Suain is a dream in Irish and Scots Gaedhlig.

Why does it matter where the song comes from? It "sounds" Irish to me - the tune, that is, not the song - but so what? It's an American song.

A few years ago I was on a bus, and standing behind me was an irascible middle European, one of the first of the flood of Poles and Latvians and Lithuanians and Estonians now bringing their talents to Ireland.

He was lecturing an Irish friend about how the tunes of which Irish people are so proud are "all from eastern Europe anyway".

I suspect that there's a library of tunes that's travelled from Africa to Greenland and from Ireland to Kamchatka, and vice versa. We are humans. We sing our song.