I've read through the majority of this thread, and to be honest all I've heard is a lot of song names repeated and repeated one that springs to mind and i don't mean to critisise this song in any way but raglan Road:It's a song for a male performer! it was written by a man! also included is Kilkelly Ireland while it has beautiful lyrics narrates the letters a father writes to his son.I no these are just technicalities but they matter. i stumbled onto this site looking for a different song to sing for a competion that is held here in Ireland called scor and when i saw the heading Irish songs for female singers i thought well this is graet i'll have found a song in no time.i'm replying to a thread that was started over three years ago and well i'm sorry to say that i haven't found anything out of the ordinary.if you want to truly perform an irish song to the best of your ability you must first find a song that suits your voice and that you believe in this is different for everybody, for example when i'm asked to sing my father always asks me to sing "only a river runs free" but for some reason i was never comfortable singing it until about two weeks ago when i heard a version of it playing in my dads car i guess something just made sense a song sang in a different way than your used to can be quite powerfull. I'm only 15 years old and i won't pretend i know every thing there is to know about it but i've been singing since as long as i can remember i think my first song that i claimed to be my own was "nobody's child!"If you want to hear a really good irish singer the one name that springs to mind would have to be Sinead O' Conner although some of her compositions are are quite new her version of "she move through the fair"( featured on the michael collins film)is abslootly fantastic plus "scorn not his simplicity" even though is was written by Phil Coulter these two names are probably the greatest song writers/performers ireland has produced well in the last while anyway.
I've nothing much else to say except i hope someone finds some use in all of this!