The Echo of Sixteen – A 1916 Rising Ballad of Courage, Valor & Legacy

The Echo of Sixteen — A Ballad Remembering the 1916 Rising

The Echo of Sixteen is an original Irish ballad that honours the leaders, volunteers, and ordinary citizens who stood against the British Empire in the Easter Rising of 1916.
It is a song set not in myth, but in the real streets of Dublin — where history shifted in smoke, blood, and fire.

The ballad opens with the city stirring to rebellion in Easter Week.
From the soot-blackened tenements to the granite pillars of the General Post Office, the Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers raised the green flag and claimed the right of a nation to exist. The song invokes the names that still command reverence — Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett — but it never forgets the unnamed men, the young messengers, the women who ran dispatches under fire, and the civilians caught in the crossfire. They were the people who, in that moment, believed Ireland could be free.

The verses echo the devastation of the Rising — artillery pounding O’Connell Street into rubble, snipers haunting the rooftops, and the flames turning Dublin’s skies red — yet the emotional core of the song lies not in the battle, but in Kilmainham Jail.
Here, one by one, the poets, leaders, and dreamers were executed.
The ballad pays special tribute to Connolly, shot while tied to a chair — a symbol of England’s fear of a man who could not be broken even when crippled and bleeding.

But this isn’t a song of nostalgia or sentimentality.
It does not sugar-coat the cost — it refuses to.

The Echo of Sixteen instead stands as a declaration:
that the Rising was not a failure, but the spark that lit the road toward independence.
The echoes of 1916 still linger in songs, in language, in the very ground of Dublin’s streets — and this ballad ensures they are not forgotten.




LYRICS

Through Dublin’s haze, the spring awoke, In nineteen-sixteen, the silence broke, The Citizen Army made their stand With rifles raised and fate in hand. From tenements grim to the city’s core, They struck the spark of a rebel war, Flags's of green defied the crown, For Ireland’s soul, they’d not back down. Oh, praise the brave, unyielding band, Who shook the chains from this ravaged land, Though cannons roared, their hearts stayed strong, Heroes lost, yet forever belong. The GPO, their hallowed ground, Where fearless souls in glory crowned, Pearse, a lion, with words of flame, Connolly’s steel defied the shame. Against a Crown who'd gouged and bled, Seven hundred years, our children dead, They'd raped the soil, they'd torched the glen, Yet Ireland’s sons rose proud again. Oh, praise the brave, unyielding band, Who shook the chains from this ravaged land, Though cannons roared, their hearts stayed strong, Heroes lost, yet forever belong. The Crown unleashed their butcher’s hand, In Kilmainham Jail, a slaughter planned, With twisted grins, they aimed to break, Our heroes’ hearts for cruelty’s sake. MacDonagh stood, his spirit roared, Plunkett gazed without a word, Connolly, bound, still spat their scorn, Murdered cold, yet a legend born. Oh, praise the brave, unyielding band, Who shook the chains from this ravaged land, Though cannons roared, their hearts stayed strong, Heroes lost, yet forever belong. The Rising fell, when smoke had cleared, The Crown struck fast — executions neared. The barracks swarmed with names to take, Each rebel marked for them to break. But praise the men who faced the storm, Outnumbered, bruised, yet un-forlorn, In sixteen’s ash, their valor gleams, Defeat can’t dim our rebel dreams.

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