BELFAST – On the eve of St. Patrick’s Day this year, locals gathered to ring in the holiday at a local club with a musical display of Irish indigeneity. Amid shouts and cheers, Stephen Loughran, an Irish trad musician donning a druid-inspired ram skull, declared collective ancestry from the mythological warrior-hunter Fianna in Irish. He finished with a rallying cry – “Long live the revolution!” – and a fist in the air that was emulated by most of the crowd.
As Loughran and his band, Huartan, led the audience in a celebration of a pre-colonial Ireland, they also championed a second cause: Palestine. And after a few songs with electric lighting and well-crafted choreography, the Palestinian and Irish flags flew together across the stage.
In West Belfast, music groups like Huartan are using their platforms to promote the Palestinian cause in a variety of ways, ranging from visual solidarity statements in live performances to fundraisers, protest songs, music videos, and Instagram activism.
Huartan in concert at the Oh Yeah Music Centre in Belfast (Credit: Abbie Hopson)
West Belfast, a staunchly Catholic republican area of the city, where much of the violence of the Troubles took place, is a hot spot for pro-Palestine activism. The Falls Road and Northumberland Street are filled with murals depicting scenes from Palestine, Civil Rights leaders, and Irish republican heroes like Bobby Sands. In many community spots, the sounds of the Irish language and Irish traditional music are equally as ubiquitous and just as political as the murals.
In Ireland, and in Belfast specifically, music has long been a means of activism and protest. In a place where the Catholic community was historically ostracized and forced into silence, music and art became primary ways to spread controversial or forbidden republican ideas. Rebel songs, a genre of Irish folk music themed on rebellion and Irish independence, are a rich tradition in the region.
Music, poetry, and story “was one of the main formats through which Irish people could express resistance against colonialism,” said Don Duncan, a journalist and professor in the School of English, Media, and Creative Arts at the University of Galway.
“It’s a new iteration of a very old tradition,” said Duncan, describing the rise of pro-Palestine activism among Irish musicians.
Out of West Belfast, where many rebel tunes originated, new artists are continuing the legacy of protest. Kneecap, an Irish-language hip-hop group from West Belfast, has garnered international attention for their public support of Palestine and Irish republicanism.
Ties between Ireland and Palestine have existed since the early 20th century, said Andy Clarke, a local historian from Belfast and creator of the Irish history Instagram page “tanistry.” As Britain’s first colony, many of the colonial methods later used in other parts of the world were developed in Ireland. Some of the British colonial strategies first used in Ireland include land-confiscation, militarized policing, resource control, sectarian division, and cultural suppression.
There are Irish people today who have been “burned out of their homes, and they’re just seeing it happen somewhere else,” said Clarke.
They also share direct links, he explained, referencing the Black and Tans, a British paramilitary force that moved into Palestine after gaining a reputation for violence in Ireland, and Arthur James Balfour, who served as both Chief Secretary for Ireland and famously wrote the 1917 Balfour Declaration which announced British support for the Zionist movement.
“[A similarity] that strikes a massive chord, I think, culturally, is that use of religious divide to oversimplify it,” said Clarke. Although armed conflict ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, the divide between Catholic republicans and Protestant loyalists is still very evident in Belfast today.
Palestinian solidarity murals cover the International Wall in West Belfast (Credit: Abbie Hopson)
Growing up in West Belfast, anti-colonial ideas are taught in households, through art and music, and through the community’s history and lived experience.
“When I was growing up in the house, I would’ve had an awareness of Cuba, Palestine, Kurdistan, the Congo, South America,” said Jake Óg Mac Siacais, of growing up as the son of a formerly incarcerated Irish Republican volunteer and a mother who worked for an Irish festival. As a young child, he occasionally visited his mother’s father in England, who was in prison for IRA activity.
“My first exposure to [Palestine] was through being just a republican from West Belfast,” he said.
Mac Siacais is the frontman and lyricist of The Shan Vans, a West Belfast rock band of Irish-speakers formed in 2023, who released their Irish-Palestinian solidarity anthem “The Shan Van” in February. The song and accompanying video is a collaborative project with over 100 contributors.
