Play loud. Be proud.
Remember - if you're Irish, you're Irish 24/7, not one day a year.
For those interested, a Wikipedia quote:
"The Foggy Dew" is a product of the political situation in Ireland in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and
World War I.
Approximately 210,000 Irishmen joined up and served in the British forces during the war.
[7] This created mixed feelings for many Irish people, particularly for those with nationalist sympathies. While they broadly supported the British war effort, they also felt that one of the moral justifications for the war, "the freedom of small nations" like
Belgium and
Serbia, should also be applied to Ireland, which at that time was under British rule.
[8] The 1915 Gallipoli slaughter of the young and mainly middle-class Irishmen who had joined up in response to
John Redmond's call turned many people against the war.
In 1916, Irish patriots led by
James Connolly and
Patrick Pearse, taking advantage of Britain being preoccupied by
World War I, seized some of the major buildings in Dublin including the
General Post Office, while others came out in
Ashbourne and
Galway in the
Easter Rising.
The brutal response to the Rising, and the execution of its leaders that followed, marked a turning point for many Irish people. The public revulsion at the executions added to the growing sense of alienation from the British Government.
[8]
Canon O'Neill reflected this alienation when he wrote
The Foggy Dew commemorating the few hundred brave men who had risen out against what was then the most powerful empire in the world. In 1919, he attended the first sitting of the new Irish Parliament,
Dáil.
[9] The names of the elected members were called out, but many were absent. Their names were answered by the reply
faoi ghlas ag na Gaill – "locked up by the foreigner".
[9]"