"Raglan Road" began as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, written about Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student he met in Dublin in the 1940s. Kavanagh was 40, a published poet who called himself a peasant poet. Hilda was 22. He fell for her, she did not fall back, and he put her in a poem that Ireland has never stopped singing.

Written for Hilda Moriarty — Published Under Another Woman's Name

Hilda Moriarty was a medical student at University College Dublin whom Kavanagh encountered around Raglan Road in Ballsbridge, Dublin. In RTÉ's 1987 Kavanagh documentary Gentle Tiger, she told the story herself. She had teased the self-described "peasant poet" about his subjects — stony grey soil, cabbages, and turnips — and told him to write about something else. He answered that he would immortalize her in poetry, went away, and wrote it. She also said, plainly, that the age gap between them was a main reason the relationship failed. She later married Donogh O'Malley.

When the poem first hit the newsstands in the Irish Press on 3 October 1946, it bore the header "Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away" rather than "Raglan Road." Kavanagh chose "Miriam"—the name of his brother Peter's girlfriend—as a clever pseudonym to shelter Hilda from public attention. It wasn't until his 1964 Collected Poems reached print that the piece adopted its now-famous title, “On Raglan Road”.

This deliberate title switch reveals the intimate core of the narrative. Knowing from its opening lines that the romance was destined to falter, Kavanagh still penned this poignant tribute, publishing a parting message to his muse while cloaking her identity behind an assumed name.

The Air Kavanagh Chose: “Fáinne Geal an Lae”

The poem's iconic melody comes from an earlier air, "Fáinne Geal an Lae" ("The Dawning of the Day"). Originally an Irish-language song published by Edward Walsh in 1847, it was translated into English by Patrick Weston Joyce in 1873. Rather than being a choice made later by another performer, historical accounts show that Kavanagh always intended for his words to be set to this specific air.

Shortly after writing the piece, Kavanagh was remembered by Benedict Kiely test-singing it to the air, and a radio recording exists of the poet performing it to the melody himself. The union of poem and tune was already fully forged by the author before Luke Kelly ever sang it; the verse simply awaited its ideal interpreter.

The Bailey: Kavanagh Hands Luke Kelly the Song

The landmark encounter occurred in the 1960s at The Bailey pub in Dublin, where Patrick Kavanagh formally handed the poem over to Luke Kelly. Kelly consistently credited the poet with passing along the song, which Kelly went on to introduce to audiences across the globe. While persistent folklore claims Kavanagh demanded five pounds in exchange, that detail remains an unverified tale.

What is documented is the enduring legacy of their collaboration. The Dubliners released "Raglan Road" in 1971 as the B-side to "Scorn Not His Simplicity," and their definitive recording later served as the centerpiece for the 1986 compilation Luke's Legacy. By approaching the work as both elevated literature and a spirited pub ballad, Kelly fully realized the potential Kavanagh had envisioned back in 1946.

Versions Worth Hearing

Kelly's version remains the standard. Van Morrison recorded "Raglan Road" with The Chieftains — his take belongs with the rest of his Irish shelf here, Brown Eyed Girl and And It Stoned Me as well as his version of Star of the County Down. Sinéad O'Connor, Roger Daltrey, and Ed Sheeran have all sung it: a poem published under a borrowed name in a Dublin newspaper became a song any serious singer eventually has to try.

In our set it stands with the other Dublin literary songs: The Auld Triangle, Behan's Dublin, and Grace, Dublin, love, and loss in 1916 dress. Inside Irish Music's film, The Dubliners, Part 1 — Luke Kelly, is the best video companion to all three.

The fullest single account of the song's making — Hilda's own telling, Kiely's memory, The Bailey, and the air — is The Great Irish Songbook's Raglan Road, and NewsFour's Raglan Road: The Enchanted Way walks the Ballsbridge street itself for readers who want the place.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Auld Triangle" is a prison song from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, sung along the Royal Canal. It is usually credited to Brendan Behan, because it opens his 1954 play The Quare Fellow. The best-documented account says Behan did not write it: the writer was Dick Shannon, a Dublin friend of Behan's, and Behan himself said so, on the record, more than once.

Behan first performed the song publicly in 1952, two years before the play, on RTÉ radio's The Ballad Maker's Saturday Night. The song's world is the prison day — the triangle struck to mark waking, meals, and lockdown, and the canal outside the walls carrying on without the men inside.

