I should qualify my recent remarks by saying that none of what I said in them should be read as indicating that there actually is an extant Irish language text which is contemporary with the composition of the music. The best source (to my knowledge) for anyone really interested in tracking a relatively early set of lyrics (if such existed) for Tabhair dom do lámh would be Dónal O'Sullivan's work on the Bunting Mss. Another likely source and one of the first ports of call for research into material such as this would be Clár Litridheachta na Nua-Ghaedhilge (spelling betrays terminus) which is a reference book giving further points of reference to work published before the Clár itself. Checking the index of first lines there would point people in the right direction.

As stated above, this is an area of enthusiasm for me rather than expertise, but I would be surprised if an early text (if it existed) would not have been included in anthologies with which I would be reasonably familiar and no such inclusion comes to mind.

To be absolutely definitive on this point one would have to be familiar with a huge amount of unpublished ms material since the seventeenth century from Ireland and Scotland.

I would like to qualify previous remarks regarding relative stresses in the Irish and English versions by raising the possibility also that Ruairí Dall had a syllabic metre in mind rather than a song metre given his dates.

Always good to keep in mind though an observation (which I don't think Perry Mason ever made) that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.