Irish Songs of Memory and Activism

This is a post about two Irish songs that deal with memory. 1994 was the release date of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and Sinead O’Connor’s “Famine,” and both emerged out of The Troubles, a period of about thirty years (late 1960s to 1998), when tension in Northern Ireland between forces that favored independence and those who wanted to stay as part of Great Britain led to episodic violence. “Zombie” and “Famine” are about the powerful role of memory, but they each have very different angles.

Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries, composed “Zombie” after bombs detonated by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) killed two young children in Warrington England in 1994. As the lyrics make clear, “Zombie” is what you become when you cannot let go of a painful memory — it can infest the way you act out your life with needless violence. “It’s the same old thing since 1916. In your head, in your head they’re still fightin’,” Dolores keens, referring to the Easter Uprising that marked the start of the Irish independence movement. When asked about her stance on Irish independence, O’Riordan stated “I don’t care whether it’s Protestant or Catholic, I care about the fact that innocent people are being killed.”

Sinead O’Connor’s message about memory is quite different: whereas “Zombie” was about the problem of remembering, “Famine” was about the problems of forgetting. O’Connor rapped in her song about the Irish Potato Famine that went from 1840-1847, resulting in one million starvation deaths and massive emigration. As Sinead reminds her listeners, “there never really was” a famine. While the potato blight did wipe out the staple food for many of the Irish people, there remained a large quantity of grain: but the government of Great Britain decreed that the grain should not be used to help the starving Irish peasants. For decades, the schools in Ireland refused to discuss the famine and its causes, dismissive of the collective trauma this miseducation would cause. As O’Connor sang, “if there ever is gonna be healing there has to be remembering and then grieving so that that there can be forgiving”.