As for Dion Boucicault, the best that can be said is that he rewrote and gave shape to something that began as a song before he was born in 1820. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature's claim for Henry Grattan Curran as author doesn't materially help, since Curran was born in 1800 and if Galvin is correct, the song was alive two years before that.

So the song seems to have begun as a folksong, or, at least, as the composition of an unknown author who was old enough to write songs in 1798. Whether there was a yet earlier version that dealt with events before the Great Rebellion is a question worth asking; just how far back can this song be traced?