Lloyd regularly made contradictory claims about the sources of his material, and I wouldn't care to hazard a guess as to the truth of most of them, whether quoted directly from him or through third parties. In this case, it's certainly true that there are several Irish tunes that are very close indeed to the one he used; I mentioned the one published by Hughes earlier in this discussion, I think, and at least one of the examples in Stanford-Petrie (in yet another thread on the same subject, if I recall correctly) is also very close.

That in itself proves nothing, but I'd agree that a direct English source for the set that he popularised (and which everybody and his or her dog has since recorded, usually insisting that it's about vampires or werewolves or some such nonsense) is extremely unlikely.

Congratulations, incidentally, on being the first person to add anything worthwhile to any of the numerous discussions on this song that we have here, in quite some time.