The Kettle's Boyled: The ballad of my lovely white horse

In 1911, GK Chesterton published ‘The Ballad of the White Horse,’ a monster of the literary world with 2,684 lines broken into several ‘books.’ It vaguely described King Alfred’s defeat of the Danes at the battle of Ethandun in 878. Given he was writing about events from a thousand years earlier, It was inevitable he might stretch the truth a bit.

Possibly because of the ongoing unrest in Ireland at the time of writing, with a surge in militant trade unionism and a lot of agitation around the question of Home Rule, Chesterton made a few references to Ireland in the work. He referred to the music of the Gaels, saying, ‘His harp was carved and cunning/His sword prompt and sharp/And he was gay when he held the sword/Sad when he held the harp.’ Even then, Ireland was viewed as a place of music and song as much as a place of Celtic warriors.

Chesterton rounded his Irish reference off nicely when he added, ‘For the great Gaels of Ireland/Are the men that God made mad/For all their wars are merry/And all their songs are sad’. To be fair, that does sum us up pretty well. We often seem to fight about issues so that we can sing about them later.

I’m just glad some sadist in the Department of Education didn’t put ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ on the Leaving Cert curriculum. Imagine having to learn all those lines by heart? That would have kept teachers busy back in my schooldays. Given we had to learn poems off by heart, they’d have had to thrash lots of children who got stuck on line 945. Corporal punishment was abolished in the early 1980s, something generations of pupils are grateful for. Or they should be, if they know their history. But you’d have to worry about that too, if you consider the one-sided narrative around various overseas wars for instance.

Ireland made its mark on the Eurovision Song Contest almost from its beginning. We’ve won it seven times, and featured well on other occasions. It has undoubtedly added to our reputation as a country where music is important in our culture, part of an image that sees us as a place to visit, to respect, and indeed to invest in. That’s not something we should throw away lightly.

In 2008 we insulted the Eurovision by sending a puppet of a turkey, and this year we withdrew from the competition altogether in a piece of pointless virtue-signalling that won’t save one life in the Middle East. Then to add insult to insult RTÉ decided to screen the episode of ‘Father Ted’ that parodied the Eurovision with a song called ‘My Lovely Horse.’ That was childish, and unbecoming of a national broadcaster seeking to be taken seriously while spending our money with abandon. Who decided that might be any kind of a good idea?