Mountjoy Prison and The Quare Fellow (1954)

The Quare Fellow is set in Mountjoy on the night before an execution — "quare fellow" is prison slang for the condemned man. The song hangs over the play the way the triangle hangs over the prison day: it is the sound of the routine that continues whatever is happening in the cells.

Mountjoy is one of the two Dublin prisons that run through this repertoire. The other is Kilmainham, where Joseph Plunkett married Grace hours before his execution in 1916. A generation separates the two songs. The buildings, and the system behind them, are the same subject.

Dick Shannon: The Man Behan Said Wrote It

Behan's biographer Michael O'Sullivan records that Mícheál Ó hAodha, who produced the RTÉ programme on which Behan first performed the song in 1952, said Behan never claimed authorship and asked him to send the copyright to Dick Shannon.

Introducing his own 1960 recording, Behan said it plainly: "This song was written by a person who will never hear it recorded, because he's not in possession of a gramophone. He's … pretty much of a tramp." Shannon's family — his nephew Deasún ÓSeanáin and his grandson Tom Neary — have made the case publicly: Shannon wrote it, he was an articulate man from the Liberties, and he never received a penny in royalties for it.

Why Dominic Behan's Name Is on It Too

Dominic Behan, Brendan's younger brother, made the first commercial recording of the song, on his 1958 Topic album Irish Songs. The liner notes describe it as "a song of Mountjoy Prison … made popular in the play 'The Quare Fella'" — without claiming he wrote it. Even so, some secondary sources credit Dominic as the writer, which is how his name became attached to it.

Dominic was a major songwriter in his own right — Come Out Ye Black and Tans is unquestionably his — and the Behan family thread runs through this set in both directions: in Streams of Whiskey, Shane MacGowan dreams of meeting Brendan and taking his advice. The authorship of "The Auld Triangle" stays disputed in print. The documented account — Behan's own words, his producer's account, and Shannon's family — points to Dick Shannon.

The Triangle Still Hangs in Mountjoy

The triangle in the song is real equipment, not a symbol invented for the lyric: a large metal triangle beaten to mark the stages of the prison day. It still hangs in Mountjoy at the point where the wings meet, its hammer mounted beside it, and it is no longer used.

The song is still working in Dublin, too. It is now sung as a terrace chant by supporters of Bohemians FC, whose ground stands near the prison — a prison song carried out of the play, onto the records, and into a football crowd a short walk from where it is set. Prison writing in this repertoire did not end with Behan: Men Behind the Wire is the internment song of a later generation, written out of the same experience of men locked up and time marked for them.

Wikipedia's article on the song gives the fullest available account of the Shannon claim, the 1952 first performance, and the recording history, and links to the Mudcat Café discussion where Shannon's family make their case in their own words.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Dominic Behan wrote "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" in the early 1960s, a generation after the events it argues about. It is one of the best-known Irish rebel songs ever written — and most people who sing the chorus have never looked at who it is actually aimed at. It is not, for the most part, aimed at the Black and Tans at all.

Behan knew this world from inside his own house. He was the son of Stephen Behan, an IRA veteran, and the younger brother of Brendan Behan. The song is family memory set to music: a son writing down his father's Dublin, in his father's voice.

Who Were the Black and Tans? Ireland, 1920–21

The Black and Tans were reinforcements sent to Ireland in 1920–21, during the War of Independence, to strengthen the Royal Irish Constabulary against the IRA. Most were British veterans of the First World War. A shortage of standard uniforms put them in a mismatch of dark RIC tunics and khaki army trousers — the two colours that gave them their name.

Their reputation was earned quickly. The Tans became known for reprisals against civilians — burned homes, beatings, killings — in answer to IRA attacks. A century later, the name still works in Ireland as shorthand for the worst of that war.

The Twist: Behan's Song Is Aimed at His Dublin Neighbours

Here is what the verses actually do. The song opens not on a battlefield but on a Dublin street, in the 1920s and 30s, with Behan's father Stephen coming home drunk and calling out the neighbours.

