Another popular famine song is ‘Dan O’Hara’, whose chorus is a deceptively joyful and rhyming ‘A Cuisle Geal Mo Chroí / Won’t you buy a box from me’, where ‘Geal Mo Chroí’ is also a clichéd exclamation meaning ‘brightness of my heart’ or ‘my beautiful sweetheart’. The underlying grief is, once again, only perceived when the ‘sceal’ of the song is told: although the song was probably written by Delia Murphy from Claremorris in 1951, Dan O’Hara was a real tenant farmer from Clifden, Connemara, who was evicted from his farm and forced to emigrate to America as he couldn’t pay the rent. Unfortunately, no official figures are available for evictions before 1849, when 90,000 thousand of them were recorded by the constabulary, the figure rising to 100,000 in 1850.
http://rfcb.revues.org

Sung by Finbar Fureys, Rory Gallagher, Brendan Nolan, the Blackthorn