B126: Don't Forget Your Shovel

19/3/2024

For the weekend that was in it, St. Patrick’s weekend, it got me thinking of the Irish diaspora away from home. I was thinking in particular of my contemporaries who left school in 1983 and emerged into the world looking for jobs at the height of a recession. Many of my classmates went to the UK, US or Australia and found work in offices, hotels and factories. Many of the fellas went onto building sites. In the intervening years many have returned to Ireland but not all.

I was reminded recently of a song from that time sung by Christy Moore, “Don’t Forget Your Shovel”. You don’t hear it played so much anymore. Maybe it’s indicative of the times or the type of Irish emigrant and their choice of work nowadays. Maybe shovels aren’t used much on modern building sites anymore!

In any case, “Don’t Forget Your Shovel” brings me right back to 1983. The song was written by Christy Hennessy, a Kerry man….but made famous by Christy Moore a Kildare man. As a portrait of the Irish navvy's former lot in Britain, it is just as biting as McAlpine's Fusiliers. In the space of three minutes, it covers everything from the lack of sanitation on building sites, to contractors' cynicism about health and safety, meaning-of-life concerns of manual earth-movers everywhere: "We want to go to heaven but we're always digging holes."😂

Lyrics of "Don't Forget Your Shovel"

It also touches on Britain's tense relationship with us Irish, at a time when we were its biggest import. Irish immigrants were needed for the heavy lifting, but were regarded sometimes with suspicion and hostility. Or as the song puts it: "Enoch Powell will give us a job diggin' away to Annascaul/ And when we're finished digging it, he'll close the hole and all." The song's tone is jaunty and without bitterness throughout, even on the sad bit at the end: "There's six thousand five hundred and fifty nine Paddies over there in London all tryin' to dig their way back to Annascaul/ And very few of them boys is going to make it back at all./ I think that's terrible."

Christy Moore

Following his departure from band Moving Hearts, folksinger Christy Moore, also a member of the band Planxty, released his solo album ‘The Time Has Come’. The album included ‘Don’t Forget Your Shovel’. The song was described by one critic as the nearest thing possible to Kerry reggae!!
Christy Moore released ‘Don’t Forget Your Shovel’ as a single, and it became his first big hit, spending seven weeks in the Irish charts. Its success was partly due to the radio airplay it received from DJ Ronan Collins on his RTÉ Radio 2 breakfast show.

The tongue-in-cheek video accompanying the song features Moore, clad only in sandals and jeans, working with his shovel on an Irish building site.