The Patriot Game

The Patriot Game is a famous ballad about Fergal O’Hanlon, an Irish Republican Army volunteer killed in the 1950s. Its brief appearance in the account of Kevin McKee’s disappearance places the song’s remembered past beside a new episode of detention and execution, giving the title a historical resonance without making the two stories interchangeable.

Identity and Reference

The book identifies The Patriot Game as a famous ballad whose subject was Fergal O’Hanlon. It does not supply lyrics or details of the song’s composition; its significance here comes from the history attached to its subject and from the setting in which the title is invoked.

The Ballad in McKee’s Story

After Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright were taken by the Irish Republican Army, Dolours Price drove them south across the border and left them with a local unit. McKee was held in County Monaghan in a house belonging to the family of O’Hanlon, whose death in the 1950s had made him the subject of the ballad. The setting brings the song’s commemorative association into a scene of immediate danger: McKee was waiting there for senior leaders to arrive for his court-martial. The people guarding McKee grew fond of him. He was remembered as a good cook and an entertaining presence; at one point, he telephoned his mother from a nearby priest’s home and asked her to bring him a change of clothes. When his mother and aunts arrived, McKee was gone. The man who met them told them to take the clothes back because he would not return. The ballad’s mention thus sits beside the ordinary details of McKee’s captivity and the abruptness of his removal, rather than turning his fate into a song or a public memorial.

Historical Resonance

Elsewhere, the book traces a political climate in which peaceful protest against discrimination gave way, for Dolours Price, to armed commitment after the violence at Burntollet Bridge. Against that wider shift, the reference to a ballad about a volunteer killed decades earlier suggests how the present conflict existed alongside an inherited republican past. The text does not claim that the song caused or explained McKee’s fate; its function is more contained and pointed: it identifies the house through a name already bound to an earlier death, while the story unfolding there moves toward another.