Music with Eddie Rowley

SINGER songwriter Declan O’Rourke was inspired by some grisly tales from the Famine as he created his latest album.

Among them is the story of a Westmeath landlord called Manning, who was ambushed and shot.

Locals formed a mob, found Manning’s body, hacked the corpse to pieces and threw them into a ditch.

O’Rourke and his band members re-enact the scene in a photo shoot for the cover of the album, Chronicles Of The Great Irish Famine.

This latest album by O’Rourke, whose song ‘Galileo’ is regarded by luminaries like ‘The Modfather’ Paul Weller as “possibly the greatest song written in the last 30 years”, was 15 years in the making.

After discovering that his own grandfather was born in a workhouse, Declan says he began researching his back- ground and “stumbled into a chapter of history I knew almost nothing about”.

The epic creative cycle combines the best of traditional Irish music and songwriting to present a series of extraordinary true tales from that horrific period in Irish history. Its effect on the population was so devastating that seven generations and 170 years later, Ireland’s population is still far from where it was in the 1840s.

O’Rourke recounts another story from 1849 in which a 23-year-old captain called Curry Shaw abandoned his passengers to their fate and made off in the only lifeboat when The Hannah struck ice in the waters off Newfoundland.

As he points out, the songs have relevance today as people are still fleeing their homelands en masse as they struggle to escape tyranny and poverty, too often in vessels unfit for human transportation.

But he says the album also highlights the resilience of Irish people.

“It’s not just about people dying, it’s about how they survived,” Declan adds.