From Des Geraghty's memoir of Luke Kelly (1994):
The song which made The Dubliners famous was Seven Drunken Nights, an English version of a light-hearted Irish song that the group had picked up from Seosamh O hEanai long before in O'Donoghue's pub. It was released as a single on St Patrick's Day 1967 and promptly banned on RTE as offensive to public decency. Sometime later Seosamh himself gave a straight-faced interview to an evening paper stating that the song was about an Irishman who'd worked away from home for twenty years - a commonplace situation for men from rural Ireland in those years - and returned to find he had a full-grown son. And who are we to differ? In fact, the tongue-in-cheek way in which the song is composed [...] is typical of a sly ambiguity in many Irish songs about sex.
Intrigue was added to the incident by the fact that the song actually mentions only five nights, and some play was made afterwards of speculation that the 'missing' verses might have been too shocking for even The Dubliners. What was true was that the song had been recorded by Seosamh himself in Irish years before and played on RTE without a murmur of protest; while the Irish establishment were conservative and puritanical in English, they were quite often indifferent to how irreverent and unorthodox our culture was in Irish.
But [...] Radio Caroline gave Seven Drunken Nights saturation airtime. The hypocrisy and the foolishness of RTE's decision was too much for a generation already chafing under censorship and prudery, and within two days the record had sold 40,000 copies. It didn't take long to reach the music industry's Silver Disc status, the award for sales in excess of 250,000. The letters pages of the papers were inundated with letters of indignant protest at censorship; the British papers picked up on Ireland's banned song, and not long afterwards, Seven Drunken Nights reached Number Five in the British pop charts.Roy Palmer gives a couple of soldiers' last verses in his book on soldiers' songs 'Oh What A Lovely War' (1990). I'm not going to quote them, but they could be described as fairly graphic... - Susanne