Tag: Solidarity Sessions

SOLIDARITY AND RESISTANCE IN MUSIC AND SPOKEN WORD IN DUBLIN

On By rebelbreezeIn Cultural Comment, Current Event Report, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, National Liberation, Palestine, Police Violence, Political Analysis, Song, Song in Struggle, Workers' Struggles, World War OneLeave a comment

Clive Sulish

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

Thursday night (30th), with almost non-stop downpour of rain was a dreary and miserable one in Dublin. Not so however inside the Cobblestone’s back room where solidarity and resistance resounded in song, instrumental and spoken word.

The event organisers, Solidarity Sessions collective, an independent organisation founded late last year have declared a number of times that they wish to contribute to “creating a community of solidarity and resistance through culture.”

Certainly the flags on the stage of the Tricolour, Starry Plough and Palestine conveyed some of the context, as did posters of 1916 martyrs Connolly and Pearse with text pointing out that the first was a migrant and the second, son of a migrant.1

In addition a merchandise stall sold T-shirts figuring the Palestinian Resistance with funds raised going to Palestinian relief work on the ground. Solidarity Sessions have also donated to ‘buy’ a water truck from Uisce for Gaza and also donated to Streetlink Homeless Support in Dublin.

Mark Flynn performing at Solidarity Sessions No.3 in the Cobblestone. (Photo: R.Breeze)

The material performed on stage contributed much of solidarity and resistance also. This was the third event this year and the second at the Cobblestone pub, one other being at the International Bar and the fourth expected at the Peadar Brown pub on Southside’s Clanbrassil Street.

There was a lot of audience participation at times during the evening, with Alan Burke joined from the floor in the chorus of his spirited rendition of The Aul’ Triangle (to which he added a verse of his own) and Sive was accompanied on request by continuous refrain under her singing.

Mark Flynn was also backed by the audience in his adaptation of A Roving I’ll Go to a sailing to Portugal song he told his audience he had put together in minutes of a creative flash the like of which he ruefully admitted not having experienced since. Flynn also sang Bogle’s antiwar Waltzing Matilda.

Alan Burke performing at Solidarity Sessions No.3 in the Cobblestone. (Photo: R.Breeze)

The audience was extremely quiet during Dorothy Collin’s spoken word pieces about assassinations by the Zionist Occupation and Palestinian resistance, interrupting her performance with applause only after a haiku in Irish and at a point where she became visibly emotionally affected.

The Resistance Choir included in their performance an exuberant Bread and Roses, the lyrics originating in a speech at a mostly female textile workers’ strike in Massachusetts, USA in 1912 and Burke sang of an innocent miner framed on a murder charge and hanged – but pardoned posthumously.

Class struggle was also present in Burke’s singing My Name Is Dessie Warren, about a trade union activist with flying pickets2 during the 1970s construction workers’ strike in England. Some were tried under the Conspiracy Laws and jailed, including Ricky Tomlinson and Des Warren.3

The Resistance Choir about to perform at Solidarity Sessions No.3 in the Cobblestone, being introduced by the MC, Ru O’Shea. (Photo: R.Breeze)

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Three imminent resistance events were announced from the stage: Friday morning, due to appear in court4 were two Palestine solidarity activists attacked by Gardaí at Dublin Port and a good show of numbers in solidarity was requested.5

On Saturday a picket in solidarity with Irish Republican prisoners would be held outside Kilmainham Jail6 and on Sunday a demonstration to blockade Dublin Port was announced, people being requested to gather at The Point on the north Liffey quays.

Sive, who performed at Solidarity Sessions No.3 in the Cobblestone. (Photo sourced: Internet)

The organising collective, volunteers on door duty and the performers all donated their services free of charge. Further donations will be made to causes considered worthy, the collective assured their guests and supporters.

Ru O’Shea, MC for the evening, thanked all the performers who gave their services for free, the audience for their attendance, supporters staffing the door, the Cobblestone and sound engineer. The next Solidarity Sessions night will be at Peadar Brown’s on Thursday 4th December.

