Skibbereen – Irish Famine Ballad of Loss, Exile & Eviction | Traditional Irish Ballad
Skibbereen — An Irish Famine Ballad of Loss, Exile & Eviction Skibbereen stands among the most heartbreaking of all Irish ballads — a father’s story told to his son about why they left their homeland. It is a song born from the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) of the 1840s, when hunger, eviction, and exile scarred every parish in Ireland. In the ballad, a young man asks his father why they now live in exile. The old man answers with quiet pain: their home in Skibbereen, County Cork was destroyed, their crops failed, and their people starved while landlords seized the land. Soldiers came “to drive us from our home,” and his wife — the boy’s mother — died in the chaos that followed. Every verse deepens the tragedy. The father’s memories are not just personal; they are the voice of an entire nation cast adrift. The famine years saw more than a million Irish people die, and another million forced to sail for America, never to return. Through the song’s haunting refrain — “And th...