For Ireland I’d Not Tell Her Name

The title is a near-literal rendering of the Irish "Ar Éirinn Ní Neosfainn Cé Hí" — "for Ireland I would not tell her name." The song behind the air is a love lament whose narrator, walking the far side of his farm, is captivated by a young woman he meets and swears he would not reveal her name even for the whole of Ireland. The melody appears in the mid-19th-century Goodman manuscript collection from County Cork, and the song settled deeply into the Déise sean-nós tradition of County Waterford, where Nioclás Tóibín was among its noted singers. It is most often heard as a slow air.