Ongoing “contributing to building a community of solidarity and resistance.” And outside, it had stopped raining for awhile.

End.
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FOOTNOTES

1James Connolly was born into the Irish diaspora in the poor area of Cowgate in Edinburgh and first came to Ireland as an adult in response to an invitation to found the Irish Socialist Republican Party. Subsequently Connolly went to the USA for a period before returning to Ireland (therefore 3 times a migrant). Patrick Pearse was born and raised in Dublin but his father was English. Both Pearse and Connolly were executed in Kilmainham Jail with another twelve by British bullets after their surrender of the 1916 Rising.

2‘Flying pickets’ operate in principle like the guerrilla ‘flying columns’, sending a large number of union picketers to specific locations chosen in secret, thereby reducing the opportunities for the police etc to mobilise at the spot in advance

3Ricky Tomlinson after release became a famous actor, mostly in comic roles. Warren developed Parkinson’s from forcible injections with restraining drugs and long periods in isolation in jail, dying not long after release. I remember the case and campaigns when I was working in England and a period afterwards when I was briefly active in the Construction Safety Campaign and read statistics about on average a construction worker killed weekly and one seriously injured daily on British construction sites.

4Yes, the Gardaí charging with criminal offences people they pepper-sprayed and batoned without warning.

5For report on that, see https://rebelbreeze.com/2025/10/31/strong-solidarity-support-for-arrested-port-blockade-activists/

6Kilmainham Jail was a British colonial prison in Dublin, also used for a while by the Irish Free State to imprison the Resistance during the Civil War/ Counterrevolution. It is now a very popular museum and holds the execution site of 14 prominent Irish Republicans after their surrender in 1916.

“A GREAT NIGHT” AT SECOND SOLIDARITY SESSIONS

On By rebelbreezeIn Cultural Comment, Current Event Report, Gaeilge, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, irish history, Irish Language, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, Poetry, Political Prisoners, Resistance Art, Song, Song in Struggle, Traditions & Folk CustomLeave a comment

Clive Sulish

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

An Irish punk rock band, Mongolian throat-singers, a poet and Irish folk singers all performed at Solidarity Sessions No.2 to a good crowd in the International Bar, in in Dublin City centre Wicklow Street on Wednesday 17th..

An Irish and international resistance theme in decor was presented by flags of the Starry Plough and Palestine with Saoirse don Phalaistín as stage backdrop, while flags respectively of Cumann na mBan and Basque Antifa concealed the original decor’s ubiquitous photos of Michael Collins.

Flesh B. Bugged performing (Photo: Dermo Photography)

A PFLP1 flag was also taped to a wall. Hand-written signs on the stairs leading to the basement venue, alternatively in Irish and in English, asked for quiet/ ciúnas for the performance/ racaireacht. The Irish language was present too in some of the performances to follow.

MC for the night, Jimi Cullen, himself a singer-songwriter activist told the crowd the purpose of the organising collective was “to build a community of resistance and solidarity with our struggles and with struggles around the world” through culture in a social atmosphere.

Before the crowd — a flag temporarily changing the decor. (Photo: R. Breeze)

Themes of love, nature and emigration were covered in song; however the dominant theme was resistance – to prison regimes, foreign occupation, fascism, class oppression, racial discrimination – and solidarity with the struggles of others, near and far.

Diarmuid Breatnach, singing acapella kicked off the night with a selection of songs from the Irish resistance tradition and a couple of short ones from the USA civil rights movement. Some of the melodies however, of particular interest perhaps to Back Home in Derry2, were his own originals.

Diarmuid Breatnach performing (Photo: Dermo Photography)

Eoghan Ó Loingsigh, accompanying himself on guitar followed with more material from the same tradition, dedicating one to his late IRA father. A folk song Ó Loingsigh announced as ‘non-political’ performed acapella turned out to be very much political but on the issue of social class.

Áine Hayden followed with poems on a range of topics, from swimming in the Royal Canal during the Covid shut-down, deleting a personal relationship to a dedication to comedian and activist Mahmoud Sharab murdered with family in a “safe zone” tent by the Israeli Occupation Force.

