Colin Randall writes: the death of Mickey McConnell, a well respected Irish singer-songwriter whose Only Our Rivers Run Free slightly predates the Troubles but stands as a striking testament to nationalist aspiration, brings to mind a Salut! Live discussion about another, lesser-known example of his work.
MacConnell, born near Enniskillen, was not only a fellow folkie but a fellow journalist.
He worked for the Irish Press, Irish Times and The Kerryman. I am sad to say he was not among the many journalists I met and worked with during my time covering events in Northern Ireland and south of the border. Others were more fortunate.
Once. a journalist .. how Mickey MacConnell kept his hand in (his column for the Maine Valley Post online newspaper)
Only Our Rivers Run Free is all the more impressive when you realise MacConnell was only 17 when he wrote it. It is an unashamedly partisan song; Stuart Baillie, the veteran Irish music writer, described it as “political but not hectoring”.
MacConnell insisted it was "never a republican song per se but a song about the love of one’s country". It came to him after he had witnessed the naked bigotry of councillors in south Fermanagh, allocating social housing to single Protestants rather than Catholic families.
But his songwriting went some way beyond one great ballad. His albums, Peter Pan and Me and Joined Up Writing have also attracted enough praise for me to be determined to explore their contents more than I have done to date.
Back to that other song. The Boys the Byline Brigade gives rare musical expression to the boys (and girls) who earn their living as reporters.
A byline, effectively the journalist's signature appearing above or at the end of his or her article, is important to those of us in this trade, if mostly of no interest to anyone else. Beyond the minor recognition on the printed page or screen, it is seen by other journalists, perhaps other potential employers.
MacConnell himself said the song was his "genuflection to all of the old time heroes who populated the journalistic days of my youth, and who were badly paid, badly regarded, and who were relegated to working the nightshift – the Doomwatch – at the end of their days".
Remarkably, the song would serve as progenitor to another with same title. Geoff Lakeman, also a reporter who ended up on the Daily Mirror having worked for the Press Association, Independent Radio News and The Daily Telegraph , heard MacConnell sing his and decided at some later date to write his own. An accomplished folk singer who has built a successful second career in music, he gave it a new tune and lyrics describing the working lives of Mirror journalists.
The fuller background to the two songs is told in two parts at:
* Boys, bylines and missing fivers (1)
* Boys, bylines and missing fivers (2)
I can fund no trace of either song on YouTube. However, there are clips of several of MacConnell’s other songs,. His repertoire also included the sublime Tinkerman’s Daughter, the sad tale of a young woman used as barter by her family to a farmer in return for a pony. MacConnell was apparently inspired by a poem by Sigerson Clifford but the song is his.Niàmh Parsons sings it beautifully.
Yet another former journalist, Gervase Webb, who features in the story of The Boys of the Byline Brigade, is particularly fond of the title track from Peter Pan and Me, tracing the transition from futile civil rights protest to armed rebellion – 'another sad and elegiac song, and yet another from ostensibly a nationalist viewpoint, but it's wonderfully poignant and transcends any divide".
Mickey MacConnell, who lived for many years in Listowel, Co Kerry, was 78 and leaves a wife, Maura, daughters Kerry and Claire and three grandchildren. He was the younger brother of Cathal McConnell, a founder member of the Irish-Scottish band, the Boys of the Lough.
Salut! Live offers warm condolences to all the family.
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