The Dubliners: The Dubliners

IT IS an irony that The Dubliners should have come to prominence with ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ in 1967, the same year that Dermot O’Brien’s IRA rallying call ‘The Merry Ploughboy’ topped the Irish charts for its length, and precisely when the festering politics of Northern Ireland finally and irrevocably erupted. Since then, the dilemma of Ulster has grown more clamorous as The Dubliners’ muted Republicanism has become ever more subdued.