by Mattie Lennon
On July 3 this year we lost one of our greatest singers/songwriters. Mickey MacConnell wrote about 400 songs and his best known is Only Our Rivers run Free which he wrote in twenty minutes when he was aged eighteen and didn’t ever change a word of it later. It is available on YouTube.
The highest honour the folk music world can bestow on any individual is The Creative Arts Award which is given annually and Mickey MacConnell was the recipient at the Fiddlers’ Green Folk Festival in Rostrevor, Co Down in 2016. He found himself in the company of a host of talented people. Mickey found himself inducted into a rarefied hall of fame, including the award’s first winner ever, then Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, the legendary Pete Seeger, Ralph McTell and a host of other famous names. In other words he was with his own.
Not ever stuck for a word, the former columnist with The Kerryman newspaper said, ‘It’s nice to get it while still alive!‘
I interviewed him for Radio Dublin in 2001, and being the humble unassuming person that he was he gave another singer all the credit for the success of ‘Only Our Rivers run Free’, ‘It was a classic example of the right song, in the right place at the right time, recorded by the right artist, Christy Moore, because Christy’s career was taking off in a big way it afforded an authority and a whole importance to the song…suddenly it became an anthem for the dispossessed and assumed an importance that I had not necessarily seen. And it has gone on to be regarded almost as a traditional song; a universal song.‘
When I mentioned to him that his friend John B. Keane once said that it is easier to write in Listowel than not to write, the man from Ballinaleck replied, ‘I would disagree with John B. there. I need anger to write and I think that, perhaps.’
And what inspired him? , ‘I can’t remember that there was any one particular thing that sparked it off. Except that growing up in south Fermanagh was a very melancholy time. And it was a sort of spiritual Chernobyl in many ways; in that every day you went out you’d be running into B-Specials on the road and they’d be asking you your name and who you were despite the fact that they were neighbours of yours. And there was a general sort of disillusionment and disappointment and I think what really triggered it was looking at the older generation; people of my father’s age and my mother’s age and seeing this terrible apathy and acceptance of a society.‘
He emphasised to me that although it has for decades been seen as a republican anthem it is in fact, ‘a cry for all the oppressed – regardless of creed.‘ The song was recorded more than 400 times, by artists too numerous to mention and translated into 16 different languages and the teenage Mickey was inspired by his, ‘ . . . frustration over the bigotry I witnessed in the meeting; with the allocation of houses to single Protestants over Catholic families.‘ ‘Only Our Rivers run Free’ was adopted as an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, before violence erupted in Northern Ireland. His advice to young songwriters? ‘Keep trying. It happened to me. It could happen to you.’
Mickey wrote about 400 songs, many of them funny here is an example of his lighter side:
The Politician’s Song
Well, for twenty frantic fruitless years I worked in Dublin Town
Reporting for newspapers, I was busy writing down
All the words of politicians in my endless quest for truth
Twas at such a wasted exercise I squandered all my youth.
That’s the cause of my misfortune, as I’ll explain to you
For I find myself now talking like politicians do
And if anyone should ask me ‘Do I take sugar in my tae’?
I grasp them firmly by the hand and this is what I say.
(chorus)
Well I’m very glad you asked me that for at this point in time
In the circumstances that prevail there is in the pipeline
Infrastructural implications interfaced with lines of thought
Which lead to grassroots viabilities which at this point I’d rather not
Enunciate in ambiguities but rather seek to find
Negotiated compromises which are the bottom line
For full and frank discussions which could serve to integrate
With basic fundamental principles to which we all relate
Not in doctrinaire philosophy which any fool can see
In inescapable hypothesis confronting you and me
So in the interests of the common good so you need never fear
For I have the matter well in hand and I’m glad I made things clear.
When his great friend John B. Keane died in 2002 Mickey wrote a moving ballad, ‘In the Footprints of John B.‘ Here it is in part.
There is nowhere quite so lonely as a silent darkened stage
When the footlights have all dimmed and died and the props are put away
But our town felt just as lonely as May turned into June
When God finally rang the curtain down and called our playwright home.
