Erskine Childers (whose moither was Irish) was of course shot by the Free State Government - the charge being possession of a revolver, which he'd never even fired. He had been given the revolver by Michael Collins - who was dead himself by that time.

Of course Peader Kearney wrote A Soldier's Song years before all that. Insofar as "some have come" has that meaning, he'd have been thinking primarily about American Fenians I imagine.

Does anyone know who did the translation into the Irisg anyway? I suppose it might have been Peader Kearney himself, in which case it would settle what the primary meaning of that phrase was anyway, since the Irish version is clear enough. He wrote the song in 1907, and only started learning Irish the next year (according to Seamus De Burca's biography of Kearney - which has a set of great songs at the back, incidentally.)