Rapper Blue Niall’s new project reimagines his life merged with the Irish myth of Oisín and Niamh

Just inside the pillars at the front entrance to the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street, the rapper and artist Niall Morahan was sitting on a bench in a white Aran jumper and Dublin GAA cap.

It was a little after 3pm on the grey post-St Patrick’s Day bank holiday Monday, and there were only a handful of people wandering around the area – mostly consulting their phones for directions.

Morahan, who performs under the name Blue Niall, associates the archaeological museum, in part, with his childhood, he says. “I would have come here with my school.”

But, it also carried some significance as he grew up.

It was one of those places in Dublin that captured his imagination once he returned to the city in 2018 after spending six years in London, he says, now strolling through its echoey ground floor.

“When I started to miss home, I wanted to come back in and go through my culture,” he says, passing display cases with golden collars from the Iron Age and the Bronze Age.

It was then, upon his return and while developing his latest project, Oisín: A Modern Retelling of the Story of Tír na nÓg, that he became immersed in the museum, reappropriating its artefacts to concoct his story, told through music, videos and a graphic novel.

A sprawling and surreal odyssey, Oisín is a fictionalised reimagining of Morahan’s own biography, merged with the Irish myth of Oisín and Niamh in Tír na nÓg – the Land of the Young.

Personal myth

In a dim corner of the museum, by the golden glow emanating from a case displaying the Corleck Head, Morahan grabbed a seat.

The Corleck Head is a three-faced stone idol uncovered in County Cavan, and dating from the first or second century AD.

It is one of several objects within the museum that makes an appearance in the Oisín, graphic novel, which Morahan created with Limerick artist Emmett Walsh, otherwise known as Diabhal.

In one panel of the story, two of its faces are replaced by those of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Micheál Martin.

The idea for Oisín stemmed from his 2019 EP Blue Summer, released a year after he had returned home to Dublin, he says, and from a desire to be more ambitious in the scope of his work and reflective of his own identity.

He started to experiment with samples of Irish traditional music, sounds that gave it a sense of place, he says. “My music before felt like it could have been made by a lot of people. It wasn’t personal enough.”

It was a case of endless writing until something stuck, and once he amassed a large enough trove, he began to reflect on whether there was a story contained there, he says. “There were songs about my childhood and adolescence, and when I decided to leave for London.”

“When I looked at this all, I felt like I saw it somewhere before,” he says, and as he started to look for what it felt familiar to, he concluded that it had a few parallels with the story of Tír na nÓg.

The hero’s journey

Morahan was born in London, but spent his childhood in Ballinteer, the south Dublin suburb, he says.

He attended Gaelscoileanna at both the primary and secondary level – he uses both Irish and English in his lyrics.

“I probably write more poetically in Irish, but also more simply because of my limitations,” he says. “But when I am adding it in, it feels like channelling my ancestors, almost like what comes through is coming from a different person.”

In the case of Oisín, that other person is the titular character, whose story hits the same milestones as Morahan, growing up in Celtic Tiger Dublin, deciding to move to London in 2012, and returning to the city in 2018.

Each frame of Morahan’s own life is heightened, and reframed loosely around the myth of Oisín, the warrior and son of Fionn Mac Cumhail, who is brought to Tír na nÓg by the otherworldly Niamh, where he lives for 300 years.

Morahan’s version of Oisín leaves Ireland for a number of reasons, Morahan says. “He finds the small-town mindset claustrophobic, and he goes to London, which is initially a very freeing, open-minded place.”

But as time wears on, London alienates him, and Oisín eventually decides to return home, like in the myth, on a white horse, which Morahan reinterprets as a half-horse, half-Ryanair plane.

And like in the original myth, the Ireland he returns to is vastly different, he says. “It’s completely changed, and comes to reflect the more Tír na nÓg-like structure that is England.”

Real and unreal

After leaving the National Museum on Monday, Morahan ambles in loops around the George’s Street area.

Bit by bit, he has been releasing songs online from the Oisín album, beginning with the tracks “New Celtic Flow” and “Leanbh.” [sic] – the latter directly reflecting on his childhood, playing on the green outside the Ballinteer Shopping Centre.

The most recent release, “Paddy Daddy”, looks more at his time in London, at how certain facets of Irishness can become elevated as a person moves abroad, he says. “It’s also about the commodification of Irishness, the ‘Plastic Paddy’, and playing up to the stereotypes ourselves.”

Across the lyrics and the imagery in both the graphic novel – in development – and the music videos released in tandem with the songs, there is a strong element of political and social satire.

But, for each element of ironic satire which sets Morahan’s fictional character in a world apart from his own, there are moments that pull it back to reality, like using voice notes from his mother, saying she is looking forward to seeing him at home again.

It was about creating a blend between the unreal and the painfully real, he says. “I wanted to bring in this whole world of artifice and then shrink it right back down to the real person.”