But you cannot kill a rainbow nor turn back the rising sun
Nor undo the works of gifted men even though their day is done
For they always walk beside us when the things they had to say
Is a part of what we were and are and form the centre of our ways
Chorus
So search for him in Market Street, Pound Lane or in the Square
Or late afternoon in Church Street – sure you’ll likely find him there
Or where the laughing sparkling silvery Feale sweeps westward to the sea
There you’ll follow in the shadow of the footprints of John B.
He always seemed to hear a tune that others seldom heard
As he walked through his beloved streets or in the woods of Gurtinard
Mickey is resting in peace; he is sadly missed. I attempted to write a tribute to him.
Mickey is resting in peace; he is sadly missed. I attempted to write a tribute to him.
MICKEY by Mattie Lennon
The Bellanaleck snowstorm was raging
As political storms still blew,
Protestors now tired and ageing
Defeat being now all that they knew.
‘Mid such turmoil a baby was born,
And the hopes were he’d live for to see
A minority not subject to scorn
And a province now bigotry free.
As a grown- man that child of the forties
Good Friday’s Agreement he saw,
With Ulster’s cessation of sorties-
B-Specials replaced by just law
By then he’d gone south of the border
To Kerry via Dublin went he
Where songs were now written to order;
Pure culture and no R.U.C.
On the day he heard his Makers voice
‘Twas July the third in twenty five
‘Oh the call? Sure I must have a choice.‘
His Heaven he’d picked while alive.
When that day was gone a legend had passed.
His last thoughts before leaving? Let’s see.
All suffering and pain gone at last
Yes. Why not banter with John.B.
Surely his God has now granted his wish
And perhaps bi-location of soul.
By the Erne his spirit is waiting for fish
The same at the Feale in Listowel.
Exploits of his youth documented
They’re just resting in ‘Peter … and Me.‘
Pain-free now and sadly lamented.
While his spiritual river runs free.
© Mattie Lennon 2025
Mickey McConnell’s albums, Peter Pan and Me, Joined up Writing, and Mickey MacConnell live at John B’s are still available.
Mattie Lennon
I spent the first 25 years of my life at home on a small farm in County Wicklow.. I can identify with Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘burgled bank of youth’ (and I am one of the few of my generation who knows how to make a bush-harrow). As a young fellow whenever I was blamed in the wrong, I would compose a derogatory ballad about my accuser. There weren’t many false accusations so I wasn’t very prolific.
I was nicknamed ‘the Poet’. but the term wasn’t always complimentary. I agree that what is said behind one’s back is their standing in the community and my favourite quotation is a comment made about me by a neighbour: ‘Wouldn’t you thnk someone would tell him he’s an eejit, when he doesn’t know himself.’
I have spent most of the last thirty years in Dublin but when asked ‘Will you ever go back to Kylebeg?’, my answer is always Joycean. When James Joyce was asked, in Trieste; ‘Will you ever return to Dublin?’ he said; ‘I never left.’
I have written articles (mostly humorous) for The Sunday Independent, The Irish Times, The Irish Post, Ireland’s Own, Ireland’s Eye, Kerry’s Eye, The Wicklow People, The Leinster Leader as well as numerous on-line publications. I have produced a DVD ‘Sunrise on the Wicklow Hills’ and edited two books, There’s Love and There’s Sex and There’s the 46A and It Happens Between Stops. I am a member of PEN (The Association of Irish Writers.)
I was once told; ‘You have the perfect face for radio’ and I compiled and presented my own programmes in the ‘Voiceover’ series on RTE Radio One. I have presented ballad programmes on KIC FM, Liffey Sound and Radio Dublin.
I co-presented a Saint Patrick’s Day Ceol na nGael programme on WFUV 90.7 in the Bronx and I do pre-recorded programmes for other stations. One such programme is ‘The Story And The Song’ in which I play a number of ballads, having first told the story behind each one.
I still write the occasional ballad (not all of them fit for human consumption).
I wrote ‘And All his Songs Were Sad’, a full length play based on the life and works of Irish songwriter, the late Sean McCarthy. It has been staged in Fort Worth, Texas, by the Pantagleize Theatre Company and by the Superior Theatre Company, Douglas Wisconsin.
Mattie Lennon has his own website: see https://www.mattielennon.com/
Tinteán 