"Really? Who's common sense? Please explain"
People are known to have made song independent of print throughout the 19th and into the twentieth century - the large repertoire of unpublished local Irish songs made as times such as those you described as their being too busy staying alive and feeding their families - famines, wars - civil and international), mass evictions, mass emigration, general hardship and poverty, oppression...... examples of this, are to be found from Travellers, the bothies, soldiers, seamen, textile workers, miners, and, no doubt from other group and communities (all independent of print and serving people who either couldn't or chose not to rely on literacy for their own culture.
All have produced a wealth of home-made songs, on these events and of life in general - man, it seems, is a natural song-maker with an in-built need to record his and her life in verse.
Yet you describe our folk repertoire as being no different from the pop songs produced for the mass market and the audiences as being mere recipients of a product - produced by an anonymous school of poets who have proved themselves less than adequate to create such gems as those to be found in our traditional repertoire - HACKS in name and description.
Any small knowledge we have of our song traditions - and it is minute - comes from the end of the 19th century, when our traditions were largely in decline, and to dismiss our people who we know to have made songs as "retired people scribbling verse" is, to me, is totally illogical.
Jim Carroll