Daily Song Discussion #39: Give Ireland Back To The Irish

"Give Ireland Back to the Irish” is the debut single by the British–American rock band Wings that was released in February 1972. It was written by Paul McCartney and his wife Linda in response to the events of Bloody Sunday, on 30 January that year, when British troops in Northern Ireland shot dead thirteen civil rights protestors. Keen to voice their outrage at the killings, Wings recorded the track two days later at Abbey Road Studios in London. It was the band’s first song to include Northern Irish guitarist Henry McCullough.

“Give Ireland Back to the Irish” was banned from broadcast in the UK by the BBC and other organisations, and was overlooked by the majority of radio programmers in the United States. The single peaked at number 16 on the UK Singles Chart and number 21 on the US Billboard Hot 100, but topped the national chart in Ireland. Having never released an overtly political song before, McCartney was condemned by the British media for his seemingly pro-IRA stance on Northern Ireland. As with Wings’ recent album, Wild Life, the song was also maligned by many music critics. These writers found McCartney’s lyrics overly simplistic and viewed the single as an attempt by him to gain credibility for his new band on the back of a pressing political issue.

Wings performed “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” throughout their February 1972 tour of English and Welsh universities. The track first appeared on an album in 1993, when it was included as a bonus track on the CD reissue of Wild Life.

Background and inspiration

Following the release of his band Wings’ debut album, Wild Life, in December 1971, Paul McCartney spent Christmas and New Year in New York visiting the family of his wife and bandmate Linda. The visit also allowed McCartney to begin rebuilding his relationship with John Lennon, his former writing partner in the Beatles, after the pair had spent the year attacking each other through the music press and in their respective musical releases. The McCartneys then returned to the UK, intent on preparing to launch Wings as a live act. In January 1972, Wings began rehearsing in London with a new fifth member, Northern Irishman Henry McCullough, on lead guitar, who joined on the recommendation of the band’s guitarist and occasional singer, Denny Laine.

On 29 January, McCartney returned to New York, where, during another meeting with Lennon, they agreed to end their public feud. The following day, McCartney wrote the song “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” in response to the news that British troops in Derry in Northern Ireland had just shot dead thirteen civil rights marchers, who represented the Catholic minority, and wounded many others during a protest march. With strong familial connections to Ireland on his late mother’s side, McCartney was appalled at Britain’s role in what became known as Bloody Sunday. According to his biographer Tom Doyle, McCartney was inspired also by being around Lennon and the vibrant and politically radical mood of Greenwich Village, where Lennon and Yoko Ono were living. McCartney later recalled: “I wasn’t really into protest songs – John had done that – but this time I felt that I had to write something, to use my art to protest.”

Recording

Before leaving New York for London, McCartney arranged a session with Wings to rush-record “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”. The band agreed to release the song as a single, although author Howard Sounes suggests that McCullough, as an Ulster Protestant, may have had his misgivings. The track was recorded on 1 February at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios with engineer Tony Clark. The band then moved to Apple Studios, where the song was mixed and possibly completed. This marked the first time that McCartney had worked in the Beatles’ Apple Studios since the group’s break-up in April 1970.

The B-side of the single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish (Version)”, is an instrumental version of the song. McCartney used this rather than another song since, anticipating problems over the political content, he thought that if disc jockeys decided to favour the B-side to avoid the lyrics being heard, they would still have to mention the track’s title. McCartney took the rhythm section parts from the A-side and overdubbed lead guitar lines (played by himself and McCullough) and an Irish penny whistle. Seeking to emulate the low-fidelity quality of Jamaican reggae singles, where instrumental dubs were commonly used as B-sides, McCartney gave the track a muddy-sounding mix, with barely any high-end sound.

Ban and reactions

In the United Kingdom, the song was banned by the BBC, and subsequently by Radio Luxembourg and the Independent Television Authority (ITA). BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel was the only member of those organisations who spoke out in support of McCartney, saying: “The act of banning it is a much stronger political act than the contents of the record itself. It’s just one man’s opinion.”

McCartney later said of the song in the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland:

“From our point of view, it was the first time people questioned what we were doing in Ireland. It was so shocking. I wrote “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”, we recorded it and I was promptly ‘phoned by the Chairman of EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood, explaining that they wouldn’t release it. He thought it was too inflammatory. I told him that I felt strongly about it and they had to release it. He said, “Well it’ll be banned”, and of course it was. I knew “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” wasn’t an easy route, but it just seemed to me to be the time [to say something].”

Wings played “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” throughout their first concert tour, which consisted of a series of unannounced shows at universities in England and Wales over 9–23 February. The BBC banned the song while Wings were in York, where they played at Goodricke College on 10 February. In its issue dated 19 February, Melody Maker reported McCartney’s response to the ban: “Up them! I think the BBC should be highly praised, preventing the youth from hearing my opinions.”

Writing about the tour for the NME, Geoff Liptrot said the band’s performances were generally good, but the song “grated a little with its harsh, sing-song chorus immediately conjuring up visions of a drunk rolling along a street bellowing at the top of his voice”. When asked by a reporter from The Guardian whether the shows were fundraisers for the Provisional Irish Republican Army, McCartney declined to comment, beyond saying: “We’re simply playing for the people.” Guitarist Henry McCullough’s involvement with the song led to his brother Samuel being beaten up in an Irish pub, in Kilburn, an area of north-west London that was popular among Irish expatriates.

