Anonymous (Irish street ballads)

The street ballads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland were songs in English, composed by unnamed hands and circulated as cheap printed broadsides sold at fairs, markets and street corners, and carried further by singing. Many were set to older Irish airs, and their authors, often hedge-schoolmasters, soldiers or tradesmen, are almost never known.

Their subjects ranged from comic courtship and the carousing of young gentry to the grim humour of returned soldiers and, above all, the politics of rebellion, among them the French landing hoped for in 1798, the United Irishmen and the martyrs of the national cause. W. B. Yeats gathered a selection of them among the anonymous pieces in A Book of Irish Verse, the source of the texts given here.