Republic of Ireland Chants Songs & Famous Chants: From The Boys in Green to The Fields of Athenry
Republic of Ireland supporters have spent the better part of forty years turning up in enormous numbers and singing, whatever the result of the football match they were there for. It’s fair to say that 2026 handed them a helping of both extremes. Under Heimir Hallgrímsson, the Icelander who was given the manager’s role, the Boys in Green went to Budapest in the November of 2025 and watched Troy Parrott score a hat-trick, the winner deep into stoppage time, to drag them into a World Cup play-off almost nobody had given them a hope of reaching.
Then, in the way these things tend to go for Ireland, they lost the play-off semi-final to Czechia in Prague the following March and missed the finals once more. The team breaks Irish hearts on a regularly basis, but the singing does not depend on success, which is just as well, and with Dublin down to co-host Euro 2028, the crowd will soon have a tournament on its own doorstep to aim at. Here, we look at some of the songs of the Republic of Ireland football team, sung by the Boys in Green at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin as well as on the road. They are a different tradition from the rugby songbook.
There is no Ireland’s Call in here, for example, because that one belongs to the other lot. The single crossover is The Fields of Athenry, which Irish crowds sing at football and rugby alike, but which took root in the football songbook long ago and has never been removed from it, even spreading out further and reaching the likes of the Kop at Anfield, where Liverpool supporters, always a group with a decent Irish connection, are happy to belt out their own version.
Image: YantsImages, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Boys in Green
The nickname and the song arrived together. The Boys in Green was written by the journalist Michael Carwood as an official anthem for the 1988 European Championship, which was Ireland’s first ever major tournament, and it has been knocking around the stands ever since. Of course, it has received the odd lyric update whenever a new tournament comes into view. That first summer gave Irish football its founding legend, Ray Houghton heading the goal that beat England in Stuttgart, and the song still carries the giddy disbelief of a country that had finally arrived on the big stage.
Successive generations have simply swapped the tournament and the manager’s name into it and carried on, which is part of why it has lasted. The opening lines set the tone and the folksong nature of it grows from there, with the following being the original version:
We are the boys in Green,
The best you’ve ever seen,
We’ve just made history,
We’re going to Germany,
We had to wait ‘til now,
Big Jack he showed us how,
You’ll wonder where we’ve been,
When you see the boys in Green,
You’ll say Ireland, Ireland,
Show them what you’ve got,
Ireland, Ireland.
We’re going to beat the lot,
You’ll say Ireland, Ireland,
We can celebrate,
Ireland, Ireland.
In Euro ’88.
We are the boys in Green,
We’ll be on your T.V. screens,
Everyone will see,
Our lads in Germany,
We have a lot to prove,
Big Jack he’s found the groove,
You’ll wonder where we’ve been,
When you see the boys in Green.
We are the boys in Green,
And now we’ve set the scene,
For Germany next June,
It can’t come too soon,
We’re going to sing our song,
And you can sing along,
You’ll wonder where we’ve been,
When you see the boys in Green.
Put ’Em Under Pressure
If there is one record that means Italia ’90 to anyone who lived through it, this is the one. Put ’Em Under Pressure was the official song of Ireland’s 1990 World Cup campaign, produced by U2’s Larry Mullen Jr with an opening from Moya Brennan of Clannad, and it soundtracked the summer Jack Charlton’s side reached the quarter-finals in their first ever World Cup. That was the summer of Packie Bonner’s penalty save against Romania in Genoa and the whole country grinding to a halt, with the record capturing the feeling all of it.
It is played at the Aviva to this day, more a piece of shared memory than a terrace singalong mind, but it handed the crowd the chant they still reach for whenever a lull needs filling. The title line is the hook:
Put ’em under pressure!
Olé, Olé, Olé
That chant deserves its own mention, because Ireland did as much as anyone to make it a fixture of these islands. It is not remotely unique to Dublin and half of world football lays claim to it, but it arrived here on the back of the Charlton years and it remains the reflex noise an Irish crowd makes when it wants to fill a quiet minute or celebrate a goal that has just gone in. It is worth including precisely because Ireland took a borrowed chant and wore it in so thoroughly that a couple of generations now assume it was theirs all along.
Although there is nothing to it beyond the four syllables of Olé Olé Olé Olé, it is worth putting a longer sample of the lyrics here so you get a sense of the context from which they were taken:
Olé Olé Olé Olé, Olé Olé
Olé Olé Olé Olé, Olé Olé
We’ll prepare and we’ll go, and we’ll do our best
We’ll put ‘em under pressure (Ooh ahh! Ooh ahh!)
The game is about being effective
Being aggressive winning the ball
Getting on with the play
We’ll put ‘em under pressure
Olé Olé Olé Olé, Olé Olé
Olé Olé Olé Olé, Olé Olé
We’re all part of Jackie’s Army
We’re all off to Italy
And we’ll really shake them up
When we win The World Cup
‘Cause Ireland are the greatest football team
Put ‘em under pressure
It’s not going to be easy for us
But it’s not going to be easy for them either (Ooh ahh! Ooh ahh!)
We inflict our game on the people
Put ‘em under pressure (Ooh ahh! Ooh ahh!)
You’ve got a game
You’ve got a game
You’ve got a game to win
Put ‘em under pressure
Olé Olé Olé Olé, Olé Olé
Olé Olé Olé Olé, Olé Olé
Come On You Boys in Green
For the modern match day, this is the engine room. Come On You Boys in Green, shortened to COYBIG on every flag and social media post going, is the plain declaration of intent the crowd falls back on more than any other, usually paired with its close cousin Stand Up for the Boys in Green. Neither is complicated and that is exactly why they work across a full stadium. It is the sort of thing a first-time visitor to the Aviva has joined in with before they have found their seat. It is also the chant that greeted Parrott and his teammates home from Budapest.
This is the one that does the everyday work of creating atmosphere whilst the bigger anthems wait for their moment:
Come on you Boys in Green,
Come on you Boys in Green!
The Fields of Athenry
Everything else builds towards this. The Fields of Athenry was written by Pete St John in the 1970s. It is a ballad about a man transported to Australia for stealing food during the Great Famine and it long ago became the sound of Irish support at its most defiant. Its most famous football airing came at Euro 2012, when Ireland were being taken apart four-nil by Spain and the travelling support simply refused to stop singing it, turning a hammering into one of the tournament’s abiding images.
That is the point of it. It is sung loudest when there is least to celebrate, a slow, sad tune that an entire stadium somehow makes sound like defiance. It travels everywhere the Boys in Green go, from Dublin to Budapest to whatever ground breaks their hearts next. Here’s what they sing:
By a lonely prison wall,
I heard a young girl calling,
Michael, they are taking you away,
For you stole Trevelyn’s corn,
So the young might see the morn,
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.
Low lie the Fields of Athenry,
Where once we watched the small free birds fly,
Our love was on the wing,
we had dreams and songs to sing,
It’s so lonely ’round the Fields of Athenry.
By a lonely prison wall,
I heard a young man calling,
Nothing matters Mary when you’re free,
Against the Famine and the Crown,
I rebelled, they ran me down,
Now you must raise our child with dignity.
By a lonely harbour wall,
She watched the last star falling,
As that prison ship sailed out against the sky,
Sure she’ll wait and hope and pray,
For her love in Botany Bay,
It’s so lonely ’round the Fields of Athenry.