Jimmy Rabbitte--Manager of the Commitments--Testifies
Then Jimmy spoke. --Rock an' roll is all abou' ridin'. That's wha' rock an' roll means. Did yis know tha'? (They didn't.) --Yeah, that's wha' the blackies in America used to call it. So the time has come to put the ridin' back into rock an' roll. Tongues, gooters, boxes, the works. The market's huge.
--Wha' abou' this politics?
--Yeah, politics. ----Not songs abou' 'Fianna fuckin' Fail or annythin' like tha'. Real politics. (They weren't with him.) --Where are yis from? (He answered the question himself.) --Dublin. (He asked another one.) --Wha' part o' Dublin? Barrytown. Wha' class are yis? Workin' class. Are yis proud of it? Yeah, yis are. (Then a practical question.) --Who buys the most records? The workin' class. Are yis with me? (Not really.) --Your music should be abou' where you're from an' the sort o' people yeh come from. -----Say it once, say it loud, I'm black an' I'm proud.
They looked at him.
--James Brown. Did yis know -----never mind. He sang tha'. -----An' he made a fuckin' bomb.
They were stunned by what came next.
They nearly gasped: it was so true.
--An' Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin' everythin'. An' the northside Dubliners are the niggers o' Dublin. -----Say it loud, I'm black an' I'm proud.
He grinned. He'd impressed himself again.
He'd won them. They couldn't say anything. (Doyle, 8-9)
Ania Loomba - “Various English administrators such as Edmund Spenser, John Davies, or Fynes Morison describe the Irish as wild, thieving, lawless, blood-drinking, savage, barbarous, naked; these are also the terms routinely used to describe New World Indians” (2002, 41). The subsequent protracted history of colonialism, exploitation, hostility, and violence, leading to the partition of the island under Home Rule in 1922, obviously exacerbated an already bitter situation.
The very British Dr. Johnson defined bogtrotter in 1755 as “one who lives in boggy country,” a term which has been applied to the Irish as far back as 1682 in reference to “an idle flam of shabby Irish Bogtrotters” in the Philanax Misopappas , “Tory Plot” It implied an Irishman to denote the political label when Tories originally referred to Irish outlaws, robbers, or bandits.
The term blarney from Blarney Castle near Cork, has negative connotations of “soft, wheedling speeches and flattery to gain some end” since its appearance in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). A quotation from Walter Scott in 1796 states that the flattery is transparent: “I hold it … to be all blarney”
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