"gifted individuals"
You are once again reducing the making of these thousands of songs to "individuals" - it is becoming distastefully dishonest of you.
We don't know who these "individuals" were - the songs were absorbed into the community and became part of their traditional repertoire, distinguished from the 'Lord Batemans' and 'Green Weddings', 'Banks of the Nile' and 'Captain Woodburrens'   (all current in this part of the country) only by their 'local' references.
We included nine of these local songs on our West Clare collection 'Around the Hills of Clare', over half of them dealing with incidents which had taken place during the lifetimes of the singers; yet we were unable to give authors to only one of them, by a local poet who published a collection of his poems.
All of our traditional songs must have been given a push start by "gifted individuals" at one time or another, yet you would put that (and the later remakes) down to what you describe as "hacks" - how 'frightfully illogical' of you.   
You are twisting what facts that we do have and rejecting the most likely explanation for the creation of our traditional songs to fit your theory - this really is shoddy scholarship.
A wonderful example of this twisting is your latest classic; "could have found employment as hacks." You are substituting "what ifs" for necessary research. Do you have any examples of specific hacks who went to sea or joined the army or worked on farms...... or any of the other occupations covered by our songs, and if you do, can you tie them in with any specific songs relating to their former occupations? If not, this is nothing more than defensive speculation - an attempt to artistically disenfranchise the rural working population from the song-making that has always been attributed to them.
Your arguments are little more than putty to fill in the holes in your theory.
It echoes perfectly Barry's "sunk to the level of the folk which has the keeping of folklore", except, of course, that you have gone a step further than him by casting doubt on the 'folk' having even re-creating the songs by crediting the hacks with the versions also.
This really is a re-appearance of the old and long-rejected idea that the ballads and folk-songs are too good to have been created by the folk.
Jim Carroll