BBC denies cutting out Irish language lyrics from new CMAT song after singer criticises ‘crazy edit'
The song was released yesterday and debuted on BBC Radio 1 at about 6pm. The first 45 seconds of the nearly five minute song were cut and featured lyrics in Irish.
'It was not my decision to have the Irish language edited out of the first ever play of EURO-COUNTRY on radio,' CMAT said.
'I don't know if it was a mistake or what happened, but that was not my decision. I don't know who edited it out – that was crazy of them.'
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Taking to social media, the Meath-born singer, whose full name is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, said BBC representatives were in contact with her yesterday 'and said that they are going to play the Irish language intro, the full version of EURO-COUNTRY tomorrow to make up for it'.
'Not my decision, but they're fixing it,' she said.
In a response to The Irish Times, a BBC spokesperson said: 'BBC Radio 1 did not edit the Irish language from this single.'
They said the station played the radio version of the song 'that was supplied by the record label'.
The added that the station 'has already played the full version that includes the Irish language intro today ... and it will be played again' on two shows later today.
The lyrics at the start of the song read: 'Cad is gá dom a dhéanamh mura bhfuil mé ag bualadh leat? / Tá ceann folamh agam, agus peastantach nua / Eirím níos dofheicthe, is tú imithe ó mo shoal / Níl aon rud fágtha sa scátháin / An mbeidh mé álainn mhaol?'
This translates in English to: 'What am I to do if I'm not meeting you? / I have an empty head, and a new personality / I become more invisible, you're gone from my life / There's nothing left in the mirror / Will I be beautiful bald?'
The song's bridge, which references the spike in suicides after the 2008 financial crash, was also edited out of the radio broadcast.
'All the big boys / All the Berties / All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me,' she sings in reference to scandal surrounding former taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
'I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me,' she continues in the song's bridge.
'They also did a crazy editing out of [that line], which I guess is more understandable,' CMAT said on social media..
In an interview with The Irish Times last month, she explained that 'everyone else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everyone became unemployed' in the aftermath of the crash.
'Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash,' she said.
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