This song wasn't originally about the potato famine at all: the 1844 publication date in New York undermines that idea, particular when the sheet music calls it "'A Doleful Ballad' One of the Olden-Time."

So does the appearance of the "geese" stanza, exactly as we know it, a comical campaign song called "Cidercratic Lament to be Sing by All Good Locofocos on All Good Occasions - Air" My Name is Robert Kidd" in the "Spirit of the Age" (Woodstock, Vt.), Nov. 5, 1841.

The song includes lines like "And there's the Buckeye State, gone to pot" and "Maryland too soon/ Has caught our sleeping coon,/ And slung him to the moon."

It was based on a similar satire in the "Burlington [Vt.] Sentinel" of Dec. 3, 1838, which also included the geese.

A writer in the "Lancaster [S.C.] Examiner" (Dec. 23, 1840), recalled hearing about the grease-accumulating geese during his schooldays, an unspecified number of years earlier.

Nor is there anything Irish in the "Over There" lyrics. But it's still startling to see the "Freeman's Journal" of Dublin (Dec. 22, 1863) frankly assuming that the "Over There" song is American - and typically ridiculous.

A "wonderful" song, as advertised on the sheet music, implies entertainment, not tragedy or pathos. There isn't much pathos in eating "clam pie," wishing to be "a geese," or accumulating "much grease" - over there or anywhere else.

Consider this, from The Era Almanack [sic] and Annual 1872 (London: The Era, 1872):

"We have heard a crowded house roar with merriment at one of his effusions, from which the following stanzas are extracted :—

Potatoes they grow small — over there,                                                                      Potatoes they grow small — over there,
Potatoes they grow small: you must eat them tops and all — over there.

"I wish I were a geese - over there,
I wish I were a geese over there,
I wish I were a geese: to accumulate much grease - over there.

"Rubbish! we hear the reader exclaim, and rubbish undoubtedly it i; but “Laughter, holding both his sides,” is present whenever and wherever it is sung by the gentleman to whom we now allude."

Or the Chicago Sunday Tribune (June 12, 1898), referring to the 1830s:

"Wentworth...thought he would show them that a white man could sing as well as an Indian. Bringing out an old fiddle, he started to sing in the same droning chant as the Indians. I remember the first verse. If it was made up for the occasion or if it was one of the songs of the time I will leave unsaid:
   
      I wish I was a goose [sic]
         All forlorn, all forlorn,
         Eating corn, eating corn.
      I would accumulate much grease,
         All forlorn,
         all forlorn.

"And this he kept up until both he and the Indians were exhausted."

There are numerous newspaper references to the song on two continents, but a connection to the Famine has to wait till 1944 (Chicago Daily News, June 17). The source of information is Richard Dyer-Bennett.

"Over There" gave birth not only to the satirical "In Kansas" (by 1889) but also to the bawdy "In Mobile" (by 1941).

It's an interesting family tree.