Seanchaí, NYC's Underground ‘Irish Rebel Hip-Hop' Group, Is Back

Forbes

09-07-2025

Seanchaí, New York City's influential underground 'Irish rebel hip-hop' group, is back again after a twelve-year hiatus. Fronted by Chris Byrne, cofounder of New York's legendary Celtic punk band, Black 47, Seanchaí also features Ursula Garry, a talented vocalist and flutist who trained under Martin Mulvihill and Jack Coen, and the band's multi-instrumentalist beatmaker, Andrew Harkin. Recently, Seanchaí played an acclaimed series of sold-out Manhattan shows at Ernie O'Malley's. This Saturday, they will be bringing their groundbreaking mix of politically-inflected punk, electronic beats, traditional Irish music, and hip-hop lyricism to rap's birthplace, The Bronx.
Seanchaí performs a sold-out show at The Speakeasy at Ernie O'Malley's in 2025. Seanchaí
Seanchaí is the Irish term for a storyteller, someone who preserves and recounts communal histories, traditions, and folklore. In Gaelic Ireland, though, seanchaithe (oral historians) had formal status as such in social order alongside ollaim (scholars), filí (poets), and baird (bards). British rule dispossessed seanchaithe of their status, although they remained unofficial – and sometimes countercultural – custodians of collective memory among ordinary people. The seanchaí is thus a paradoxical figure, one mediated by centuries of colonial history, who can speak from both the political margins and cultural centre simultaneously, and whose speech can be both radical and profoundly conscious of tradition.
Storyteller Michael Heeney relates a fairy tale in Gaelic to a gathering of villagers in a cottage in Teelin, County Donegal, March 1947. The local word for a storyteller is 'seanchai' or 'shanachie'. Original Publication : Picture Post - 4338 - The Irish Story Teller - pub. 15th March 1947(Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/) Getty Images
'For me,' Byrne reflects, 'the songs that I listen to, whether that's Joe Heaney singing or 'It's a Good Day' by Shungudzo or Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' when it came out hit me straight away. When it comes to the words, a good story is a good story. Good stories are told well.' If overproduced, commercialized songs play tag with a fleeting moment of pop culture, music with a seanchaí-storytelling ethos often borders the avant-garde because of its willingness to see surprising continuities between the past and present.
'The timing of our return,' Byrne remarks, 'means different things to different people. For Andrew, it's the political atmosphere, and it's not lost on me that there's a very successful Irish-language rap group now. Unlike the generation Kneecap comes from, our generation grew up afraid of hip-hop. We were like a nightmare to them.'
LONDON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 08: Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvaí of Kneecap attend the 27th British Independent Film Awards at The Roundhouse on December 08, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage) Samir Hussein/WireImage
In a sense, Kneecap's confrontational postcolonial aesthetic involves historically-minded performances as seanchaithe. Similarly, Sinead O'Connor positioned herself as public, populist seanchaí in songs like 'Famine,' a beat-driven lesson on The Great Hunger, as does Damien Dempsey in his multi-genre performance project, Tales from Holywell . In all these cases, assuming the traditional role of storyteller-historian goes hand-in-hand with an openness to seemingly 'nontraditional' musical forms for Irish music such as rap, reggae, or electronica.
'A lot of Chris's songs are educational,' Garry reflects. Byrne's lyrics present lessons from the Irish and Irish-American legacies of colonial repression, diaspora, revolution, generational urban life, and working-class politics. One song celebrates Ernesto Guevara Lynch. Another retells the story of Gypo Nolan from Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel, The Informer . Yet another reminds us that American military-industrial elites 'have never had it so good since the Gilded Age / Raising an army / Not the minimum wage.'
A poster for John Ford's 1935 drama 'The Informer' starring Victor McLaglen and Heather Angel. (Photo by Movie Poster) Getty Images
If these are a seanchaí's lessons in terms of content , Seanchaí demonstrates an important point about how the forms of Irish music evolve. Diasporic cultures tend to bridge the felt distance between home and away, past and present, self and other, with a kind of experimental traditionalism. Take Jean-Michel Basquiat for model, whose exploration of a repertoire of ideas was firmly rooted in 'suggestive dichotomies' between 1980s NYC and a panoply of heroic figures, saints, and kings that evoked Catholic Haitian traditions. 'A lot of my politics in terms of writing,' Byrne remarks, 'came from Sandinista by The Clash. I revisit it every few years.' But for the NYC-based Byrne, NYC-based rap like 'The Message' made 'the most punk sense of anything else I'd heard at the time. So that's what we set out to so, break down all the rules. Why not just do it all if you can?'
Seanchaí promotional poster from April 2025. Seanchaí
There are continuities between, say, Fontaines DC's 'Big,' The Jim Carroll Band's 'Catholic Boy,' and Seanchaí's 'Irish Catholic Boy,' that speak to free circulation of shared expressive language across geographical distances and generations rather than centres and margins of cultural influence. The same might be said of Seanchaí's defiant 'Fenians,' penned by Byrne – an ex-NYC cop – and famously played on loop overnight at a West Belfast radio station.
Like Black 47 before it, Seanchaí educates its fans, but not in the sense of asking pupils to re-present the lessons of a schoolmaster on command. 'When something moves me,' Garry reflects, 'it's more about someone's voice. What we're doing is clearly giving people something that's fun to dance to or listen to, but they don't know they're being educated,' at least in a conventional sense. If education is potentially liberatory, it is only so when it involves active participation. This is a point made by radical educators like Paulo Freire, who draws a stark distinction between the 'banking' and 'problem-posing' models of education, or Augusto Boal's 'Theatre of the Oppressed,' which asks audience members to actively participate in the direction of dramatic storytelling and performance.
BOSTON, MA -July 2006: (MANDATORY CREDIT) Black 47 performs. July 2006 in Boston. (Photo by) Getty Images
Part of the necessary creative and social risk assumed in Seanchaí's experimental traditionalism is that you will get shaken from placing yourself or others into simple categories. 'If James Connolly were alive today,' Byrne stresses, 'I don't see him campaigning for a lot of people running for office at the moment,' an important reflection in a fraught New York City election year. 'I've always tried to keep with a philosophy of presenting really good thinkers who went against the status quo but didn't put on a jersey. It's a lot harder in 2025, presenting the case of really good thinkers without saying you're on the team.'
Celtic Rock musician Chris Byrne, of the group Black 47, plays uilleann pipes as he performs onstage at Paddy Reilly's Music Bar, New York, New York, January 1, 1992. (Photo by) Getty Images
And part of Seanchaí's experiment involves seeing what tradition becomes in the hands of an audience this year. Byrne is the former owner of the legendary NYC bar, Rocky O'Sullivan's, which hosted writers such as Jimmy Breslin, Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, and Edna O'Brien. It is not surprising that Seanchaí is performing at New York venues that further freewheeling conversations about Irish and Irish-American culture, such as Ernie O'Malley's or The Burren Public House, which regularly host notable writers, storytelling events, and original performances with an edge.
Playwright and WBAI personality, John McDonagh, hosts 'Say It Ain't So' at Ernie O'Malley's. John McDonagh
'It just struck me,' Byrne reflects. 'I don't know if we're changing people's perspectives or vice versa. They don't want to kill us now. They're my people. I know them. I know their politics. And people in general know that society's screwed. And people like to dance.'
Ar ais arís – Seanchaí is back again. They will be performing this Saturday at 9pm at The Burren Public House, located at 4342 Katonah Avenue in The Bronx. Limited tickets are available on Eventbrite here.