"Harrow is just a bloody agricultural implement"
How dare you sir - isn't it one of the centres of British excellence where we send our betters to be educated!!
There are thousands of Irish songs which are not only 'in the public domain' but in fact originated with that "public" - try 'The Carroll/Mackenzie Collection' on the Clare county website, or the Inishowen or 'Goilín' collections on the Irish Traditional Music sites to see the size and the scope of them.
It's rahher limiting to narrow down Irish songs to seventeen that are well known and somewhat over-sung.
I have been staggered over the last few years to discover the number of unknown songs, locally tailored to respond to everyday occurrences, which lived only in their own localities and ceased to be sung when the memories of those occurrences faded from memory - an essential part of modern history and a lifetime's work for some enterprising soul.
As an elderly man told us a couple of years ago, "if a man farted in church, somebody made a song about it".
The Irish song repertoire is full of untouched fruit just begging to be harvested.
Jim Carroll