Great stuff - thoroughly enjoyed reading it! Would love to read the book - has it been published?

My late father was a Boyle from Donegal, and left home at the age of 14 to work in Scotland and England, sending money back to his parents. After working as a farm labourer , he then spent a large part of his working life with the big contractors including spells with McAlpines - as did many of his friends and relations from 'home'. They did have a reputation as hard working hard drinking men and many of their wives would time a visit to the pub on pay day to prevent all of the the pay packet reaching the hands of the landlord before the end of another drunken night. There were of course many exceptions to this hard drinking image - my father was a long term 'pioneer' - but this quieter side of the Irish personality understandably went unnoticed. As far as drinking is concerned, It seems to me that there was no middle ground - I don't remember who first said this but it was often a case of "one Guinness is too many, and twenty is not enough". Perhaps the alcohol was the help some of these men needed to throw off the inhibitions they brought with them from strict their Catholic upbringing when they left home. As my brother and I left school and were heading for further education, my father gave us both a taste of his working life for a couple of weeks each - about as much as we could take - and enough to convince us of the merits of a good education. That education lead me to work in the head office of the London pub company who owned the Crown in Cricklewood, so the song had an additional relevance to me as well as the one it had when I first heard it played back home in Edinburgh. In my view,like a previous poster has said I think, the men who worked for McAlpine and the other big firms were proud of what they did, despite the conditions and body-breaking nature of the work. They were also fiercely proud of their country, and the song gave their feelings a voice.