Just Irish Music

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 t...

In the grey stillness of dawn, as rain taps gently on old stone, the echoes of gunfire still seem to linger in Kilmainham Gaol. Over a century has passed, but the memory remains sharp — a wound etched into the soul of Ireland. “Rain on Kilmainham” is a ballad of sorrow and remembrance, written for those who stood before a British firing squad in May 1916, condemned not by crime but by conscience. This song is not a call to arms — it is a lament. It mourns the loss of brave souls who gave everything for the dream of a free Ireland. It recalls the final steps of men like Pádraig Pearse , James Connolly , Thomas Clarke , and others — led from their cells by the boots of Empire, blindfolded in a cold yard as dawn broke through the mist. The ballad draws its power not from rage, but from grief — from the quiet dignity of sacrifice, from the soft weeping of a nation watching its future die behind prison walls. Kilmainham was never just a prison. It became a place of martyrdom, of transfor...