Johnny Seoighe

Nowhere is this criticism more bitterly expressed than in ‘Johnny Seoighe’, a satirical song in the refined allusive poetic tradition of Ireland, which can only be fully understood if one hears the accompanying scéal, the story traditionally told by the singer before singing: on Christmas Eve, the author (probably Tomás Shiúnach from Carna, in Connemara) and his family walked all the way to the workhouse only to find they couldn’t be accepted there for lack of space. They then asked the famine relief officer, Johnny Joyce (Seoighe, in Irish), for help and food, which was denied, and his wife and children subsequently died on the way back home from hunger and exhaustion. One can hardly imagine the grief that led to those subtly sarcastic and angry lines.

Here again, this song was long regarded as taboo, and kept well within the Carna community, until it started being sung in public in the late 1950s by sean-nós Connemara singer Seán Mac Dhonnchadha, who remembered ‘being publicly criticised for singing this song in the Damer Hall in Dublin at the Oícheanta Seanchais concerts organized by [the state-funded company] Gael-Linn in the late fifties and early sixties’.15 The exact reasons remain unclear, as the scéal (story) is now partly missing, and the irony thus remains partly lost, but it would seem that Johnny Seoighe was a shady character of dubious morals.16 It is generally difficult to know in which circumstances a traditional song was created, but in this case, specific events and folk memory handed down orally from generation to generation give us a different approach from history books about the origins and conditions in which the destitute were living.
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