Skw@,

Most homes in Ireland had some or all of the following items of decoration during the sixties:

Portrait photo of JFK (along with Jackie, usually)
Portrait photo of the pope

Picture of the Sacred Heart usually with a small red lamp lighting in front of it

Statue of the Child of Prague (a religious icon)
A collection box for St Anthony, who could be guaranted to find missing objects. The amount of money promised increased with the value of the missing object and the length of time it was missing.
This puts a context on some of the references in this song.

Frank Patterson is a serious Irish tenor who would not normally be associated with any version of Spancil Hill.

Harpic is a trade name for a toilet cleaner (!). Surely the last refuge of the drinker . . .

I see Alice Glenn has been replaced by Maggie Thatcher in this version.

I feel like a Latin scholar explaining the classical references in a John Donne poem...

Paddy