Let The People Sing? Irish Rebel Songs, Sectarianism, and Scotland’s Offensive Behaviour Act

Irish rebel songs afford Scotland’s Irish diaspora a means to assert, experience, and perform their alterity free from the complexities of the Irish language. Yet this benign intent can be offset by how the music is perceived by elements of Scotland’s majority Protestant population. The Scottish Government’s Offensive Behaviour Act (2012) has been used to prosecute those singing Irish rebel songs and there is continuing debate as to how this alleged offence should be dealt with. This article explores the social function and cultural perception of Irish rebel songs in the west coast of Scotland, examining what qualities lead to a song being perceived as ‘sectarian’, by focusing on song lyrics, performance context, and extra-musical discourse. The article explores the practice of lyrical ‘add-ins’ that inflect the meaning of key songs, and argues that the sectarianism of a song resides, at least in part, in the perception of the listener.

Official histories of parliament and the nature of the union of 1707:a forgotten episode in Anglo-Scottish academic relations

The Scottish Committee on the History of Parliament was established in 1936 as an offshoot of Col. Josiah Wedgwood's scheme for a collaborative ‘history of parliament’ researched and written on biographical lines. Circumstances, however, determined that the Scottish history would take a separate path. When Wedgwood's scheme was revived in 1951 an unsuccessful attempt was made to reintegrate the two projects. Discussions between the respective managing committees were conflicted and often bad-tempered, focussing on different interpretations of the nature of the united parliament created in 1707. The Scottish committee insisted that it was a new constitutional entity, while the English saw it as a continuation of the Westminster parliament with Scottish MPs added. This story of mutual incomprehension illustrates the profound differences between Scottish and English academics in the writing of parliamentary history, and also reveals a hitherto unobserved element in the development among leading Scottish jurists of a strain of ‘legal nationalism’ based on their interpretation of the constitutional significance of the Union.