The breed of me walked the high hills that shouldered the stars
My long stepping mountainy men and women who drank
Clear white whiskey that made them mad and rage against
The sallow strangers who grazed our green fields below
While my people wrestled the rushes and the snipe grass
While we sang our anthems of the fallen but not forgotten.
Our poetry and songs screamed to the sky
Our lovely language was sweet music to the soul
And they sat shivering in their stone prisons in fear
That the wild men whose only mistress was moonlight
That the wild men who stood up to the stranger
Would sweep down and take back the rich red clay
Take back the land the Gaelic chiefs had loved beyond words
The green land that was lost and won with blood red sword
Take back the thing that we all only have a lend of
The green land that laughs at those who would lord it.
The green land of our people that holds the heroes
Who never forgot where they were from and who they were
They were the breed of me who walked the high hills that shouldered the stars.
Gerry McLaughlin writes:
I wrote this one in memory of my Uncle, John Mór McGuire who has passed away- he was a mountainy man, an old style Republican who told me the story of our great, great great grandfather Thomas Mór McGuire and his brother John who were hounded from good flat land in Boho County Fermanagh to Tullygrevagh, a rough mountain farm near Cashel, around 1800.
It could not be proved that they were United Irishmen, but rumours were spread that they were involved or had knowledge of the death of an informer called Dominick Noone who was thrown down a cave and the brothers were banished forever from Boho. They are “The Breed Of Me”
Image Credit: Still from 1990 film The Field
