Ok guest. The Kathleen thread didn't actually say steal - it said "claimed as trad. Irish" but I think this is not quite accurate. I'd say in most cases these songs have been attributed as trad Irish - in many cases by those who either knew no better, or were too lazy to go and check it out. Maybe I was getting a bit paranoid, but I've read a lot of these threads and the same stuff gets repeated again and again. Maybe I should have named this thread "Songs wrongly thought to be Irish" and everybody could have posted their favourites there. Then people could just add a link to that thread every time they felt inclined to rant on the subject rather than clog up the origin threads.

I'm all for accuracy. There are people out there who seem to feel qualified to publish song books who don't feel the need to research the material in any sort of a thorough way. But obviously there's a market there for this stuff, so they might feel there isn't any need for accuracy.

At the end of the day (as Roy Keane might put it) I think Rich M has the right attitude. I sing and play songs from many parts of the world, and if anybody can be bothered to listen to me, and they want to know, I'll tell them as much as I know about the provenance of the song. In the unlikely event that anyone was willing to record and publish any of that material I'd do my best to produce accurately researched sleeve notes, but there's no guarantee that people would read them.

By the way, as far as I'm concerned you (The English and/or The Scots) can have Danny Boy back now. We're finished with it !