Reading this with half attention - is someone trying to make the case that Luke Kelly *wrote* Raglan Road??? Heavens!

If so, it's simply settled; the poem's first date of publication should be well enough known.

Kavanagh, a sad, bitter alcoholic genius, was one of a group of poets of the first generation of the Irish state, along with Donagh MacDonagh, Valentin Iremonger, Brendan Behan, Pádraig Fallon, Ben Kiely - I'm just reeling off names here, and have left many honourable poets unnamed.

He came from a fairly well-off family - wasn't his family the owner of the Monument Creamerires? - but as a poet he lived a rather hand-to-mouth life.

He was known in all the newspapers, where he worked as a freelance - he'd wander into the Catholic Standard and start writing a piece on a typewriter there, then unreel the roll of paper and wander onwards to The Irish Times or The Irish Press and continue.

When he came to file his copy, it would be multicoloured and in different typefaces from all the typewriters he'd used to make up the story.

One legend has him interviewing the Beatles for the Catholic Standard, but I don't know if that's true or not. Seems to be apocryphal, unfortunately.

These young poets of the 1940s brought out literary magazines such as The Bell in which they published new work, and also sold poems, articles and stories abroad.

The next generation - the generation of the Dubliners - came out of a new vision of the same tradition. People like Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew have links to Behan and his extended family, and also to the theatre world of the time.

Luke Kelly's beautiful interpretation of Kavanagh's poem is just that, an interpretation.

By the way, Wikipedia lists On Raglan Road as having been first published in the Irish Press in October 1946 under the title Dark-Haired Miriam Ran Away.