Since the Flute is a pop-cultural production, what's more iinteresting to me than what the author or the publisher intended (which can't know for certain) is how the song has been received.

It's undoubtedly humorous, but at whose expense? It ends with the indefatigable, irrepressible Orange flute whistling "The Protestant Boys," a loyalist anthem with lyrics like

   When James half a bigot, and more of a knave
   With masses and Frenchmen the land would enslave,
   The Protestant Boys for liberty drew
   And showed with the Orange the banner of Blue.

Historian Richard Parfitt writes of the Flute that "Orangemen confronted [fears of Catholic social and political influence] in comedic song, belittling and disarming what they otherwise regarded as a genuine threat to Protestantism."

Of course, that's just his opinion, but even humorous anti-Catholicism must have offended a lot of Catholics since ca1900, and especially since 1969.

When the Clancys and Makem performed the song in the early '60s, it sounded to disinterested listeners like me (and clearly to them as well) like just a bit of clever fun. And so itstill sounds to many.

Here in the U.S., there's occasional but apparently growing objection to the "Star-Spangled Banner" as "racist" because

a) the poem contains, in the rather convoluted third stanza, the lines
   
   No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
   From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.

and

b) the fact that Francis Scott Key owned slaves proves it.


That's despite the evident fact that the "offensive" lines don't refer to actual slaves but to the British army, and that Key (and others like Washington and Jefferson) could be patriots just as much as they were slaveholders.

If one misapprehended word in an obscure verse is enough to raise hackles, it seems reasonable to assume that a flute that whistles "The Protestant Boys" even as "Papists" attempt to destroy it will raise even bigger, though clearly not universal, hackles.