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# not a rebel song
Sinn Féin 'didn't intend' to use U2 sound-alike song for their 2016 video
Rebel song? Or NOT a rebel song?
SINN FÉIN’S MAIN 2016 organisor has said the party didn’t set out to make use of a U2 sound-alike song as the soundtrack for their ‘alternative’ centenary video.
The party launched a full programme of events yesterday to mark 100 years since the 1916 Rising, making their announcement at Wynns Hotel, just around the corner from the GPO.
Introducing their in-house produced promotional video, National Centenary Co-ordinator Bartle D’Arcy stressed that — unlike the Government’s contentious video — theirs didn’t include any of the ‘heroes of modern Ireland’.
However, eagle-eared listeners — amongst the media in attendance, and in our own comments section afterwards — noted that its soundtrack sounded not unlike U2 Troubles-era hit ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’.
What do you think?…
Speaking to TheJournal.ie after the launch, D’Arcy said that as far as he knew, the sound-track was taken from a website of rights-free library music.
Asked whether he’d thought the tune was a little U2-esque, he said.
I didn’t hear that myself, but if it did that wouldn’t have been the intention.
The party had been looking for “a dramatic score that was royalty-free,” he said.
‘Sunday, Bloody, Sunday’ is one of the Dublin band’s most overtly political songs. Its lyrics depict the revulsion felt by an observer witnessing the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry.
Throughout the 1980s — aware that its lyrics could be misinterpreted as sectarian — Bono typically introduced it at concerts by saying “this is not a rebel song”.
Read: Protester removed from 1916 event after she called Enda Kenny the C-word
Read: Relatives boycott launch of 1916 commemorations, calling it a ‘political stunt’
