So I was below in Ennis a few weeks back, a Friday, in a snug at a pub I won't name (they'd only get notions), and I witnessed one of the great debates of our time. Bigger than any election. Bigger than the weather.
Two men. Both pushing seventy. Both from Clare to the bone. And they spent the guts of an hour arguing over which is the greater Clare song — Spancil Hill, or the Rattlin' Bog.
I'll set the scene for ye.
Yer man on the left — I'll call him Paddy, because his name was Paddy — is a Spancil Hill man. Devout. He has the song the way some people have religion. To Paddy, Spancil Hill is the most heartbreaking thing ever committed to memory, and he is NOT wrong about that, I want to be fair here. It's a man dreaming of home from the far side of the world, walking the old places, meeting the dead and not knowing they're dead until he wakes. Clare lads emigrated and never came back and that song is what they carried. Paddy's grandfather sang it. His father sang it. He sang it at his father's funeral, he told me, and his voice went a bit when he said that, and I had to look at my pint for a minute.
The other fella — I'll call him Mossy — is a bog man. And Mossy's argument was simpler but he made it with great force.
"A song that makes you cry," says Mossy, "is grand. But a song that makes the whole pub SING? That's the trick of it. That's the harder thing to do."
And lads, he had a point. He had a point I have made on this very site about a hundred times.
I should say at this stage that they both knew who I was. That was the problem. Word had got round the snug that I "run a website about the bog song" (the way it gets described locally, like I sell carpets), and so I was appointed referee. Against my will. I had come in for one quiet pint and a read of the paper.
Paddy's case, when he laid it out properly, was this. Spancil Hill is ART. It has a story, a setting, a heartbreak, a turn at the end that gets you every single time even when you know it's coming. It's a song you LISTEN to. You go quiet for it. You don't talk over Spancil Hill, you'd be put out of the pub. It's about Clare specifically — about a real fair, a real townland, real homesickness — in a way the bog song just isn't, because the bog song could be any bog, anywhere. (He said that last bit to wound me and it did land, I'll admit.)
Mossy's case was the case of the people. The bog, says he, is a song that does WORK. It builds. It gathers. It pulls the shy fella at the end of the bar into the singing whether he likes it or not, because by the third verse he's the only one not at it and that's worse. You can't be sad and sing the flea verse. It is physically not possible. He banged the table on "flea verse" and a third man at the bar, no part of the conversation at all, shouted "and on that flea there was a WING" without even turning around. Proof, said Mossy. Rest my case, said Mossy.
Now. They wanted a verdict.
And here is where I have to be honest with ye, because I always am.
I'm a bog man. Obviously. I have given the better part of my adult life to this song. I run a SHRINE. If I told ye I was neutral ye'd rightly never trust a word out of me again.
BUT.
I couldn't do it to Paddy. I couldn't sit in a snug in Ennis and tell a man with a wobble still in his voice that the song he buried his father to was the lesser of the two. That's not a debate, that's just cruelty with a scoreboard. And anyway — and this is the bit I actually believe — they're not the same KIND of thing. You wouldn't ask is a candle better than a campfire. One is for the quiet end of the night and one is for the loud middle of it, and a good session needs both or it's not a session at all, it's just noise or just sorrow.
So here's the verdict I gave, and they both grumbled, which is how I knew it was right.
Spancil Hill is the greater song to LISTEN to. The bog is the greater song to SING. And a Clare pub that has the two of them in one night is a lucky pub, and I was lucky to be in it.
Paddy bought the next round, which I read as a concession. Mossy said nothing, which I also read as a concession. The third fella at the bar gave us another verse of the flea unprompted. And then somebody, I swear to ye, started Spancil Hill, soft, and the whole snug went quiet for it, Mossy included.
That's the thing they were both missing while they were arguing. A real session has room for the laugh and the lump in the throat in the same hour. It's not a competition. It just feels like one after four pints.
If you want to know more about the heartbreak end of it, the Spancil Hill page has the words and the story. And if you're more a Mossy than a Paddy, well, the bog lyrics are where they've always been. Sing whichever one the night is asking for.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I told Rattlin the whole story when I got home and he was unmoved, but he is from Clare too (born under a parked car on the Gort road, the most Clare origin imaginable) so I like to think he was quietly on Mossy's side.