at his occasionally pro-British neighbours. The Dublin of Behan’s youth, in the 1920s and 30s, was a divided place.

Despite the new Irish Free State, many working-class Dubliners, Catholic and Protestant alike, still served in the British Army or clung to old loyalties. For some, joining up and taking the kings shillling was simply about putting food on the table.

For others, it reflected a cultural identity tied to the Empire.

Behan, a rabble rouser by genetics and experience, provocatively calls on the despised Tans to “come out and fight me like a man,” mocking their medals from Flanders and sneering at their colonial exploits against under equiped felled colonalian victims the Arabs and Zulus.

The lyrics celebrate how the IRA made them “run like hell away” from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra in Cavan. Curiously, there’s no evidence of any IRA clashes with the Tans there. This isn’t the only factual question marks raised by the song. But why allow a little historical inaccuracy get in the way of a banger of a tune?

Refferenced also are those traitors who sneered at the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, the jeers when the 1916 rebels were executed, and the slaughters of colonial wars. It links Ireland’s struggle to the fates of other indigenous peoples who also suffered under the British Empire. A sentiment potently mirrored by Irelands support of the suffering of the people of Palestine

Many are unaware that the music was not composed by Behan. The song is actually his words set to an old Irish air called Rosc Catha na Mumhan (“Battlecry of Munster”), composed by Piaras Mac Gearailt in the 18th century. That same melody has a tangled history of its own. Originally associated with Jacobite rebels, loyalist songs like The Boyne Water, and folk ballads like Barbara Allen across the Atlantic.

For me, the definitive version is the 1972, The Wolfe Tones recording on their album Let the People Sing. Less illustrious and, in my opinion, tacky and disrespectful was the ill concerived use of the song in 2019, for a certain food product advert hijacked the tune swapping “Tans” for “Hams.”