The present crisis around Foot and Mouth disease in England set me thinking about a song that Joseph Plunkett wrote. (For more about Plunkett, who was a signatory of they Proclamation in the Easter Rising in 1916, and was shot for it after the surrender, see here, with a good selection of poems - but not this one.)

Anyway, the tune it goes with is The Groves of Blarney:

As I walked over to Magheraroarty
On a summer evening not long ago,
I met a maiden most sadly weeping,
Her cheeks downstreaming with the signs of woe.
I asked what ailed her, as sure became me
In manner dacent with never a smile.
She said, I'll tell you, O youthful stranger,
What is my danger at the present time.

On my father's land there are many mansions
With sheep and cattle and pigs go léor,
Until the Saxon came over the border
With detention orders that raked him sore.
His herds they plundered and killed five hundred,
And the rest they sundered, north, east and south,
Saying keep the hides and the woollen fleeces
For the beasts have diseases of the foot and mouth!

With these words deceitful sure he was cheated,
Not a mouth was dropping, not a hoof was sprung,
But the only disease came over from England
The Cloven Hoof and the Dirty Tongue.
Now what can avail me, O youthful stranger
To save the beasts and my father's life,
And my marriage portion that's my only fortune
For the lad that's courting me to be his wife? ^^

The thing about Foot and Mouth is that though it's terribly infectious, it's not that serious a disease for the beasts involved, they'd be unlikely to die of it - but they are slaughtered because that's seen as a cheaper option. Peasant farmers in Ireland at the start of the century bitterly resented that policy.

(To see a song of my own about BSE, click here

And here is another ballad by Plunkett, which I put a tune of my own too since I don't know what tune he'd have had for it, click here).