Come Out Ye Black And Tans

Come Out Ye Black and Tans takes a different tone than the songs that come after it -- it's openly sung from the perspective of memory and remembrance.

Dominic Behan wrote the song in 1961, nearly 40 years after the Irish Civil War broke out. Behan is to the Civil War as Kneecap is to the Troubles, a generation removed from the violence but born into the political aftermath.

Behan’s father fought in the Irish Civil War as a member of the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army. After the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), the British and Irish leadership signed a treaty that ended the fighting—but at a price. It formalized the partition of the island, keeping the six northern counties under British rule as “Northern Ireland,” while creating the Irish Free State as a dominion of the British Crown.

The treaty was sold as peace, but for many republicans, it was betrayal. The Civil War that followed was a fight between those who accepted the compromise and those who refused to trade their dead comrades’ sacrifices for a partial freedom still stamped with the crown.

Behan wasn't just born into this history, he was born into his father's memories, which he immortalized in the first verse of the song:

In the first verse of the song, Behan references his birthplace of Dublin and the prevailing loyalist sentiments of his Dublin neighborhood. He uses the British propagandized image of themselves as he describes them -- but not before flipping it to portray them as oppressors:

"And those lovely English feet, they walked all over us"

He describes his father coming home at night drunk, heading into the yard and shouting a challenge to the occupying Black and Tans:

"Come out ye black and tans

Come out and fight me like a man

Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders

Tell her how the IRA,

Made you run like hell away

From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra"

The hook is poignant and layered: it issues a challenge to the occupiers and references their histories in WWI that earned them medals. He challenges their manhood and says that the IRA had them running for their lives during the War of Independence, questioning what really went on in Flanders in WWI.

The second verse connects two generations of Irish resistance. Behan calls out the slander of Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, who was discredited by a British-fueled scandal in the late 1800s. Parnell was taken to court and exposed for having fathered several children with another man's wife—something that, in devoutly Catholic Ireland, was enough to destroy his political career. While the charge might seem trivial today, it shattered the movement towards home-rule. Behan links that moralistic contempt directly to the executions of the 1916 Rising leaders. The RIC didn’t just kill the rebels -- they mocked them, sneered at their sacrifice, and tried to shame the cause. But in doing so, they only deepened the resolve of those who carried the struggle forward.

The third verse is special, as it globalizes the struggle. Behan writes of the British occupations of Palestine and South Africa, where their superior technology greatly outmatched the indigenous population. Behan taunts them as cowards, relying on technological advantages instead of fighting on an even playing field. He ridicules the triumphs of the Empire and reframes it as bullying, as an unvirtuous act.

This is especially powerful when contrasting with the prevailing narratives in favor of colonization, of "civilizing the savages of the orient." Edward Said writes about it extensively in Orientalism.

The final verse is essentially a "Tiocfaidh ár lá" in verse form. Behan says that things are going to change soon... just a few years later, British Troops would again patrol the streets and the resistance would take arms again.