This is a song I know from the Moloney, O'Connell, Keane CD titled 'There were Roses'. I have now found the words in the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin. Here they are, not exactly as on the CD but very close.

Wolfgang

DRIMIN DONN DILIS (DEAR BROWN COW)

Oh! Drimin Donn Dilis! The landlord has come,
Like a foul blast of death has he swept o'er our home;
He has withered our rooftree - beneath the cold sky,
Poor, houseless, and homeless, to-night we must lie.

My heart it is cold as the white winter's snow;
My brain is on fire, and my blood's in a glow.
Oh! Drimin Donn Dilis, 'tis hard to forgive
When a robber denies us the right we should live.

With my health and my strength, with hard labour and toil,
I dried the wet marsh and I tilled the harsh soil;
I moiled the long day through, from morn until even,
And I thought in my heart I'd a foretaste of heaven.

The summer sun shone around us above and below,
The beautiful summer that makes the flowers blow;
Oh! 'Tis hard to forget it, and I think I must bear
That strangers shall reap the reward of my care.

Your limbs they were plumb then - your coat it was silk,
And never was wanted the mether of milk;
For freely it came in the calm summer's noon,
While you munched to the time of the old milking croon.

How often you left the green side of the hill,
To stretch in the shade and to drink to the rill!
And often I freed you before the grey dawn
From your snug little pen at the edge of the bawn.

But they racked and they ground me with tax and with rent,
Till my heart it was sore and my life-blood was spent:
To-day they have finished, and on the wild world
With the mocking of fiends from my home I was hurled.

I knelt down three times for to utter a prayer,
But my heart it was seared, and the words were not there;
Oh! Wild were the thoughts through my dizzy head came,
Like the rushing of wind through a forest of flame.

I bid you, old comrade, a long last farewell;
For the gaunt hand of famine has clutched us too well;
It severed the master and you, my good cow,
With a blight on his life and a brand on your brow.