Come Out, Ye Black and Tans - Meaning

Meaning

The song begins, "I was born in Dublin street, where the royal drums did beat and the loving English feet they walked all over us". The narrator's father, coming home from the pub, "would invite the neighbours out" with this chorus:

Come out, ye Black and Tans;

Come out and fight me like a man;

Show your wife how you won medals out in Flanders

Tell her how the I.R.A. made you run like hell away

From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.

The reference to Flanders alludes to the fact that some Black and Tans were unemployed British Army veterans from the First World War. Killeshandra is a town in West Cavan that may have been the location of one of the many successful I.R.A operations during the War of Independence, though this has never been proven. The service of the British Army in colonial wars against the Arabs and Zulus is also mocked, as the "natives" had "spears and bow and arrows" while the British "bravely faced each one, with your 16-pounder gun". The Anglo-Zulu War was in 1879. The line about "Arabs" refers to the Iraqi revolt against the British in 1920.

The song goes on to describe the neighbour's previous gloating at the defeats of Irish nationalism, "when you thought us well and truly persecuted", for instance, when they "slandered great Parnell" - the Behans in fact lived very close to the Mountjoy Square home of Robert Anderson who was partly responsible for the Piggott forgeries (see Charles Stewart Parnell#Pigott forgeries). However, alongside the bitterness evoked in such sentiments is a triumphalism, borne of the fact that loyalists are a small minority in post-independence Ireland. The narrator asks, "where are the sneers and jeers, that you loudly let us hear, when our leaders of '16 were executed". The implication is that the neighbours, no longer backed by the British state, no longer have confidence to express such sentiments in public.

The song closes on a hopeful note, promising that the time is coming when "all traitors will be cast aside before us". The narrator promises that his children will say "God Speed" (i.e., go home), with the same song that his father used to sing to his loyalist neighbours.