What is the best-selling single in Irish history?
A real reminder of a country’s cultural remoteness is had when perusing the records of their national top single sellers.
Not behind, or judging from some lofty pedestal of musical snobbery, but simply observing the national soundtracks vastly different from countries that may share the same geographical borders. What dominates the charts serves as a powerful soundtrack to people’s lives, a nation’s events, and the chapters of a shared history, coloured by vastly different pop songbooks in the memory of states, no matter how close their proximity.
Ireland’s a case in point. Just over the Irish Sea and behind one fraught border, the Republic feels oh so close yet far removed, should anyone have ever visited. A quick look at Ireland’s top sellers reveals some pop common ground, Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, and a shared love of Wings’ ‘Mull of Kintyre’ all pepper their ten biggest singles of all time.
There’s also a dash of Boney M and plenty of Sweden’s biggest pop export, ABBA, boasting as many as four big-hitters in the claimed sales smashers.
But Dr Hook & the Medicine Show country pop number ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ sitting at incredible number ten in claimed sales? And Bill Whelan featuring fifth on the Irish pop record books with ‘Riverdance’, launching the namesake stage show, only half remembered over in Britain as a 1990s TV footnote? Clearly, such numbers were big deals for the day’s Irish pop pickers while carrying less weight beyond the Republic’s borders.
While definitive data is hard to glean, Ireland’s biggest-selling singles on the certified and claimed front will respectively trigger no surprises while also prompting a “who?!” at the artist who has broken the Republic’s musical records.
So, what is Ireland’s biggest-selling single?
When it comes to certified unit shifters from the Irish Recorded Music Association, up to 2012, Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ rework in memory of Princess Diana’s death ranks at the top of the Irish historic charts. Seemingly swept up in the operatic grief that engulfed the UK and much of the world, the single’s 33million sales count Ireland as a significant chunk of its frenzied grab, beating the aforementioned Whelan and Popstars winners Six’s cover of ‘There’s a Whole Lot of Loving’.
Over to claimed sales, and the top of the Irish pops is a singer from the Irish showband tradition that never saw much success outside the country. Taking a stab at Marilyn Sellars’ ‘One Day at a Time’, Gloria counted herself as one of the many around the world who found chart wins of Kris Kristofferson’s co-penned country and western number alongside Scottish singer Lena Martell’s domestic number one version.
Dropped in August 1977, Gloria’s rendition of ‘One Day at a Time’ would sell over 120,000 claimed copies, topping the Irish charts after its re-release the following year and remaining in the charts throughout the entirety of 1979 and into 1980, the longest single run in Irish pop history with a hefty 90 weeks in the Top 30.
