I first heard the song The Boys of Barr Na Sraide in Ireland on the small isle of Inishbofin off the coast of Galway. My wife’s grandmother was born here and she immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. We had visitied Paddy Joe and Regina King, some distant cousins of my wife’s. Their son, Peadar (the Irish version of Peter), had shown me a CD by Colm O’Donnell, Farewell to Evening Dances, which he was very fond of and I share that feeling now. The title of Colm O’Donnell’s CD is taken from the song The Hill of Knacknashee, another sentimental and lyrical ballad on the CD. I shamelessly copied the idea and took a line out of The Boys of Barr Na Sraide, the line that goes “And when the hills were bleeding and rifles were aflame…”, to use it as the title for my book “The Bleeding Hills“.