The folk music that rose out of the H-block struggle, and the hunger strike in particular, characterizes a new era of music that tries to reconcile the past with the present. Folk music clearly has deep historical and cultural roots in Ireland, and reflects a long-established oral storytelling tradition that often emphasizes heroes and martyrs. Much of this music is political and nationalistic in meaning, though frequently employs extended metaphors to express this, mainly due to repressive British laws criminalizing Irish patriotism. In the twentieth century in Northern Ireland, folk music takes on a unique role, both serving the same and a very different purpose. While it is true that Irish Catholics were repressed at the hands of the British, it is also the case that the IRA of the 1980s existed in a globalized and interconnected world, contextualizing the Irish struggle in terms of other ethno-nationalist movements around the world. To write a folk song about the 1981 hunger strikers is to situate them within this tradition of Irish heroes, and draw connections between this struggle and past Irish struggles against the British. Of course, this is not just exclusive to song; it is also implicit in the very act of hunger striking itself.
The lyrics of these songs all focus on memory and loss, commemorating the deaths and sacrifices of the hunger strikers, both as a collective group and as individuals. These men take on different meanings, as symbols for the prisoners’ rights struggle in “The H-Block Song,” as men who made the ultimate sacrifice in “O’Hara, Hughes, McCreesh and Sands,” and as lads from certain neighborhoods and representing certain groups, as exemplified in the individual songs later in this playlist. In relation to the ability of songs to represent multiple purposes at the same time, the lyrics of these songs are often much less explicitly political than other art forms that came out of this struggle, including murals and poetry. Music becomes an especially powerful way to transmit the stories of the hunger strikers, and the ability to learn lyrics as a connecting factor in communities certainly is essential, but while this music does have a certain universality to it in that the IRA had by this time gained some international support, it also does serve to exclude certain potential listeners in a way that less specific songs do not.