Philomena Lynott, the mother of Thin Lizzy's late-singer and bassist Phil Lynott, has taken Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to task for using her son's 1976 classic "The Boys Are Back In Town" during last week's Republican National Convention. Philomena, who wrote the 1996 biography of her son, My Boy: The Philip Lynott Story, slammed the GOP ticket, telling Ireland's HotPress.com, "I am really upset at Philip's music being used in Mitt Romney's campaign in a political way that Philip would not have approved of. As far as I am concerned, Mitt Romney's opposition to gay marriage and to civil unions for gays makes him anti-gay -- which is not something that Philip would have supported. He had some wonderful gay friends, as indeed I do, and they deserve equal treatment in every respect, whether in Ireland or the United States."

She went on to say: "Neither would Philip have supported his policy of taxing the poor and offering tax cuts to the rich, which Paul Ryan is advocating. There is certainly no way that I would want the Lynott name to be associated with any of those ideas."

• Phil Lynott was bi-racial, with his mother being Irish and his father Afro-Guyanese. Philomena explained: "There is a black President of America, which to me -- as it would have been to Philip, as a proud, black Irishman -- is wonderfully symbolic. I have a lot of time for Barack Obama, so to hear 'The Boys Are Back In Town' being appropriated by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in their campaign against him is deeply upsetting."
• Phil Lynott died on January 4th, 1986 of multiple organ failure due to substance abuse. He was 36 years old. His bandmate, guitarist Scott Gorham leads the current edition of Thin Lizzy.