There's a painfully appropriate Tom Lehrer lyric about protest music, "They may have won all the battles, but we had all the best songs."

Bitterness and weary sadness run through the music of both sides of the Irish Troubles documented in Charles Lane's richly detailed program putting the folk music of Ireland in historical context.

Folk songs have a habit of outliving their political references and this program re-sets several centuries of Celtic music in the bloody conflict that surrounded its creation.

Certainly appropriate for programming around St. Patrick's Day, stations should note the seriousness of this presentation. The music here is a tool for understanding or at least trying to put a human voice to a tragic conflict and should not be casually programed as exclusively musical fare.