Paddywhackery: the Mary Wallopers write for the crowd they built

Paddywhackery is the first Mary Wallopers record where the band's reputation stops doing the work and the songs start. Eleven tracks, most of them built to be shouted back at a festival crowd, and a temper in the writing that makes an 18th-century bounty and a 1930s building site sound like last week. It is loud and funny, and more careful than it lets on.

They are from Dundalk, County Louth, and started as brothers Charles and Andrew Hendy with Seán McKenna. The lockdown livestreams from the Hendys' house built the audience before the records did, and two albums, The Mary Wallopers in 2022 and Irish Rock N Roll in 2023, turned that audience into a touring one. The lineup keeps moving: McKenna left in March 2025, and the band now runs Róisín Barrett on bass, Ken Mooney of The Urges on drums and Finnian O'Connor on tin whistle and uilleann pipes. The politics were never a side room. They met an anti-5G protest in tinfoil hats, played a 2023 Gaza fundraiser at the 3Arena, and had their Victorious Festival set cut after two minutes in August 2025 when they refused to take a Palestinian flag off the stage; two other acts pulled out of the bill in response. John Sheahan of The Dubliners called them mediocre musicians and singers in 2024. That verdict does not survive this record.

Paddywhackery is out on BC Records, with a Dinked Edition pressing for the vinyl run, and it mixes its sources on purpose: original songs, folk standards rebuilt, and historical stories rescued from the archive and set to a beat. The title is a word used to sneer at Irishness. The band have taken it as a name badge and gone to work.

Fast is the default. The guitars are crisp, a bodhrán sets the march, and a tin whistle melody carries the choruses while the uilleann pipes ring out over the top. The vocals sit well forward of everything else, half-sung and half-bawled, and the arrangements stay simple on purpose: verse, chorus, and a room full of people who already know the second line.

Crowns Of England opens it with a thirst England cannot quench and a walk back to Dundalk town, the place that quenched it first. The Big Mixer goes after Robert McAlpine's firm and the Irish navvies it worked in the 1930s, then finds the same arrangement at a Tesco self-checkout, its chorus riding a whistle line that will not leave. Seán na Sagart is the fastest thing here, an 18th-century priest hunter set to a chorus of "100 for a Bishop, 20 for a Priest," which is a bounty list and a hook in the same breath. Landlord's Demise turns on the property-owning class, tips its hat to Tom Barry, and gives the front half its one breather before the volume comes back up.

Workers Song and The Mickey Dam are the two reimagined ones, and the band treats them as inheritance. The first is a straight homage and knows it. The second slows the tempo and strips the arrangement back, letting the older melody carry the weight on its own, and it is the last thing you hear.

It is for anyone who has stood in a field for Lankum and then wanted the tent to go up a gear, or who followed the rowdier end of The Pogues and wondered who picked it up. These songs are built to be sung back, which is why the European dates that follow will do more for them than streaming ever will. Nobody looking for subtlety is going to find it here.

The dip is real, though. Ending on The Mickey Dam is a misjudgement: after ten tracks of attack, the record hands the last word to its quietest arrangement, and the momentum that Seán na Sagart and The Big Mixer build leaks away right at the close. The band's whole case is volume, in the writing and in the singing, and this is the one place the record does not trust it.

Paddywhackery is a record written for the crowd the band built, and it hits that crowd more often than not. The songs are up, the history is load-bearing, and the only thing left to argue about is the last three minutes.

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