Flogging Molly - Tobacco Island Lyrics Meaning

I hope this one hasn't been flogged to death already (pardon the pun), but I just finished watching the 1970 move "Cromwell", starring Richard Harris and felt the need to elucidate. This is the bit of history that inspired Dave's lyrics. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell, in his zeal for God and the slave trade, sent an expedition to seize Jamaica from Spain. It soon became Britain's West Indian base for the slave trade.

In 1649 Oliver Cromwell and his 20,000-man army invaded Ireland. They killed the entire garrison of Drogheda and slaughtered all the townspeople. Afterwards, Cromwell said, "I do not think 30 of their whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody in the Barbados."

Under Cromwell's policy, known as "To Hell or Connaught," Irish landowners were driven off millions of acres of fertile land. Those found east of the river Shannon after May 1, 1654, faced the death penalty or slavery in the West Indies. Cromwell rewarded his soldiers and loyal Scottish Presbyterians by "planting" them on large estates. The British set up similar "plantations" in Barbados, St. Kitts and Trinidad.

The demand for labor on these distant plantations prompted mass kidnappings in Ireland. A pamphlet published in 1660 accused the British of sending soldiers to grab any Irish people they could in order to sell them to Barbados for profit: "It was the usual practice with Colonel Strubber, Governor of Galway, and other commanders in the said country, to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies, and by computations sold out of the said country about a thousand souls."