I remember Peter Bellamy telling a story about this tune many years ago (he played whistle too)- that it was collected by the Lomaxes in the USA, published on a record that Willy Clancy heard, he took up the tune, someone else recorded from him, and so it passed into Irish "tradition"- which it really is. That's probably the way "tradition" always worked. You can add this story about it, with probable inaccuracies, to the tradition if you want- like the stories about hearing a tune whist sleeping on a fairy mound, or sitting on a bank of turf to listen to the larks. I have evidence indeed that there wasn't a bank of turf to be found the length and breadth of all Ireland in traditional times, they'd all been etten by famine victims.