Songfacts®:

• Lisa O'Neill is an Irish folk musician who often writes songs about Irish people who are no longer around to tell their stories. In this tune from her fourth studio album, Heard A Long Gone Song, she sings from the perspective of Violet Gibson, an Irishwoman who was committed to a psychiatric hospital in after attempting to assassinate Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1926. Although Gibson was institutionalized until her death in 1956, O'Neill doesn't believe she was insane.
  
  "People still scratch their heads today at what level of madness was Violet Gibson at to shoot a man like Mussolini. I just think, do we not have that answer? She wasn't mad. She saw something that others didn't see. She saw that this guy was going to a very negative place very fast," O'Neill told Songfacts in a 2023 interview.
  
  O'Neill's song also draws a parallel to modern times, where people like Violet Gibson are still condemned by society.
  
  "I know that women in the world, and people in the world today, it's still very easy to label someone as mad when they are speaking against the status quo," she continued. "It's frightening that someone can be imagined in history as not to be taken seriously when really the opposite was true."
• The idea came from a songwriting prompt that O'Neill received from her friend Ian Lynch of the Irish band Lankum. She'd never heard of Violet Gibson, but when she started researching the woman's story, a song developed out of the anger she felt about the way Gibson was treated. In the lyrics, Gibson shares her motive for targeting Mussolini ("I simply saw a bad egg and I thought I'd take the bad egg out"), her time at St. Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, England, and her wish to return to Ireland.
• O'Neill admits it's a risky business putting words in the mouths of dead people who can't speak for themselves, but she incorporated facts she learned about Gibson for authenticity.
  
  "You are taking a risk and suggesting she might have talked like this and said that," she told Songfacts. "There are facts in there. There are images in there of what she did love to do, and she spent all these years at the psychiatric hospital and loved to feed the birds and she did have a wish to come back and be buried in Ireland, so I bring us back to the address of Merrion Square [a famous Georgian garden square in Dublin]. There's lot of facts in there. I'm being brave I suppose and taking a risk by taking her voice and suggesting she's saying:
  
  I moved in silence
  for the love of truth not violence
  I'm mad and I know
  people don't really change I suppose
  they just go a little bad when they go"
• O'Neill released her debut album, Has An Album, in 2009. Two years later, her career took off when British singer-songwriter David Gray brought her on his Lost and Found tour as an opening act. By the time she issued Heard A Long Gone Song in 2018, she had two of Ireland's Choice Music Awards nominations and a gig at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival to her credit.