I'm being somewhat conservative there
The locally made songs we encountered date back to the end of the Famine (1850) - no songs as far as we can find were made during the Famine
They covered the victions and emigrations following the Famine, the Fenian uprising in 1867 the land wars and Cattle raids during the re-redistribution of Estates, the anti-enlistment campaign in WW1, the War of Independence 1818 to 1922 and after
That timeline would pt the Irish rural population pretty well in line the period Steve is now referring to
All periods produced masses of home made songs
One of the things Ireland had that England didn't was a rich repertoire of traditional Irish and Anglo Irish songs and ballads to use as a template for making new songs
That templte was smashed by the joint effort of Church and Government around the end of the 1940s when they mounted a concerted attack on "unchaperoned' entertainment
Jim