Re. "Only for nights in Ballygrant.." question. When I first heard this song fully in English (I'd heard Sean O' Se with the bilingual version before), and was able to work out what the words were most likely to be, and recognised the kind of impression of incoherence to which McG of H refers, and then heard several other versions and variations, and long before I'd been told of Mudcat, I eventually came to sing it thus:

"I wish I were (or, "wish I had you") in Carrickfergus:
Only for nights in Ballygrant
I would swim over the deepest water
The deepest water, my love to find.
But this sea is wide, and I can't get over,
Nor have I wings, that I might fly;
Then I will find me a handy boatman
To ferry me over, O my love, to die"

That is, "only for the fact that I'm perpetually drunk, or otherwise occupied, in Ballygrant, I'd do traditional heroic deeds (like swimming "the Suir, or Slaney, or the Shannon any day") in order to meet with my love." The next four lines can be taken either literally - the sea is too wide to contemplate swimming (that's why it's "deepest water" earlier, by the way), so I'll need a boatman in order to cross, or metaphorically, in that the singer's days are over (or numbered) and the sea to be crossed is no earthly one. Obviously, in order properly to bring in an allusion to Charon, the ferryman of Greek myth, it can't be "sea" since we'd be talking of the River Styx or a Celtic equivalent (Lough Derg anyone?), but then of course the words could be altered to "The water's wide.." - ah, but that's another song.

Additionally, how many verses do each of you sing, and in what order after this first one?