Poor bewildered, my heart goes out to you.

It's a Northern Ireland running joke which has taken on a life of its own. In fact it could arguably stake a claim to becoming a permathread, because it started off way off topic with someone who needed to get a load off his chest about current political issues by sharing it with fellow-mudcatters, but then mysteriously drifted bang onto topic by giving rise to a good dozen parodies, many of which are in the pure folk tradition of updating old songs to new circumstances.

It's drifted back off for a while, but even when OT it contains numerous musicians' in jokes, many of which would be accessible to folkies who are not Irish - e.g. the obsession with the Corrs which permeates the Chiff & Fipple forums, or the inevitable bodhran abuse theme.

I'm a newbie myself and still learning netiquette, so I'm still signing on as a guest, but Mudcat has been a revelation. At an early stage, when I was still aglow with gratitude for all the help which I'd got from Catters in finding words to a song, I posted a critical comment about someone lowering the tone of the site with some rather sharp political comments. But of course, I was the one who was wrong, because folk song (not least of the US variety) would be a mere shadow of itself if you took out the political content and commentary on current affairs.

On a quiet day at work I went right back to the start of the Drumcree threads and read on from there, which is the only way to make sense of this magnificently surreal phenomenon. The original posting takes ages to download, and someone kindly put it up on a website at

http://members.atozasia.com/munster/Drumcree1.htm

(sorry about the unblue unclickiness) where it's much easier to print and read, if you're interested in Drumcree itself. If you want to know more about the Northern Ireland situation as a whole, another contributor to the thread posted the URL of a trustworthy online archive run by a university at

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/cainbgn/index.html

- otherwise just skim through Brendy's magnum opus at the Drumcree site to get a flavour of the background then move on to where the fun begins at

http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=43154

Beware, especially if you suffer from the German/American disease (spot the troll ;-) of literal-mindedness: not everything on this thread is to be taken at face value, and most if not all of the abuse is firmly tongue in cheek. Also, you will probably realise after a while that not all the postings in the name of famous musicians have necessarily been put up by the musicians in question. Likewise, Sean Pol O'Tuathail is Pope John Paul II, and he probably didn't really write the last posting.

But if you can spare the time, it will expand your consciousness in ways you could never have imagined.

And thanks to Mooman for encouraging me to go back to source on this mother and father of all threads (cue Iraq thread drift).