A Nation Once Again

The great Irish nationalist anthem, with words by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814–1845), co-founder of Young Ireland, first published in his newspaper The Nation on 13 July 1844. Davis — a Protestant from County Cork who preached a nationalism uniting “Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter” and famously held that “a song is worth a thousand harangues” — died of scarlet fever the following year at thirty, before the song’s full ascent. The text has been set to several tunes over its history, and the melody’s lineage is tangled in the sources (an unsuccessful anonymous first setting, later settings by Thomas Sherlock and Edward Comerford, and a claimed Mozart borrowing for the chorus). The Wolfe Tones’ 1972 recording topped a 2002 BBC World Service poll as the world’s most popular song, and it appears memorably in A Hard Day’s Night, sung by Paul McCartney’s grandfather at the police.