Just Irish Music

The Perfect Holocaust — A Ballad of Ireland’s Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) This is not a famine song. This is a cry from the soil. “The Perfect Holocaust” is a modern Irish protest ballad rooted in the Great Hunger of 1845–1852 — a catastrophe that reshaped the Irish identity forever. The common schoolbook line calls it “the potato famine.” The real history is harsher. Ireland during those years was exporting grain, beef, butter, and provisions at industrial scale, while entire parishes starved. This ballad points directly to that contradiction — that the land was productive, yet the people were dying. In this piece, the music is built around uilleann pipes, low whistle, fiddle laments, and the relentless pulse of the bodhrán. The sound is intentionally stark — not romanticised, not softened — because the story demands uncomfortable honesty. The ballad names the policy makers and the ideology behind them. Trevelyan’s famous belief that starvation was “a moral lesson” echoes through t...

Whispers from the Coffin Ships — A Great Famine Ballad of Exile, Silence & the Sea Whispers from the Coffin Ships is a haunting Irish famine ballad set during the darkest years of 1845–1852 — when millions of Irish souls were starved out of their homeland, and another million fled across the Atlantic on vessels so deadly they were remembered not as emigrant ships, but as coffin ships . This piece stands as a lament for those who left Ireland half-alive, and those who never arrived at all. The ballad blends acoustic guitar, tin whistle, and violin to paint a bleak but truthful picture of forced emigration — cottages left in ruin, families torn from hearth and kin, children dying from fever before landfall, and the cold indifference of empire. Each verse is rooted in history: seized crops, sealed grain stores, mass evictions, and landscapes scarred by famine roads. In this interpretation, human-directed AI visuals deepen the storytelling — pairing every lyric with imagery of salt-...