Oh, I forgot Peter Kennedy's note that Winnie got the song during her youth in Kerry and Connemara, so Bob was mistaken in that particular.

Kennedy (or perhaps John Brune, who was, I think, responsible for most of the background material in the "Travelling People" section of the book) speculates that the song was "a traveller's version of an English translation or a remake of an Irish-Gaelic original". Maybe; the refrains seem mainly to comprise of familiar Gaelic vocables, at any rate.