Those neighbours were working-class Dubliners, Catholic and Protestant, who had served in the British Army. Stephen Behan's taunt — the line that gives the song its chorus — invites them to come out and fight like men, and to show their wives how they won medals down in Flanders. "Black and Tans" is the insult he throws across the street: in his mouth, it means men who took the King's shilling and served the empire, not the uniformed force of 1920.

Only after that street row do the verses widen to the whole history Stephen is arguing from: Parnell, the executed leaders of 1916 — the men whose story our Grace post tells from inside Kilmainham — and the empire's other wars, in the song's words, how they slew poor Arabs two by two, and Zulus with spears and bows and arrows against rifles.

A Republican Anthem Sung to a Loyalist Tune

The melody carries its own argument. Behan adapted an old Jacobite air, Rosc Catha na Mumhan, and that air traces back to The Boyne Water — an Ulster loyalist song. A republican anthem, sung to a tune with loyalist roots.

That is not an embarrassment to the song; it is how Irish music has always worked. Tunes were common property, and both traditions in Ireland ended up singing some of the same airs with different words and opposite loyalties.

The Behans run through this blog. Dominic's brother Brendan is the writer tied to The Auld Triangle and sung about in Streams of Whiskey — one Dublin family, three posts. And the rebel-song tradition Dominic wrote in runs forward to Men Behind the Wire, the next generation's song about the next round of the same fight.

January 2020: No. 1 in Ireland, as a Protest

The Wolfe Tones recorded it in 1972, on Let the People Sing, and their version is the one the world knows. In January 2020, it proved the song is a living thing and not a museum piece.

When the Irish government proposed an official commemoration of the RIC, the public argument was immediate, and the Wolfe Tones' recording was its soundtrack. The song went to No. 1 on the Ireland and UK iTunes charts, No. 1 on the Scottish singles sales chart, and No. 29 on the Irish chart. The Wolfe Tones gave the proceeds to the Peter McVerry Trust, a homeless charity.

A song about a drunk man shouting across a 1930s Dublin street topped the charts in 2020 as an act of political protest. We play it because that is what it is for: it keeps an argument alive that Ireland is still having, and it does it the way Stephen Behan did — out loud, in company, with the neighbours listening.

Want to dig deeper? Wikipedia's article on Come Out, Ye Black and Tans gives the full account of the song, its verses and the tune's history, and its companion piece on the Wolfe Tones recording covers the 2020 chart run. On video, Davy Holden's The History Behind: 'Come Out Ye Black and Tans' tells the song's story at length.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Grace" tells the true story of Joseph Mary Plunkett and Grace Gifford, who were married in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol late on 3 May 1916, hours before Plunkett was executed at dawn on 4 May for his part in the Easter Rising. It is the song people ask us about most, and the question behind most searches for it — "Grace song true story" — is simple: yes. It happened, and the record of it survives in detail.

Who wrote "Grace"? The song is far younger than the story. It was written in 1985, by Frank O'Meara, who composed the melody, and his brother Seán O'Meara, who wrote the lyrics. Jim McCann's recording reached No. 2 in the Irish charts in 1986 and stayed charted for 33 weeks, and Rod Stewart recorded the song on his 2018 album Blood Red Roses. A ballad written 69 years after the event became the way most people now meet Grace Gifford.

Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett: Married in Kilmainham Gaol, 3 May 1916

The wedding was not arranged in the shadow of the execution. Plunkett and Gifford were due to marry on Easter Sunday 1916 — the day the Rising began. Grace, a Protestant-born artist and cartoonist, had converted to Catholicism in April 1916. Plunkett, a poet and one of the Rising's planners, was already seriously ill with tuberculosis and had just undergone surgery on his neck. The Rising, the surrender and the court-martial replaced the wedding day.

What they got instead was the gaol chapel, just before midnight on 3 May, married by Fr Eugene McCarthy of St James's parish. On the marriage certificate, Joseph is listed as a "gentleman" and Grace as an "artist." The only witnesses were two British soldiers. She was taken out of the gaol a widow in everything but the final fact, and at dawn on 4 May Plunkett was shot in the gaol yard. The Rising they married in the middle of is the world of The Rising of the Moon, the older ballad of the same hope.

Historian Davy Holden tells this story plainly and well in The Story of Joe Plunkett and Grace Gifford, and we tell our own short version in our 60-second story of Grace and Joseph.