Eoghan Ó Loingsigh performing (Photo: Dermo Photography)

The three performers were all introduced as activists as well as artists and the mostly-young crowd, apparently containing a strong representation of political and social activists, responded well to the performers with applause, yells of encouragement and often joining in on choruses.

More people arrived before, during and even after the break – including an elderly couple who had just arrived from the USA and could only pay in dollars but were admitted for free. Leaving later with thanks they promised a contribution to Palestine solidarity when they got home.

Before the crowd — a Cumann na mBan flag temporarily changing the decor. (Photo: Dermo Photography)

Also an activist, Ru O’Shea sang an Irish, Scottish, French and Italian selection, accompanied by bouzouki and guitar and performed a spoken word piece with a refrain of ‘Éire under attack’ before schooling the audience to sing the chorus of Robbie Burns’ Green Grow the Rushes Oh!

Áine Hayden performing (Photo: Dermo Photography)

Nomads were the next act. Composed of two Mongolian musicians playing violins in the style of the viola and a Dubliner modulating on a sound deck they were unusual enough but it was the amazing throat-singing of one of the Mongolians that had the audience enthralled.

It was amazing to learn that there are three different kinds of Mongolian throat-singing and then to hear them performed, one of which was a kind of whistling with a vibrating bass undertone wavering through it. The applause, particularly when they concluded, was rapturous and sustained.

Before the crowd — flags temporarily changing the decor. (Photo: R. Breeze)
Ru O’Shea performing (Photo: Dermo Photography)

The evening’s entertainment concluded with Flesh B. Bugged, a punk rock Irish duo of bass guitar and drums with spoken voice pieces in Irish from the bass guitar player. Their volume and beat got some of the crowd up and dancing and the wider crowd responded well to them too.

MC Jimi Cullen went up on stage for the last time to thank venue, performers, audience, doorkeepers, poster designers Ríona and Azzy O’Connor, also Diarmuid for original artwork. At a prompt from the crowd Cullen also got a round of applause from the audience for his MCing.

The Mongolian musicians of Nomads performing (Photo: D.Breatnach)

Remarking they’d “had a great night” and encouraging his listeners to follow the organising collective on its Instagram page, Cullen told them that details of Solidarity Sessions No.3 and the collective’s decisions on recipients of donations from money raised would be posted on there.

Diarmuid Breatnach told the audience that each individual could help build a community of resistance through attending the Solidarity Sessions and encouraging others to attend. He welcomed any ‘competion’ from solidarity sessions around the country.

Bass guitarist of Flesh B. Bugged (Photo: Dermo Photography)

The downstairs area of the International Bar is not perhaps the best layout for this kind of event but it worked out well enough for the collective, audience and performers on the night. Their next event will be back at their launch venue,The Cobblestone, Smithfield on Thursday 30th October.

End.

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The Mongolian throat-singer in Nomads (Photo: Dermo Photography)

FOOTNOTES

1People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of two specifically secular armed resistance organisations in Palestine.

2Irish mega folk singer Christy Moore had organised Bobby Sands’ poem into song to the melody of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot.

USEFUL LINKS

@solidaritysessionseire

“Building resistance through culture”: successful Solidarity Sessions launch in Dublin

On By rebelbreezeIn Cultural Comment, Current Event Report, Folk Custom, Gaeilge, Genocide, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, Irish Language, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, National Liberation, Palestine, Political Analysis, Popular Resistance, Resistance Art, Song, Traditions & Folk Custom2 Comments

Clive Sulish

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

Around 80 people attended a concert in the back room of Dublin’s Cobblestone pub launching an initiative to “build a community of solidarity and resistance through culture”. Flags of Irish and other struggles around the world decorated the venue.

The evening’s entertainment consisted of five musical acts and one of poetry. The MC for the evening, Diarmuid Breatnach, told the audience that Irish struggles had always found an expression in culture and that culture itself encouraged further resistance.

