I was delighted to catch up with Rhob Cunningham in Malahide and document this beautiful accapella song he learned from his late aunt. Was a real pleasure to also walk around the seaside villages of Malahide and Portmarnock. I feature just a small portion of the magnificent scenery in that area of Dublin.

If you don't know of Rhob, I highly reccomend watching the long-form film we made together in Switzerland in 2019, when Rhob climbed 2000 meters in his bare feet to play a gig in a log cabin beside a glacier. Climbing bare foot was not by choice, as he sufferred irritating blisters in the first hour of what was an 8 hour trip up the alps. 'Tis a somewhat heroic, and mostly gorgeos wee story: [ Ссылка ]

See current films by Myles O'Reilly on [ Ссылка ]

Thank you so much for you patronage and loyalty. I'm so so very grateful.

I'll let Rhob himself take over now, to explain to you a little more about this song:

"I learned this song, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, from a version that my late aunt, Anne Byrne, sang. She had a lovely singing voice like the Byrnes and Bradys before her..

Singing the words, the only word I didn’t know was Oulart, which is a place name.

There is a hill at Oulart, a location in Ireland, where hundreds of people died in 1798. Some people were oppressing other people for a long time and it was getting worse and worse and a local incident sparked some indiscriminate killing from the oppressive group, so the other group rallied together and this battle at Oulart Hill was really quite a brutal incident.

Many people died; it was a violent reactionary expression of how we all pine for security, a security which includes culpability. Culpabiility that, when missing, brings out our worst.

There is a cave in Cyprus where a fig Tree grew. Fig trees don’t grow normally in that region so it sparked an investigation and the remains of three people were found underneath the fig tree. They had been killed there with dynamite in 1974. At the time, some people were trying to install a different power structure, other people didn’t want that and many people went missing.

One of the three people found in the cave had eaten a fig that they had brought from their hometown . That is how the bodies came to be found.

Some of the people at Oulart that died, they had barley in their pockets. They had walked great distances to fight together. On their journey, locals would fill their pockets with barley for sustenance. In the years after the event, small patches of barley would appear scattered in the region, denoting memorials to where these people had fallen and died.

The first and second time I sang this song, a person laughed, perhaps nervously, at how I was singing the notes so high, and it rather threw me left of centre. It’s such a heartfelt lament that laughter, as a reaction, felt like I had failed to represent something.

Myles visited me and I sang the song and I was glad he didn’t laugh.

Someone created a lovely installation space at Oulart in the 1980’s.

I would like to go there one day and sing this song and think of those people that fought, think of barley, think of figs and think of my Aunt."

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