Well, I found a recent song with that phrase here (click). The songwriter is not identified.
A recording is available here (click).
-Joe Offer-


McElwee's Farewell

[chorus]
Farewell to Bellaghy, likewise Tamlaghtduff,
And the green hills of Derry that I dearly love,
My thoughts return to you from a dark H-Block cell,
So friends and brave comrades I bid you farewell.


For hundreds of years now we've kept on the fight,
And the history books told me of Ireland's plight,
So with gallant Francis I followed the cause,
To conquer the tyrant and defy England's laws.

Through the hills of south Derry we marched and we drilled,
To our exploits in action all Irish youth thrilled,
Most feared men in Ulster, volunteers on the run,
We give England our answer from the barrels of our guns.

Oh gallant south Derry you are forever blessed,
In the struggle for freedom you have given your best,
There's Hughes and there's Bateson, Sheridan and Leigh,
And enscribed with their names now brave Tom McElwee.

---

Thomas McElwee
Died August 8th, 1981
Sincere, easy-going and full of fun
THE TENTH republican to join the hunger strike was twenty-three-year-old IRA Volunteer Thomas McElwee, from Bellaghy in South Derry. He had been imprisoned since December 1976, following a premature explosion in which he lost an eye.
He was a first cousin of Francis Hughes, who died after fifty-nine days on hunger strike, on May 12th.
One of the most tragic and saddening aspects of the hunger strike was the close relationships between some of the hunger strikers.
Joe McDonnell following his friend and comrade Bobby Sands on hunger strike and then into death, both having been captured on the same IRA operation in 1976.
Elsewhere, similar close ties, parallels, between one hunger striker and another: the same schools; the same streets; the same experiences of repression and discrimination.
And for those families, relatives and friends most acutely conscious of the parallels there is of course an even more intense personal sadness than for most, in the bitter tragedy of the hunger strike.
But of all those close relationships, none was surely as poignant as that between Thomas McElwee and his cousin, Francis Hughes: two dedicated republicans from the small South Derry village of Bellaghy, their family homes less than half-a-mile apart in the townland of Tamlaghtduff, who were close friends in their boyhood years and who later fought side by side in the towns and fields of South Derry for the freedom of their country.
It came then as no surprise to those who knew them when Thomas and Francis stood side by side again in the H-Blocks (along with Thomas' younger brother, Benedict) in taking part in the thirty-strong four-day fast at the end of the original seven-man hunger strike last December.
And when the deaths of Bobby Sands and Francis Hughes, on the subsequent hunger strike, only months later, failed to break the Brits intransigence, the McElwee family were already certain that either Thomas or Benedict, both of whom had volunteered, would soon be joining the hunger strike as well.