Release

The “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” single was released by Apple Records on 25 February 1972 in the United Kingdom (as Apple R 5936) and 28 February in the United States (as Apple 1847). It was Wings’ debut single release, after the cancellation of their scheduled single from Wild Life, a reggae-style cover of “Love Is Strange“. Further to McCartney’s refusal to include the Apple logo on the LP face labels for Wild Life, five green Irish shamrocks appeared on the single’s customised labels. In the US, the song lyrics were reproduced on the yellow paper sleeve enclosing the disc.

On 7 March, Wings were filmed rehearsing “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” at the McCartneys’ St John’s Wood home in London for a segment on ABC News in the United States. McCartney told the ABC reporter that he did not plan to focus on politics in his work, but that “on this one occasion I think the British government overstepped the mark and showed themselves to be more of a sort of oppressive regime than I ever believed them to be.” A 30-second television advertisement for the single was produced by Apple but never broadcast by the ITA, who cited the stipulation regarding “political controversy” in the Television Act, by which the organisation was legally bound.

“Give Ireland Back to the Irish” peaked at number 16 on the UK Singles Chart, and number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. According to author Bruce Spizer, listeners there felt alienated by McCartney’s political stance and “Airplay was so marginal that the song, for all practical purposes, was also banned by American radio.” On the other US singles charts, published by Cash Box and Record World, the single peaked at number 38 and number 36, respectively.

The single reached number 1 in Ireland and in Spain. McCartney attributed the song’s success in Spain to its popularity among Basque separatists. The A-side was included as a bonus track on the 1993 Paul McCartney Collection CD reissue of Wild Life. In 2018, footage of rehearsals for the song, at the McCartneys’ home and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London before the 1972 university tour, was included on the DVD in the remastered deluxe edition of Wild Life.

Critical reception and legacy

As a political statement, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” was out of character for McCartney and attracted suspicion from contemporary reviewers. Some writers accused him of attempting to project a less wholesome image by aligning himself with British countercultural thinking, as a means of gaining credibility for his faltering career after the Beatles. Another widely held suspicion was that McCartney was attempting to impress John Lennon, who had been vocal in his support for Irish republicanism. In a review of Lennon’s 1972 album Some Time in New York City, which included two political songs about Ireland, Richard Williams of Melody Maker wrote: “how sad that the only thing in years on which he and Paul have agreed should have drawn from both their very worst work. Neither ‘The Luck of the Irish’ nor ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ can do anything but increase the bigotry of the already ignorant.” Writing for Rough Guides in 2003, music critic Chris Ingham said of the Wings single: “The record managed to irritate everyone, not least for its naive, simplistic attitude to a complex situation … but also for its musical mediocrity. The BBC banned the record, granting it a notoriety disproportionate to its importance.”

NME critic Bob Woffinden described “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” as “self-conscious, awkward” in the mould of “Lennon’s least successful diatribes”. He added that, although Lennon would soon “do far worse”, McCartney’s song “gave the appearance of being an exploitation single every bit as much as ‘tribute’ singles that are rushed out in the wake of the death of a star name”. Writing in Record Collector in 2001, Peter Doggett said that McCartney’s and Lennon’s “ill-fated” musical statements on Irish politics, following on from the pair’s public sparring in the music press throughout 1971, “combined to tarnish” the four ex-Beatles’ standing among music critics in the UK and so contributed to an unjustly harsh critical reception there for George Harrison’s 1973 album Living in the Material World.

Authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter describe the song’s lyrics as “clumsy (yet well-intentioned)” and comment that McCartney fully exploited the “‘hip’ cachet” resulting from the radio ban in his print advertising for the release. They view the song as an unwise choice for Wings’ first single, given the relative failure of Wild Life. When compiling the Wingspan greatest hits album in 2001, McCartney had intended to include “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”. Following a terrorist incident in London that year, however, he acceded to EMI’s request to omit the song, recognising that its inclusion might be viewed as a gesture of support for the IRA’s use of violence.

“Give Ireland Back to the Irish” and McCartney’s political stance formed one of the Beatles-related parodies included on National Lampoon magazine’s 1972 album Radio Dinner. In the sketch, an Irishman attempts to sing the song in a pub but is soon silenced by a blaze of gunfire.

Kevin Rowland, a songwriter of Irish parentage, applauded the single in a 2020 interview, and recalled: “In this club, they normally played soul music, which you had to learn how to dance to, if you wanted to dance with a girl. And suddenly ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ comes on at the end of the night. I told my parents about it, because the room erupted. I realised everyone there was like me: second-generation Irish.”

"It’s not really me. At least, I think people will be surprised because I’ve never attempted anything like this. It was Bloody Sunday. I woke up a few days ago with the thought in my head and wondered, why don’t I do it? You read the papers and you don’t take it in. You don’t realise that that’s happening.

