My father picked up a version of this whilst in the army during the second world war. He would refuse to sing some of the verses, claiming that he could not remember them - though I suspect that they were bawdy and he could not sing them to me (!) Most of the men that he was with in North Africa and Italy were from Scotland (Fife) and he said that he heard it from a Scot, and not from an Irishman (as I had first suspected).