What Happened to Grace Gifford After 1916?

Grace's life did not end at the chapel door, and it is the half of the story the song cannot hold. She threw herself into republican work through her art — designing posters and cartoons for the movement — and was elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917. Her sister Muriel, widow of the executed Thomas MacDonagh, drowned that same year, in 1917. When the Treaty split the movement, Grace opposed it.

In February 1923, during the Civil War, Grace Gifford was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol — the same building where she had married Joseph seven years earlier, this time in a cell of her own. There she painted a Madonna and Child on her cell wall, the painting now known as the Kilmainham Madonna; a reproduction of it can still be seen by visitors to the gaol today. Davy Holden has filmed in that cell — his Short on Grace Gifford's prison cell in Kilmainham Gaol is the companion piece to this part of her story.

She was released in May 1923. She never remarried, lived on her art, and died in 1955. The ballad her life inspired now travels where she never did — History Ireland notes that it "is heard from the terraces of Celtic Park" in Glasgow, sung by supporters whose grandparents' generation carried these songs across the water. It belongs with the blog's other prison-and-loss ballads written long after their events: Back Home in Derry and Sean South of Garryowen.

One current note: the chalice and altar vessels used at the 1916 wedding have been lent to the OPW and are going on public display in Kilmainham Gaol Museum's "Last Words" section, as announced in September 2026 — the newest chapter in a story that is still being added to.

To read more: Kilmainham Tales' Grace Gifford page has the wedding certificate details and her own 1949 witness statement. Wikipedia's Grace (Jim McCann song) covers the song itself — 1985, the McCann single, the Stewart recording. History Ireland's Hearts Ne'er Waver tells Grace's story among the women prisoners of the Civil War.

— hear us play it live (video above).

On the evening of 18 June 1875, fire broke out in Laurence Malone's bonded warehouse on Ardee Street, in the Liberties district of Dublin. The warehouse held about 5,000 hogsheads of whiskey, with Reid's malt house next door. When the casks burst, the whiskey did not just burn where it stood — it ran. A stream of burning liquor, about six inches deep, flowed through the streets as far as the Coombe, and houses on Cork Street, Ardee Street, Chamber Street and Mill Street were destroyed before the night was out.

This is a true story from Dublin's working-class history, and it is the story behind our song "Dublin Whiskey Fire," which we wrote with our friend Chris Pappas. In 1875 the Liberties was the centre of the world's whiskey trade, and the people who lived in its tenements lived on top of it.

The Night Dublin's Streets Ran With Burning Whiskey (18 June 1875)

The alarm, in part, came from the animals. Panicked pigs and livestock in the yards around the warehouse made enough noise to wake the neighbourhood, and people got out of the houses ahead of the flames. Nobody died in the fire itself.

What killed people was the whiskey. With a river of it running down the gutter for the taking, locals scooped it up in whatever they had — hats, pots, porringers, even boots — and drank it on the spot. This was undiluted cask-strength spirit, straight out of the burning warehouse, and it was poison at that strength. Thirteen people died of alcohol poisoning. Not one of the thirteen was killed by the flames. In total, over five acres of the city burned.

Fire stories run through Irish song — our post on Old Dun Cow  tells the other famous one, a pub fire in a song. The Dublin fire was not a song first. It happened, on a real street, to real people.

Stopping a River of Fire With Manure

The detail everyone remembers from that night is how the fire was stopped. Water was worse than useless on burning whiskey: it would have floated the spirit on top and carried the fire further through the streets. Captain James Robert Ingram of the Dublin Fire Brigade understood that, and his men dammed the flow instead — first with sand and gravel, and then with cartloads of horse manure brought in from the city's depots. The manure soaked up the whiskey, smothered the stream, and killed the flames.

It is the kind of practical, unglamorous thinking that working cities run on, and it worked. We tell the short version of this story in our song-story Short, Dublin Whiskey Fire: Pigs, Shoes, and The Fire Brigade.

The Liberties: Dublin's Golden Triangle

To understand how one warehouse fire could flood a district, you have to know what the Liberties was in 1875. By the turn of the 19th century Dublin had 37 distilleries, and six of them stood in the Liberties, in the area known as the Golden Triangle. George Roe's distillery covered 17 acres and was the largest in the world. By 1887, Irish distillers held about 70 percent of the global whiskey market.

