Usually it's not the Irish singers who popularise songs that originated outside of Ireland are not the people who wrongly describing songs as Irish. Unfortunately people who learn the songs from the Irish sources assume that they are Irish and describe the songs as such. Often they are half right as the songs have been created or developed by Irish emigrants and brought back home after a generation or more. As many of you have already said, you can't always pin a song down to one country or another.

Sometimes Irish singers and songwriters have deliberately turned songs from elsewhere into Irish songs. Si Kahn's "Aragon Mill" got turned into "Belfast Mill". OK, often in the folk tradition people change placenames to fit a song to their own locality. And the author of this song may even be pleased at evidence of its universality. But it doesn't seem right that a known living author isn't acknowledged; lots of people think this song is Irish because of a one-word alteration.

Curiously, several of the songs of the fight for Irish independence from Britain were closely modelled on English songs. Examples include "All around my hat I wear a tri-coloured ribbon" and "I am a merry ploughboy and I plough the fields all day ... I'm off to join the IRA"

ozmacca - give Dan O'Connell credit for the steam engine (or at least for a novel use of it - see the song)