That's the great thing about looking for things, Sarah you find other things you weren't looking for.

Yes, Martin, it is a bit different, which is why it stuck in my mind as being by him. Where I found it is in a little book of words published I think by Walton in Dublin sometime in the 1950s or so. The cover's gone and so is the title page so I can't be sure.

I'd trust them to have it right though, because it starts with "A Soldier's Song"(sic) in both English and Irish, and has Fairyland just next to Peadar Kearney's "Three-coloured Ribbon", and a few pages away from "Michael Dwyer" and "Whack Fol the Diddle", so they knew their Peadar Kearney. Which you'd expect, if I'm right and it was pubished by Waltons, since Martin Walton was interned with Peadar.

There's a life of Kearney by Seamus de Burca called "The Soldier's Song", published by P.J.Bourke in Dublin in 1957, but I don't think that's got a mention of this one in it. What it does have though is a set of songs and poems, some of which I've not seen elsewhere, including an extra for the "Soldier's Song" about the North. And there's a lively one about a singing pub, "Down in the Village", with the chorus:

Heigh ho! slan to the revilry, Shouting and drinking and singing so merrily Red nights we never again shall see Down in the village we tarried so long.