The song’s like, the Irish liked us before and now they hate us. What I’m saying is that in the beginning, it was the Protestants against the Catholics but now it’s the Irish against us. The Protestants are all like Heath. They’re English, the landowners. If you send the troops in there what can you expect but the people to be mad. You wouldn’t like it if some guy came into your home and started ordering you around. So I’m saying this to the Government, to Heath. And it’s also a bit like with Apple and me, being prevented from owning what is mine." -Paul McCartney – From Melody Maker, February 12, 1972

"The morning after what they call in the newspapers Bloody Sunday, I read the newspapers and it just looked a bit wrong, what the British Army was doing in there. So I started on this piano and wrote the song. That’s how I did it.
I’m British, I was born in Britain and the song is written from a British point of view. I’ve had people saying you shouldn’t go talking if you’re not Irish, but the point is it’s the British Army that’s causing the trouble, not the Irish, you know? The Irish got taken over about 800 years ago, a little bit of it, by the British. They injected British people into there and made it a little bit of Britain. I have always really thought of it all as one place, Ireland."

"I see the trouble now being that certain people think that the British shouldn’t be there, and if they are there they certainly shouldn’t be shooting the Irish people. I think they shouldn’t be, you know? It’s a bit much.

The English have got a great history of this. I was brought up to be proud of the British Empire, proud of what the British owned all over the world. We used to own most of the world at one time, almost, and gradually had to give it back ’cause people said ‘Hey, listen, it’s ours, not yours,’ and they wanted it back. I just see that’s the same thing in Ireland, you know, it’s a little bit of territory we’ve gained in the past, and I figure that if we didn’t gain it legally, with the consent of the majority of the people, then there was something wrong somewhere.

I think this Bloody Sunday, where the British paratroop regiment went in and shot at the people, it just isn’t on as far as I’m concerned. I’m more on their side than the British troops’ in that particular thing because they’re the people who live there, it’s their country, they’re the Irish, and we’re the British. No matter how many of the Ulster people say ‘Yeah, we’re British too’, I can see that point of view, but me, as a British citizen, I don’t like my army going around shooting my Irish brothers. That’s about the size of it.

I’m British, yeah, of course, I am. I’ve probably got some Irish background, yes, but I feel British, and I’d like to feel proud of Britain and what Britain does." -paul McCartney – Interview with ABC News, March 1972

I"im a taxpayer, so that entitles me to an opinion. I’m living in the West, so we’re allowed to talk over here, right? So when the English paratroopers, my army who I’m paying rates for, go into Ireland and shoot down innocent bystanders, for the first time in my life I go, ‘Hey, wait a minute. We’re the goodies, aren’t we?’ That wasn’t very good and I’m moved to make some kind of a protest, so I did ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’, which was promptly banned in England. But it was No. 1 in Spain of all places! That was rather odd, Franco was in power. Maybe they couldn’t understand the words and they just liked the tune." – Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” by Keith Badman

Musicians:

Paul McCartney: vocals, bass guitar

Linda McCartney: vocals, keyboards

Denny Laine: vocals, guitar

Henry McCullough: guitar

Denny Seiwell: drums

Studio Version

SUGGESTED SCALE: (you can use decimals)

1-4: Not good. Regularly skip.

5: It’s okay, but I might have to be in the right mood to listen to it.

6: Slightly better than average. I won’t skip it, but I wouldn’t choose to put it on.

7: This is a good song. I enjoy it quite a bit.

8-9: Really enjoyable songs. I rank them pretty high overall.

10: Masterpiece, magnum opus, or similar terminology.

Rating Results

McCartney 1 : 7.20/10

1. The Lovely Linda: 6.77/10

2. That Would Be Something: 8.21/10

3. Valentine Day: 5.25/10

4. Every Night: 9.48/10

5. Hot as Sun/Glasses: 6.61/10

6. Junk: 9.35/10

7. Man We Was Lonely: 7.18/10

8. Oo You: 7.22/10

9. Momma Miss America: 5.71/10

10. Teddy Boy: 6.53/10

11. Singalong Junk: 7.16/10

12. Maybe I'm Amazed: 9.63/10

13. Kreen-Akrore: 4.53/10

14. Suicide: 5.48/10

15. Women Kind: 3.54/10

RAM 8.42/10

1. Too Many People: 8.78/10

2. 3 Legs: 7.20/10

3. Ram On: 8.52/10

4. Dear Boy: 8.79/10

5. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey; 9.32/10

6. Smile Away: 7.70/10

7. Heart Of The Country: 7.96/10

8. Monkberry Moon Delight: 9.14/10

9. Eat At Home: 7.89/10

10. Long Haired Lady: 8.26/10

11. Ram On reprise: 7.10/10

12. Back Seat of My Car: 9.71/10

13. Another Day: 9.10/10

14. Oh Woman Oh Why: 7.95/10

WILD LIFE 6.68/10

1. Mumbo: 6.08/10

2. Bip Bop: 5.48/10

3. Love Is Strange: 7.01/10

4. Wild Life: 6.43/10

5. Some People Never Know: 7.13/10

6. I Am Your Singer: 6.30/10

7. Tomorrow: 8.00/10

8. Dear Friend: 7.04/10