Frank Harte’s version, sung in English, has the following as its third of four verses:

A jacket short is being sown, and trousers coarse and worn, for us they are being made

A seaman’s suit of blue, the likes we never knew in Both a’Duin na gCraobh

We’re it not for friends at home our lives would not be our own, we’d have lain in quicklime graves

And now we are sent away, to spend our time and stay in the New South Wales.


I take from this that they may have been given death sentences which were commuted following an appeal for clemency.

By the way the Harte version also refers to two brothers (“you spoke those words untrue that damned us brothers two...”).