I'd heard something like the Yeats/Gogarty/McCormack story before, only the song in that case was one of the "Tin-Pan Alley", pseudo-Irish songs that McCormack sang so often and so well (Rachmaninov once said he sang good songs well - and bad songs better). However, I'd remembered Yeats's words as, "Oh, the damnable clarity", which I took to mean that he thought it a pity that everyone could hear what the sixty-year old, smiling public man clearly thought was rhyming drivel. It would be really unlike McCormack not to attribute the words, since he and Herbert Hughes actually collected some of Hughes' "Irish Country Songs" together and in a couple of radio broadcasts from America which were recorded, McCormack does give credit to accompanists and arrangers &c.

In my mischievous childhood, a "sally rod" was a feared instrument in the hands of a grandmother.