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...

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...