He gave the example of Thomas Davis who founded with others the patriotic newspaper The Nation in the mid-1800s, publishing contributed songs and poems and his own, including The West’s Awake and A Nation Once Again, songs still sung in Ireland nearly two centuries later.

The first act of the evening was the folk duo The Yearners, specialising in harmonies around renditions of song covers and their own song about the Mary of the New Testament, as a woman pressured to bear a child because “How can you say no to God?

The audience joining in on Pearse’s Gráinne Mhaol was followed by some songs with hard satirical edges like the Kinky Boots song from the Irish Republican repertoire and their own Save A Landlord.

The Yearners during their performance. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)
Dúlamban during their performance. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)

The MC introduced another all-female duo, Dúlamban, recently formed from two individual singer-musicians. Among their material, Sinéad on violin played two compositions of her own while Aisling sang her adaptation and translation of the Rising of the Moon: Ar Éirí na Geallaigh.

The one poet of the evening, Barry Currivan, performed a number of shorter and longer pieces of his repertoire. He was particularly applauded for his “anti-othering” piece Those People and his humorous concluding piece comparing himself to a good cup of tea or coffee.

After the break, the MC spent a few minutes outlining the Solidarity Sessions collective’s project and encouraging the audience to take part in it by spreading word of its events and supporting them in person, in addition to stepping forward to assist in organisation and in poster design.

Barry Currivan during his poetry performance at the Solidarity Sessions launch. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)
Section of the audience presumably during Currivan’s performance. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)

Another female duo took the stage, Sage Against the Machine on guitar accompanied by Ríona on violin, performing a number of love pop covers and SAM’s own song against patriarchy.

Some remarks about Bob Dylan’s Zionism followed in Sage’s introduction of the former’s Masters of War which she performed with great feeling and followed with El Gallo Rojo, an anti-fascist song from the Spanish ‘Civil War’.

Sage Against the Marchine (right) and Ríona during their performance. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)
Jimi Cullen during his performance at the Solidarity Sessions launch. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)

Breatnach then introduced Jimi Cullen who he said has been hosting a weekly musical protest picket for an hour on Wednesdays (2-3 pm) outside the US Embassy for a great many weeks, in which the MC had sometimes accompanied him amidst the solidarity beeping of passing traffic.

Jimi accompanied himself singing his Housing for All and Guthrie’s You Fascists Bound to Lose, then commenting on Bob Marley’s Zionism while introducing the latter’s One Love song, saying that love above all is what binds humanity together, a theme also of his We Are All Palestinians.

His monologue The Genocide Will Be Televised was much sharper and renewed an earlier Death, death to the IDF!1 chant from the audience.

Trad Sabbath during their performance. (Photo credit with thanks: Dermo Photography)

There was much irreverent comment about the name of the band to conclude the evening, Trad Sabbath, a four-piece band of guitars, banjo, bodhrán and fiddle, apparently in the context of the very recent death of the Black Sabbath band’s lead vocalist, Ozzie Osbourne.

Sardonic cries about “his poor widow”, Sharon Osbourne2 were also heard, a Zionist personality star in a ‘reality’ TV show about the late Ozzie’s family. To fill in the delay in their setting up with the sound engineer, Breatnach sang Kearney’s Down by the Glenside ballad.

The band concluded the evening with traditional melodies and some songs from Eoghan and Hat with others backing on choruses.

Poster advertising the event (Design: Ríona and D.Breatnach)

The MC thanked all for their attendance, performances and technical support before reiterating the Solidarity Sessions’ objective and encouraging participation. His comment that “Repression is here and more is coming down the road” was underlined by the presence there of a prominent victim.

In the audience was Richard Medhurst, the Britain-based journalist specialising in Middle Eastern coverage who was recently detained under anti-terror (sic) legislation and charged by British police as he returned from abroad and again later detained though not actually charged by Austrian police.

Richard Medhurst’s tweet during the evening at the event.

End.

FOOTNOTES

1Made famous by the Bob Vylan duo at Glastonbuy getting the audience chanting the slogan. The IDF is what the Israeli Occupation Forces call themselves.

2Who had called for the banning of the the Irish rap group Kneecap.