Today’s Open Thread notes the completely foreseeable problem Northern Ireland is posing to the feeble, delusional brains behind Brexit. The solution to the problem is simple: Give Ireland back to the Irish. Even Paul McCartney could see that back in 1972. When British troops killed 13 unarmed civil rights protesters in Derry on Jan. 31, 1972, an event quickly dubbed Bloody Sunday, McCartney wrote and recorded this tune two days later.
McCartney’s wasn’t the best-known song to come out of the Troubles — that would be U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which didn’t appear until more than a decade after the event. McCartney’s single was on record-store racks less than a month after the massacre.
Critics savaged him for it, claiming he was glomming onto a hot political issue to gain publicity after Wings’ first album, “Wild Life,” had landed with a thud the previous December. It didn’t help that the BBC banned the tune, which didn’t appear on an album until “Wild Life” got a re-release with bonus tracks in 1993.
Like a lot of McCartney’s music from the period, his approach is lightweight and banal, but that doesn’t make him wrong.
![Sir Paul McCartney & Wings - Give Ireland Back To The Irish [New Master Exp.]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/r0zGVVcsbPg/hqdefault.jpg)