I started to catalogue the Irish songs for which I have words in songbooks, record sleeves and so on, and enthusiastically copied from websites at the same time to keep the collection growing. I at first agonised over what I should include as Irish. I set a few ground rules:(1) include anything with specific reference to Irish places, people or institutions (2) anything which appears to have been in the irish tradition for generations (3) anything obviously Irish in language or context and (4) anything written by Thomas Moore, Percy French, Thomas Davis, Samuel Lover, etc.

I specifically did not include fairly recent Irish acquisitions from such as Ewan MacColl and Eric Bogle. Apart from a few particularly extreme examples, I did not "filter" on the grounds of taste or quality and I'm now at 2600+ and counting, many hundreds fairly recently added with the help of Mudcat.