Thank you, Jim.

I've seen comments that this song is unusual in that the singer embraces emigration in a positive frame of mind, which is not usually the case with most emigration songs.

That, and the fact that it refers to Canada (now a popular destination for 21st-century emigration from Ireland), makes it a song for our times 200 years on. To quote one of our cack-handed politicians, it presents emigration as a "lifestyle choice" - or, in the worldview of the economists who have become our new priestly caste, as a rational response to economic restructuring in a globalised environment.

This positive attitude to emigration (feck it, the country's banjaxed, I'm getting out of here while I still have a life ahead of me) could also explain the brisk delivery commented on in the song notes Jim links to.