“Shan Van,” from the phrase “Shan Van Vocht” is directly translated as “the poor old woman.” The Shan Van Vocht has a rich history as an allegory for Ireland in colonial bondage, an image sometimes used to bypass censors while commenting on colonial oppression.
In “The Shan Van,” one rendering of this idea is the symbolic nature of a mother grieving for her son, which is evident in many of the art pieces and lyrics.
Mikey Cullen, a Dublin-based poet and collaborator on the project, took inspiration for his part from the influential women of Irish history and from the important relationship of nationalist activists to their mothers, citing poems Patrick Pearse and Bobby Sands wrote for their mothers before their deaths.
“The naked light of the sun / Screaming down the ages / Who is the Shan Van Vocht?” sings Mac Siacais in Irish.
Using the overarching symbol of the Shan Van as a representation of colonized peoples, the song depicts solidarity between Ireland and Palestine through their shared experiences of colonialism, with hope for the future.
“We’re a rock band, and we’re singing songs about decolonization,” Mac Siacais said, describing the core focus of the band.
Instead of the trivial signs and slogans that typically show up in concert crowds, Mac Siacais described instances of concertgoers shouting liberation quotes and flying Palestinian flags, something he appreciates.
For The Shan Vans, music is a form of activism.
“It should be about politics; it should be about ideology,” Mac Siacais said.
A mural covers the outside wall of Maddens in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast (Credit: Abbie Hopson)
This action-oriented attitude is common in West Belfast, where a large part of the violence of the Troubles took place. Maddens, an iconic republican pub in the Cathedral Quarter, where Mac Siacais frequents, is decorated inside with images and mantras of Palestine, South Africa, the American Civil Rights movement, IRA leaders, and the word CEARTA, Irish for “rights.” Outside, the pub reflects the current republican movement, with a large mural that references several local bands and artists.
One of these illustrations, Mac Siacais points out, is local tradtronica (a blend of Irish trad music and electronica) band Huartan’s hawthorn tree, the origin of their name, and a sacred figure in Irish folklore that represents the gateway to the Otherworld and symbolizes protection.
Another West Belfast band, Huartan fuses the Irish language, precolonial tradition, and Palestinian solidarity. Stephen Loughran and the other two original members met while working as trad musicians in the Hawthorn Bar, a West Belfast neighborhood gathering place.
About a month before his birth, on March 16, 1988, a family member in the IRA was shot and killed by a loyalist paramilitary in what is known as the Milltown Cemetery attack. Like Mac Siacais, Loughran was born into a world where he was candidly aware of the pervasive politics surrounding him, in a neighborhood covered in Irish and Palestinian flags.
Loughran described Huartan’s work as a “rejection of the systems of oppression.”
In their songs and performances, Huartan tries to capture an Irish identity detached from colonialism – a response to the injustices and loss of culture stemming from British colonization.
“That’s maybe a way that we connect when we see that sort of thing happen in other places – Palestine being the most obvious example at the minute,” said Loughran.
Last year, the band released the song “Fiáin,” Irish for “wild.” It uses the melody of “The Foggy Dew,” a famous Irish rebel song about the 1916 Easter Rising, and audio snippets from Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a prominent Irish civil rights activist and former politician. The song and music video promote the 2024 campaign against Sinn Féin attending the White House’s annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration due to the Biden administration’s support of Israel.
“We wanted to just essentially try to elevate [McAliskey’s] words, to be part of a campaign,” said Loughran.
The band describes the project as a “plea to Irish politicians to remember our own history and struggle and to stand in true solidarity with the people of Palestine.”
In their personal lives, both Loughran and Mac Siacais are just as active as in their art. Apart from music, Loughran works at the Cultúrlann, an Irish cultural center which he described as “an incubation center” for the Irish language and culture, and Mac Siacais works for Fóram na nÓg, an Irish-language youth organization.
For both Loughran and Mac Siacais, the Palestinian solidarity movement is part of a larger cause; it is a fight for universal civil rights and decolonization.
“This is more than just Palestine that we’re talking about here, and that’s why we’re talking about it so passionately,” Mac Siacais said.
Editor’s note: this story has been updated to reflect the correct number of band members in The Shan Vans.