Right. I've been meaning to write this one for ages and I keep putting it off because, honestly, I'm a bit territorial about The Irish Rover. Not in a bad way. In the way you're territorial about a cousin who's louder than you at weddings but you'd still fight anyone who said a word against him.
Here's my thesis, and I'll defend it in the pub: The Irish Rover is not a cumulative song. But it WANTS to be. It's got the heart of one.
Let me explain what I mean, because it matters.
The song's about a ship — the Irish Rover herself — and yer man singing tells you about the voyage. She sailed from Cork. She was built, depending on which verse you trust, somewhere in the region of "in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and six," and she had a crew of "a comical crew" and a cargo that is, and I cannot stress this enough, a LIE. A magnificent, escalating, gleeful lie.
Because then you get the list. And the list is the whole point.
"We had one million bags of the best Sligo rags." One million. Of rags. From Sligo. Already we are in nonsense country and we have only just left the harbour. "We had two million barrels of stones." Two million BARRELS. Of STONES. Who's shipping stones in barrels, lads. Nobody. It doesn't matter. "We had three million sides of old blind horses' hides." Now we're counting blind horses, which is a detail so specific and so daft it makes me laugh every single time. "Four million barrels of bones." "Five million hogs." "Six million dogs." "Seven million barrels of porter." (The porter is the only cargo on that ship I'd personally sign for.) "Eight million bales of old nanny goats' tails."
Do you see it? Do you SEE it?
It counts UP. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and the numbers get sillier and the cargo gets more rotten and ridiculous as it climbs. That, my friends, is a counting song wearing a sea shanty's coat. It's a tall tale built on a ladder of multiplying numbers, and the joy of singing it — the actual physical joy in your chest when a pub does it well — comes from that climb. You're racing the song up its own staircase.
And THAT is the family resemblance. That's why I'm writing about it on a Rattlin' Bog shrine.
The bog builds. The Rover counts. Different machines, same engine: the human delight in MORE. Add a flea to the feather to the bird to the nest, or add a million bales of nanny goats' tails to the last impossible cargo, and the audience leans in the same way. We are a species that loves a list that won't stop growing. I've gone on about exactly why that grip on the brain works over in my history of cumulative songs, and the Rover sits just on the edge of that family — close enough to wave, not quite close enough to be invited to the cumulative reunion. (It doesn't repeat the list backwards every verse. That's the line. That's the technicality. The bog does, the Rover doesn't.)
Now. The lies.
Because the genius of The Irish Rover isn't just the counting. It's that the whole thing is a story told by a sailor who is, very obviously, having you on. The ship is too big. The crew too comical. There's "Mick McCann from the banks of the Bann" who built her, and a "Mickey Coote" who played hornpipe on his flute, and the captain's dog — and then, in the last verse, it all goes WRONG. She hits a rock, the ship is lost, the whole crew drowned, and the only survivors are the singer and the captain's old dog. (And there's a measles outbreak in there too that wipes out the crew before the rock even gets them, depending on the version. Two disasters. Belt and braces.)
So the punchline is: the man telling you this impossibly tall tale of a million bags of rags is the SOLE survivor of a ship nobody can now check. He's the only witness. Of course the numbers are mad. There's nobody left to correct him. I find that genuinely brilliant. It's a lie with a built-in alibi.
The version everybody knows is the one The Dubliners and The Pogues did together — that recording is rightly famous, and if you've never heard Ronnie Drew and Shane MacGowan trading the verses, fix that today — but the song is much older than that pairing. It was published in the late 1800s under J.M. Crofts, though as with most of these things the "author" likely tidied up something already floating around the ports for years. Folk songs rarely have one da. They have a townland.
How do you sing it? Loud, and a touch dishonest. Lean into the numbers. Let "EIGHT million bales" land like a man who knows he's stretching it and dares you to call him a liar. Don't rush the last verse — the drowning needs to land soft and sudden after all that bragging, because the gut-punch of a comic song is when it goes quiet. And mind: it's a story, not a chant. The Rover wants a storyteller. The bog wants a crowd.
If you want to fall further down the Irish-songs hole while you're here, the songbook is filling up nicely, and the Rover'll be in there proper before long once I stop arguing with myself about which verse order is correct.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I tried to explain to Rattlin (the cat) that the Rover carried six million dogs and not one single cat, and she gave me a look of such pure betrayal I had to give her a bit of ham to settle the matter. She's not wrong, mind. Where were the cats. A ship's nothing without a cat.