In resistance to the British Empire, the nineteenth-century political group known as Young Ireland promoted a bold Irish nationalism in their journal, The Nation, and ballad collection, The Spirit of the Nation. These ballads, intended to rejuvenate Irish musical culture, involved long-standing Orientalist pseudo-histories that traced Irish ancestry to eastern civilizations, namely the Phoenicians and Milesians. In opposition to British utilitarianism and white-on-white racism, these imagined identities helped articulate Young Ireland’s racial politics, as they interpolated a novel kind of nationalism into Irish traditional music. However, an examination of Young Ireland’s musical practices—their approach to setting traditional airs using recycled Jacobite poetic genres—reveals a friction in racial politics involving ideas of Orientalism, uplift, and Anglicization. These conclusions expand the current understandings of Orientalism in Irish music and lead to a deeper understanding of the complexities of Orientalism in Irish culture and history.