The foggy dew just describes a typical early morning in an Irish glen; I remember driving up the mountains to go hillwalking a few years ago and passing Glenasmole just as the sun was warming it - the glen was steaming like a kettle, with clouds of fog boiling up out of it.

A few points: "As down the glen one Easter morn..." - Easter is the time of the Easter Rising, and the armed men in squadrons who passed by in silence were marching to take part in that rising.

On the other hand, I don't know what the Angelus (rung at noon and 6pm) is doing ringing at the time when you'd be heading in to a fair!

If it's ringing over the Liffey, the singer is presumably somewhere on the circle of the river between the Sally Gap in Wicklow and its debouchment into the sea in Dublin city centre.

Better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-al-Bar - this refers to the choice made by Irish Volunteers; the majority joined the British Army to fight in World War I for the implied promise of 'Home Rule'; the others fought the British in Ireland.

(A question slightly clouded by the fact that hundreds of thousands then returned home in 1918 and joined in the War of Independence, rejoining the Irish Volunteers to fight the British, after the suppression of Irish nationalism and the execution of the leaders of the Rising.)

Royal Meath: Meath, the county where Tara is, was the old seat of the High Kings, and an important religious and cultural site. Sign's on it, the Irish government is now driving a motorway through Skryne Valley, where Tara is sited.

Brittania's Huns - the British referred to the Germans as 'Huns'; this is turning their own insult back on them.

Wild Geese - the Catholic aristocracy of Ireland were forced into emigration en masse in the 18th century, where they became mercenaries in the armies of Europe; cf "Was it for this the Wild Geese spread/ a grey wing on every tide?"

Lonely graves by Suvla or the waves of the grey North Sea - the two areas where there were the greatest number of Irish Volunteers (now in the British Army) slaughtered in the Great War. And Ulster Volunteers too, of course.

That 'small nations might be free' - the recruiting catchcry of the British at the start of the war was the brutal treatment of 'small nations' such as Belgium by the Germans (who were indeed brutal) - the point being made here is that Ireland too is a small nation, itself being brutalised by an empire.

Had they died by Pearse's side and fought with Cathal Brugha - Pearse was the leader of the 1916 Rising, and Cathal Brugha the Minister for Defence in the first Dail, if I'm remembering rightly; Brugha was killed fighting for the Republic during the Civil War, which lasted until 1923.

Where the Fenians sleep - a dual reference, to the Fianna, the warrior poets who were under the command of Fionn Mac Cumhaill in the myth, and also to the 19th-century revolutionary group of which Tom Clarke, one of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence, was a member.

Perfidious Albion - originally 'perfide Albion', perfidious England, in the 17th-century French insult.

The rest is more or less free of metaphor, I think.

I hope this is some help, and expect a bottle of champagne on your graduation, Minna!

I assume you also know the Foggy Dew that starts "As down by the glenside, I met an old woman"