Sigh!
I don't remember anyone denying the existence of local songs and song-makers, some of which lasted long enough in oral tradition to be called folk songs. I gave examples from my own collecting and no doubt other field workers could come up with plenty of examples. Very few of these, for one reason or another, made it into the national corpus.

The point is, the corpus under discussion (as we have repeatedly written) was that body of material noted down in c1890 to c1920 mainly in southern England, by the likes of Sharp, Gardiner, Baring Gould, Kidson, Broadwood, the Hammond brothers, Butterworth and Vaughan Williams and a few others. It has been shown that of that corpus 89% had its earliest manifestation in some form of urban commercial enterprize. Those (unlike JC) who have studied for many years the relationship between many examples of oral tradition and commercially produced ballads are of the opinion that the likely figure to have originated in this way would be closer to 95%.

To state that conditions in mid-20th century Ireland were the same as in rural Britain c1800 is a ludicrous statement, but we've been through all of this before ad nauseam.