That wealth sat in the middle of one of the poorest districts in the city. The tenements of the Liberties housed the families who worked in the distilleries, breweries and tanneries, and when the whiskey ran burning past their doors, it was their homes that stood in its path. Dublin and whiskey belong together in this blog — see also Streams of Whiskey, Brendan Behan's Dublin as the Pogues sang it, and Whiskey in the Jar, the oldest whiskey song in our set.

Why We Wrote a Song About the Dublin Whiskey Fire

Most of the songs we play are traditional, but this one is ours. We asked Chris Pappas to help us write it because the 1875 fire is exactly the kind of Dublin story that deserves a song: a disaster nobody famous died in, in a poor district, stopped by a fire captain with carts of manure. The great events of Irish history get the ballads. The Liberties deserved one too.

To dig deeper: Visit Dublin's official guide tells the history of whiskey in Dublin, from the Golden Triangle to the fire itself. Wikipedia's Dublin whiskey fire page has the full timeline and the damage figures. Wine Enthusiast's How a Fire Forever Changed Irish Whiskey

 covers what the fire meant for the trade that followed.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Rocky Road to Dublin" tells the story of a young man from Tuam, County Galway, who walks to Dublin, takes a ship to Liverpool, and gets into trouble at every stop. The words were written by D. K. Gavan, known as "the Galway Poet," for Harry Clifton, an English music-hall performer who made the song popular in the 1860s.

The narrator is a character written for the stage, and the song is his story: a migrant labourer leaving home to find work, mocked for his accent and his clothes the whole way, and rescued at the end by men from his own county. Ireland took the song back and made it a standard. It has been in the Irish repertoire ever since.

Written by the Galway Poet for Harry Clifton

Gavan wrote the song for Clifton (1832–1872), a star of the English music hall, who popularised it. That was a common arrangement at the time: Irish writers supplied material, London stages supplied the audience, and emigrants in the audience heard their own journey sung back at them.

The tune is older than the words. Sheet music for the tune was published as early as 1841 in The Dublin Magazine, already described as well known in Ireland. The song is catalogued in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 3012.

The narrator is not travelling for pleasure. In the opening he is "off to reap the corn" — leaving Tuam to find harvest work. That one detail sets the song inside the long Irish story of seasonal labour migration to England.

Tuam, Mullingar, Dublin, Liverpool: The Journey Verse by Verse

In Mullingar, the girls mock his clothes and his accent. In Dublin, his bundle is stolen, and while he hunts for the thief he is mocked again for his Connacht brogue — in his own words, "my Connaught brogue wasn't much in vogue."

He is shipped across in the hold with the pigs and is seasick off Holyhead. In Liverpool the locals mock his Irishness, he starts a fight with his blackthorn shillelagh, and he is losing until other Galway men join in on his side.

Read as a list, it is a comic routine. Read as a record, it is what waited for a young Irish labourer on the road: suspicion in every town, safety only among his own. Our post on Leaving of Liverpool covers the same road from the dock, and Thousands Are Sailing covers the emigrant journey at full scale.

A Slip Jig in 9/8: Why Nobody Can Breathe Singing It

The song is set to a slip jig in 9/8 time, which is the plain reason it is a tongue-twister. The rhythm keeps moving in threes, the lines are packed with words, and there is almost nowhere to take a breath. Singers treat getting through it cleanly as a feat in itself, which is part of why it works as a showpiece — Gavan wrote it for a professional stage performer, and it still behaves like one.

The first-person voice is the other half of its staying power. Like the narrator of The Orange and the Green, the Rocky Road narrator tells on himself as much as on anyone else, and the comedy carries a harder story underneath.

An Emigrant Song Ireland Took Back

A song written in Ireland, for an English stage star, about an Irishman being jeered in England, ended up as one of the most Irish songs in the book. That round trip is the diaspora story in miniature: the material went where the audience was, and the audience was leaving.

Wikipedia's article on the song sets out the Gavan and Clifton history, the 1841 tune printing, and the song's later life, including its appearance in Joyce's Ulysses. For a different journey, History Ireland's essay on Peter Lennon's 1967 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin follows an Irish émigré journalist who borrowed this song's title to ask what Ireland had done with its independence.

— hear us play it live (video above).